A Proposal for Advocates

The strongest case for any candidate is also the most honest one: one that leads with primary source evidence, acknowledges what it cannot prove, and holds itself to the same standard it applies to the orthodox attribution. It is a harder discipline than accumulating correspondences, but a more persuasive one.

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This page is addressed specifically to people who have already committed to a candidate: Oxfordians, Marlovians, Baconians, and advocates for any other alternative author. It is written with respect for the serious scholarship that exists in every camp, and without the assumption that advocacy is the same thing as crankery. The argument is simply that the current strategy is not working, and that a different approach would serve the question better.

This site applies a consistent evidential standard to the Shakespeare authorship question, not to prove any candidate, but to establish what the primary sources actually say and where the genuine uncertainties lie. The site uses Diana Price’s ten-category literary paper trail framework and a convergence analysis as analytical tools, scoring every major candidate by the same criteria. If you have not seen the rest of this site, that context is not required to follow the argument here, but it is there if you want it.

If you are interested in avoiding the weakest arguments questioning the traditional attribution, family illiteracy, spelling variants, the will, the lost years, the sycamore trees, and the Stratfordian rebuttals that sink each one, that is on the Weak Arguments page.

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Why correspondences don’t accumulate

Advocacy groups for every Shakespeare authorship candidate have been accumulating biographical correspondences for well over a century. The mainstream has learned to ignore them. This is not simply institutional stubbornness; it reflects a genuine methodological problem that the correspondences themselves cannot solve.

A correspondence is a data point, but only if it is collected like one. Adding measurements to a graph only narrows uncertainty when you record all of the data points: the ones that fit and the ones that do not. A point that falls off your curve is evidence against it, and that is lost if you only record the hits. Recording everything is what gives you your denominator, the total number of measurements taken.

Correspondence-cataloguing as practiced in authorship advocacy does none of this. Advocates record the hits and silently drop the misses. No one counts how many proposed correspondences were examined and failed. The denominator is unknown, so no hit rate can be calculated. And because the works are large and Elizabethan biography is complex, you would expect many coincidental correspondences with any educated person of the period, which means the comparison class is not controlled either.

The result is a list that mimics the form of evidence without its substance. Ten thousand such correspondences do not accumulate into a probability, because probability requires a denominator. The mainstream knows this, and dismissing a catalogue of correspondences requires no engagement with any individual item. The problem is structural, not quantitative.

Consider two well-documented Elizabethan figures who are not authorship candidates: Robert Sidney and Fulke Greville. Both travelled on the Continent, both moved in aristocratic literary circles, both had melancholy temperaments documented in their correspondence, both knew the law. A correspondence dossier for either could be assembled without difficulty.

But here is what the dossier would have to suppress. Sidney spent most of 1589–1616 as Governor of Flushing, the canon has no Dutch settings; his surviving poetry is stylistically unremarkable; his letters show no interest in theatre and no connection to any acting company; he knew little Italian. Greville’s two surviving plays were closet dramas, never staged; his documented literary style is dense and Senecan, the opposite of Shakespeare’s dramatic register; he wrote almost entirely in tragic and philosophical modes, leaving the comedies entirely unaccounted for; no Italian journey is documented; no connection to Southampton exists. The dossier for a serious candidate looks like the dossier for these two men, minus the suppressed column.

Neither man is a plausible candidate, but that’s the point. The same biographical raw material that generates a correspondence dossier for a favoured candidate also generates one for people nobody seriously proposes. The dossier is an artefact of the method, not the person.

The symmetry test

Every serious advocate of an alternative candidate will, at some point, invoke Diana Price’s literary paper trail framework as evidence against Shakspere. Price’s ten categories, the types of primary source documentation that every other acknowledged writer of the period left behind, are cited precisely because they expose a gap. Shakspere’s documentary record is thin by Price’s standard, and as advocates note.

This site has already run that test, for every assessed candidate, against all ten categories, with the same evidentiary standard applied throughout. The scores are in the Paper Trail table. Find your candidate. Find Shakspere. Look at the two rows side by side.

Every assessed candidate on this site outscores Shakspere. That is itself the finding: the anomaly is Shakspere, not the alternatives. A higher score than Shakspere does not prove authorship; it establishes a better-documented candidate, which is a different and more defensible claim. The more useful comparison is between candidates: where does your candidate sit relative to the others, and what does that differential actually show? If you find yourself arguing that certain documents count for your candidate but equivalent documents do not count for a rival, you have located the methodological flaw this page is about.

