Errata

Factual errors: wrong dates, misattributed documents, incorrect citation details, should simply be corrected and I am grateful to hear about them.

Scoring errors, where a cell in a framework table doesn't follow from the criteria as stated, are the most consequential and the most welcome to receive.

Errors of omission: relevant evidence or scholarship this site hasn't covered, are the hardest to catch, because this site cannot know what it doesn't know. If you are aware of something that belongs here, please say so.

Interpretive disagreements, where the evidence is correctly reported but the significance is misjudged, shade into legitimate scholarly argument and I am open to those too, though they require engaging the criteria rather than just the conclusion.

Date	Original	Correction / Page
2 September 2026	The 1593 cluster (Line 5) was presented as four converging facts: a dated biographical event, the debut of the “Shakespeare” name in print, a genre match, and the Southampton connection.	Two of the four legs are already scored elsewhere: the Southampton connection is Line 1, and the genre match overlaps Line 8 (genre range). Line 5 reused that evidence without flagging it; its independent content is the date coincidence alone (Marlowe’s death and the debut of the name within weeks). An overlap note has been added. Raised by Richard Anderson. Convergence Analysis
31 August 2026	The Shakspere profile page showed a head-and-shoulders portrait captioned “Droeshout engraving, First Folio (1623)” (with matching alt text).	The image is in fact the Chandos Portrait (National Portrait Gallery), an oil painting, not the Droeshout line engraving printed in the First Folio: two different objects. The caption and alt text now identify it as the Chandos Portrait and note that both the sitter’s identification and the dating are traditional rather than documented. Raised by Richard Anderson. William Shakspere
31 August 2026	Three pages attributed the phrase “thy Stratford Moniment” to Ben Jonson’s First Folio poem, alongside his “Sweet Swan of Avon”: the Shakspere, Correspondences and Evidentiary State pages.	“Sweet Swan of Avon” is Jonson’s; “thy Stratford Moniment” is Leonard Digges’s, from his separate commendatory poem in the same 1623 volume. All three pages now credit Digges for the “Stratford Moniment” and keep the two phrases and their authors distinct (the institutional, case-for-shakspere and objections pages already did so). Raised by Richard Anderson. Shakspere · Correspondences · Evidentiary State
31 August 2026	The Institutional page dated John Weever’s transcription of the monument inscription to “1617–19” and described him as transcribing it “within a year or two” of Shakspere’s 1616 death, stated as established fact.	The tight window is a scholarly inference, resting on the latest datable monument in the relevant notebook (Thomas Gerard, d. January 1618), not on any dated entry for the Stratford visit. The Folger records only that Weever made the transcriptions between Shakspere’s death in April 1616 and Weever’s own death in 1632. The page now gives that certain span, presents the 1617–19 estimate as an inference rather than a fact, and rewords the “further puzzle” passage so it no longer leans on the early date. Raised by Richard Anderson. How Shakspere Got Connected to the Works
28 August 2026	Convergence line 16 (chronological compatibility) tested only the front of the author’s documented window: it gave ◑ to candidates who died before the canon closed, but a clean ✓ to every candidate who lived through it, however long past. Yet the ever-living poet page already noted that the 1623 First Folio’s own editors attest the author dead by 1623, which the candidates who outlived that date contradict.	The line now closes the window at both ends. The 1623 First Folio (Heminge and Condell, “by death departed from that right”) is a plain documentary attestation of the author’s death, not a contested reading like the 1609 “ever-living” epithet, so it is taken at face value as the front-of-window records are. Candidates still alive in 1623, Bacon (d. 1626), Stanley (d. 1642), Florio (d. 1625), Emilia Bassano (d. 1645), now score ◑ rather than ✓ on this line, the mirror of the ◑ already carried by candidates who died before the canon closed; each must hold that the Folio’s attestation names the front-man, a concealment sustained past the candidate’s own death. It excludes no one and crowns no one: the 1623 terminus does not reach Oxford (d. 1604), who is unchanged and keeps the half-mark he already carries for dying before the canon closed. Convergence totals: Bacon ~9.5→~9.0, Florio ~12.0→~11.5, Stanley ~6→~5.5, Bassano ~6→~5.5; no candidate changes band. Raised by John Shahan. Convergence · Ever-Living Poet
25 August 2026	The Looney author profile scored Edward de Vere ◑ on criterion 8 (“a lyric poet of recognised talent”), on the stated ground that “talent of the Shakespearean order is not evidenced under his own name.”	The rationale was circular: it measured de Vere’s own-name verse against Shakespeare’s, which assumes the disputed works are already his, the move the site faults elsewhere. The criterion asks for recognised talent, not talent of the Shakespearean order, and de Vere’s contemporary reputation as a poet is documented, so he now scores ✓, as Mary Sidney and Marlowe already did. His totals rise to 18/18 on the full profile, level with Marlowe at the top of the sound-eight check. The correction strengthens the site’s point rather than weakening it: a top profile score, even a perfect one, is still not evidence of authorship. Raised by John Shahan. Page: looney-critique.
