onebug

I'm gonna go long on this one, just because I feel like it's rarely ever laid out for a general public how this stuff works. So I know you didn't quite ask for that, and apologies for the wall of text (if you wanna hop off, the first two paragraphs will respond to your question just fine, though, I think):

It's straight up a conspiracy theory. Every alternative authorship theory is founded on basic misunderstandings of the historical record and the circumstances of the early modern theater. For example, collaboratively written plays existed, and were credited to the people who wrote them! Are there examples of historical misattribution, or collaborators going uncredited who get uncovered later? Yes, but it turns out these people are always other playwrights from the time, not cool historical figures. For example, it's generally accepted now that Shakespeare's Two Noble Kinsmen, one of his last plays, was co-written with John Fletcher, who replaced him as the writer for his troupe when he retired.

It's important to notice, then, that all Shakespeare authorship conspiracies point to someone more exciting than "John Fletcher, the guy who got Shakespeare's job later." As you suggest, they need a more salacious air that gets people to listen through sheer outrageousness. They rely on coming up with some weird political reason--usually literal conspiracies about machinations of the court--that someone otherwise very famous and important was secretly also a playwright but couldn't say they wrote these plays, and were trying to communicate secret knowledge the public wasn't ready for, or details about Queen Elizabeth's bastard baby or something like that. Almost always, they also come down to looking for secret codes and cryptography puzzles in the plays that they then "solve" (looking at the first letter of every other line in this or that soliloquy, reading the sonnets in reverse order, etc). These are classic movements of conspiracy theories.

But why does this happen? Well, you're also somewhat correct to see a counterargument to "great man" history, but the actual truth is all authorship conspiracies are weirdly classist in their origin--they are always eager to put forth a "greater man" whom they find to be a more believable author of the plays. I'll say more about this below, but at the start, it's important to be clear about why this is: the animating question of these conspiracists is always "How did this one guy happen to write so many great plays?" with the assumption that the plays are and have always been considered great. And that's just not true!

First of all, Shakespeare wrote like 30 plays. And we only commonly talk about 5-8 of them--the rest are pretty forgettable then, if not outright flops. (And boy howdy are there flops--the aforementioned Two Noble Kinsmen is not exactly a banger, and King John sucks an incredible amount of ass.) But people liked Shakespeare in his time just fine. He was popular!

The comparison is not exact but think of how people feel about, like, Steven Spielberg--guy's got some good movies in him! But is he the greatest director in history? Some people may believe that, but they're definitely in the minority--he's a crowdpleaser, first and foremost. Similarly, in his time no one thought Shakespeare the greatest poet who ever lived. In his own moment and for the century or so after his death he was considered a "natural genius," which is to say, a guy with great talent but no discipline--his verse gets messy, he mixes generic modes too much, etc. For context, to call someone a "natural" in this time was equivalent to saying they had an intellectual disability!

Immediately after Shakespeare's death, the person considered to be the greatest playwright was his contemporary and rival Ben Jonson, who followed very strictly the classical precedents for drama (generic purity, the Aristotlean unities, clear moral arguments, etc) that marked art in that time as "good." Art was all about following models that the classics set down, and was judged according to how well it met those criteria. In fact Jonson gave Shakespeare shit constantly for not being as smart and as well read in the classics as him! And Jonson was so popular that there was an entire subsequent generation of poets who called themselves "The Tribe of Ben" (yes they meant this as a weird joke about Judaism) and basically mimicked and elaborated him endlessly. All of late 17th and early 18th century comic drama is people doing reruns on Jonson.

Shakespeare does not attain the superstar status we still currently attach to him until the late 1700s, with the advent of Romanticism, an aesthetic movement that is extremely antagonistic to the formalist prescriptions about artwork that Jonson subscribed to and which, up until then, were in fact the standards by which all European art was judged (it was called neoclassicism--the French loved it). John Dryden and Alexander Pope produced entire revisions of Shakespeare plays because, while the stories were popular and the characters likeable, it drove them nuts how he didn't always keep regular poetic rhythm and meter, or mixed comedy and tragedy in the same play. But with the advent of Romanticism, these former weaknesses became points of strength, signs of the author's "individual creativity" and disregard for convention and history, which still informs our ideas of artists to this day any time someone is praised for being "original." (This is also when the word 'natural', which earlier suggested cognitive deficiency when applied to people, flips around to meaning 'good'--the Romantics believed the natural world was good, that people were naturally good, and that society malformed them, whereas earlier, under a stricter Christian logic of original sin marring all things, it was a given that anything 'natural' was in need of repair or redress.)

As Shakespeare became more central in the English consciousness, on into the 19th century, we also saw the rise of "Bardolatry"--like idolatry, a pseudo-religious object of devotion. Shakespeare now becomes the greatest poet who ever lived, because he so easily is made to embody the values of individual creativity and atomized thought that the culture was coming to cherish, and which prior to that point, were actually considered his weaknesses. BTW, notice how closely this traces the rise of industrial capitalism and individualist bourgeois ideology!

