Who Wrote Shakespeares Plays?
For sheer longevity, no conspiracy theory can match the notion that William Shakespeare did not write tile plays that have been attributed to him. The plays contain too much accurate detail about distant places of affairs at court to have been written by someone of as low social standing as Shakespeare, goes one argument. The plays display too wide a range of style, goes another. Shakespeare was not educated enough and Stratford-on-Avon was too backward a place to have produced a playwright of such caliber, goes a third. And so, almost every prominent Elizabethan has been suggested at one time or another as the author of one or more of Shakespeare’s plays: Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh and of course, Francis Bacon. Bacon is a favorite candidate because he wrote some of the earliest modern works on codes and ciphers, and so generations of effort have been wasted trying to find hidde
