What the Criteria-Based Evidence Returns

The frameworks on this site are described on the Two Frameworks page. The detailed scoring tables are on the Convergence Analysis and Price Paper Trail pages. What follows are the analytical positions those scores support, conclusions that hold across the evidence as a whole, rather than within any single candidacy.

The null result

On the Price literary paper trail, which measures personal primary source evidence of literary activity, not authorship of the Shakespeare works specifically, Bacon scores highest (10/10), with Florio and Mary Sidney Herbert close behind; de Vere scores lower. On the convergence analysis, five candidates (Bacon, de Vere, Florio, Marlowe and Mary Sidney Herbert) have the higher totals, about 7 to 9. Bacon, Florio and Mary Sidney Herbert are therefore well documented on both frameworks; the frameworks do not separate them, and neither is a measure of authorship: nothing in either table says which of them, if any, wrote the works. And separately from both frameworks, no candidate has produced a primary source document connecting them to writing specifically under the name “Shakespeare”, or circumstantial evidence that meets the five conditions on What Would Settle It. Either would be a different kind of evidence from anything the frameworks assess, and could settle the authorship, which the frameworks cannot do.

This is the site’s central finding, and it points in two directions at once. It counts against the traditional attribution: Shakspere scores last on every framework, including the Price framework designed and applied by a scholar who has no investment in any alternative candidate. It is also what the site can say about the alternatives: the frameworks leave three candidates well documented on both without separating them, the evidential question is open, and no candidate has closed it.

Shakspere scores last on every framework

On Price’s literary paper trail, Shakspere returns zero positive scores across all ten categories, the only writer among the twenty-four she surveyed for whom this is true. The one manuscript ever put forward as an exception, the Hand D pages of Sir Thomas More, is examined on its own page, where the handwriting case for it cannot be made: Hand D and the Sir Thomas More Manuscript. On the convergence analysis, he scores one point, for chronological compatibility (he was alive during the composition period), the least discriminating line in the framework, since every candidate alive in those decades scores it.

The conventional response is that this silence is expected, that a writer of his social background in that period would naturally leave no literary trace. Diana Price’s survey of twenty-four of Shakespeare’s literary contemporaries establishes that this is not true. Every one of them left at least one lifetime primary source document connecting them to their literary work. Several were of lower social standing and fewer resources than Shakspere. The silence is anomalous within his own comparison group, and the period, the profession and his social class do not explain it.

What Looney found: and didn’t

J.T. Looney drew eighteen characteristics of the author from the works and found that Edward de Vere matched them. His method records how well one life fits the profile and never asks how many other lives would fit it as well: the denominator he left out. What an author profile can and cannot show is set out on Why J.T. Looney’s Author Profile doesn’t settle the question.

The convergence analysis is a different framework

The convergence analysis is not an extension of Looney’s profile. Where Looney derives characteristics from the works, asking what kind of person wrote them, the convergence table asks questions drawn from independent historical evidence: documented Southampton connections, Italian topographical knowledge, echoes of Florio’s Montaigne, the 1593 biographical cluster, legal knowledge, Greek dramatic sources, contemporary testimony, and others. These are external facts about candidates that either align or don’t align with what the works require and what the publication record shows. They come from different types of evidence deliberately, because convergence across methodologically diverse lines is stronger than accumulation within a single method.

The two frameworks are therefore independent; they ask different questions from different sources, and they return different answers. The higher convergence totals, about 7 to 9, belong to Bacon, de Vere, Florio, Marlowe and Mary Sidney Herbert. Price is led by Bacon (10/10), with Florio and Mary Sidney Herbert close behind, and de Vere lower. Bacon, Florio and Mary Sidney Herbert have higher convergence totals and are at or near the top of Price. Neither framework says who most likely wrote the works, and agreement between them does not either. The frameworks draw on different types of evidence, and they do not produce the same short list.

Correspondences and base rates

The authorship literature is overwhelmingly composed of correspondence arguments: a detail in the plays matches something in a candidate’s biography, or a phrase in the works appears in something a candidate is known to have read, or a character resembles someone a candidate knew. These arguments are interesting and often carefully researched. They are circumstantial evidence, and they count towards authorship only as far as they meet the five conditions on What Would Settle It.

On its own, a correspondence establishes consistency: the candidate’s life is not inconsistent with the plays, which is a much weaker result than confirmation. What turns a correspondence into evidence is a base rate, an estimate of how many other people it would also fit (condition 2). Without one, fifty consistent correspondences rule out fifty inconsistencies and add up to nothing measurable. The denominator problem compounds this: correspondence hunters record hits and not misses, so the total number of tests applied is unknown, and the result cannot be evaluated against a background rate.

The four arguments on this site that are not correspondences are: the Fenner report (Stanley, 1599, a primary source document naming him as playwright); North’s source-text fingerprint (an EEBO-verified phrase cluster traceable to a specific passage in a specific edition, absent from other Elizabethan texts); Stritmatter’s Geneva Bible annotations (246 passages marked in de Vere’s hand with documented parallels to the Shakespeare canon, assessed against a comparison with other writers); and Roe’s Italian topographical findings (on-the-ground detail beyond what printed sources could supply). These are a different class of argument: they concern the narrow population of people who could have supplied a specific input.

Three cases that cut awkwardly

A consistent standard has to be applied where the results are awkward too.

