The Self-Check
For anyone who is already certain, whichever candidate that is, including Shakspere of Stratford. Seven questions to ask of your own case before asking them of anyone else’s.
Here is what actually happens, for almost everyone, and there is nothing wrong with it. You read about a candidate (a life, a set of dates, a handful of striking parallels) and something in it feels right. Not proven, just right: the pieces seem to fit a shape you recognise. Then the parallels start to add up on their own: a phrase in a letter that turns up almost verbatim in a play, a plot point that seems to trace a documented event, a name or a place that appears in both the life and the work. Each one is small. But they accumulate, and at some point the accumulation itself starts to feel like the proof: surely, you think, they can’t all be coincidence. So you read more, and the feeling deepens, because that is what reading more of anything you already suspect tends to do. You mention it to someone who has read the same case, and they nod, because they felt the same thing reading the same material, coincidence for coincidence. None of that is naive or careless. It is how conviction actually forms in a human mind, on any subject, and it happens to careful people as readily as careless ones.
The seven questions below are not a way of saying that process was wrong. They are what comes after it, because the feeling of a case fitting together, however genuine, cannot by itself tell you the difference between a true account and simply a well-told one. Both feel exactly the same from the inside. Why that is, and why it catches careful people as readily as careless ones, is the subject of On Knowing.
This page is not addressed to Oxfordians, or Marlovians, or Baconians, or any other single camp. It is addressed to certainty itself, and certainty is not the exclusive property of the alternative candidacies. If you are confident the author was Shakspere of Stratford, the same seven questions apply to that confidence as to any other.
None of what follows asks you to change your conclusion. It asks you to run your own reasoning through the tests this site applies to every candidate it assesses, before applying them to anyone else’s. A case that survives all seven is a stronger case for having been tested. A case that only survives because none of them was asked is already in trouble.
One question comes before all seven, and decides whether the rest are worth asking: are you capable of entertaining real doubt about the position you hold, or are you operating from a position of certainty that doesn’t admit revision? If it’s the latter, nothing below will change that, but know which condition you’re in before reading further.
If this list reads like a reason not to bother, that isn’t the intent. Work that fails one or more of these tests hasn’t been wasted; it has answered a different question from the one these seven tests ask. Archival research into a candidate’s life adds to the historical record regardless of what it ever proves about a pen name. A source traced, an allusion identified, a life and a play carefully brought into contact is real literary scholarship, and it stands on its own terms. The bar these tests set is for a narrower and harder claim specifically: a document, not a resemblance, connecting a named person to named writing. Falling short of that bar doesn’t erase what the work has otherwise shown.
None of this requires running all seven, every time, on every case. Most people won’t, and that’s fine; one is enough. If a single question here catches on something (a moment where you notice you wouldn’t accept this reasoning from a rival candidate, or a gap you’ve been quietly explaining away) that catch is real information. It doesn’t need company from the other six to be worth stopping for.
1. The denominator test
How many other people would your method also identify? A profile assembled from the plays and matched to one biography means something only if it could not be matched to several others by the same procedure. If you have not checked how many candidates fit, the sense of fit you are feeling may be a property of the search method, not the evidence. Full treatment: The Denominator Problem.
2. The mirror test
Would the argument work as well with a different name in it? Swap in your candidate’s strongest rival and rerun the same reasoning: the parallel biography, the thematic echo, the court connection. If it holds up just as well for someone else, the argument is testing your search method, not identifying an author. Full treatment: The Mirror Problem.
3. The falsifiability test
What finding would change your mind? If every gap in the record (no letters, no contemporary mention, no manuscript) becomes evidence of concealment rather than evidence against the theory, the theory cannot be tested. A claim that comes out the same way regardless of what is found is not a historical argument. Full treatment: Logic Errors.
4. The document test
Is what you are counting a document, or a resemblance? A shared phrase, a plausible motive, a biographical echo is a different kind of evidence from a letter, a payment record, or a signature. This site scores only the second kind as primary source evidence; the same rule applied to the candidate you favour should be applied to the one you are arguing against. Full treatment: The Two Frameworks.
5. The symmetry test
Would you accept this gap from a different candidate? If an absence of correspondence, a late biography, or an undocumented skill is explained away for your candidate but treated as disqualifying for a rival’s, the standard is doing the work the evidence should be doing. Full treatment: A Proposal for Advocates.
6. The credential test
Are you weighing who said it, or what they found? Dismissing a finding because of the venue it appeared in, or accepting one because of the institution behind it, answers a different question from whether the finding is correct. Ask what the evidence shows before asking who is presenting it. Full treatment: Logic Errors.
7. The steel-man test
Can you state the case for the position you reject in a form its own advocates would recognise as fair, or does your account of it sound like something built to be easy to beat? And when you argue against it, are you engaging the argument or the person making it? A case that only wins against a weakened version of the opposition, or that wins by discrediting the person rather than the claim, has not actually been tested.
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None of these seven questions settles the authorship question in either direction. What they test is whether a case (any case, including the orthodox one) has been put through the same scrutiny before it is presented as settled. That is a different question from the evidentiary one, which this site answers the same way for every candidate: two fixed frameworks, scored from primary sources. See all fourteen assessments on the Candidates page, or compare two directly with the comparison tool.