Advocates, please read this

What every advocate did

Before this site launched, I asked Marlovians, Baconians, and Oxfordians to review it and give me feedback. Every one of them did the same thing: they went to their candidate’s page, identified every score below a ✓, and made the case for why that score should be higher. In several cases they were right; I looked at the evidence again and adjusted the table. That is what the process is for.

But I was disappointed, not because they challenged the scores, that is fair game, but because almost none of them engaged with the methodology. The frameworks, the criteria, the equal weighting, the standard of what counts as evidence, the foundations the scores rest on, were nearly invisible to every advocate I consulted. The only thing visible to them was the number next to their candidate’s name.

The pattern has a subtler form. This page is not making a list of points to be agreed with; it is making a diagnostic claim about a pattern. And some advocates, on reading it, do exactly what it describes: they agree with the strategic points briefly and move on, while directing every substantive argument (the counter-evidence, the careful reasoning) not at the methodology or the strategic claim this page is making, but at improving their candidate's score.

The most important strategic point on this page is that the most defensible position in the SAQ is the limited claim: that the question is genuinely open and the evidence does not support the traditional attribution, not “my candidate wrote the works,” just that. An advocate who agrees with that argument in a sentence and then spends the rest of their response arguing that their candidate is the only viable one has not taken this page on. They have noted it and moved past it.

That response is doing serious damage to something advocates presumably care about: the prospect that the SAQ will one day be treated as a legitimate subject of scholarly inquiry.

What academia sees

Academia’s objection to the SAQ is not primarily that the question is unanswerable. It is that the public face of the question (the books, articles, and conferences that academia actually encounters) is not making a scholarly case. Scholarship means fixing your criteria before examining the evidence, applying them consistently to all candidates, and revising conclusions when the evidence requires it, including when it goes against the candidate you favour. Every advocate who goes immediately to their candidate’s score, argues for adjustments upward, and leaves the methodology untouched is confirming academia’s read of the field: that the conclusion was fixed in advance and the argument is being built to fit it.

One implicit objection to this argument is that it holds alternative candidates to a standard the traditional attribution does not meet either. That is correct, and it is the point. The same framework applied to the traditional attribution produces the documented gap in Shakspere’s record. This site is not imposing a bar that the conventional attribution clears; it is reporting that neither attribution clears it, which is why the question is open.

A historian who picks up a typical SAQ publication finds arguments from correspondence without denominator, date-range claims unsupported by primary sources, cipher arguments that would yield results for almost any sufficiently long text, and biographical parallels offered as if their existence were self-evidently probative. These are not the strong version of the case, but they are what advocates publish most, and what a dismissive reviewer can quote.

A single sentence suffices: “Advocates count the hits and ignore the misses.”

That sentence, accurate about a large portion of the published literature, allows a scholar to set the whole enterprise aside without ever engaging the primary source gap, the dating evidence, or the convergence analysis. Advocacy’s most visible arguments are not being answered; they are functioning as a reason not to look further. Every weak argument in print is costing credibility that the stronger arguments need.

The template that works

None of this is a dismissal of what advocates have built. Roger Stritmatter’s identification of de Vere’s Geneva Bible annotations is a model of archival rigour: a single document, worked in depth, with traceable linguistic specificity. Richard Roe’s on-the-ground verification of Shakespeare’s Italian topography established facts that no armchair scholarship could have found, and that still have not been adequately answered by the mainstream. Kevin Gilvary’s systematic audit of the play-dating evidence has not been refuted on primary source grounds and deserves wider engagement than it has received, engagement that, as the Proposal for Advocates argues, probably requires the audit to be re-made in a venue the mainstream cannot discount. These contributions are real. They have moved the needle, not because they argued harder for a candidate, but because they produced primary source evidence that changed what is known. The evidentiary table changed as a consequence; recording that shift is what the table is for. That is the template. The question is whether the rest of the advocacy literature is channelling its considerable energy in the same direction.

The point about Shakspere’s documentary weakness is not news to advocates. Diana Price’s literary paper trail framework, and the finding that the traditionally credited author scores approximately 1 out of 20 against it, is foregrounded by every serious advocacy group. The problem is not that advocates don’t know it. It is what they do with it. The standard move is to use Shakspere’s documentary gap as a launching pad: therefore my candidate wrote the plays. That leap hands academia an easy response: you have established a gap in one attribution, not a case for another.

The limited claim

The strategic shift that would actually move the needle is to stop at the intermediate step and argue for it directly: the question is genuinely open, the evidence does not support the traditional attribution, and that finding alone deserves serious scholarly engagement. That is a defensible and demonstrable claim. It does not require proving a candidate. And it is far harder for a mainstream scholar to dismiss than the argument that follows it.

Objections

One objection holds that a site presenting multiple candidates as worthy of assessment is itself a failure to narrow the field, that genuine rigour would eliminate the clearly non-viable candidates rather than treating them as live options. The objection misreads what the framework is doing. A candidate who scores poorly on pre-stated criteria has been narrowed out, by the evidence, not by assertion. The table discriminates; it simply refuses to do so before it is applied. A site that declared one candidate the winner and eliminated the rest by argument would be doing advocates’ work for them, at the cost of the credibility that makes the argument worth making. The methodology does the narrowing. That is a feature, not a failure of nerve.

