There is sufficient motive

The argument

In Elizabethan England, writing plays was not considered an acceptable pursuit for a woman — and the motive for concealment follows directly from that fact. Women were not absent from the theatre. Plenty were involved in it: they worked in the wardrobe departments, they collected admission tickets, and they acted as patrons financing theatre productions. The exclusion was specific rather than general. Women were not expected to appear on stage in productions, and they were not involved in the writing process, which was very much a masculine domain. So the theatre was a place where women were present, knowledgeable and financially invested, while the one role that carried authorship was closed to them. That combination is what makes concealment likely rather than merely possible. A woman around the theatre would have had the material — the conventions, the company, the practical knowledge of what plays on a stage — and no legitimate route to putting her name on a play. The obvious solution is to write anyway and let the work appear under someone else's name or none at all. The documentary pattern is consistent with exactly that. Around 80% of Elizabethan plays were authored anonymously, a proportion far higher than a settled profession of named writers would produce, and it suggests that many women did write plays but did not put their names to them. Anonymity on that scale needs an explanation, and an entire class of writers with a reason to avoid attribution supplies one. It is not beyond the realms of possibility, therefore, that Shakespeare was a front for a female writer who needed to stay anonymous in order to preserve her reputation. The motive is not speculative: the period supplied it to every woman who could write.

Context

Other Shakespearean authorship theories develop outlandish and imaginative reasons for the author to adopt a pseudonym. A far simpler explanation would be, because Shakespeare was a woman writing in Elizabethan England.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There are many reasons why someone writing plays in Elizabethan England might use a pseudonym and the use of a pseudonym does not exclusively mean the author of Shakespeare's plays was a woman. If we accept that Shakespeare was not the author of the work penned under his name, it is just as plausible to suggest that the author was, in fact, a man of high social standing. The theatre was seen as an immoral and lowly pursuit at the time. An aristocrat writing plays might also adopt a pseudonym to protect his reputation. However, the far simpler conclusion is that Shakespeare, the glover's son from Stratford wrote the plays. If 80% of plays were left anonymous, why would an author that wished to hide his/her identity bother to find someone to put their name to it at all? Why not just publish the plays anonymously? This would likely be far easier (and cheaper) than paying a Stratfordian bard to put his name to the works.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Nor was it considered a suitable pursuit of noblemen and citizens of high social standing. [Rejecting P2] A male aristocrat would also have likely published under a pen name or anonymously. [Rejecting P3] It is just as likely that Shakespeare was a male of high social standing.