31 July 2026	The cipher-arguments page examined page-number, letter-skip, acrostic and geometric ciphers, but did not address text-embedded anagrams, the one class that, sitting in the dialogue itself, would bear on authorship rather than on publication.	A new section was added examining that class through Roberta Ballantine’s Marlowe anagrams: it grants that such ciphers are the only kind that could speak to authorship, then shows the method fails the site’s finish-line (reproducibility) test on the author’s own terms. This is an expansion, not a correction, and does not accept the Marlowe cipher case. Prompted by correspondence from HM. Cipher Arguments
26 July 2026	The Shakspere profile page opened: “William Shakspere was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564.” The analogues page likewise listed him as “born 1564, baptised at Holy Trinity Church.”	Births were not registered in Elizabethan England. The primary source is the Holy Trinity Church baptism record, 26 April 1564; there is no document establishing that the birth itself occurred in Stratford. Both pages now read “baptised” in place of “born.” Noted by correspondent DK. William Shakspere
25 July 2026	Candidates were classified on a four-tier scale (Tier 1 full assessment, Tier 3 preliminary, Tier 4 documentation), and the Price and Convergence framework tables were limited to the nine Tier 1 candidates, Emilia Bassano Lanier and Roger Manners (Rutland), though each supported by a qualifying publication, were assessed only on their own pages and stated to be “not included.”	Two changes. (1) The four-tier scale is retired: candidates are now grouped by one factual distinction, whether the authorship case has appeared in an independent publication, with depth of treatment (full assessment / preliminary / documentation) stated separately, and publication status kept distinct from evidential strength. (2) The framework tables now score all eleven candidates that hold a qualifying publication (the nine full assessments plus Bassano and Rutland, preliminary), so every published-case candidate is compared on the same axes; both were additionally scored on the three convergence lines added in the July renumbering (18a, 19, 20). No existing score changed. The Looney profile table remains a nine-candidate Oxford-profile test. Candidates · Convergence · Price
22 July 2026	Two convergence lines rested on patronage rather than authorship: line 18a (literary dedications received), which claimed to measure “literary centrality,” and line 18b (source material overlap), which credited a candidate when the translator of one of Shakespeare’s sources dedicated that work to him. Both track the capacity to attract dedications, wealth and rank, not who wrote the works. Separately, Marlowe’s line 10 (professional musical knowledge) was scored ◙ despite documented sight-reading training, and line 2b (Italian) ~ despite engagement with Italian material not then available in English.	Line 18b retired (see Lines Considered and Set Aside); line 18a relabelled “dedications received,” the “literary centrality” claim withdrawn and the line weighed as context. Marlowe line 10 ◙→✓ (the Parker scholarship’s sight-reading requirement is documented professional training) and line 2b ~→◙ (the Jew of Malta Machiavelli predates the first printed English Prince, 1640; the Faustus epilogue draws on Petrarch). Convergence totals adjusted. The convergence table is now presented as bands rather than a decimal ranking, the half-point differences being finer than the method’s resolution. Line 8 (genre range) similarly corrected for de Vere (✓→◙): patronage of genres is not documented own-name output, so the mark now credits only the comedy and lyric he demonstrably wrote. Prompted by correspondent Ros Barber.
