There were rumors during Shakespeare's life

The argument

The Post-Stratfordian case does not rest only on later scholarship; it points to doubts recorded during the lifetime of the man from Stratford. Two documents from the early 1590s are offered as that contemporary trace. In 1591 the dramatist Robert Greene wrote a missive complaining of playwrights putting their name to other people's work, and of other "underhanded brokery". The complaint is general rather than directed, but its subject matter is the specific practice this position alleges: a name appearing on plays written by someone else. That such a complaint was worth making indicates the practice was current in the London theatre of exactly the period in question. The following year Greene began warning others in the industry about an "upstart Crow", a figure who thinks he is the "onely Shake-scene in a countery". Many literary historians believe this Crow was Shakespeare, and the wordplay in "Shake-scene" is the reason. The epithet itself does the argumentative work: a crow is a bird that takes what others have made and displays it as its own, and "upstart" places the figure outside the established order of university-trained dramatists rather than within it. Read together, proponents argue, the two documents place a named contemporary complaining about attribution fraud in the theatre and then identifying a particular newcomer as an interloper dressed in borrowed plumage. On the Post-Stratfordian reading this is not hindsight but testimony: someone working in the same industry at the same time appears to have thought something was wrong with how the name was attached to the work. The claim advanced is therefore modest in form and substantial in consequence. It is not that Greene proved anything, but that suspicion about the authorship was voiced while the events were still happening — which is what one would expect if the attribution were not what it appears to be, and would not expect otherwise.

Context

Playwrights putting their name to other people's works and taking the credit for other authors' words was a persistent problem in the days before copyright and intellectual property laws. One specific missive written by Robert Greene in 1591 complaining of the practice appears to refer to someone with similarities to Stratford's Shakespeare.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Shakespeare’s achievements, going from a glover’s son to Britain’s most prominent playwright, would have been a cause for anger and jealousy. His rise was a slap in the face to those better off with access to more elite education and more opportunities. It is no surprise, therefore, that his genius would have put him in the crosshairs of his contemporaries. This could explain Greene's malicious missive. There are also several rivals who concede Shakespeare’s genius and leave glowing reviews. Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s great literary rival coined the term the “Swan of the Avon”. He references the great playwright’s talent, then places him as being from Stratford-upon-Avon. It is inconceivable that he would do that to his rival if Shakespeare was merely a front for another author.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Rumour is not sufficient ground to question his authorship, particularly given Shakespeare would have been a source of envy for his rivals.