The Reader's Guide
Everyone has answered the question of who wrote the works of Shakespeare. Almost no one has asked it properly.
Both sides answer before they ask. The Stratfordian starts from the man in the parish register and reads the works back onto him; the anti-Stratfordians start from a favoured candidate, Oxford or Bacon or Marlowe, and build the case toward him. The name changes; the habit is the same, a conclusion settled first and defended after. Asking the question properly means the opposite: fix a test that no advocate had a hand in before any candidate is chosen, then put every name through it on the same terms, the Stratford man included.
Start with what a leading Shakespeare scholar concedes. Sir Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, has said he would love to find a contemporary document naming William Shakespeare as the dramatist of Stratford, written during his lifetime, and that none has yet turned up. The traditional attribution rests on posthumous testimony, the 1623 First Folio and the Stratford monument, and on no document from the man’s own lifetime tying him to the works.
An attribution never tested against a lifetime record is not a settled fact but a claim, and a claim can only be tested by holding it to the same standard as its rivals. That is the only reason candidates are examined here. Not because someone else is assumed to have written the plays, but because once the Stratford attribution is treated as a claim rather than a given, every name put forward, the Stratford man first among them, has to meet the same documentary test.
So the test is fixed before any candidate is examined: two independent frameworks, the Literary Paper Trail and the Convergence Analysis, in which no advocate had a say. Applied consistently to the primary source record, they return two results that form the spine of this site:
1. Of twenty-five Elizabethan contemporaries examined, twenty-four left primary source evidence of a literary career. The man traditionally credited as the author, William Shakspere of Stratford, left none.
2. No alternative candidate is established. The identity of the author remains unresolved, and that cuts both ways: against Shakspere, and against every proposed alternative.
Those are not starting assumptions; they are what the criteria returned once applied to the record.
The rest of this page is orientation; the frameworks and the arguments themselves live under Contents. If you want the detail first: The Two Frameworks explains what each one measures; Logic & Evidentiary Standards sets out why the mainstream case rests on a single unexamined identification: that every reference to the author “Shakespeare” is a reference to Shakspere of Stratford; and The Case for Shakspere states the orthodox chain as its defenders make it and shows where the gap falls within it.
One caution the tables make unavoidable: a high score measures a well-documented literary life, not authorship. No score on either framework can establish that a candidate wrote the plays, and raising any candidate’s score does nothing to resolve the question. What cannot be argued away is the finding itself: Shakspere is the only one of the twenty-five Diana Price examined who left no literary paper trail at all, a point the attribution’s own chief custodian, Sir Stanley Wells, effectively conceded to Newsweek in 2014. That is why the site keeps the anomaly and the inference separate, and asks alternative-candidate advocates to read Advocates, Please Read before arguing scores higher.
What this site offers different readers
Alternative candidate advocates: the most systematic application of consistent criteria to all nine fully-assessed candidates: where each case is strongest, where it has gaps, and exactly what primary source evidence would raise a score. The site won’t confirm your candidate, but it will give you the strongest honest case and be explicit about what is missing.
Stratfordian advocates: the same standard applied to Shakspere as to every other candidate. Orthodoxy runs your way institutionally, but it rests on inference and tradition, not the primary documentation this site measures, as the 2014 Wells admission concedes. If the standard reveals an anomaly, the response is to account for it, not to dismiss the standard.
General readers: a structured account of what the debate is actually about, and how to tell evidence from correspondence. Much of what circulates as “proof” is only consistency argument: the candidate could have written the plays, which is far weaker than it sounds.
Sceptics: the methodology in full on The Two Frameworks; every score carries an evidence note saying what was found and why. Correspondence, inference chains, and biographical parallels are explicitly excluded, exactly the grounds academic scholarship would accept. A case that survives those exclusions is what the field would require.