20 July 2026	Convergence Line 1 scored Rutland ~ for personal connection to Southampton (“no primary source document connects Rutland personally to Southampton, documented Essex-circle proximity only”). The ~ was set on 12 July, when connection through the shared Essex–Southampton patronage network was judged, correctly, not to count.	Network membership still does not count, but a documented personal tie does exist. Rutland and Southampton were born on the same day three years apart (6 October 1576 and 1573), were both raised as royal wards in Burghley’s household, were friends from their teens, and followed Essex together to Essex House in 1601. A.L. Rowse (Shakespeare’s Southampton, 1965, p. 53) cites Rutland’s July 1590 letter to Burghley sending commendations to Southampton (CSP Domestic) and a planned 1591 visit between them (HMC Rutland MSS I). That is a personal connection to Southampton himself, not network proximity, so Line 1 is corrected ~→✓ and Rutland’s convergence total from ~4.5 to ~5.5/20. Line 4 (Southampton household) is unaffected, Rutland was never a member of Southampton’s household, and remains ~. Corrected on notice from correspondent DK. Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland
20 July 2026	The Convergence Line 1 tooltip (mirrored on devere.html) said “both Oxford and Southampton were royal wards in Burghley’s household” and that the marriage negotiation “ran through Burghley as guardian of both men”, implying the two were wards together and that Burghley was Oxford’s guardian at the time of the match.	Oxford was Burghley’s royal ward in the 1560s and became his son-in-law by marrying Anne Cecil in 1571; Southampton did not enter the household until about a decade later. By the marriage negotiation (c.1590–91) Oxford (some twenty-three years Southampton’s senior) was long past wardship; Burghley pressed the match as Southampton’s guardian and as grandfather of the proposed bride, Oxford’s daughter Elizabeth Vere. The tooltip now sequences the two wardships and describes Burghley as “Southampton’s guardian and the prospective bride’s grandfather.” No score changed (de Vere Line 1 remains ◉). Corrected on notice from correspondent DK. Convergence Analysis · Edward de Vere
17 July 2026	The Cipher Arguments page opened by describing the page-number cipher as the author encoding “his ordinal title” in the First Folio’s page numbers, without noting that an ordinal title (a “17th Earl”) presupposes a titled nobleman. The framing therefore applied only to Oxford while appearing to describe cipher claims in general.	The page now states plainly that the page-number cipher is a specifically Oxfordian argument: it works only for a candidate who has an ordinal number to conceal, and cannot be made for untitled candidates such as Marlowe, Francis Bacon, or Mary Sidney. The opening was also broadened to record that ciphers have been advanced for other candidates too, the Baconian biliteral cipher, and letter- or number-based ciphers for Marlowe, Sir Henry Neville, and others, all judged by the same Friedman standard applied on the page. Corrected on notice from correspondent RB. Cipher Arguments
14 July 2026	The Bassano page illustrated Emilia Bassano Lanier with a portrait of a woman of apparent West African descent, captioned only “authenticated attribution uncertain,” and gave no account of the historiography behind A.L. Rowse’s 1973 Dark Lady identification.	Portrait replaced with a Nicholas Hilliard miniature (V&A, P.8-1945, c.1590), captioned to attribute the Emilia identification to John Hudson (2014) rather than to the museum, which catalogues the sitter only as “an unknown woman.” A new paragraph records Samuel Schoenbaum’s assessment of Rowse’s claim, “It is useful for a Dark Lady to be demonstrably dark” (William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, 1977), and the misreading of Simon Forman’s “brave in youth” as “brown in youth” it criticizes. Corrected on notice from correspondent DK. Emilia Bassano Lanier
14 July 2026	The Convergence Line 1 tooltip (mirrored on devere.html) described Oxford’s connection to Southampton as “documented and personal, but social and familial,” without distinguishing personal contact from personal stake; separately, devere.html’s prose still read “de Vere was fined for the breach in November 1594”, a leftover the 11 July payee correction never reached.	No letter or direct exchange between Oxford and Southampton themselves is documented, the marriage negotiation ran entirely through Burghley as guardian of both. The tooltip now makes clear that what is personal is Oxford’s stake in the outcome (his own daughter proposed as the bride), not contact with Southampton himself. The stray prose sentence stating Oxford was fined is corrected to match the 11 July standard: any penalty was owed to Burghley, not de Vere, and remains unconfirmed by fiscal record. No scores changed (de Vere Line 1 remains ◑). Corrected on notice from correspondent DK. Convergence Analysis · Edward de Vere
