Encouraged by no less a figure than Ralph Waldo Emerson, Delia Bacon travelled to England and gained an audience with Jane and Thomas Carlyle, who invited the great Baconian scholar James Spedding to be present as she outlined her ideas. To her dismay, this distinguished trio was wholly unconvinced, Carlyle bursting into helpless laughter as she spoke: ‘Once or twice I thought he would have taken the roof of the house off,’ Delia wrote dejectedly to her sister some weeks later. Convinced nonetheless that Shakespeare’s will and other papers crucial to her argument were secreted in his tomb in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Delia Bacon entered the church one night with a lantern and spade determined to dig up this supposed evidence, but lost her nerve at the last moment, and resolved to continue her researches and ruminations elsewhere. Eventually, she was to set out her views in a large book called The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespere Unfolded (1857), which was received with incredulity by contemporary reviewers, and dismissed as unreadable by later scholars. Conscious of her failure in this intellectual mission, Delia Bacon descended gradually into poverty and mental distress, and died in 1859 at the age of forty-eight.

Yet Delia Bacon was in one sense a pioneer, the first of a growing tribe of sceptics and speculators who would go on to write books with such titles as Was Shakespeare Shakespeare? A Lawyer Reviews the Evidence; The Shakespeare Conspiracy: Did the Jesuits Write Shakespeare?; and Shakespeare, Thy Name is Marlowe. Those who continued stubbornly to believe that William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare tended for a while to respond to such studies in much the same manner that Carlyle had responded to Delia Bacon, with mirth: regarding the very names of certain of these advocates as indicative of their merits. There was for a start J. Thomas Looney (the name in fact rhymes with ‘pony’), the schoolteacher from Gateshead who in 1920 first championed the view that Shakespeare’s works were written by Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford. There was George M. Battey, who believed that Shakespeare was Francis Bacon or (more remarkably) Daniel Defoe, he wasn’t sure which; and there was the American attorney Sherwood E. Silliman, who supported the view that Shakespeare was actually Christopher Marlowe.

Over the years, the tribe of Shakespearean sceptics has continued nevertheless to swell, as has the number of candidates advanced as the possible author of ‘Shakespeare’s’ works. By 1992 some 4000 books and articles on the authorship question had been published; today, with the advent of the Internet, that number has vastly increased. Some eighty figures have now been proposed as the ‘real’ William Shakespeare – including some rather long-odds contenders such as Sir Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, Miguel de Cervantes, Anne Hathaway, and the Rosicrucians. Campaigning for the more favoured candidates has meanwhile hotted up. Roland Emmerich’s recent movie Anonymous (2011), promoting through a series of fantastic historical riffs the authorship claims of Edward de Vere – one of Elizabeth I’s several illegitimate children, we learn, who, having written A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the queen at the age of nine, went on to become her lover – was solemnly accompanied by an educational package designed by Sony Pictures for use in American high schools. An online ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare’ <doubtaboutwill.org> – endorsed by actors Derek Jacobi, Michael York, and Mark Rylance – has sought ‘to legitimize the issue in academia so students, teachers, and professors can feel free to pursue it’, and has now attracted more than 2800 signatures. As the Reasonable Doubters began to present themselves in increasing numbers at the school gates as champions of free enquiry, it was clearly time for a measured response from the Old Believers.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt is a collection of patiently argued essays by twenty-two leading Shakespearian scholars, affirming the case for believing – not as a hunch or a probability but as a matter of reasonable certitude – that William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford, was indeed the author of the plays traditionally thought to be his. It follows James Shapiro’s masterly analysis of the authorship question, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), and an earlier online program organised by the present editors, Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, in response to the release of Emmerich’s Anonymous, giving sixty actors, writers, and scholars – Stephen Fry, Margaret Drabble, Simon Callow, Michael Holroyd, and others – sixty seconds apiece to answer the same question: ‘Who wrote Shakespeare?’ The new collection allows for more measured reflection on beliefs and arguments commonly advanced in the course of this debate.

Several of the essays in this volume look in some detail at the claims of individual candidates in the authorship debate. Charles Nicholl, author of a much admired study of the death of Christopher Marlowe (The Reckoning, 1992), notes that Marlowe’s name was first advanced as the possible author of the plays of Shakespeare in the late nineteenth century, when the precise date of Marlowe’s own death was still unknown. Present-day supporters of Marlowe’s case choose to ignore Leslie Hotson’s discovery in 1925 of the Coroner’s report on the death of Marlowe at Deptford, which clearly fixes this event as occurring on 30 May 1593; and maintain that Marlowe was still at large and writing plays for the London stage in the second decade of the new century. With equal defiance of the extant evidence, the Marlovians successfully lobbied the Dean and Chapter of Westminster to insert a question mark after the date of Marlowe’s death (‘1593?’) in a commemorative window installed in the Abbey in 2002. Problems of chronology are brushed aside with similar ease by supporters of Edward de Vere, who seem undeterred – as de Vere’s biographer, Alan Nelson, points out – by the fact that several of the later plays clearly refer to events that took place after de Vere’s death in 1604: The Tempest (c.1611) being, for example, demonstrably based on reports of a shipwreck occurring off the island of Bermuda in 1609.

Whatever uncertainties may be thought to surround the subject of Shakespearean authorship, one fact – as James Mardock and Eric Rasmussen argue in a persuasively detailed essay – is plainly evident. Whoever wrote Shakespeare’s plays cannot have been an aristocrat, diplomat, or scholar, removed from day-to-day realities of the theatre. As their close analysis shows, the plays are expertly structured in terms of characters’ exits and entries to allow at all times for the doubling of parts that – given the constraints of company size – was essential to repertoire playing in Shakespeare’s time. Even Sir Francis Drake and the earl of Oxford, for all their talents, would not have been likely to get these matters right.

The case that the essays in this volume collectively make for Shakespearean authorship of the canon is cogently and persuasively presented, and for many readers must seem (it’s tempting to say) unanswerable. But in regard to this curious and seemingly unstoppable debate, unanswerable is never, it seems, the appropriate word. A few months after Shakespeare Beyond Doubt was published in the United Kingdom, early this year another book – with almost identical title, typography, and cover design – emerged from a small press in the United States. One punctuation mark differentiates the main title of this book (edited by John H. Shahan and Alexander Waugh, grandson of novelist, Evelyn), from its predecessor. It is called Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? – that small note of interrogation assuring us, like the similar mark in the window of Westminster Abbey, that the battle is not yet over.