Another objection holds that the primary source standard is unfair to concealment candidates. If authorship was deliberately hidden, as the tradition of aristocratic anonymity or political prudence might require, then an empty documentary record is exactly what a successful cover-up would produce. Holding candidates to an evidential standard therefore begs the question.

Notice what it requires. Concealment is itself a historical claim, one that needs evidence, not a background assumption available to neutralise any negative finding. The historical record contains instances of pseudonymous authorship that left traces even under deliberate concealment: in private letters, in private papers, in the gap between a private identity and a public one. The Martin Marprelate authors wrote under threat of execution and moved their printing press constantly across England; depositions from nineteen witnesses and handwriting in a seized manuscript identified them regardless. The author of the Junius letters maintained anonymity for two centuries before handwriting analysis pointed to Philip Francis. The question “what evidence would you expect to survive if this specific concealment scenario were true?” is not a hostile one; it is the question that separates a falsifiable hypothesis from an unfalsifiable one. A theory that predicts no positive evidence and explains away all negative evidence as confirmation of the cover-up cannot, strictly, be argued for.

A related but distinct objection holds that the primary source standard is structurally biased against aristocratic candidates, who would not have generated the commercial transactions and payment records that a professional playwright would. The Price framework is not sensitive to this distinction in the way the objection supposes. Its ten categories include forms of evidence (books annotated, letters discussing literary matters, records of correspondence with other writers) that are, if anything, more likely for an educated aristocrat with literary interests than for a working playwright. The finding that Shakspere is anomalous was established against a comparison population of twenty-four Elizabethan writers of different social standings, not a commercial-playwright-only baseline. If an aristocratic candidate scores poorly on the framework, the framework is saying something worth hearing.

“Forget academia”

There is one further objection. At least one advocate of my acquaintance dismisses this entire argument with a shrug: Forget academia, they will never change. That response contains two questions, neither of which is easy to answer.

The first is: why do you think that is? If academia resists even a well-made primary-source case, what explains it? The usual answer in advocacy circles is institutional self-interest: tenured scholars protecting a consensus, establishment figures with reputations and sometimes honours staked on the traditional attribution, literary departments whose whole interpretive apparatus assumes an author. But the attribution survives on inertia and self-protection, not evidence. That is a stronger sceptical claim than most advocates make out loud, and one an undecided reader might take seriously.

The second question is harder: if not academia, then what is your goal? If the answer is “other advocates,” the community is producing scholarship for itself, and the question of whether the SAQ is legitimate will be decided by the mainstream in the advocates’ absence. If the answer is “the general public,” then the public face of the question matters enormously, which is precisely the argument this site is making. And if the answer is “posterity,” the question of how that recognition eventually arrives, and whether it requires the current generation to do the difficult methodological work, cannot be deferred indefinitely.

There is a further answer, and it may be the most honest one. The goal is not necessarily to change Stratfordian scholars; it may be that many of them will not change regardless of what evidence is produced or what arguments are made. A site that applies pre-stated criteria consistently and remains on the internet as a public record does something no individual book or article can do: it documents non-engagement. Every time a scholar dismisses the primary source gap without engaging it, every time the SBT asserts the attribution is “beyond doubt” without addressing the documentary anomaly, this site is the public standard they have not engaged. Non-engagement is not invisible when there is a public standard to be measured against. This site is that standard, and the goal is to make that non-engagement visible and documented, so that the next generation of scholars, and the general public, can see exactly what was not addressed and why.

A note for Stratfordian scholars

The argument above is addressed to advocates for alternative candidates. But the Stratfordian position is also an advocacy position, and it carries the same methodological obligations.

Defending the traditional attribution on evidential grounds requires engaging the primary source gap directly: not dismissing Diana Price’s comparison as motivated, but demonstrating where it is wrong. It requires explaining why seventy-odd documents recording Shakspere’s life include none connecting him to a literary career, when every acknowledged literary contemporary left at least one such document. It requires engaging Gilvary’s play-dating audit on its own terms rather than reasserting the conventional dates. And it requires answering the question this site puts to every candidate: what primary source evidence would cause you to revise your view?

Institutional consensus is not evidence. The length of time a position has been held does not bear on whether it is correct. If institutional pressure explains why some scholars dismiss the SAQ, as the discussion above concedes, it equally explains why others defend the traditional attribution without examining the primary source record directly. The honest position, for a Stratfordian scholar as much as for any advocate, is to say what evidence would change their mind, and to have examined whether that evidence exists.

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Is this site advocacy too?

A different kind of objection applies to this site rather than to the advocacy literature: that arguing the question is open is itself an advocacy position, and that this page in particular is an argument directed at advocates, which is a form of advocacy too. There is a distinction, though, between pre-stated criteria consistently applied and conclusions fixed in advance of examination. Everything measured on this site is defined before any candidate is scored, on a page that can be checked and challenged. If a reader thinks the criteria are wrong, that is the productive place to push, not at the level of individual scores, and not by observing that the site has a position. Every evidential assessment has a position. The question is whether it was reached by following the evidence or by preceding it.

The collective habit of going straight to the scores and arguing upward is, ironically, one of the most effective ways of keeping the SAQ exactly where it is, in the territory where serious historians decline to go.

This site is not the obstacle. The response from Advocates so far has been an obstacle, however, and one possible measure of the success of this site will be to track to what extent Advocate responses prioritise both of the frameworks over the number next to their candidate’s name.