There is an extraordinary – seemingly an insatiable – urge on the part of quite a number of people to believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare. The number of published books suggesting – or more often insisting – as much is estimated now to be well over 5,000.

Shakespeare’s plays, it is held, so brim with expertise – on law, medicine, statesmanship, court life, military affairs, the bounding main, antiquity, life abroad – that they cannot possibly be the work of a single lightly educated provincial.

The presumption is that William Shakespeare of Stratford was, at best, an amiable stooge, an actor who lent his name as cover for someone of greater talent, someone who could not, for one reason or another, be publicly identified as a playwright.

The controversy has been given respectful airings in the highest quarters. Perhaps the most extraordinary development of all is that Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London – built as a monument for his plays and with aspirations to be a world-class study centre – became, under the stewardship of the artistic director Mark Rylance, a kind of clearing house for antiStratford sentiment.

So it needs to be said that nearly all of the antiShakespeare sentiment – actually all of it, every bit – involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. Shakespeare “never owned a book”, a writer for The New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes.

For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probable that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.

In the normally unimpeachable History Today, William D Rubinstein, a professor at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, stated in the opening paragraph of his antiShakespeare survey: “Of the 75 known contemporary documents in which Shakespeare is named, not one concerns his career as an author.”

That is not even close to being so. In the Master of the Revels’ accounts for 1604–5 – that is, the record of plays performed before the King, about as official a record as a record can be – Shakespeare is named seven times as the author of plays performed before James I. He is identified on the title pages as the author of the sonnets and in the dedications of the poems The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. He is named as author on several quarto editions of his plays, by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia, and (allusively but unmistakably) by Robert Greene in the Groats-worth of Wit. John Webster identifies him as one of the great playwrights of the age in his preface to The White Devil.

The only absence among contemporary records is not of documents connecting Shakespeare to his works but of documents connecting any other human being to them. As the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate has pointed out, virtually no one “in Shakespeare’s lifetime or for the first 200 years after his death expressed the slightest doubt about his authorship”.

So where did all the antiStratford sentiment come from?

The story begins, a little unexpectedly, with an odd and frankly unlikely American woman named Delia Bacon. Bacon was born in 1811 in the frontier country of Ohio, into a large family and a small log cabin.

Delia was bright and apparently very pretty but not terribly stable. As an adult she taught at school and wrote a little fiction, but mostly she led a life of spinsterly anonymity in New Haven, Connecticut.

The one lively event in her secluded existence came in the 1840s when she developed a passionate, seemingly obsessive, attachment to a theological student some years her junior. The affair, such as it was, ended in humiliation for her when she discovered that the young man was in the habit of amusing his friends by reading to them passages from her feverishly tender letters.

Gradually, for reasons that are not clear, she became convinced that Francis Bacon, her distinguished namesake, was the true author of the works of William Shakespeare. Though she had no known genealogical connection to Francis Bacon, the correspondence of names was almost certainly more than coincidental.

In 1852 she travelled to England and embarked on a long and fixated quest to prove William Shakespeare a fraud. It is easy to dismiss Delia as mildly demented and inconsequential, but there was clearly something beguiling in her manner and physical presence, for she succeeded in winning the assistance of a number of influential people (though often, it must be said, they came to regret it).

Charles Butler, a wealthy businessman, agreed to fund the costs of her trip to England – and must have done so generously, for she stayed for almost four years. Ralph Waldo Emer-son gave her an introduction to Thomas Carlyle, who assisted her on her arrival in London. Bacon’s research methods were singular to say the least. She spent 10 months in St Albans, Francis Bacon’s home town, but claimed not to have spoken to anyone during the whole of that time. She sought no information from museums or archives, and politely declined Carlyle’s offers of introductions to the leading scholars.

Instead she sought out locations where Bacon had spent time and silently “absorbed atmospheres”, refining her theories by a kind of intellectual osmosis.

In 1857 she produced her magnum opus, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, published by Ticknor & Fields of Boston. It was vast, unreadable and odd in almost every way. For one thing, not once in its 675 densely printed pages did it actually mention Francis Bacon; the reader had to deduce that he was the person whom she had in mind as the author of Shakespeare’s plays.

Exhausted by the strain of her labours, Delia returned to her home-land and retreated into insanity. She died peacefully but unhappily under institutional care in 1859, believing she was the Holy Ghost.

Despite the failure of her book and the denseness of its presentation, somehow the idea that Bacon wrote Shakespeare took wing in a very big way. Mark Twain and Henry James became prominent supporters of the Baconian thesis. Many became convinced that the plays of Shakespeare contained secret codes that revealed the true author (who at this stage was always seen to be Bacon).

It has also been written many times that Stratford never occurs in any Shakespeare play, whereas St Albans, Bacon’s seat, is named 17 times (Bacon was Viscount St Albans).

For the record, St Albans is mentioned 15 times, not 17, and these are in nearly every case references to the Battle of St Albans, a historical event crucial to the plot of the second and third parts of Henry VI (the other three references are to the saint himself).

On such evidence one might far more plausibly make Shakespeare a Yorkshireman, since York appears 14 times more often in his plays than does St Albans.

Eventually, Baconian theory took on a cult-like status, with more avid supporters suggesting Bacon wrote not only the plays of Shakespeare but also those of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene and Lyly, as well as Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Montaigne’s Essays (in French) and the King James Version of the Bible.

