The Convergence Analysis
A short list, not a ranking
Methodologically diverse questions about the authorship, each applied consistently across all candidates. No single line is decisive. The interest lies in the pattern: where multiple methodologically diverse strands converge, the signal is more meaningful than any single result.
Convergence matters because independent strands cannot easily be made to agree by accident. If a candidate's documented biography, the internal characteristics of the works, and a separate body of historical correspondences all point in the same direction, without having been constructed from the same source material, that agreement is harder to dismiss than any one of them alone. Three witnesses who have never spoken to each other giving the same description is more significant than three witnesses who read the same report. The diversity of the methods is what gives the pattern its weight. Convergence across diverse strands also addresses fabrication. A single document, however compelling, can be forged; the Shakespeare canon has a long history of exactly that, from the Ireland papers of the 1790s to the Collier forgeries of the 1840s. What cannot plausibly be forged is the agreement of evidence drawn from different archives, different document types, and different scholarly traditions that have never been in contact with each other. The more methodologically diverse the strands, the less fabrication can account for their convergence.
This table covers the eleven candidates with a qualifying publication. Emilia Bassano Lanier and Roger Manners (Rutland) are now included as preliminary cases; their published cases have not yet engaged the primary source evidence problem, so they carry a preliminary rather than a full assessment.
How to read this, and how not to. Each candidate’s total is a count of the documented features on the lines below, with marks that follow from noble birth counted once. The totals rank candidates on that count. They do not say who most likely wrote the works.
A total depends on dozens of individual line judgments, several of them arguable, and a single judgment can move it by a point. Each total is therefore given as approximate and uncertain by about a point either way, and two totals differ meaningfully only when they are more than two points apart. Candidates closer than that are not separated by this table.
No total is evidence of authorship. The table meets two of the five conditions on What Would Settle It: its marks rest on primary sources, and marks that share a cause are counted once. It does not meet the other three (base rates, a control, and facts that together fit very few others), and those are what turning a count into a likelihood would need.
Because of that, this site does not adjudicate contests of rank. It will correct a line when a primary source shows a mark is wrong, and retire or relabel a line found to measure the wrong thing (matters of accuracy, made whoever they help). It said it would not reweight lines to move a candidate up or down, for any advocate, in any direction. In September 2026 it did change how marks add up. When the site set out the conditions a circumstantial case must meet, its own table failed two of them, so marks with no documentary basis were removed and marks that follow from noble birth now count once (see the note under the grid). The same rules apply to every candidate, and they moved some candidates a long way, de Vere by 6 points. The change and its reasons are recorded in the Framework Review Log.
The line-by-line scores behind each total remain visible in the grid below. Bassano and Rutland are marked preliminary because their published cases have not yet engaged the primary source evidence problem; they are scored on the same lines as everyone else. Until September 2026 the table grouped candidates into coarse bands. After the corrections recorded in the Framework Review Log, the totals run from about 9 down to 1 with no gap between neighbours wider than the table’s uncertainty, so any band boundary would rest on a difference the table cannot measure, and the bands were dropped. The Stratford man’s single line is the lowest count in the table, and the independent paper-trail framework reaches the same result by a different route.
Show the line-by-line evidence and methodology (the full grid)
This table asks 19 independent questions about the authorship (Italian knowledge, legal expertise, court access, chronology, connection to the dedicatee, literary dedications received, and others) and records, for each candidate, whether the primary sources answer it. The questions come from different types of evidence deliberately, so that agreement across different methods carries more weight than the same argument repeated in different forms.
These scores do not settle the authorship, and are not meant to. Convergence groups candidates by how much documented correspondence each shows. It is not proof, and it does not say who most likely wrote the works: even a perfect column for one candidate would not establish authorship, because the case this site rests on is the asymmetry of the primary-source record, the documented silence around the Stratford man as an author set against the paper trail every other writer of the period left, and it holds whatever the cells below say.