Relatedly, then, having a "national poet" who embodied all the correct values was also an extremely effective colonial tool, something to make people in subjugated countries read and perform to show they could "attain" civilization. Why Shakespeare and not Ben Jonson? Well, because Ben Jonson did a thing Shakespeare didn't do: he wrote closer to the mode of social realism, about characters living and working in the London of his time, for a London audience. He anchored his work explicitly in a way that means it became outdated, whereas Shakespeare's stories about broad heroes and villains in loosely defined fantasy-history worlds were easily exported as "universal" symbols of culture. It's more ideologically smooth to tell someone whose village you've commandeered in India that they have to understand Hamlet's philosophical meandering to tap into universal humanity rather than say they have to appreciate a Ben Jonson character's complaints about how the London grocers of 1598 love to rip you off on produce following the recent failed grain harvests. (By the by, Shakespeare also references current events like the 1590s failed grain harvests, but they're less central to the plot and therefore are easily ignored in favor of the broader readings.)

So, notably, it is not until after the advent of Bardolatry that alternative authorship theories first spring up. Or in other words, Shakespeare was dead for about 200 uncontroversial years before anyone came up with this idea. The first person to advance the hypothesis that Francis Bacon (and perhaps a few others) wrote Shakespeare's plays was a woman named Delia Bacon (no relation). Her basic argument was that the plays were so philosophically insightful and scientifically interesting a philosopher or scientist had to have written them. Crucially, nobody prior to the Romantic turn thought this way, but when the cult of Bardolatry inflates these works to larger than life size, it suddenly becomes very difficult to believe that, short of him being a god on earth (hence, Bardolatry), one guy who had a pretty solid but not extensive education could have written so many Perfect Works that are so in touch with All These Profound Issues (ignoring that these people are assuming these issues are being spoken to, and therefore reading for and thus finding those ideas in ways the original audience did not).

This is where the classism I mentioned comes into play, and we get what looks like pushback on (but what turns out to be a preservation of) "great man" thinking. It's a matter of historical record that Shakespeare had a moderately good education, which is to say typical for a man of his station, but he was not going out of his way to learn Greek or translate the Romans on his own like Ben Jonson was. Shakespeare seemed to be, above all, A Guy With a Job. His father was a fairly successful tradesman, a glover, who tried to purchase the status of gentleman (you could purchase your way into the lower rungs of the better social ranks) and failed. Shakespeare does corking business in the London theater, and one of the first things he does when he returns home is buy that status. And that seems to have been enough for him! He had no apparent pretensions about great art, like Jonson did. But if that's the case (ask the conspiracists) then how did all these obviously great works of art flow from his pen?

Clearly, someone much smarter and more ambitious than him must have been involved--a philosopher like Francis Bacon, or a court favorite like Walter Raleigh, or someone who Actually Went to College like Christopher Marlowe, or even Queen Elizabeth herself! In modern times the primary alternative author suggested is the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere--and the argument is usually similar. How could a common tradesman like this Shakespeare possibly know so much about the works of Kings and Queens as demonstrated by his plays? (Note: plays are not reality! Everyone in Shakespeare's cohort wrote about royalty even though none of them were themselves aristocrats!) How could someone with so little schooling write something as philosophically complex as Hamlet? Clearly someone of great learning did it instead! (Note: people historically felt Hamlet was a fun character but thought the play was a fucking mess, not a philosophical treatise! And anyway, you don't have to be 'educated' to be thoughtful, curious, or philosophical!)

So that's the high level issue with authorship conspiracies: they mistake the reception of the work for its truth, and ignore the circumstances under which it was produced. There's also loads of little things people bring up in this context that just demonstrate how little we are taught about history, and especially, how history means difference from what we expect:

• Why are Shakespeare's extant signatures always spelled differently? (English spelling was not standardized until the 18th century, almost everybody had varied spellings of their names)
• Why are there no books mentioned in his will? (What books people owned were often collected as part of other goods and sundries; people who listed books in their wills were either professional scholars or people like Ben Jonson, who wanted you to Know They Had a Library)
• How did Shakespeare write so much and why did all these plays stick around? (After he died, Shakespeare's friends in London collected all his plays in a volume we call the First Folio, meaning a lot of them were preserved while one-off printings from other authors were lost. Prior to this, omnibus editions were considered an honor worthy of only classical writers, not contemporary ones, so why did Shakespeare's friends do it? Because it was a speculative moneymaking venture, backed by none other than our old pal Ben Jonson who had a few years earlier published all of his own works in this way [the man was not modest] and was probably hoping Shakespeare's folio would normalize the extremely weird thing he did and boost his sales!!!)
• Why do we know so little about Shakespeare's life? (We actually know quite a bit; less than Ben Jonson, who if you could not tell by now was kind of nuts and wrote about himself constantly, and everyone thought he was a weirdo for it, but we have more evidence about Shakespeare's life than we do of the life of John Webster, writer of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, and notably no one suggests other authors for those plays)

So there you have it! A crash course in theater and print history, Shakespearean ideology, and conspiracies. I personally think what's funniest about all this is the part Ben Jonson plays--the man spent his entire life trying to brand himself as the new master of poetry, got in fights with everyone constantly (guy was arrested a few times and almost executed once), succeeded at the master poet thing for a little bit, and then got his spot absolutely obliterated by a dude he thought was a lowkey hack.

And if you're still reading, OP, and still listening to HMTW, I hope some of the stuff I've said here (and say, or will say, on that show) helps illustrate kind of one of my big deals: the importance of being able to properly distinguish reactions to an artwork from the artwork itself--things happen in history, and history changes everything, especially how and why we read.