THE outgoing artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and his ebullient successor have clashed over the true identity of the playwright.

Mark Rylance, who leaves the Globe at the end of this year, has always doubted that the author was William Shakespeare. He recently endorsed a theory that Shakespeare’s work was composed by a team of writers led by Francis Bacon.

Dominic Dromgoole, who will join the Globe from the Oxford Stage Company, has branded Mr Rylance’s favoured theory “baloney” and its supporters “snobs”.

“I think that all this theorising about Shakespeare is absolute baloney,” he told The Times. “There is a mass of historical evidence that shows there was a working-class playwright from Stratford writing the plays. All of this other stuff is nonsense. It says more about the people who are putting forward the theories than Shakespeare himself.”

He believes that supporters of Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, are motivated by snobbery. “People can’t accept that he was working-class. They can’t accept that his father was illiterate, and that he wasn’t posh.”

Mr Rylance, chairman of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust, last year credited Francis Bacon as the author. “I became more and more convinced that Francis Bacon was the doorway into it and had to be involved in some way,” he said. “Undoubtedly the Stratford actor (Shakespeare) is involved in the creation of the plays because he is a shareholder in the Globe but I have not seen a convincing argument that he was capable of writing the plays.”

In a foreword to The Shakespeare Enigma, a book by Peter Dawkins that proposes a team of writers led by Bacon, Mr Rylance wrote that he had difficulty reconciling the Stratford actor’s access to learning with the intellectual references in the plays.

“The amount of learning in the plays has been downplayed and the opportunities that the actor Shakespeare had to learn have been played up,” he wrote. “I do argue that there is cause for reasonable doubt that Shakespeare the actor wrote the Shakespeare plays and poems, and alternative theories should be weighed fairly without resort to slander of the individual proposing the theory — an all too common occurrence in the media.”

Mr Rylance has not limited his authorship theories to Bacon. He is listed by the Shakespeare Oxford Society as endorsing Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. “I find that the unfortunately limited evidence of the Stratfordian authorship theory seems to reveal little more than monetary motivation,” he wrote in a 1997 society newsletter.

“I find the work of the Shakespeare Oxford Society reveals a character, in Edward de Vere, motivated to use the mask of drama to reveal the true identity and nature of his time, as only someone in his position would have known, and as was the well established habit so clearly demonstrated in Hamlet.”

Sceptics of the Oxford attribution mention that De Vere’s poems are not of a high standard and that his death, in 1604, is inconvenient for a playwright who went on to write 11 plays after that date.

Professor Anne Barton, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, described De Vere’s death as “an insuperable problem”. “It is like the attempt to attribute Shakespeare’s plays to Francis Bacon. Like that one, this (theory) is a product of snobbery, that a Stratford grammar-school boy could not have written the plays, and I’m thoroughly fed up with it.”

FOR

FOR ‘All this theorising about Shakespeare is absolute baloney. People can’t accept that his father was illiterate and that he wasn’t posh’

DOMINIC DROMGOOLE

AGAINST

‘Shakespeare was involved, but I have not seen a convincing argument that he was capable of writing the plays’

MARK RYLANCE