The best-known alternative instrument, J.T. Looney’s eighteen-characteristic author profile (1920), is not used on this site: the criteria that survive scrutiny from it are captured in the lines below, and several of its remaining criteria import assumptions rather than evidence; see the criterion-by-criterion review.
This framework was assembled by this site and has not been externally peer-reviewed. It is this site's own analytical tool, not an application of established scholarly methodology. The methodology notes below explain the selection criteria and what this analysis does and does not establish. Scores are approximate.
The frameworks and criteria on this table were fixed before any candidate was examined. A high convergence score means a candidate fits the known evidence better than others; it does not mean authorship is established. No candidate on this table has cleared that bar. See A Proposal for Advocates.
Hover over any symbol to see the evidence behind it.
Full framework scores are given for the eleven candidates with a qualifying scholarly publication. Nine are full assessments; Bassano and Rutland are preliminary; their published cases have not yet engaged the primary source silence or earned independent scholarly reception. Other candidates can be explored individually using the Compare tool.
How to Read the Lines, Framework and Source Notes
Each line is sub-headed in the table with a one-line description of what it measures. The notes below explain how lines 1–19 were selected, and give source notes for the lines most likely to raise questions about operationalisation.
All evidence is accounted for, including contrary evidence. Most ~ scores mean no evidence found; the question stays open. A smaller number of cells are marked ⊗ where a real primary source document actively conflicts with the candidacy. These carry a heavier burden of explanation than a simple absence. The score is set by the underlying symbol: ⊗◑ = 0.5, ⊗~ = 0.
Line 1 asks for a documented, personal connection to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, the dedicatee of Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594), in the years those dedications appeared. What scores is a tie to the man himself: shared membership of a wider patronage network (the Essex circle, for instance) is not scored, because a broad network admits many candidates and discriminates among none. The same holds for a posthumous tribute or a shared competence: such connections are scored only in the separate collaborative-authorship framework, which asks who belonged to a documented group, and whose marks are not added into this convergence total. Line 4 asks for the stronger form: a primary source document placing the candidate within Southampton's household. Why that document carries evidential weight of its own, rather than merely restating the dedication tie of Line 1, is argued on the Sonnets page: the anxious, dependent posture of the poet toward the Fair Youth fits a household dependent. Lines 1 and 4 overlap and are flagged ⚑; they are not fully independent.
The inclusion of Southampton as a criterion, and the weight it carries across two lines, is a judgment call. Venus and Adonis and Lucrece are the only works where the author speaks in the first person to a named patron, explicitly promises more work, and signs as that patron's servant. That is a different evidentiary class from the First Folio's collective dedication to the Herberts, which is posthumous and addressed to patrons of the acting company rather than explicitly from the author. The Herbert/Pembroke connection is captured separately in the convergence table (line 18a: literary dedications received), where Mary Sidney Herbert scores ✓. A reader who weights Southampton less heavily than this table does is entitled to do so; the overlap flag is an honest acknowledgment that lines 1 and 4 are not fully independent strands.
Florio's presence in Southampton's household is established by two primary sources: a 1594 deposition from the Danvers case naming him as one of Southampton's "servants," and Florio's own dedication in A World of Words (1598) stating he had lived "in whose paie and patronage some yeeres." The description of his role as language tutor is the standard scholarly inference from his profession and these sources, but is not itself a primary source term. De Vere's marriage negotiation with Southampton is documented but does not establish household membership. No primary source connects Shakspere personally to Southampton.
This line asks whether a specific set of dated facts converge for one candidate: (1) a documented biographical event at the date of publication; (2) the debut of the Shakespeare name in print; (3) genre match to the first published Shakespeare works; (4) the Southampton dedication connection. It is the only line that fires for exactly one candidate by design; it is testing a specific historical theory, not a general authorship question.
Two of the four legs are already scored elsewhere: leg (4), the Southampton connection, is Line 1, and leg (3), the genre match, overlaps Line 8 (genre range). Line 5 therefore reuses evidence on the same principle Lines 1 and 4 are flagged for, and a reader is entitled to net it out. Stripped of the two duplicated legs, what Line 5 contributes on its own is the date coincidence: the Deptford inquest of 30 May 1593 and the debut of the Shakespeare name in print within weeks of it. That coincidence is real, but it is one fact, not four converging strands.
