Shakespeare's name is on the plays and poems attributed to him

The argument

Shakespeare was a writer during a time when authors tended to omit their name from their manuscripts. Plays generally included the publisher's name and the name of the acting companies that performed the plays. Yet, so many of Shakespeare's plays were published under his own name. This is a testament to his fame. In 1598, when publishers included Shakespeare's name to sell plays, printing techniques could cause spelling issues. This meant Shakespeare's name was spelled two different ways. There is an argument that if a nobleman was writing Shakespeare under a pseudonym, they would make sure the name was spelled correctly on their work. This argument further believes it would have been easier for a writer to keep their anonymity by following the common practice of not including a pen name. Shakespeare was Shakespeare because his name is on the work accredited to him.

Premises

Counter-arguments

For centuries skeptics have found it hard to believe Shakespeare, a man of common birth, would have the necessary grasp of languages, the classics, political theory, and history to write the plays and poetry attributed to him. Some skeptics believe Shakespeare's plays are more suited to an educated nobleman like the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. This argument has been supported by influential people such as Orson Welles, Derek Jacobi, and Sigmund Freud. In fact, over 70 alternative candidates have been suggested, and there are still others who don't know who wrote Shakespeare but believe it wasn't him.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The generalisation is too strong. Attribution on title pages was becoming common in the period, so the premise reads the presence of a name as a testament to fame when it is also the ordinary practice it claims was absent. Fame is in any case not evidence of authorship, which is the claim at issue. [Rejecting P2] The spelling argument is weak in both directions: early modern spelling was unstable, including for the names of people who indisputably wrote under them, so variation shows nothing either way — and the reasoning attributes a particular level of care to a hypothetical pseudonymous nobleman with no evidence about what such a person would have done. Speculating about what a concealed author would have preferred cannot establish that there was none. The stronger case for the traditional attribution is documentary: contemporaries who knew him naming him as a playwright, the theatre and payment records, and the First Folio assembled by his colleagues. The argument uses none of it, while the counter-argument's actual objection, about education and background, goes unanswered.