In 1596, upon Shakespeare’s application, the College of Arms granted his father the now-familiar coat of arms he had taken the first steps to obtain almost twenty years before, and in 1598, John’s son–now permitted to call himself “gentleman”–took a 10 percent share in the new Globe playhouse. In 1597, he bought a substantial bourgeois house, called New Place, in Stratford–the garden remains, but Shakespeare’s house, several times rebuilt, was torn down in 1759–and over the next few years Shakespeare spent large sums buying land and making other investments in the town and its environs. Though he worked in London, his family remained in Stratford, and he seems always to have considered Stratford the home he would eventually return to. Something approaching a disinterested appreciation of Shakespeare’s popular and professional status appears in Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (1598), a not especially imaginative and perhaps therefore persuasive record of literary reputations. Reviewing contemporary English writers, Meres lists the titles of many of Shakespeare’s plays, including one not now known, Love’s Labor’s Won, and praises his “mellifluous & hony-tongued” “sugred Sonnets,” which were then circulating in manuscript (they were first collected in 1609). Meres describes Shakespeare as “one of the best” English playwrights of both comedy and tragedy. In Remains…Concerning Britain (1605), William Camden–a more authoritative source than the imitative Meres–calls Shakespeare one of the “most pregnant witts of these our times” and joins him with such writers as Chapman, Daniel, Jonson, Marston, and Spenser. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, publishers began to attribute numerous play quartos, including some non-Shakespearean ones, to Shakespeare, either by name or initials, and we may assume that they deemed Shakespeare’s name and supposed authorship, true or false, commercially attractive.

For the next ten years or so, various records show Shakespeare’s dual career as playwright and man of the theater in London, and as an important local figure in Stratford. In 1608–9 his acting company–designated the “King’s Men” soon after King James had succeeded Queen Elizabeth in 1603–rented, refurbished, and opened a small interior playing space, the Blackfriars theater, in London, and Shakespeare was once again listed as a substantial sharer in the group of proprietors of the playhouse. By May 11, 1612, however, he describes himself as a Stratford resident in a London lawsuit–an indication that he had withdrawn from day-to-day professional activity and returned to the town where he had always had his main financial interests. When Shakespeare bought a substantial residential building in London, the Blackfriars Gatehouse, close to the theater of the same name, on March 10, 1613, he is recorded as William Shakespeare “of Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick, gentleman,” and he named several London residents as the building’s trustees. Still, he continued to participate in theatrical activity: when the new Earl of Rutland needed an allegorical design to bear as a shield, or impresa, at the celebration of King James’s Accession Day, March 24, 1613, the earl’s accountant recorded a payment of 44 shillings to Shakespeare for the device with its motto.

For the last few years of his life, Shakespeare evidently concentrated his activities in the town of his birth. Most of the final records concern business transactions in Stratford, ending with the notation of his death on April 23, 1616, and burial in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.

THE QUESTION OF AUTHORSHIP

The history of ascribing Shakespeare’s plays (the poems do not come up so often) to someone else began, as it continues, peculiarly. The earliest published claim that someone else wrote Shakespeare’s plays appeared in an 1856 article by Delia Bacon in the American journal Putnam’s Monthly–although an Englishman, Thomas Wilmot, had shared his doubts in private (even secretive) conversations with friends near the end of the eighteenth century. Bacon’s was a sad personal history that ended in madness and poverty, but the year after her article, she published, with great difficulty and the bemused assistance of Nathaniel Hawthorne (then United States Consul in Liverpool, England), her Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. This huge, ornately written, confusing farrago is almost unreadable; sometimes its intents, to say nothing of its arguments, disappear entirely beneath near-raving, ecstatic writing. Tumbled in with much supposed “philosophy” appear the claims that Francis Bacon (from whom Delia Bacon eventually claimed descent), Walter Ralegh, and several other contemporaries of Shakespeare’s had written the plays. The book had little impact except as a ridiculed curiosity.

Once proposed, however, the issue gained momentum among people whose conviction was the greater in proportion to their ignorance of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English literature, history, and society. Another American amateur, Catherine P. Ashmead Windle, made the next influential contribution to the cause when she published Report to the British Museum (1882), wherein she promised to open “the Cipher of Francis Bacon,” though what she mostly offers, in the words of S. Schoenbaum, is “demented allegorizing.” An entire new cottage industry grew from Windle’s suggestion that the texts contain hidden, cryptographically discoverable ciphers–“clues”–to their authorship; and today there are not only books devoted to the putative ciphers, but also pamphlets, journals, and newsletters.

Although Baconians have led the pack of those seeking a substitute Shakespeare, in “Shakespeare” Identified (1920), J. Thomas Looney became the first published “Oxfordian” when he proposed Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, as the secret author of Shakespeare’s plays. Also for Oxford and his “authorship” there are today dedicated societies, articles, journals, and books. Less popular candidates–Queen Elizabeth and Christopher Marlowe among them–have had adherents, but the movement seems to have divided into two main contending factions, Baconian and Oxfordian. (For further details on all the candidates for “Shakespeare,” see S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 2nd ed., 1991.)

The Baconians, the Oxfordians, and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common–they are snobs. Every pro-Bacon or pro-Oxford tract sooner or later claims that the historical William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the plays because he could not have had the training, the university education, the experience, and indeed the imagination or background their author supposedly possessed. Only a learned genius like Bacon or an aristocrat like Oxford could have written such fine plays. (As it happens, lucky male children of the middle class had access to better education than most aristocrats in Elizabethan England–and Oxford was not particularly well educated.) Shakespeare received in the Stratford grammar school a formal education that would daunt many college graduates today; and popular rival playwrights such as the very learned Ben Jonson and George Chapman, both of whom also lacked university training, achieved great artistic success, without being taken as Bacon or Oxford.

Besides snobbery, one other quality characterizes the authorship controversy: lack of evidence. A great deal of testimony from Shakespeare’s time shows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays and that his contemporaries recognized them as distinctive and distinctly superior. (Some of that contemporary evidence is collected in E.