The Deptford inquest record (30 May 1593) is a primary source document. Venus and Adonis was registered 18 April 1593; the publication is a primary source fact. The Ovidian genre match to Marlowe's documented Hero and Leander is a textual fact. A sceptical reader is entitled to weight this line differently from the others precisely because it tests a single specific theory.
The Shakespeare works echo Florio's specific English phrasings from his Montaigne translation, not merely ideas available in Montaigne's French, the clearest instance being the Gonzalo commonwealth speech in The Tempest (II.i), which follows Florio's wording closely. These echoes appear in plays from 1603 onward, consistent with use of the published translation; no author is documented using the translation before its 1603 publication. The line therefore reflects proximity to the source text, strongest for Florio, who produced it, not documented authorship.
Matthiessen (1931) noted the stylistic affinity between Florio's translating manner and Shakespeare's. George Coffin Taylor, Shakspere's Debt to Montaigne (1925), catalogued the verbal parallels and dated them to 1603 and after, concluding Shakespeare drew on the published book; Taylor expressly declined to claim influence on Shakespeare's thought. The earlier framing of this line as pre-1603 manuscript access has been withdrawn (see Errata).
The plays demonstrate technically accurate musical knowledge (correct instrument classification, modal terminology, part-singing conventions) at a level scholars have identified as exceeding lay aristocratic familiarity. This line asks whether the candidate has a documented professional or near-professional musical background that would explain this knowledge.
The musicological argument for professional knowledge is made by John Fuegi and Ross W. Duffin (Shakespeare's Songbook, 2004). De Vere scores ✓ on this line: John Farmer's dedication to The First Set of English Madrigals (1599) states that Oxford had "overgone most of them that make it a profession" using music as a recreation, primary source evidence of exceptional musical skill. Mary Sidney Herbert also scores ◑, with a documented string consort household.
The plays demonstrate insider familiarity with aristocratic social ritual, feudal obligation, and court ceremony, knowledge that, some scholars argue, could only be acquired from within. This line asks whether the candidate's documented position provides a primary source basis for that familiarity. The assumption that insider position is required (rather than observed knowledge) is contested, see methodology notes.
De Vere, Stanley, and Mary Sidney Herbert score ✓ on documented insider aristocratic position. Florio and Marlowe have documented court-adjacent access. The interpretive question, whether the plays require an insider rather than an acute observer, is the contested variable, not the biographical facts themselves. That question is examined directly in the Looney profile review (criteria 10 and 11), where playwrights of humble origin (Jonson, Kyd, Webster) are the counterexample: convincing renditions of aristocratic worlds did not require membership of them. A ✓ on this line therefore records that a candidate demonstrably had the position the insider reading assumes; it is not evidence that the insider reading is correct.
The plays show structural parallels to Greek tragedy (recognition scenes, reversal, hamartia) that some scholars argue imply direct access to Greek dramatic texts, not mediated through Latin. The line asks whether the candidate has a documented primary source establishing Greek reading at the required level.
De Vere's Greek is the best documented: the Jolly catalogue records Greek editions of Sophocles and Euripides at Cecil House; annotations in a Greek edition of Cassius Dio at Audley End are attributed to him by forensic handwriting analysis (Stritmatter 2023). North's Plutarch was translated from Amyot's French, not the Greek directly. A.D. Nuttall (a Stratfordian scholar) concedes Shakspere "almost certainly never read Sophocles or Euripides in Greek." Caveat: several other candidates (Bacon, Marlowe, Neville, Stanley) had Greek as part of their university education, so Greek ability alone is not distinctive. What is more specifically documented for de Vere is access, through the Cecil House library, to the specific Greek dramatic texts the plays draw on. The The Audley End annotations, if de Vere's, show reading and say nothing about writing. Even if de Vere were the only candidate with documented Greek annotations, the conclusion would be the same: uniqueness changes the weight of the circumstantial case, not its logical category. A primary source document connecting the candidate to the writing, not the reading, is what would close the gap.
