Christopher Marlowe

Marlowe was just two years older than Shakespeare and had the required talent to pull it off. Marlowe’s death was said to be faked, or that he kept working covertly while bleeding from a stab wound for twenty years. Under the protection of his patron, Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe was said to have written Shakespeare’s masterpieces.

In 1956, Calvin Hoffman, a New York press agent, was granted permission to open Walsingham’s tomb in the hopes of discovering manuscripts and letters that would prove this case. He found nothing, not even Walsingham, who was buried somewhere else. Nonetheless, he produced a bestseller, The Murder of the Man Who Was “Shakespeare.” The bulk of Hoffman’s claim was that the “Mr. W.H.” on the title page of the sonnets was “Mr. Walsing-Ham." The support, in this case, has been thinning into obscurity.

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby

His claim to the Bard’s throne is that they have the same initials. That and the fact that the proponents of his candidacy argue that the comic scenes in Love’s Labour’s Lost were influenced by a pageant of the Nine Worthies that was only performed in Stanley’s hometown of Chester.

Sadly, no poems or plays have survived in his name, with one possible exception--an untitled poem that is not very close to Shakespeare’s style, and it may or may not be Stanley's work. Stanley retired in 1613 and wrote nothing for the last twenty-nine years of his life--a long period of hibernation for a talented writer. 

Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland

Manners would have been a bit too young to have written half of the Bard’s plays. In 1595, he was only 18 and still attending Cambridge, and there were no accounts that he attended the Rutland School for Gifted Children, or he could have pulled it off. Still, his connection to the work is made through Hamlet, wherein Manners was a royal ambassador to Denmark and attended the University of Padua with two students named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

He married the daughter of Philip Sydney, and the German literary critic Karl Bleibtreu believed that the pair collaborated to write the complete works of Shakespeare. Still, the loophole was  Manners’ age, who was only 16 when the first published work was made available.

Sir Walter Raleigh

Raleigh’s claim was propagated by Henry Pemberton, Jr. On account that King James I did not like Raleigh, Pemberton claimed that Raleigh referenced Claudius of Hamlet as King James I and that Raleigh uses Hamlet, the main protagonist, to diss the monarch.

While Raleigh was well-traveled and propagated a story about a city of gold that made people believe in El Dorado, his credentials as a traveler do not negate Shakespeare’s descriptive skills of people, places, and events, as put forward by critic H.N. Gibson, and this is simply by virtue of the genius that the Bard possessed.

Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke

A small group of proponents claims that the First Folio was dedicated to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, the Countess’s sons. The Countess also had her estates on the Avon, and her private crest bore a swan, which explained Ben Johnson’s reference to “Sweet Swan of Avon." Sidney was an appealing candidate. Fair and learned, she also had good connections. Her uncle, Robert Dudley, was the Earl of Leicester, while her brother, Sir Philip Sidney, was a poet and patron of poets. She spent most of her life hobnobbing with people with literary inclinations. Edmund Spenser dedicated one of his poems to her. But what is missing is anything that may connect her to Shakespeare. Correspondence between her works and those of Shakespeare in terms of source material, style, and imagination, remain in search of connections.