In a survey of twenty-four early modern literary contemporaries, every one left a personal trace of their work.
Shakspere left none.

Seventy documents record the life of the man from Stratford. They cover grain sales, tax debts, a lawsuit over a few shillings, a property purchase, his will. None of them mentions a play, a poem, or a letter about either. For every other writer of the period surveyed by modern scholarship, at least one such document exists. For him, none does.

That is the question. Not a conspiracy theory—a gap in the record where a document should be.