The candidate's documented lifespan must cover the full composition window. Performance records establish terminal dates for specific plays: The Winter's Tale (Forman diary, May 1611) and The Tempest (Revels Accounts, November 1611) were performed in 1611. A performance record establishes when a play was performed, not when it was written; a play composed before a candidate's death can be performed afterward.
Kevin Gilvary, Dating Shakespeare's Plays (2010), argues that no play can be definitively placed as written after 1604 on primary source evidence alone. For Marlowe (died 1593), the faked-death hypothesis is unfalsifiable and so cannot carry evidential weight.
A primary source produced during the candidate's lifetime connecting them to the Shakespeare name or to the specific works. The 1623 First Folio and the Stratford monument (c.1620s) are posthumous; Jonson's "Sweet Swan of Avon" appeared seven years after Shakspere's death. No candidate scores ✓ on this line.
The Northumberland Manuscript (c.1596–1603), bearing Neville's name alongside Shakespeare work titles, is the closest primary source connecting any candidate to the Shakespeare name outside the posthumous Stratfordian evidence. It does not name Neville as author, but is a genuine and documented anomaly, hence ◑ for Neville. Every other candidate scores ~.
Line 18a asks whether major contemporary writers dedicated their published works to this candidate. It records patronage standing, the capacity to attract dedications, not literary authorship as such: a well-placed patron drew dedications whether or not he wrote a line himself. It is weighed on that understanding, as context rather than as evidence of who held the pen.
Dedication records are drawn from the English Short Title Catalogue. Line 18b (source material overlap) has been retired, see Lines Considered and Set Aside. It shared 18a's confound and, measured by who received dedications of Shakespeare's sources, rewarded patronage rather than authorship.
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| Line of Evidence | Shakspere | de Vere | Marlowe | Stanley | M. Sidney | Florio | Bacon | Neville | North | Bassano | Rutland |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Southampton connection ⚑ Documented personal tie to Southampton himself, in the dedication period, network proximity does not count | ~ | ◑ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ◑ |
| 2a Italian topographical knowledge ⚑ Field-verified accuracy of Italian settings (Roe 2011). Note: Roe's findings establish physical knowledge of Italian topography, not that it was acquired in any specific decade; the claim that de Vere's 1575–76 journey is uniquely consistent with this evidence has not been demonstrated. | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ◑ |
| 2b Italian linguistic / literary knowledge ⚑ Command of Italian sources not in English translation | ~ | ◑ | ◑ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ◑ | ~ |
| 3 Court life correspondences Insider accuracy of court procedure and events | ~ | ✓ | ◑ | ✓ | ✓ | ◑ | ✓ | ✓ | ◑ | ◑ | ✓ |
| 4 Southampton household documented ⚑ Primary source placing candidate in Southampton's household; this criterion discriminates primarily in Florio's favour; he is the only candidate with a direct primary source document establishing household membership | ~ | ◑ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ |
| 5 The 1593 cluster Marlowe's Deptford inquest (30 May 1593), debut of the name "Shakespeare" in print, genre match, Southampton connection, four facts that converge uniquely for Marlowe | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ◑ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ |
| 6 Florio-specific Montaigne phrasing Echoes of Florio's specific English phrasings, appearing post-1603 from the published translation, reflects proximity to the source text, strongest for Florio as its translator | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ◑ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ |
| 7 Legal knowledge Technically accurate use of legal procedure and terminology | ~ | ✓ | ◑ | ◑ | ◑ | ◑ | ✓ | ✓ | ◑ | ~ | ◑ |
| 8 Genre range Documented output covering comedy, tragedy, history, and lyric (✓ for three or four of the four, ◑ for one or two) | ~ | ◑ | ✓ | ◑ | ◑ | ~ | ◑ | ~ | ◑ | ◑ | ~ |
| 9 Narrative poem authorship Documented Ovidian narrative verse matching Venus and Adonis / Lucrece style | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ◑ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ◑ | ~ |
| 10 Professional musical knowledge Documented professional musical background explaining the plays' technical musical accuracy | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ~ |
