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

The argument

The Stratfordian case made here rests on a straightforward piece of evidence and on what the alternative would require: the plays and poems carry Shakespeare's name, and a nobleman writing in secret would not have arranged things that way. The context is publishing practice. Shakespeare wrote at a time when authors tended to omit their names from their manuscripts; plays generally carried the publisher's name and the name of the acting company that performed them. Against that background it is notable that so many of Shakespeare's plays were published under his own name. The name was added because it sold copies, which makes it a testament to his fame — and fame of that kind attaches to a working figure known to the theatre world, not to a hidden one. The spelling supplies the second point. In 1598, when publishers began including his name to sell plays, printing techniques could produce inconsistencies, and his name was spelled two different ways. The inference drawn is about care. If a nobleman were writing as Shakespeare under a pseudonym, he would have made sure the name appeared correctly on his work, since a pseudonym is a deliberate construction and its consistency is the whole of its value. A name left to the compositors is a name nobody was managing. The third point concerns the method a concealed author would actually have used. It would have been far easier to preserve anonymity by following the common practice of the period and publishing with no name at all. Inventing a pen name, attaching it to a real man, and then allowing it to be printed inconsistently is a more elaborate and more fragile arrangement than simply doing what most authors already did. On this reading the simplest explanation holds: Shakespeare was Shakespeare, because his name is on the work accredited to him.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Authorship sceptics reply that a name on a title page establishes what name sold the plays, not the identity or biography of the man from Stratford. If someone wrote under 'William Shakespeare' as a pen name, or used a front, the printed attribution would look exactly the same, so publication under that name does not distinguish the Stratford man from a concealed author using it. They add that the spelling point cuts the other way: variable spelling of names, including the Stratford man's own surviving signatures, was ordinary in the period, so two spellings in 1598 indicate nothing about whether the name was genuine or assumed. Doubters rest their case not on the title pages but on what they see as a gap between the documented life of the Stratford businessman and the literary and courtly knowledge in the works. Mainstream scholarship still regards the Stratfordian attribution as by far the best supported, but critics argue the printed name alone does not settle it.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics argue a name on published plays shows which name was used to sell them, not that the Stratford man wrote them; a pseudonym or front would produce the same title pages. [Rejecting P2] Variable spelling of names, including Shakespeare's own signatures, was normal in the period, so two spellings do not indicate whether the name was authentic rather than assumed. [Rejecting P3] Anonymity was one option, but a memorable attributed name also sells plays, so publishing under a name is compatible with its being a deliberately chosen pseudonym rather than proof of genuine authorship.