12 July 2026	Convergence Line 1 (Southampton connection) scored ◉ for Marlowe, Neville, and Rutland, each on the basis of documented proximity through the shared Essex–Southampton patronage network. Rutland’s Line 4 (Southampton household) carried a matching ◉ on the same basis.	Line 1 asks for a documented, personal connection to Southampton himself, in the years of the dedications; shared membership of a wide patronage network is not such a connection and, being common to many, discriminates among none. The three ◉ scores rested only on that network proximity and are corrected to ~. The line’s title and note are re-anchored accordingly, and the methodology note now says network membership does not score. Rutland’s Line 4 (Southampton household) rested on the identical network inference and is corrected the same way, ◉→~. de Vere and Mary Sidney keep their ◉, each rests on a specific documented event (the marriage negotiation; Southampton standing godfather to a Sidney child), not on network membership, and Florio’s ✓ (household servant, 1594 deposition) is unaffected. Convergence totals: Marlowe ~9, Neville ~5.5, Rutland ~4.5 (de Vere still leads at ~14.5). Prompted by David Richardson. Convergence Analysis · Christopher Marlowe · Henry Neville · Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland
11 July 2026	The de Vere assessment (convergence-table Line 1, mirrored on his page and the narrative-poems page) had Southampton refuse the marriage to Oxford’s daughter Elizabeth Vere and pay “a £5,000 penalty bond directly to de Vere,” stating the payment as fact.	Two corrections. The wardship was Burghley’s; he held the marriage, so a fine for refusing the match he tendered would have been owed to Burghley as guardian, not to Oxford; the site’s own narrative-poems page already had Oxford merely losing a son-in-law. And the payment is only reported (Father Henry Garnett; Hurstfield treats it as a rumour), with no fiscal document confirming it or the £5,000 figure, so it now reads as reported and probable rather than proven, while the documented refusal stands. “Candidate to marry” is reworded: Burghley pressed his ward, and Southampton refused. No scores changed (de Vere Line 1 remains ◑). Corrected on notice from correspondent DK. Convergence Analysis · Edward de Vere
10 July 2026	The Bacon assessment stated flatly that “no Italian travel is documented” for him, on both his page and the Italy page.	The flat denial was too absolute. The primary record documents three years in France (1576–79) in Sir Amias Paulet’s embassy and a plan to travel on into Italy in February 1579 that was cut short when his father died and he was recalled, an intended Italian journey, not a completed one. Pierre Amboise’s Discours sur la vie de François Bacon (1631), the first biography and the one source that sends Bacon further, is late, second-hand, and demonstrably unreliable where it can be checked, so it cannot carry the Italy claim; the passages now record France as documented, the 1579 plan as aborted, and Amboise as uncorroborated. No scores changed (the line already read ~). Prompted by a correspondent. Francis Bacon · Italian Knowledge
10 July 2026	The bibliography cited Cockburn’s The Bacon Shakespeare Question only in its 1998 private printing, describing it as of limited circulation.	The Francis Bacon Society reissued the book in 2024, with a new foreword by Christina G. Waldman; it is available again. The entry now records the reissue. Prompted by a correspondent. Bibliography