| 11 Feudal and aristocratic outlook Documented aristocratic position explaining the plays' insider feudal perspective (specifically wardship law, estate obligation, and court ceremonial), not the range of classes depicted | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ✓ |
| 12 Ovidian erotic voice Documented lyric and erotic verse consistent with the Sonnets and early narrative poems | ~ | ◑ | ✓ | ~ | ◑ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ◑ | ~ |
| 13 Theological and sceptical range Documented combined Protestant / Catholic / Montaignean perspective | ~ | ◑ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ |
| 14 Botanical knowledge Technically specific botanical language in the plays, beyond lay knowledge | ~ | ~ | ◑ | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ◑ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ |
| 15 Greek dramatic knowledge Structural parallels to Greek tragedy implying direct access to Greek texts | ~ | ✓ | ◑ | ◑ | ◑ | ◑ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ◑ |
| 16 Chronological compatibility Candidate's documented lifespan fits the author’s documented window at both ends: through the composition and revision period, and not living past the author’s death attested by the 1623 First Folio | ✓ | ◑ | ◑ | ◑ | ✓ | ◑ | ◑ | ✓ | ◑ | ◑ | ◑ |
| 17 Contemporary testimony Period primary source connecting this candidate to the Shakespeare name or works | ~ | ⊗~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ◑ | ~ | ~ | ~ |
| 18a Literary dedications received Major contemporary writers dedicated published works to this candidate, a measure of patronage standing, weighed as context | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ◑ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ |
| 19 French fluency Documented French literacy, translation from French originals, residence in France, or diplomatic correspondence in French | ~ | ✓ | ~ | ~ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ~ |
| Convergence total ✓=1 ◑=0.5 ~=0 (approx.; rank-derived marks counted once) | ~1 | ~7 | ~9 | ~2.5 | ~7 | ~9 | ~8 | ~5.5 | ~5 | ~4 | ~2.5 |
Marks counted once. Lines 2a, 2b, 3, 11, 15 and 19 record travel, Italian gained through travel, court life, aristocratic outlook, classical education and French. For a nobleman of the period these commonly followed from one fact, his birth. Where a candidate’s marks on these lines come from noble rank or upbringing, they count once in the total, at the best such mark; marks that come from a profession, an office, scholarship or an embassy count in full. This is condition 3 on What Would Settle It. It lowers the totals of de Vere (lines 2a, 2b, 3, 11, 15 and 19), Mary Sidney Herbert (3, 11 and 15), Stanley (3, 11 and 15) and Rutland (2a, 3, 11 and 15). Three debatable cases (Neville’s tour with Savile, Bacon’s peerage by creation and Rutland’s Cambridge education) are treated as rank-derived, which can only lower a total. Every line stays visible in the grid, since each records a distinct feature of the works. The falconry line (formerly line 20) has been retired: none of its marks cited documented falconry practice, and each rested on rank. It would return as a line for documented practice if a primary source of any candidate’s practice were produced.
Notes on framework design and what convergence does and doesn't establish, click to expand.
On the Selection of the Lines
The lines were assembled by this site, not by a published scholar. That is a methodological fact that deserves direct acknowledgment: a critic can reasonably ask not just whether the lines were chosen to produce a particular result, but why these lines, and not some other set that might have produced a different winner.
The generative principle. The lines were derived by asking: what does the text itself, the publication history, and the historical record jointly require of any plausible author? That is inductive logic, working from the works outward to the author, rather than selecting a candidate and identifying what they happen to fit. Each line corresponds to a documented feature of the canon or its historical context that constrains who could plausibly have written it: the Italian plays require Italian knowledge of a specific kind; the Montaigne echoes require knowledge of one specific English translation; the 1593 publication cluster requires a specific biographical fact. No line asks a question that only one candidate can in principle answer. Each line was also identified by scholars working on questions other than authorship, literary historians, musicologists, legal historians, geographers, rather than by authorship advocates. A line whose primary proponents have an authorship stake does not qualify: the risk of motivated selection cannot be separated from the argument.
