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Right there is the most important part of the battle. Various candidates -- including DeVere -- may remain eternally unconvincing to most folk, but an honest appraisal of his history must lead one to the conclusion that Stratford Will is no more likely!

One thing that always surprises me is that traditional Shakespeare scholars, who claim to believe in the sanctity of title page evidence, really don't when it comes to the 'apocryphal' Shakespeare plays and Shakespearean 'bad quartos.'

There’s an old Stratfordian joke that goes like this: "Shakespeare’s plays weren’t actually written by Shakespeare. They were written by some other guy named Shakespeare.” The funny thing is, there could very well have been “some other guy named Shakespeare.” According to title page evidence and other usually reliable forms of authorship evidence, this other William Shakespeare wrote, adapted, or co-authored around a dozen surviving plays: The Taming of A Shrew, The Troublesome Reign of King John, Fair Em, Locrine, Mucedorus, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Thomas Lord Cromwell, The Puritan,The London Prodigal, A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Birth of Merlin, and perhaps Double Falsehood (originally titled Cardenio). These plays are usually assigned to the “Shakespeare Apocrypha,” but they were evidently accepted as authentic Shakespeare plays by William’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries even though they weren’t printed in the First Folio. The “other Shakespeare” was also credited with writing six or so Shakespearean 'bad quartos,' shorter and poetically inferior adaptations of six canonical plays. There are no contemporary records indicating that anyone other than William Shakespeare wrote these apocryphal plays and bad quartos, at least as a co-author or play reviser.

After all, what's in a name....?