A History of the Question

Orthodox surveys of the authorship question devote most of their space not to the documents but to the history of doubting them.

A word on “doubt,” since the history turns on it. This page uses it in one sense: questioning whether the man from Stratford wrote the works, an attribution left open rather than assumed. That differs from a second sense the debate often trades on, a claim to know who the concealed author really was. When someone calls Harvey in 1593 or Meres in 1598 the first doubter, they usually mean the second thing, not that either man questioned the attribution, but that, read a certain way, he pointed to a particular candidate. A coded identification of the true author is a claim to knowledge, not a doubt. The doubt this page tracks is the open question.

Doubt before the First Folio? 1593–1598

Before the 1623 Folio fixed the name to the works, was there doubt? Advocates point to two contemporary texts, read closely. Gabriel Harvey’s L’envoy to his “Gorgon” sonnet (1593), written after Marlowe’s death that May, has been read (Ros Barber, Critical Survey, 2009) as hinting that Marlowe lay behind the name newly printed on Venus and Adonis. Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (1598), which lists “Shakespeare” and “Edward Earle of Oxenforde” as separate figures, has been read (Roger Stritmatter, Critical Survey, 2023) as encoding an identification of de Vere.

Neither text says the man credited with the works did not write them. They are inferential readings laid on ambiguous passages, and the two point to different authors, Harvey’s to Marlowe, Meres’s to Oxford. Whether that counts as doubt is a matter of definition; the site treats documented, published doubt as beginning with Hart in 1848, while granting that the impulse reaches back into the 1590s.

Two centuries without a question, 1623–1840s

For two hundred years no doubt of the attribution is recorded, and by that measure it begins in 1848. Through the Restoration, Shakespeare was one admired playwright among several, behind Beaumont and Fletcher in popular taste; only after David Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee of 1769 did he become the national poet, and only in the following decades did Edmond Malone’s generation invent documentary biography, the systematic searching of archives that makes attribution a testable question at all. The sequence matters, and it is the subject of Objection 17: doubt could not precede the instrument that detects anomalies, and it arrived almost exactly when the instrument did. The same decades produced the Homeric Question and the higher criticism of the Bible from the same new tools.

The first doubts, 1848–1857

Open published doubt begins with Joseph C. Hart’s The Romance of Yachting (1848), followed by an anonymous “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1852). Delia Bacon’s 1856 article in Putnam’s Magazine and her 1857 book proposed the first group theory, a circle of politician-philosophers led by Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon, while William Henry Smith’s 1856 pamphlet made Francis Bacon the first single alternative candidate proposed in print. The academic reply began at once: George Henry Townsend’s William Shakespeare Not an Impostor (1857) attacked the early sceptics’ scholarship on exactly the grounds (false premises, specious parallels) that this site’s Weak Arguments page now applies to both sides. One qualification from recent scholarship: Bryan Wildenthal's Early Shakespeare Authorship Doubts (2019) catalogued dozens of expressions of puzzlement or indirect doubt going back to 1589, including five separate indications that the author had already died before Shakspere's death in 1616. Whether these constitute “doubt” in the organised sense Hart’s generation inaugurated is definitional; what Wildenthal established is that the question did not emerge from a cultural vacuum in 1848.

A note on what came before Hart: a manuscript “discovered” in 1932, purporting to show the Reverend James Wilmot doubting the attribution as early as 1781, has since been identified as a probable forgery. This site does not cite Wilmot, and the question’s history needs no backdating.

The embarrassments, 1880s–1950s

What followed the first doubts was, for several decades, mostly indefensible. Ignatius Donnelly’s The Great Cryptogram (1888) launched a cipher craze: Orville Ward Owen built a thousand-foot “cipher wheel” and, in 1907, dredged the River Wye for a box of Bacon’s manuscripts his decodings had located; Elizabeth Wells Gallup searched panels in Canonbury Tower on the strength of a biliteral cipher; Delia Bacon had already spent nights in the Stratford chancel, unable in the end to lift the gravestone her readings told her concealed the proof. A 1916 Chicago courtroom briefly ruled, on cipher evidence, that Bacon wrote the canon, a verdict rescinded amid the ensuing uproar. Tombs were petitioned, and in 1938 Edmund Spenser’s was opened; it contained old bones. The definitive demolition of the whole genre came from mainstream cryptology: William and Elizebeth Friedman, two of the twentieth century’s foremost codebreakers, examined every proposed cipher system and showed that none meets the elementary standards of valid decipherment. The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (1957) won the Folger Shakespeare Library’s own literary prize. This site’s methodology excludes ciphers entirely, in agreement with the Friedmans’ finding. The cipher era discredited its practitioners. It did not, and could not, settle what the Stratford archive does or does not contain.