Methodological diversity as a constraint on cherry-picking. The lines span five distinct evidential types: geographic and linguistic knowledge (lines 2a, 2b), documented biographical facts (lines 1, 4, 5, 16, 17), textual and stylistic characteristics (lines 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15), social and institutional position (lines 3, 7, 11), and literary range and patronage (lines 8, 13, 18a). The diversity is itself part of the design: it is much harder to rig a framework across five methodologically independent evidence types than to cherry-pick within a single type. A candidate who scores well across all five types is more robustly evidenced than one who scores well only within one.
What was considered and excluded. Stylometrics is not a line in this table. The Zeta test methodology underpinning the main attribution claims has been shown to produce unreliable results under early modern drama conditions, where genre, collaboration and manuscript transmission confound the signal, and stylometric results are measurements that a single mark cannot carry. Studies that compare the candidates’ own writing with the works are weighed separately, on Stylometric Evidence. Biographical correspondences of the kind assembled by advocacy groups were also excluded: a correspondence between a play's content and a candidate's biography proves nothing unless it depends on specialised knowledge that could not have been acquired by literary means.
The honest residual problem. There are certainly other defensible lines that could have been included. A framework with different but equally justifiable lines might weight candidates differently. The response to that concern is not to claim the lines are the only possible set; they are not, but to invite scrutiny of each one: is any line framed in a way that advantages a particular candidate unfairly? Is there a well-evidenced line of inquiry that was excluded and whose inclusion would materially change the results? The scoring rationale in each tooltip is there to support exactly that challenge.
The flagged lines (⚑). Four lines carry a structural warning. Lines 1 and 4 are nested: both test Florio's documented connection to Southampton's household, with line 4 the more specific version. They are not fully independent, treating them as two separate pieces of evidence double-counts a single primary source document. Lines 2a and 2b were split from what could have been a single Italian knowledge line. The split is defensible, topographical knowledge of Italy (acquired through travel) and linguistic or literary knowledge of Italian (acquired through language) are genuinely distinct and a candidate can possess one without the other, but the split doubles the Italian advantage relative to a single combined line. A sceptical reader is entitled to treat lines 1+4 as one line and lines 2a+2b as one line, reducing the framework to sixteen independent lines. On that reading, Florio's lead is smaller but survives. Line 18a is not flagged. It measures one thing, dedications received as a marker of patronage standing, and is weighed lightly on that understanding.
Two further concerns, not flagged but worth naming. Line 5 (the 1593 cluster) is the only line that fires uniquely for one candidate: it asks whether a specific set of dated biographical facts converge, and those facts are Marlovian by definition. Every other line asks a general authorship question; line 5 asks whether you fit a specific historical theory. Line 11 (feudal and aristocratic outlook) embeds an interpretive assumption, that the plays require an insider aristocratic perspective rather than knowledge of that world acquired by other means. That assumption is contested. Readers who dispute it should weight line 11 accordingly.
On documentary discovery and forgery. A single primary source document, however compelling, faces an immediate challenge in this field: the history of Shakespeare scholarship includes serious forgeries, the Ireland papers of the 1790s, the Collier forgeries of the 1840s, that were initially accepted by experts. That history means any smoking-gun discovery will attract the forgery question as a matter of course, regardless of its actual provenance. The convergence framework is the appropriate response to both sides of that problem. A forger would need to have fabricated not one document but agreement across multiple independent methodological strands drawn from different archives, different document types, and different scholarly traditions, a qualitatively different and far more implausible undertaking. Equally, a genuine documentary discovery does not stand alone: it either fits the existing pattern of evidence across the lines or it creates new tensions that need explaining. Convergence gives you a way to evaluate a new document rather than simply accept or reject it on impact. This analysis does not pre-empt documentary discovery. A properly authenticated document that connected a specific candidate to the authorship directly would require this framework to be reassessed, and it would be.
