There are a multitude of reasons why some historians believe that William Shakespeare, the actor, could not have written the plays attributed to him. These three are the most common:

• He did not have the education, travel experiences, or background to have written those plays and poems.

• He obviously did not own any books, including any of the more than 200 from which material was used for these plays. His will divided every inexpensive item he owned but listed no books – which were certainly required for his writing. Books were so precious at that time that they would most certainly be willed to someone. He obviously had none.

• Plays supposedly written by Shakespeare continued to appear for years after the actor died – fourteen in all.

There are likewise a multitude of reasons which corroborate the premise that Christopher Marlowe did not die in a knife fight in the bar at Deptford. These are the three most common:

• Marlowe was mysteriously and coincidentally “killed” just days before he was to appear before the Privy Council for treason, a crime punishable by death. Almost every detail of his death, including all records by the coroner, by the church officials and by the government, are contradictory — and, at best, ludicrous. The fight in a faraway tavern supposedly concerned the “reckoning” of a bill for dinner.

• England’s foremost poet was instantly and suspiciously buried in an unmarked grave with none of the ceremonies or tributes for someone of his stature.

• The man who supposedly murdered Marlowe was immediately absolved of the crime by the Queen and went back to work for Marlowe’s patron, Sir Thomas Walsingham.

There are many reasons to believe that it was really Christopher Marlowe penning the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.

• There are more than a hundred duplicate, similar or identical lines in the works attributed to Shakespeare and those written by Marlowe. There are no matches with other poets or other writers of that period. There also are various references to the works of Marlowe in Shakespearean plays.

• At the end of the eighteenth century an American University professor, Dr. Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, developed a system whereby the author of a work could be scientifically detected by a variety of mechanical devices such as word length, structure, etc. He undertook to experiment with the works of twenty famous writers, including Keats, Shelley, Thackeray, Lord Byron, Ben Johnson and even Shakespeare and Marlowe. The study was done in an effort to prove that Francis Bacon was in reality the actual author of Shakespeare’s works. There were no matches — until they got to Christopher Marlowe and then, to quote Dr. Mendenhall, “something akin to a sensation was produced.” In the characteristic curve of his plays, “Christopher Marlowe agrees with Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself.” But, since Dr. Mendenhall knew Marlowe had died before Shakespeare wrote his plays, the results were designated “inconclusive.”

• As recently as 1994, a literary scholar named Thomas Merriam worked with a computer scientist by the name of Robert Matthews to analyze and determine who wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. The computer analysis determined Christopher Marlowe had actually written them. And, once again, since the world knew that Marlowe was not alive at the time, the results were categorized “non-decisive.”