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Possible Aliases of Shakespeare  
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Tags: Shakespeare, William, writer, author, playwright, famous, AKA, alternatives, candidates

One of the most common questions people ask me about Shakespeare is "who really wrote Shakespeare's works?". Many people have been named in the search to find the 'true' author of Shakespeare's plays, including:

	William Shakespeare - With so many other potential authorship candidates out there, it's almost becoming fashionable again to suggest that Shakespeare himself actually wrote the works. After all, despite the lack of evidence that detractors love to claim, there's actually less hard evidence to tie anyone else to them. It's just crazy enough to believe.
	Christopher Marlowe - Christopher Marlowe was also an Elizabethan playwright, a predecessor to Shakespeare whose biggest claim to fame was "Doctor Faustus." According to sources, he was also occasionally an agent for Her Majesty's government. He died in a tavern brawl in 1593, well before Shakespeare's greatest works were written. Conspiracy theorists have him faking his death and writing the plays from Italy under a pseudonym.
	Sir Francis Bacon - Bacon has been a favorite for a number of years, now, although he seems to be slipping in popularity to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford over the last thirty years. Bacon's supporters point out his advanced learning and love of ciphers. Many try to support their claims, in fact, with several ciphers "discovered" in the plays that encode clues to Bacon's authorship.
	Queen Elizabeth I - It has been asserted that Queen Elizabeth wrote Shakespeare's plays secretly, as playwriting was considered a rather disreputable business. There is no evidence for this, and some of Shakespeare's plays were written after the Queen's death.
	Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford - Oxford has definitely gotten the best press over the years, and he certainly has his share of celebrity supporters. He is touted especially because he wrote poetry and is acknowledged as a playwright without having any titles specifically attributed to him. Supporters usually trot out coincidences between the earl's life and "Hamlet" as primary evidence, along with a series of passages from a family Bible and Oxford's coat of arms that features a lion "shaking a spear."
	William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby - Derby is a dark-horse candidate who either wrote the plays on his own, or was the ringleader of a group effort that included many of the other alternate candidates. The seminal work is from 1919, in which French scholar Abel LeFranc hypothesizes that whoever wrote the work had intimate knowledge of France and its royal court. Later proponents have explored the mysterious coincidence between the initials of William Stanley and William Shakespeare.
	Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland - Rutland may have been a gentleman and well-traveled scholar, but he would have been a bit young to have written at least half of Shakespeare's plays. In 1595, he was only 18 and still attending Cambridge. The two primary connections seem to be through "Hamlet." Rutland' was a royal ambassador to Denmark, and attended university in Padua with (among others) two students eerily named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

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