The strongest evidence against motivated selection is, finally, the results themselves. A framework designed to produce de Vere as the winner would not score Florio ✓ on Southampton connection (line 1), Italian linguistic knowledge (line 2b), pre-1603 Montaigne (line 6), and botanical knowledge (line 14), while scoring de Vere ◑ or ~ on the same lines. It would not score Bacon ✓ on legal knowledge (line 7) and theological range (line 13). It would not score Mary Sidney Herbert ✓ on literary dedications received (line 18a). A rigged framework does not hand the strongest results on multiple lines to candidates other than the intended winner.
On Convergence and Proof
Convergence of circumstantial evidence across methodologically diverse lines is not the same as primary source proof. A candidate who scores ✓ across many lines shows many of the documented features the works suggest their author had. That is a finding about the documentary record. It is not a circumstantial case in the sense set out on What Would Settle It, because the table does not weigh each feature against how many others of the period it would fit, has not been tested on people nobody proposes as the author, and does not show that the features together fit very few others.
No candidate is proved by this table, and the highest total says nothing about who most likely wrote the works.
On Equal Weighting
Each line counts as one point. That is a choice, not a default, and it deserves an explanation.
The alternative, differential weighting, where some lines count for more than others, sounds more sophisticated. It is actually more dangerous. To assign a weight to a line, you must first decide how much that type of evidence matters relative to the others. That decision is not derivable from the evidence itself: it is a prior judgment. And prior judgments in the authorship debate almost always carry an advocacy position inside them. A reader who believes aristocratic insider knowledge is the key to the plays will naturally weight line 11 heavily; a reader committed to Italian travel as the clinching criterion will weight lines 2a and 2b accordingly. Neither is acting dishonestly, but both have already imported the conclusion into the weighting before the evidence is examined. Differential weighting doesn’t refine the analysis; it relocates the advocacy from the candidacy claim to the methodology.
Equal weighting removes that bias. Every line poses a question about what the works require; each answer counts once. The framework doesn’t decide in advance that biography matters more than textual knowledge, or that chronology outweighs legal expertise. It asks its questions and adds up the answers. If the result strikes a reader as wrong, the challenge is available at the line level, the tooltip for every cell shows the evidence and the reasoning. A reader who thinks line 11 is overweighted can discard it; a reader who thinks lines 2a and 2b double-count Italian knowledge can treat them as one. The underlying evidence is all there. What equal weighting prevents is the invisible move of pre-deciding which questions matter most before looking at who answers them.
When the Two Frameworks Disagree
The two frameworks on this site, Price's literary paper trail and this convergence analysis, measure different things, and they can and do pull in different directions for some candidates. That disagreement is a diagnostic signal, not a flaw in the method.
When both frameworks place a candidate high, that candidate is well documented on two different measures. Both are still counts, and agreement between them does not turn either into a likelihood of authorship. When they disagree, the disagreement may show a gap in a candidate's record on one measure, or a contested assumption built into one framework. When they diverge substantially, the honest reading is that the evidence presents differently under different analytical approaches, and no single score should be treated as a verdict.
Two examples from this table illustrate the diagnostic value. Bacon scores strongly on the paper trail framework; he left an extensive documented literary paper trail, which is precisely what Price's framework rewards, but more modestly on convergence, because the authorship-specific evidence (Italian knowledge, Southampton connection, literary register match) is largely absent. That pattern, strong on documentary presence but less strong on authorship-specific evidence, is itself informative: it shows what the Baconian case does and does not establish. Mary Sidney Herbert's paper trail score is among the strongest of all candidates on this site; her convergence score is lower, in part because several convergence lines assume public theatrical engagement that her gender and social position make structurally harder to document. That pattern illuminates a limit of the convergence framework for candidates whose access to literary life was structurally constrained, not a limit of the candidate.
Reading the frameworks together, rather than relying on any single score, gives the most accurate picture of the evidentiary state for each candidate.