The uncomfortable result of looking, for most candidacies, is not that the candidate is eliminated. It is that the evidentiary situation is more symmetrical than advocacy tends to acknowledge. Shakspere has gaps. Most alternative candidates also have gaps, different gaps, sometimes smaller, occasionally larger. The honest presentation of any case begins with that symmetry, not around it.

This is not a counsel of despair either. Some candidates do score materially higher than Shakspere on primary source documentation, and that differential, honestly stated, is the strongest version of the alternative case. The advocates who have made the most progress in the mainstream are precisely those who have led with documented evidence rather than interpreted evidence, and who have acknowledged what their candidate cannot yet show.

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What would actually move the needle

The authorship question will not be settled by more of the same. What follows is a frank assessment of where effort would actually pay off, not as a route to proving any candidate, but as a route to establishing that the question is genuinely and rigorously open. That is a more achievable goal, and it is the one that credibility requires.

1. Primary source archival work

The only thing that would genuinely change the evidentiary landscape is a new primary source document. Not a reinterpretation of a known document, a document not previously examined or not previously understood to be relevant. The wells are not dry. Italian parish records, English merchant archives in Venice and Padua, Inns of Court records, Elizabethan household accounts, and local Stratford records all contain material that has not been fully worked through for authorship relevance.

Roger Stritmatter’s identification of de Vere’s annotations in the Geneva Bible, a primary source in de Vere’s own hand, connecting 246 marked passages to the Shakespeare canon, is the template for what this looks like. It required specialist palaeographic skill, archival patience, and the willingness to work with a single document in depth rather than sweeping across a wide surface. That approach is more productive than assembling a hundredth correspondence from the plays.

For Marlovian advocates specifically: the Deptford inquest document has been examined, but Elizabethan coroner’s records, parish burial registers, and Privy Council papers from May–June 1593 may not have been exhausted. For Oxfordians: Italian municipal archives from de Vere’s documented 1575–76 journey remain underworked. For all candidates: wills, inventories, and household accounts from the relevant networks have received less attention than the plays themselves.

2. The dating problem: directly

The conventional dates assigned to the Shakespeare plays are the single most consequential unexamined assumption in the authorship debate. Dates like Macbeth c.1606 or The Tempest c.1611 rest primarily on topical allusion and inference, not on primary source documentation. Yet they are repeated as settled fact and used to exclude candidates who died before those dates.

Kevin Gilvary’s Dating Shakespeare’s Plays (2010) made this argument systematically for the first time, showing that no play can be definitively dated after 1604 on primary source evidence alone. That work has not been refuted on primary source grounds. That audit now needs to be taken where it cannot be ignored: re-made or independently validated in a venue hostile reviewers will take seriously. The obstacle is no longer that the work is undone; it is that its publisher lets the mainstream decline to read it. If the dating evidence is as thin as Gilvary argues, that case deserves to be made in terms that the mainstream cannot dismiss without engaging with the primary sources directly.

3. Reframe the goal

This is the most important strategic point, and the one most consistently ignored.

Proving that Candidate X wrote Shakespeare is not achievable on current evidence. No candidate clears the evidentiary bar that would satisfy a historian working on any other attribution question of the period. Continuing to argue as if proof is within reach, or has already been achieved, is what makes the advocacy community easy to dismiss.

Establishing that the authorship question is genuinely open (not in the way conspiracy theories are open, but in the way that a historical question without a surviving signed manuscript is open) is achievable, and it is what the primary source evidence actually supports. That reframing changes the burden of proof. It asks the mainstream not to accept a new candidate but to acknowledge that the Stratford attribution rests on inference and tradition rather than primary source documentation. That is a defensible and demonstrable claim. It is the claim this site is built on.

A practical starting point for that reframing: the Compare tool on this site lets you place any two candidates side by side across both frameworks simultaneously. Before making the case for your candidate, see how they score against the others, including the candidates whose advocates you disagree with. The evidence does not always go where advocacy expects it to.

The test of clear thinking

The clearest sign that an argument has moved from scholarship into advocacy is the inability to answer this question: What primary source evidence would cause me to revise my view?

If no conceivable finding would change my candidate assessment, I am not doing history, I am doing advocacy. If I can say “I would revise toward X if primary source document Y turned up”, that is the position this site is trying to put every reader in, regardless of which candidate they find most compelling.

