Shakespeare's Works?

Every once in a while you will read some article about a so called scholar unearthing material that is supposed to prove that William Shakespeare did not really write the works attributed to him.

Many alternative authors have been suggested—most prominently, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon. One proponent of Bacon as author of Shakespeare's plays actually looked for words like "fat and lard" and calculated how their places in the texts of the plays proved that Bacon authored them.

Any schoolboy can see the fallacy of such an argument and yet many adult readers of newspaper articles, written by men who have never done any research on Shakespeare, are taken in by the arguments proposed against Shakespeare's authorship.

It is true that we have no manuscripts of plays as they came from Shakespeare's hand. After all, he wrote the plays to be acted and the actors used the author's manuscripts. However, almost half the plays appeared in print under the authors name during his lifetime which ended in 1616. A few years later, in 1623, two of Shakespeare's actor friends published a great folio volume with thirty six plays and put Shakespeare's name on the title page. They even got Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's great rival playwright, to write a poetic introduction for the folio volume.

There are other arguments I might adduce to vindicate Shakespeare's authorship. Suffice it to say, a blanket argument against those who deny Shakespeare's authorship is simply this: If Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him, it was someone else by the same name.