9 July 2026	Convergence Line 6 (“Pre-1603 Montaigne”) and related pages stated that 200+ of Florio’s specific English phrasings appear in plays dated before 1603, implying pre-publication manuscript access, and cited George Coffin Taylor’s Shakspere’s Debt to Montaigne (1925) for this and for a shared “Montaignean scepticism.” The line was scored ✓ for Florio and ◑ for de Vere, Mary Sidney, and Bacon.	Taylor’s study explicitly covers words used during and after (not before) 1603, concluding Shakespeare drew on the published translation; Taylor also expressly declines to claim influence on Shakespeare’s thought. A second cited source, “Shaheen (2012),” could not be verified and has been removed; Matthiessen (1931) is retained only for the stylistic affinity he actually describes. The line is reframed as “Florio-specific Montaigne phrasing,” grounded in post-1603 use of the published book and the Tempest Gonzalo speech; the pre-1603 / manuscript-access framing and the Taylor scepticism citation are withdrawn. Rescored: Florio ✓→◑ (source proximity, not authorship); de Vere, Mary Sidney, Bacon ◑→~; Marlowe ⊗→~. Convergence totals: de Vere ~14.5, Florio and Mary Sidney ~12.5, Bacon ~9.5 (de Vere still leads; Florio and Mary Sidney still tied for second). Prompted by David Richardson. Convergence Analysis
7 July 2026	The Bacon assessment stated: “No documented connection between Bacon and Southampton exists in the primary sources”, repeated in four convergence-line tooltips as “No documented connection to Southampton.”	One primary source does exist: Bacon’s letter to Southampton on his release from the Tower in 1603, printed in Spedding’s Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, an approach toward reconciliation from the man who had helped prosecute him, to which no reply is recorded. The page and all four tooltips now state it. The constraint the passage described survives in more precise form: the letter documents acquaintance and estrangement a decade after the 1593–4 dedications, not a relationship capable of supporting them. No scores changed. Corrected on notice from correspondent DK. Francis Bacon
7 July 2026	The Linking Documents page said of the will’s interlined bequest: “Its authenticity is not seriously disputed.”	A minority of researchers does dispute it, most fully in Bonner Miller Cutting’s studies of the will. The sentence now records the challenge and names its principal source. The document’s standing in mainstream scholarship is unchanged; the site’s claim about the state of the debate was too strong. Corrected on notice from David Richardson, who asked to be on record as disputing the bequest’s authenticity and defers to Cutting for the argument, set out in her “Shakespeare’s Will… Considered Too Curiously” (Brief Chronicles I, 2009; revised in Necessary Mischief, 2018). The Linking Documents
6 July 2026	The Shakspere assessment stated that his Globe shareholding and membership of the Lord Chamberlain’s (later King’s) Men “are documented facts about a theatre businessman,” citing the 1603 royal patent and 1604 livery allowance, documents that record the name William Shakespeare in the company, not the man from Stratford.	The company records document the name; the identification of that sharer with the Stratford man rests on a short chain, the will’s interlined bequest to his “fellows,” the Blackfriars Gatehouse deed, the Belott–Mountjoy deposition, and the posthumous monument and Folio, now stated explicitly and exhibited on a dedicated page. The site’s acceptance of the theatre connection stands; the wording claimed more directness than the documents carry. Prompted by a correspondent. Shakspere of Stratford · The Linking Documents
5 July 2026	Convergence line 7 (Legal knowledge) tooltips for Thomas North said “Gray’s Inn documented”, in four places (Convergence Analysis, North’s page, and twice in the comparison tool).	North entered Lincoln’s Inn, as this site’s own North biography states; Gray’s Inn was Bacon’s and Burghley’s. All four tooltips corrected. No scores changed. Spotted in correspondence. Thomas North
5 July 2026	The play-dating page treated chronology play-by-play but said nothing about the shape of the whole record, that the canon stops in 1613.	New section added: The Endpoint Problem, the endpoint as a two-sided test on every candidate (those dead before 1613 owe a mechanism; those alive long after owe a motive), with the evidentiary standing of the two final plays distinguished. Prompted by a correspondent’s formulation, which was sharper than anything the page previously said.
4 July 2026	Convergence line 6 (Pre-1603 Montaigne verbal precision) stated that the Florio verbal echoes “cannot have been arrived at independently from the French original.”	“Cannot” overstated the evidence: independent translators converge on the same English as a matter of base rate, and the comparison set of independent English Montaignes is small. The note now reads “unlikely,” and states that the line’s weight rests on the most distinctive renderings rather than the aggregate count. No scores changed. Prompted by Eddi Jolly’s blind-translation comparison. Convergence Analysis