The commitment is not to a specific document, no one can name a letter they do not know exists. It is to a type of document, and the types are already specified on the What Would Settle It page. The personal form of the test is whether the commitment is direction-blind: would the same class of evidence move you if it named a candidate you had ruled out? A reader who would accept a payment record connecting their candidate to the plays, but would find reasons to doubt the identical record naming someone else, has a criterion that is doing no work, the candidate is doing it all.

A concrete version. Suppose a probate inventory surfaced tomorrow, professionally authenticated, listing “the foule papers of Hamlet, in the hand of”, and then a name. Every reader can run the test before the blank is filled. If the name is your candidate, you will accept the document without hesitation; the question is what you do when the name is Marlowe, or Mary Sidney, or Shakspere of Stratford. Same paper, same ink, same provenance, only the name varies. If your acceptance varies with it, the document was never your criterion.

The same test applies to the mainstream. A Stratfordian scholar who cannot say what primary source evidence would cause them to take the authorship question seriously is not doing history either.

This test, and the symmetry test above, are two of seven covered in a shorter form on The Self-Check, a quick diagnostic for anyone already certain who wrote the works, whichever candidate that is.

Two paths forward

Strip out the small number of arguments that operate differently, primary source documents like the Fenner report for Stanley, source-text fingerprints like North’s Dial of Princes translation error appearing in The Winter’s Tale, forensic attributions like Stritmatter’s Geneva Bible work, and field-verified knowledge arguments like Roe’s Italian topographical findings where they go beyond what printed sources could supply, and what remains of the SAQ literature is almost entirely correspondences. Biographical correspondences, thematic resonances, incident matches, linguistic echoes. This is true for every candidate so far identified, and the possibility that the actual author remains as yet unnamed cannot be ruled out.

The site’s finding about correspondence arguments is not that the individual observations are wrong. Many of them are real and genuinely interesting. The problem is structural: a catalogue of correspondences without a denominator, without any accounting of how many proposed correspondences were examined and failed, cannot generate a probability. You cannot know whether a hit rate of forty out of forty examined is remarkable, or whether it merely reflects how large the works are and how motivated the analyst was. Collecting more correspondences compounds this, rather than fixing it.

Think of it as a navigator taking bearings. Twenty bearings on the same headland, however precise, give you a single line; you know you’re somewhere on it, but you have no fix. What you need is a second bearing on a different landmark, or a depth sounding, or a star sight: evidence from a different source, by a different method. More bearings on the same headland leave you exactly as lost as one. The five hundred grains of Ipanema sand on the Of Course It Was Him/Her page fail the same way: each grain repeats what the first one said. More of the same evidence is not more evidence.

This has a direct practical implication. If the correspondence method cannot move the needle regardless of how many correspondences are assembled, then the advocacy community’s standard operating procedure, more scholarship, more correspondences, more accumulated evidence of the same structural kind, is expending effort in a direction that cannot reach the destination. The site is not saying the work is done badly. It is saying the work cannot succeed by design, however well it is executed.

Two paths remain productive. The first is primary source archival work, the specific, tractable problems identified in the Open Questions on each candidate page. These are places where a document might exist that would actually change a score. The Elizabethan archive is not exhausted. Italian parish records, English merchant archives in Venice and Padua, household accounts, Inns of Court material, real archives with real gaps. Stritmatter’s Geneva Bible work is the template: a single document, worked in depth, with traceable provenance. That is what upgrades a ~ to a ✓, and therefore builds a sturdier convergence case, because a ✓ carries a weight that no quantity of correspondence observations can match.

The second productive path is exactly that convergence, not more correspondences, but different kinds of evidence, produced by different methods, pointing independently in the same direction. The site’s convergence framework attempts to operationalise this: lines using different evidential bases, assessed independently for each candidate. Where a primary source ✓ anchors one or more of those lines, and other methodologically diverse strands point the same way, the combined weight becomes something the mainstream cannot simply dismiss as motivated accumulation. That is triangulation, not cataloguing. But it should be stated plainly: even complete convergence across all the lines would not constitute proof of authorship.

Convergence narrows the field and strengthens the case for taking a candidate seriously; it does not substitute for a primary source document directly connecting a named individual to the writing of the works. No such document exists for any candidate. That is the honest position, and it is also the most defensible one.

These are not easy paths. They require different skills from the ones advocacy has mostly cultivated. But they are the only paths that lead somewhere the mainstream cannot simply ignore.