One obvious objection to any Baconian theory is that Bacon had a very full life already. There is also an inconvenient lack of connection between Bacon and any human being associated with the theatre – perhaps not surprisingly, as he appears to have quite disliked the theatre, and attacked it as a frivolous and lightweight pastime in one of his many essays.

Partly for this reason doubters began to look elsewhere. In 1918 a schoolmaster from Gateshead with the inescapably noteworthy name of J Thomas Looney put the finishing touches to a book called Shakespeare Identified, in which he proved to his own satisfaction that the actual author of Shakespeare was the 17th Earl of Oxford, one Edward de Vere.

Looney’s argument was built around the conviction that William Shakespeare lacked the worldliness and polish to write his own plays, and that they must therefore have come from someone of broader learning and greater experience: an aristocrat in all likelihood.

Oxford, it may be said, had certain things in his favour as a candidate: he was clever and had some standing as a poet and playwright (though none of his plays survives, and none of his poetry indicates actual greatness – certainly not Shakespearean greatness); he was well travelled and spoke Italian; and he moved in the right circles to understand courtly matters. One of his daughters was engaged for a time to Southampton, the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s two long poems.

But Oxford also had shortcomings that seem not to sit well with the compassionate, steady, calm, wise voice that speaks so reliably and seductively from Shakespeare’s plays. He was arrogant, petulant and spoilt, irresponsible with money, sexually dissolute, widely disliked and given to outbursts of deeply unsettling violence. At the age of 17 he murdered a household servant in a fury (but a pliant jury was persuaded to rule that the servant had run onto his sword).

Looney never produced evidence to explain why Oxford – a man of boundless vanity – would seek to hide his identity. Why would he be happy to give the world some unremembered plays and middling poems under his own name, but then retreat into anonymity as he developed, in middle age, a fantastic genius?

All Looney would say on the matter was: “That, however, is his business, not ours.” Actually, if we are to believe in Oxford, it is entirely our business. It has to be.

Easily the most troubling weakness of the Oxford argument is that he incontestably died in 1604, when many of Shakespeare’s plays had not yet appeared – indeed in some cases could not have been written, as they were influenced by later events. The Tempest, notably, was inspired by an account of a shipwreck on Bermuda written by one William Strachey in 1609. Macbeth likewise was clearly cognisant of the Gunpowder Plot, an event Oxford did not live to see.

Despite the manifest shortcomings of Looney’s book, it found a curious measure of support. The British Nobel laureate John Galsworthy praised it, as did Sigmund Freud (though Freud later came to have a private theory that Shakespeare was of French stock and was really named Jacques Pierre – an interesting but ultimately solitary delusion).

In America a Professor LP Bénézet of Dartmouth College became a leading Oxfordian. He it was who propounded the theory that Shakespeare the actor was de Vere’s illegitimate son. Orson Welles became a fan of the notion, and later supporters include the actor Derek Jacobi.

A third candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work. The idea is that Marlowe’s death that year was faked, and that he spent the next 20 years hidden away either in Kent or Italy under the protection of his patron and possible lover Thomas Walsingham, during which time he cranked out most of Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

The champion of this argument was a New York press agent named Calvin Hoffman, who in 1956 secured permission to open Walsingham’s tomb, hoping to find manuscripts and letters that would prove his case. In fact, he found nothing at all – not even Walsingham, who, it turns out, was buried elsewhere.

Despite the manifest feebleness of Hoffman’s case, and the fact that its support has withered to almost nothing, in 2002 the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey took the extraordinary step of placing a question mark behind the year of Marlowe’s death on a new monument to him in Poets’ Corner.

And still the list of alternative Shakespeares rolls on. Yet another candidate was Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. The proponents of this view maintain that this explains why the First Folio was dedicated to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery: they were her sons.

The countess, it is also noted, had estates on the Avon, and her private crest bore a swan – hence Ben Jonson’s reference to “sweet swan of Avon”. Mary Sidney certainly makes an appealing candidate. She was beautiful as well as learned and well connected: her uncle was Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and her brother the poet and patron of poets Sir Philip Sidney. All that is missing is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.

Yet another theory holds that Shakespeare was too brilliant to be a single person, but was a syndicate of stellar talents, including nearly all of those mentioned already, plus Sir Walter Raleigh and some others. Unfortunately the theory not only lacks evidence but would involve a conspiracy of silence of improbable proportions.

Altogether more than 50 candidates have been suggested as alternative Shakespeares. The one thing all the theories have in common is the conviction that William Shakespeare was in some way unsatisfactory as an author of brilliant plays. This is really quite odd. Shakespeare’s upbringing was not backward or in any way conspicuously deprived. His father was the mayor of a consequential town.

In any case, it would hardly be unique for someone brought up modestly to excel later in life. Shakespeare lacked a university education, but then so did Ben Jonson – a far more intellectual playwright – and no one ever suggests that Jonson was a fraud.

It is possible, with a kind of selective squinting, to endow the alternative claimants with the time, talent and motive for anonymity to write the plays. But what no one has ever produced is the tiniest particle of evidence to suggest they actually did so.

These people must have been incredibly gifted – to create, in their spare time, the greatest literature ever produced in English, in a voice patently not their own, in a manner so cunning that they fooled virtually everyone during their own lifetimes and for 400 years afterwards.

© Bill Bryson 2007

Extracted from Shakespeare, by Bill Bryson, to be published by HarperCollins on September 3 at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

Times Recommends

• Avro Lancaster: Owner's Workshop Manual
• iD: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century by Susan Greenfield
• Fatal Misconception by Matthew Connelly