Why Stratford Will, if he was the Author, was so careless in this matter is a question that remains unanswered. If, on the other hand, the Author was DeVere, then the answer is self-evident: as a peer of the realm, he could not participate in a commercial venture such as the publication of his plays.

Hi Eric, you're right that Shakespeare scholars devised the “memorial reconstruction” theory more than a century ago to explain the existence of the six or so 'bad quartos.' According to this theory, actors who performed in some of Shakespeare’s plays decided to reconstruct them from memory, then print them for reasons that remain obscure. Memorial reconstruction provides a useful escape hatch from thorny authorship attribution problems, but there is actually no evidence that any of the bad quartos were written this way.

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Perhaps a bit of an oversimplification, but not by much!

Factor in, too, that the Stratford Man's name ISN'T on any of the publications, at least not how he most commonly spelled it*, and that the first time the name Shakespeare was used in connection with the Work, it was spelled Shake-speare.

Not a big deal in and of itself, until we remember that a hyphen followed by a lowercase letter was often used in Elizabethan theater to indicate a made-up name.

So, to a literate Elizabethan audience, "Shake-speare" would not sound like the name of the man from Stratford, and indications would have been right there on the page that it was a non-de-plume. Points lost in the gulf of years since the Work was created.

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* Some have suggested that Shaksper, becoming a successful businessman in Stratford, wanted to distance himself from his unsavory hobby of writing plays, and so created the "Shakespeare" name as his "brand". This sounds to me a whole lot like Obi-Wan Kenobi brilliantly disguising himself with the name Ben Kenobi.