Marlowe’s candidacy is the only one that explains the Shakspere silence as part of the same theory. Every other leading candidacy leaves the silence as a separate unresolved problem alongside the authorship question. Marlowe’s collapses them into one: a living Marlowe writing under a front name required exactly the documentary vacuum Shakspere left, so on this theory the silence is expected. That explanatory completeness depends entirely on one undocumented premise: that Marlowe survived the Deptford inquest of 30 May 1593. If that premise is accepted, the Sonnets’ references to the poet’s disgrace, the career trajectory of the canon, and the Shakspere silence all resolve together. If it is not accepted, the candidacy loses its distinguishing feature, and his convergence total stands on its own.

De Vere’s timeline meets the chronology question as a constraint. Several plays are conventionally dated after his death in June 1604, but conventional dating is inference from topical allusion and source use, not documentation; on primary-source evidence no play is datable to a particular year (Kevin Gilvary’s dating audit). Composition-dating therefore excludes no candidate, de Vere included. What the documentary record does carry is the endpoint, the canon ceasing to enter the record around 1613, together with the 1634 title-page attribution of The Two Noble Kinsmen to Fletcher and Shakespeare, which asks any candidate who died before then for a mechanism by which the last works were completed and released. It is a two-sided constraint that excludes no one, and the mechanism it requires grows the earlier a candidate died.

Emilia Bassano Lanier is a preliminary case. The Dark Lady scholarship is real and documented. But identifying Bassano as a subject of the Sonnets is not the same as identifying her as the author of the plays. No qualifying publication has made that authorship case directly and engaged with the primary source silence. Her assessment page sets out the evidence she has and the evidence that would upgrade her classification.

No candidate both leads the evidence and explains the silence

The authorship question is not settled because no candidate has produced a document connecting them to writing specifically under the Shakespeare name, or circumstantial evidence that meets the five conditions on What Would Settle It. In the absence of that direct evidence, a second unknown stands alongside it: no advocate has yet explained why Shakspere left no literary trace without requiring an unverified additional premise. The Marlovian explanation, that Shakspere was a front man for a living Marlowe, is the only one offered, but it depends on the survival hypothesis. An explanation that itself requires an unverified claim moves the gap to that claim. Those are the two evidential conditions that would close the question. The What Would Settle It page defines them precisely.

The two frameworks score the candidates but do not meet either condition. Only Marlowe has argued a silence explanation at all, and that argument depends on the survival hypothesis. Bacon, de Vere, Florio and Mary Sidney Herbert score well on one or both frameworks without offering a silence explanation; their candidacies leave the Stratford anomaly open. That does not disqualify them, but it leaves the question open however well any candidate scores.

The Folio: the traditional attribution’s main evidence

The First Folio of 1623 is the principal evidence for the traditional attribution, and this site treats it seriously. Its editors, Heminges and Condell, were fellows of the King’s Men named in Shakspere’s will, and Ben Jonson wrote its main commemorative poem. Jonson’s “Sweet Swan of Avon” and Leonard Digges’s “thy Stratford Moniment” are the Folio’s links between the name and Stratford.

What the Folio establishes is narrower than it is usually taken to show. It was published seven years after Shakspere’s death and names “Shakespeare”, the name on the title pages. Neither poem names William Shakspere of Stratford as the writer: “Avon” can point to Stratford or, as Camden records, to Hampton Court, and Digges’s line associates the name with the Stratford monument. Reading that association as the identification is the assumption the orthodox case rests on, made after his death. Measured against the five conditions, the Folio’s witnesses are not independent of one another, since its verses and its address to the readers come from one publishing enterprise (condition 3). The full assessment is in the circumstantial case for Shakspere on What Would Settle It.

Two types of evidence: and why no candidate has both

The debate can be mapped onto two categories of evidence. Type A is primary source evidence of a literary career, Price’s test, any of her ten documentary categories, produced during the person’s lifetime. Type B is posthumous evidence connecting someone specifically to the Shakespeare works or name. A strong case requires both. No candidate currently has both.

✓ documented  ● partial or contested  ~ none found   |   Mary Sidney Herbert’s ● on Type B: the First Folio was dedicated to her sons William and Philip Herbert.

Shakspere is the only candidate whose Type B column is filled. Every alternative with a documented literary career (Type A) has an empty Type B column. The candidate who comes closest to both is Mary Sidney Herbert, ✓ on Type A, ● on Type B, but the Folio dedication to her sons is indirect. Nobody has a direct posthumous connection to the Shakespeare name except through the Folio’s association of the name with Stratford. That asymmetry is why the question cannot be closed in either direction on current evidence.

A question the frameworks don’t ask

Both scoring frameworks assume individual authorship; they ask which single person best fits the evidence. That assumption may be correct. But there is a finding in the pattern of results that the frameworks themselves cannot surface: the candidates who score highest individually are also among the most connected figures in the documented literary and patronage networks of the period. De Vere, Florio and Mary Sidney Herbert are among the higher scorers, and the Collaborative Authorship page sets out their connections. That overlap is not produced by the scoring.

The authorship debate is usually structured as a competition between individuals, though the Elizabethan literary world was not organised that way. Collaborative production was normal, documented in Henslowe’s accounts, in the Sidney Psalms, in the Areopagus circle, and a group model leaves the individual assessments standing and changes the question they answer. On a collaborative model, the question shifts from “did this person write all of it?” to “what role did this person play in a network that could have produced it?” The Collaborative Authorship page examines that question directly. It takes up the question the frameworks were not designed to ask, without resolving the authorship.

Scoring well on current evidence means that applying consistent standards to the available primary sources places a candidate at or near the top of a framework; it does not make that candidate more likely to have written the plays.