All I read about the authorship of “Thomas of Woodstock” in the past were endless ruminations about its anonymity, without any definitive source of attribution, but these two paragraphs made me chuckle:
Lake and Jackson were admirable exponents of what I have called the “open”, or empirical approach to authorship attribution studies, based on close observation of the texts. “Closed” approaches, by contrast, are those where enquirers are convinced that they know who the author is. Some are locked into a belief that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon, using a special cipher; others favour Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604). Readers may wonder how de Vere was able to publish and perhaps act in the six or seven plays that Shakespeare had yet to produce, but as we know from contemporary evidence, for conspiracy theorists all things are possible.[...]Claims that Bacon wrote Shakespeare were decisively refuted by the Bacon scholar J. M. Robertson in the 600 pages of The Baconian Heresy: A confutation (1913), who confronted “the Baconian fantasy” afresh, while recording that “many of these claims were made years before; but they seem to recur spontaneously”. This is true of all such fantasy attributions. If there are typing facilities in Purgatory, the authorship claimants may work away happily ever after there [LOL] ©
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