The other thread, 1908–2001

Running parallel to the embarrassments was a different kind of scepticism. George Greenwood’s The Shakespeare Problem Restated (1908) argued the documentary case against the attribution while supporting no alternative candidate: candidate-neutral, evidence-first, and the direct ancestor of this site’s approach. Mark Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909) made the documentary argument popular.

Then came the book that changed the question’s shape more than any before Price’s. J. Thomas Looney, an English schoolmaster with no prior stake in the debate, worked by a genuinely new method in Shakespeare Identified (1920): rather than starting from a candidate, he derived a profile of characteristics from the works themselves (a classically educated man of letters, a lyric poet, an enthusiast for Italy and music, of feudal sympathies and improvident finances) and then searched the period for the man who matched it, arriving at Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Within a few years Oxford had displaced Bacon as the leading alternative candidate, a position he has held ever since; Freud counted himself persuaded; and in 1922 Looney and Greenwood founded the Shakespeare Fellowship to advance the question. Looney’s standing on this site is double-edged: he made the search systematic rather than anecdotal, and the field’s leading candidacy is his doing, but the profile method itself does not survive scrutiny, because several of its characteristics pre-select aristocrats before any document is consulted. This site examined his framework, applied it for a time, and retired it; the full reasoning is on Why Author Profiles Don’t Settle the Question. A major figure, then, and not a method this site employs.

After the Second World War the question declined (by 1974 the Shakespeare Oxford Society counted eighty members) and the mid-century attempt to revive it added baggage of its own: Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn Sr.’s 1,300-page This Star of England (1952) embedded the Oxfordian case in the “Prince Tudor” theory, a secret royal child and a state cover-up, exactly the conspiracy reading this site does not employ. The modern revival was the work of their son. Charlton Ogburn Jr., elected president of the Society in 1976, concluded that academia was an entrenched authority that would never grant the question a hearing, and set out to bypass it: his 900-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare (1984) addressed the public rather than the profession, and his strategy of moot courts, media debates, and television, later extended to the Internet, made Oxford the unchallenged leading alternative and put the question back into public circulation, where it has remained. The strategy won visibility and cost something as method: a question argued past the profession rather than through it acquired the anti-establishment cast its critics now cite against it.

This site takes the opposite wager. The methodological turn came with Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography (2001): no candidate proposed, no cipher consulted, no conspiracy required, ten categories of documentary evidence, applied to twenty-five writers under identical rules, by the standards the profession itself uses. That is the thread this site continues, precisely because Ogburn’s route, whatever it gained in circulation, could not gain the only thing that settles an attribution: documents.

Trials, surveys, and the modern argument, 1987–present

In September 1987, three Justices of the United States Supreme Court heard the Oxfordian case in a one-day moot trial and ruled it unproven, finding the conspiracy reasons offered for it incoherent; three Law Lords reached the same verdict in London the following year. The trials heard candidate advocacy, argued before Price’s framework existed, with the burden placed on the challengers; they did not adjudicate the documentary anomaly, which no court has examined.

Justices Stevens and Blackmun sat on the 1987 panel, and both are among the jurists whose later-published doubts this site’s Notable Doubters section records: hearing the Oxfordian case fail did not persuade them the question was closed.

In 2007, a New York Times survey asked 265 American Shakespeare professors whether there is good reason to question the attribution: 6 per cent said yes, 11 per cent possibly, 61 per cent called it a theory without convincing evidence, and 32 per cent a waste of time. Those numbers carry weight in both directions, and this site reports all of them: a question dismissed by most of a profession, yet one that roughly a sixth of its members would not close. The modern exchange, James Shapiro’s Contested Will (2010), the Wells–Edmondson Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (2013), and the sceptical replies, is engaged throughout this site, most directly on The Case for Shakspere and the Objections page.

What the history shows

Methods discredit their practitioners; they do not settle questions. The cipher hunters were wrong in a way the Friedmans proved, and this site bars their methods. The same rule, applied evenly, covers the orthodox side’s own history (William Henry Ireland’s forged Shakespeare papers, celebrated before exposure; the forgeries of John Payne Collier, a leading Shakespeare scholar) without anyone concluding that orthodox scholarship is thereby discredited. Strip both traditions of their worst practitioners and what remains is what was always there: an archive, searched since Malone’s day, that records a documented life in abundance and a writing life not at all. The history of the question explains why doubt arrived when it did and why it has been easy to mock. It says nothing about the documents, and only the documents can settle the attribution.