About the life and work of William Shakespeare has preserved dozens of historical documents. He was well known to his contemporaries as a poet and playwright whose works have been repeatedly published and quoted in verse and prose. The circumstances of his birth, education, lifestyle.

all corresponds to the time when the profession of the playwright is still considered low, but the theaters have brought their owners considerable income. Finally, Shakespeare was an actor and a playwright, and shareholder of the troupe, he's almost twenty years spent rehearsing and performing on stage.

Despite all this, still debate whether William Shakespeare wrote plays, sonnets and poems published under his name. Doubts first emerged in the late XVIII century. Since then, there appeared a variety of hypotheses, attributing the authorship of Shakespeare's works to someone else. Offers the six most long-lived versions of who could write Shakespeare.

The impoverished daughter of a settler of the U.S. state of Connecticut Delia bacon (1811-1859) was not the first who attempted to ascribe the works of Shakespeare written by Francis bacon, but the General public was introduced to this version of it. Her belief in his own discovery was so contagious that the authors to whom she appealed for help, the Americans Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Briton Thomas Carlyle could not refuse her.

Thanks to the support of Delia bacon came to England and in 1857 published a 675-page "the True philosophy of the plays of Shakespeare". In this book it was said that William Shakespeare was merely an illiterate actor and greedy businessman, plays and poems under his name wrote a group of "highborn thinkers and poets", led by bacon alleged author of "New Organon" was hoping to get around censorship restrictions, were not allowed to openly Express their innovative philosophy (that in Elizabethan England plays were also censored, Delia, apparently, knew nothing).

However, the author of "True philosophy" no evidence in favor of his hypothesis has not submitted evidence, considered Delia, are either in the grave of Francis bacon or Shakespeare's grave. Since then, many anti sectarian believe that the true author was disposed to bury the manuscripts of "Shakespeare's" plays along with them, and if find them, then the issue will be resolved once and for all.

Delia's ideas found many followers. As evidence they showed a small literary Parallels between the works of bacon and Shakespeare, is understandable by the unity of the literary culture of the time and also the fact that the author of Shakespeare's plays had a taste for philosophy and knew about the lives of a number of European Royal houses.

A significant development of the initial hypothesis can be considered attempts to unravel "the bacon cipher". The fact that Francis bacon worked on improved methods of steganography cryptography, which in the opinion of the uninitiated looks like a full message with its own meaning. Baconians are sure that their hero wrote plays under the mask of Shakespeare, not for the sake of success "Romeo and Juliet", "Hamlet" and "King Lear", "Twelfth night" and "Storm" was a front for some secret knowledge.

A simple English teacher who called himself a descendant of the Earls of Derby, Thomas Loney (1870-1944) did not believe that "the merchant of Venice" could write man of ignoble origin, who had never been in Italy. Questioning the authorship of the Comedy about Shylock, Loney picked up an anthology of Elizabethan poetry and found a poem Shakespeare "Venus and Adonis" (1593), written in the same stanza and the same size as the poem of Edward de Vere "Female variation" (1587). De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, could boast of antiquity of family, and a good acquaintance with Italy, was known to his contemporaries not only as a poet but as the author of comedies (not preserved).

In 1920 Louny published the book "Shakespeare Identified", which found many admirers, although the date of death of the count 1604 year cuts from the Shakespeare Canon a series of late plays, including "King Lear", "Macbeth", "Antony and Cleopatra", "Winter Wonderland" and "Storm". However, Loney has found a solution: the alleged Oxford, dying, left a pile of unfinished manuscripts, later finalized by someone roughly and hastily. Followers Loney to avoid some of the contradictions in the Dating of the plays.