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There's only seventy(ish) years between us and Roswell, yet look what a mess of misinformation that is!

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Not intended, perhaps, but surely expected, since it was so common at the time, and "Shakespeare" made no effort to police the publication of his works.

"Speak the speech... as I pronounce it to you... but I care not what a hash they make in printing those speeches!"

The works were, indeed, published in various forms during the Stratford Man's lifetime, but those forms were all "pirate" editions, many apparently transcriptions taken down during performances! This is not a unified body, representing an unvarying whole, and there is no evidence that the Author (whoever he was) had anything to do with them.

Heminge and Condell are usually cast as Great Good Friends of the Author, but if that Author was Stratford Will, he had an odd of way of showing it. They are remembered in his will only as an afterthought, in a line interposed between two others. The real mover-and-shaker behind the First Folio appears to have been Ben Jonson, with H & C his puppets.

The "mystery" in Shakespeare's life, if he was the man from Stratford, is that he somehow managed to become the most famous and popular author of the time, and for centuries after, without leaving any trace at all of having a literary career. His business dealings, his marriage, his troubles with the Law, all are quite well documented, but the playwright is absent.* Even his death went completely unacknowledged at the time. (Curiously, Shakespeare wrote no elegy to Elizabeth I at the time of her death, tho Stratford Will was still alive, and the event unleashed a cascade of odes from virtually everyone in England who could hold a pen.)

+++

The case against Shakespeare, if it were down to a jury, would seem rock solid.

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A small correction: Shakespeare was the name of the playwright. In almost eighty examples of his name on documents, the Stratford Man (of the scribes hired for the job) used that spelling rarely, more commonly favoring spellings that reflected the traditional Warwickshire pronunciation, Shaksper or even Shaxsper.

When discussing the Authorship Question, if is common form to use "Shakespeare" to identify the author of the works, and Shaksper to identify the man from Stratford. This is a point Stratfordians have been working around for centuries, "modernizing" the Stratford spelling to "Shakespeare" and creating an immediate link to their man. A link not supported by anything else.

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* His missing education is a puzzle, too. Altho no records survive of the students who attended the Stratford Grammar School in that period, one would surely expect young Will to have been remembered by his classmates. Yet no journals, daybooks, letters, etc seem to exist in which anyone talks about being in the same class or playing shove ha'penny with the Famous Author.

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The best case for de Vere, as I mentioned upthread, is that choosing him requires the invocation of no grand conspiracies, as is necessary for the other candidates. Just "business as usual" in the Elizabethan court.

It's very curious that Jonson suddenly steps to the fore, claiming to have "loved" Shakespeare ("...this side idolatry...") when in the lifetimes of Oxford and Stratford he, Jonson, had nary a good word to say about Shakespeare.

The whole thing reads very much as a moneymaking scheme concocted by Jonson.

(Jonson knew a thing or six about the importance of names. At a time when spelling ran higgledy-piggledy all over the map, mostly being phonetic, he changed the spelling of his last name, dropping the H, and then locked it down, creating what today would be called a "brand name.")