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All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name

You are whom you do not want to be; that is your tragedy.
I am whom I want to be; that is my tragedy.

That was the bacon that wrote Shakespeare's plays.

A peculiar thing about the Puddin’ was that, though they had all had a great many slices off him, there was no sign of the places whence the slices had been cut.

"That’s where the Magic comes," explained Bill.  "The more you eats the more you gets.  Cut-an’-come-again is his name, an’
cut and come again, is his nature.  Me an’ Sam has been eatin’ away at this Puddin’ for years, and there’s not a mark on him." The Magic Pudding, Norman Lindsay

Magic Pudding:

The Shakespeare authorship question is a magic pudding of a conundrum, for regardless of how many serves of speculation are sliced off it, it remains in spherical completeness to feed the next contender.  It seems in some fashion, inaccessible to logic, that each successively discarded contender makes Shakespeare himself less valid and the fresh contender more eligible.

The list below, inevitably incomplete, shows the introduction date of candidates.  Some of these candidates (in particular Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere) have had support over time (both Bacon and de Vere are still current).  Other candidates, such as Michele Angolo Florio, strutted their hour upon the stage and were heard no more.

Date	Candidate	Sponsor	Announcement	Reference
1728	not Shakespeare	"Captain" Goulding	(book) An Essay against Too Much Reading	WEF
1769	Bacon (implied)	possibly Herbert Lawrence	(book) The Life and Adventures of Common Sense	WEF
1785	Francis Bacon	James Wilmot	(unpublished)	WEF, JS
1848	Ben Jonson	Joseph C. Hart	(book) The Romance of Yachting	WEF
1888	Anthony Sherley	F. Scott		WEF
(1891)	William Stanley	James Greenstreet	(articles in) The Genealogist	WEF
1912	Roger Manners	Célestin Demblon	(book) Lord Rutland est Shakespeare	WEF
(1913)	Queen Elizabeth	(W. R. Titterton)
1914	Walter Raleigh	Henry Pemberton	(book) Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh	WEF
1916	Robert Cecil	John M Maxwell	(book) The Man behind the Mask	WEF
1920	Edward de Vere	J. T. Looney	(book) "Shakespeare" Identified	WEF, JS
1927	Michele Angolo Florio	Santi Paladino	(reported in) Literary Digest	WEF
1943	Edward Dyer	Alden Brooks	(book) Will Shakespere and the Dyer’s hand	WEF
1955	Christopher Marlowe	Calvin Hoffman	(book) The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare"	WEF, JS
2005	Henry Neville	B. James, W. D. Rubinstein	(book) The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real ...	REI
2006	Mary Sidney Herbert	Robin P. Williams	(book) Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write ...	REI
n/a	Daniel Defoe	George Battey	n/a	WEF, JM
n/a	Robert Burton	M. L. Hore	(pamphlet) Who Wrote Shakespeare?	WEF

  References:

WEF:	Friedman, W. F. and E. S. The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, Cambridge, 1957
JS:	Shapiro, James, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, Simon & Schuster, 2010
JM:	Michell, John, Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions, Adventures Unlimited, 1999
REI:	readily established on internet

Index:

Navigate by Site Map	Overall site view with pages selectable by mouse click.
Index to Henry Neville pages	Brenda James in her book, Henry Neville and the Shakespeare Code, argues that the works attributed to William Shakespeare are in fact the works of Henry Neville.
Index to Edward de Vere pages	Jonathan Bond in his book, The De Vere Code, argues that the collection of sonnets attributed to William Shakespeare are in fact the works of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

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