SOURCE: "Deviations," in Shakespeare's Lives, New Edition, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 385-451.

In the following excerpt, Schoenbaum deconstructs several anti-Stratfordian arguments, including those who believe that the plays were authored by a group of individuals; those who assert the Earl of Oxford as the true author; and those who put forth other claimants, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Derby, and Christopher Marlowe.

Groupists

Delia [Bacon] was of course not a proper Baconian but a Groupist envisioning a secret association of high-born wits, Ralegh and Bacon chief among them, as the true progenitors of the Shakespeare canon. Others—many others, alas—followed her example and argued for multiple, or at least dual, authorship. In William D. O'Connor—friend of Walt Whitman, author of The Good Gray Poet (the title gave a phrase to the language), and librarian of the United States Treasury—she found her first convert...