The obsession with "correct" spelling has been around for only 150 years or so. Before that, writers spelt as they pleased, many not even bothering to be consistent. (And maybe the obsession has run its course - texting etc will lead us back to anarchy.)

BE2, you've clutched at a host of vestigial theories as someone would who was making a case for ghosts or poltergeists. They amount to nothing individually, and adding them all together still leaves you with nothing. And some of your assertions just don't stack up. For instance it is ridiculous to say Shakespeare was not credited with authorship by his peers. He is mentioned often, by fellow troupers such as Ben Johnson on the one hand, by the Cambridge set on the other. Johnson in fact was quite a close friend and made numerous references to Shakespeare as player and author. And Beaumont discussed Shakespeare's writing in correspondence with Johnson.

Of course, there was no controversy whatsoever about Shakespeare's authorship for 200 years or so. In other words all those who had been around at the time, and their descendents, accepted without question that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. And just to enlarge on a point someone made about stagecraft, it is noteworthy that no actor of any worth has ever doubted Shakespeare wrote the plays. Plots, court intrigue and locations Shakespeare could cull from the acknowledged sources - and whoever wrote the plays plainly did so, whether an intellectual, a country gentleman as Shakespeare was, or an unschooled peasant. But the understanding of stagecraft was not in any of the sources. That depended on an intimate working knowledge of the theatre.

The fact that in the past 200 years the conspiracy theorists have had to advance one candidate after another is surely a measure of how feeble their case is. Face it - the idea that someone else wrote Shakespeare is an urban legend that got out of hand.