The DU Lounge

The sheer volume of Shakespeare apocrypha shows us how loose the attribution was.

Works by Walter Raleigh, Thomas Heywood, Marlowe, Richard Barnfield and Bartholomew Griffin were printed as being "by W. Shakespeare" in 1599. And this was done by the same printer, the Jaggards, that printed the First Folio in 1623.

The traditional canon mostly excludes inferior works such as:

Sir John Oldcastle
The Birth of Merlin
Edward III
Mucedorus (the most popular play of the era)
The Merry Devil of Edmonton
Locrine
The Puritan
Thomas Lord Cromwell
Edmund Irnoside
The Spanish Tragedy
A Knack to Know a Knave
and, though initially embraced by "scholars"" and "experts", the infamous Vortigern and Rowena forgery.

Yet students will be told that "no one ever doubted that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare until 1920". And the very earliest alleged reference to Shakespeare as an author says:

So works known to be by authors not named William Shakespeare are being printed under that name while Greene alleges theft by a "crow" but all of this is ignored if not outright denied. Easier to make someone out as the best writer of their era if you can pick and choose what is good enough to qualify. The lies about "the birthplace" and the sloppy, hyperbolic scholarship related to the authorship is yet another reason that 'Shakespeare' should not be required.