Not all of Shakespeare's plays were published in his lifetime

Question: Who was Shakespeare?
Position‹2 of 5›: The Post-Stratfordian position
Argument‹3 of 10›: Not all of Shakespeare's plays were published in his lifetime

Around 16 plays were published following his death. As a career writer that published for money, this is highly irregular.

The argument

Post-Stratfordians treat the publication history of the plays as evidence about their authorship, on the grounds that behaviour is easier to read than attribution. The man from Stratford wrote for money; the theatre was his livelihood, and he is not otherwise recorded as indifferent to the income it produced. Yet a substantial part of the body of work was not published while he was alive. For a writer working commercially, leaving masterpieces unpublished — and so unsold — is behaviour that needs explaining, and the orthodox account does not obviously supply the explanation. The second anomaly concerns the family. Rights in the plays passed to his daughter Susanna, who inherited them automatically, and when the 1623 Folio appeared and the plays were sold as a collection, she sought nothing from the proceeds. Heirs to a valuable literary estate ordinarily assert the claim; an heir who does not is either unaware that she holds it or aware that it is not really hers. Neither reading sits comfortably with the proposition that her father wrote the works being sold. Taken singly, each point admits of other explanations, and Post-Stratfordians do not usually present them as proof. The argument is that the two anomalies point the same way. If the Stratford man was the author, both his own conduct and his daughter's are hard to account for; if he was not, both become unremarkable, because neither he nor his heir would have had the interest in the works that authorship would have given them. On this reasoning the gaps in the publication record are not merely the accidents of a disorganised era but a pattern consistent with the works having been written by someone else.

Context

Shakespeare died in 1616, before 16 of his plays had been published. They were later published in print in 1623.

Premises

[P1]As a writer working for money, Shakespeare would surely have published and profited from his masterpieces in his lifetime, yet many were not published until after his death. [P2] His daughter Susanna, who inherited the rights, never sought payment from the 1623 Folio's sales. [P3] Neither behaviour fits a true author or his heir. [C] Therefore, these anomalies support the Post-Stratfordian position that the Stratford man was not the true author.

Counter-arguments

The fact that many of his plays were published posthumously has nothing to do with the authorship debate. Following Shakespeare's death, two of Shakespeare's former colleagues in the King's Men acting company, John Heminge and Henry Condell, collected all the plays Shakespeare wrote and published the First Folio in 1623. They did so out of an appreciation for their former colleague's work. There could have been any number of personal or professional reasons why Shakespeare chose not to publish those plays. We cannot make wild assertions about the authorship of the plays simply because the Bard decided not to publish them in his lifetime.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P4] There could be any number of reasons why Shakespeare chose not to publish those plays.