who shakespeare?

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an English nobleman and intimate of Queen Elizabeth, remains the most prominent alternative candidate for authorship of the Shakespeare canon, having been identified in the 1920s and further researched in the 1980's. Oxford partisans note his literary reputation, education and travels, as well as striking similarities between the Earl's life, and events depicted in the plays and sonnets. The principal hurdle for the Oxfordian theory is the conventional theory that many of the Shakespeare plays were written after Oxford's death (1604), but well within the lifespan of William Shakespeare. Oxfordians counter this argument by citing research that suggests "Shakespeare" actually stopped writing in 1604, the same year that regular publication of Shakespeare's plays stopped. Christopher Marlowe is considered by some to be the most highly qualified to have written the works of Shakespeare. It has been speculated that Marlowe's recorded death in 1593 was faked for various reasons and that Marlowe went into hiding, subsequently writing under the name of William Shakespeare; this is called the Marlovian theory. Sir Francis Bacon is another proposed author for the Shakespeare works. Besides having travelled to some of the countries in which the plays are set, he could also have read the Shakespeare sources in their original Greek, Italian, Hebrew, or French. He described himself as a "Concealed Poet" and was alive at the time of the publication of the First Folio in 1623. Arguments against Bacon include the suggestion that he had no time to write so many plays, and that his style is different from Shakespeare's.

A question in mainstream academia addresses whether Shakespeare himself wrote every word of his commonly accepted plays, given that collaboration between dramatists routinely occurred in the Elizabethan theatre. Serious academic work continues to attempt to ascertain the authorship of plays and poems of the time, both those attributed to Shakespeare and others. If you're talking about Olde William - he lived at the times of Elizabeth the first in England.

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