"The Folger Shakespeare Library has been a major location for research into the authorship question, and welcomes scholars looking for new evidence that sheds light on the plays' origins. If the current consensus on the authorship of the plays and poems is ever overturned—no decisive evidence has been unearthed thus far proving that the plays were produced by anyone but the man from Stratford-upon-Avon—it will be because new and extraordinary evidence is discovered. The Folger is the most likely place for such an unlikely discovery."
—Michael Witmore
Director, Folger Shakespeare Library
Perhaps in response to the disreputable Shakespeare of legend—or perhaps in response to the fragmentary and, for some, all-too-ordinary Shakespeare documented by surviving records—some people since the mid-nineteenth century have argued that William Shakespeare could not have written the plays that bear his name. These persons have put forward some dozen names as more likely authors, among them:
- Queen Elizabeth
- Sir Francis Bacon
- Edward de Vere (earl of Oxford)
- Christopher Marlowe
Such attempts to find what for these people is a more believable author of the plays are a tribute to the regard in which the plays are held.
Unfortunately for their claims, the documents that exist that provide evidence for the facts of William Shakespeare's life tie him inextricably to the body of plays and poems that bear his name.
Unlikely as it seems to those who want the works to have been written by an aristocrat, a university graduate, or an "important" person, the plays and poems seem clearly to have been produced by a man from Stratford-upon-Avon with a very good "grammar-school" education and a life of experience in London and in the world of the London theater.
How this particular man produced the works that dominate the cultures of much of the world almost four hundred years after his death is one of life's mysteries—and one that will continue to tease our imaginations as we continue to delight in his plays and poems.
Back ... Shakespeare's Story
“Shakespeare’s Life” is one of several introductory essays included in the Folger Shakespeare Library editions. Edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, the Folger editions of Shakespeare’s plays include essays on the plays and their publication and on Shakespeare’s life, theater, and language. Each provides a thoroughly re-edited edition of the play, printed with explanatory notes and images from the Folger collection on the facing pages. Every edition includes an afterword by an outstanding modern scholar, as well as other notes and features.
From Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), Folger Shakespeare Library editions. © 2005 Folger Shakespeare Library
