The more deeply one looks into the facts related to the mainstream historian’s version of the official Shakespeare story, the more obviously implausible it becomes.
In my debate with classicist Philip Womack, he pushed the orthodox view detailed above that the apocryphal plays and bad quartos were all the result of some form of piracy. And I responded with something like the following:
Can you not tell how anti-Strafordian you sound here? You think the majority of plays attributed to William Shakespeare while he was alive and up till 1621 are fraudulent and the result of corruption (this is counting all apocryphal plays and bad quartos) despite the fact that:
- Shakespeare never protested about his name falsely being used.
- Shakespeare and company, who performed all these plays, never complained about their illicit procurement and unauthorized publication.
- No one else ever mentioned it at the time or for decades afterward.
- The real authors of the apocryphal plays never demanded proper credit.
- None of the dozens of printers or publishers were ever punished for it.
- These nefarious printers and publishers ended up pulling off a ruse that fooled the world for a century—as scholars, editors, etc. were still referring to “Yorkshire Tragedy” and “London Prodigal” as Shakespeare’s into the 18th century.
- No other playwright of the Shakespeare era was similarly victimized. In fact, no other living writer in all of English history had a similar misattribution occur to him just once—let alone twelve times!
Expanding on the last point above, there is no known case in history in which an English printer or publisher has ever purposefully misattributed a single work (like a play, essay, or novel) to a single, living author whom they knew had nothing to do with the work. Why is that? Well, because the printer and publisher would know that the credited author would complain—and so too would the wronged author whose work had been stolen and assigned to someone else. In fact, as I have shown, there also may not even be an indisputable example of such a deliberate misattribution occurring to a dead author.
There’s just no rational reason to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship of the quartos attributed to him—and no one at the time, or for even a century afterward, ever doubted those title pages either.
As usual, the mainstream inverts the actual situation. It’s not those who are revising the official history on the basis of the available facts who are the conspiracy theorists, it’s the classicists who are defending their unsupportable dogma by concocting a whole series of conspiratorial explanations.