Why some people think Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, explained

April 23, 2016, marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. That also means it's been about 400 years since people started arguing about whether or not Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare. (Hint: He did.)

That’s a slight exaggeration. Actually, people have been arguing over this question since 1785 at the earliest, when James Wilmot may have coined the first known "anti-Stratfordian theory": the idea that William Shakespeare, the glover’s son from Stratford-on-Avon, did not actually write the plays and poetry that we associate with the name William Shakespeare.

The anti-Stratfordian argument is romantic and compelling. It's also based on shoddy scholarship. Most damningly, it's a fundamentally classist argument.

James Wilmot may have been the first person to think that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare

Wilmot was a reverend and a literary scholar, and the story goes that in 1781, when Shakespeare had been dead for nearly 200 years, he set out to write a comprehensive biography of Shakespeare.

Wilmot did all the things that literary biographers did in the 18th century to research a subject. He visited Shakespeare’s hometown and every house Shakespeare might conceivably have visited within a 50-mile radius. He went through all the libraries around Stratford and searched for correspondence.

What he found astonished him: There was no record anywhere to indicate that William Shakespeare of Stratford ever read a book or wrote a letter. No bits of Shakespeare's handwriting scribbled in the margins of Ovid's Metamorphoses, no Shakespearian signatures on the bottoms of old letters, no "property of William Shakespeare" written on the endpapers of a Bible, nothing.

Wilmot could not accept the idea that the profoundly literate plays of William Shakespeare were written by a man who left no literary paper trail behind him. He privately concluded that Shakespeare of Stratford could not have written the plays of Shakespeare the poet.

His best guess was that they were the work of the highly educated Francis Bacon instead. Wilmot never shared his idea publicly, but allegedly his friend James Corton Cowell did in a series of lectures in 1805.

But it's also possible that none of the Wilmot story is true.

The lectures weren't discovered until 1931, and the Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro has argued convincingly that they were most likely fabricated in the 20th century, a desperate attempt to shore up the Francis Bacon theory when it was in danger of being overshadowed by the Earl of Oxford theory. They use language that was out of fashion in the early 19th century, and they draw on Shakespearean scholarship that wasn't known until well after 1805.

The anti-Stratfordian theory became popular in the late 19th century

Whether or not Wilmot really invented the anti-Stratfordian theory, it first took off in a big way in 1857, when Delia Bacon (no relation to Francis) and William H. Smith each separately published books arguing that the works of Shakespeare were most likely written by Francis Bacon.

The two books became an immediate sensation, particularly Delia Bacon's. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the introduction to Bacon's book, and Mark Twain wrote that it convinced him utterly that the so-called Stratford man could not have written Shakespeare.

Over time, more and more celebrities have flocked to the anti-Stratfordian theory: Freud, Whitman, Malcolm X, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, Sir Derek Jacobi. And it’s not hard to understand why: It’s a romantic, glamorous, exciting theory filled with secret conspiracies.

The anti-Stratfordian theory is glamorous, exciting, and beloved by celebrities

William Shakespeare, the idea goes, was no one but a mediocre actor from the middle of nowhere who was paid off by someone smarter and richer and better-educated for the use of his name.

The real Shakespeare, the one who wrote the plays, was brilliant philosopher Francis Bacon. Or it was romantic and tragic Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Or it was secretly Queen Elizabeth. Or Shakespeare’s rival playwright, Christopher Marlowe. (Christopher Marlowe may also have been a spy, and some conspiracy theorists will tell you that he faked his death. The man got around.)

Or it was a whole group of people! Maybe it was all of them?

Even the Supreme Court’s gotten in on the argument. In 1987, Justices John Paul Stevens, William Brennan, and Harry Blackmun held a mock trial on the authorship question. Brennan found in favor of the Stratford man, but Stevens and Blackmun weren’t so sure.

"Where are the books? You can't be a scholar of that depth and not have any books in your home," Stevens said. "He never had any correspondence with his contemporaries, he never was shown to be present at any major event — the coronation of James or any of that stuff. I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt."

More recently, the 2011 movie flop Anonymous assures us that William Shakespeare the Stratford man was a preening fool, the dupe of brilliant, romantic Edward de Vere. (Tagline: "We’ve all been played.")

Professional Shakespeare scholars think the anti-Stratfordian theory is ridiculous

But almost no professional Shakespeare scholar takes the anti-Stratfordian theory seriously. "The idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts," writes former Shakespeare professor Stephen Marche.

There are a lot of reasons to discredit the anti-Stratfordian theory. For one thing, despite Wilmot’s alleged horror at the lack of contemporary paper trail for William Shakespeare, "there is more about Shakespeare in contemporary materials than about most others in English Renaissance theater," writes scholar Irvin Mattus.

We have plenty of written references to William Shakespeare, actor, playwright, and member in good standing of the troupe that was first the Lord Chamberlain's Men and then the King's Men.

And we have the most important evidence of all: Shakespeare’s name is actually written on the plays. It would take an enormous preponderance of counter-evidence to discount that, not just a scarcity of records.

Moreover, in order for Shakespeare to have been written by any of the anti-Stratfordians' favorite candidates, you would have to re-date the plays.

Edward de Vere, for instance, died in 1604, the same year that Shakespeare most likely wrote King Lear and well before he most likely wrote The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

Anti-Stratfordians come up with creative timelines to get around this issue, but as Stephen Marche points out, most of them are the Elizabethan equivalent of a conspiracy theory that The Blueprint was secretly written in 1961 by somebody other than Jay Z: "You can’t write a hip-hop masterpiece before hip-hop has been invented. And you can’t write A Midsummer Night's Dream until English secular comedy has come into existence."

At the root of the anti-Stratfordian theory is classism

Anti-Stratfordians will sometimes focus on the issue of education. The idea is that a young country boy of no particular parentage couldn't possibly have written Shakespeare's plays. Where did he learn all his French and Latin and Greek? Wouldn't the plays have to be by a nobleman with access to a thorough education?

But Shakespeare was most likely educated in Stratford's grammar school, where the curriculum covered most of Shakespeare-the-poet's favorite sources and was heavy on Greek, Latin, and foreign languages. The Taming of the Shrew, one of Shakespeare's earliest comedies, even references the same Latin grammar book that the Stratford Free School used.

The education question is a smokescreen for the real issue for anti-Stratfordianists: class.

The thing that seems completely unbelievable to anti-Stratfordians is that the "son of a glover," as Derek Jacobi says in the opening of Anonymous, voice dripping with condescension, could have written the greatest literature of the English language.

He’s so … common. He grew up poor, he was from a small town, and he only had a basic education. How could he have accomplished so much? Wouldn't it make more sense if the plays were written by a nobleman?

That's the belief that drives anti-Stratfordians to dismiss mountains of scholarship that shows that Shakespeare of Stratford was Shakespeare the poet, to try to re-date much of Elizabethan literary history, to imagine a conspiracy theory in which Shakespeare scholars willfully ignore legitimate evidence discounting the Stratford man so that they and the "Stratford industry" can collectively share in all that sweet, sweet Shakespeare scholar money.

The truth is this: All the available scholarship shows that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon, the glover's son, the country boy from the middle of nowhere, is in fact the author of the plays of William Shakespeare.

And there's a lot to gain from accepting that fact. Sure, you lose the grand exciting conspiracy theory — but what you get instead is proof that you can reach the pinnacle of human achievement without enormous inherited wealth and privilege.

You can come from nowhere and still write something that people will love and study and invent conspiracy theories over 400 years after your death.