Who is the most popular anti-Stratfordian candidate for Romeo and Juliet?

Answer 1

Anti-Stratfordians are people who believe that for some person other than William Shakespeare wrote all of Shakespeare's plays, including Romeo and Juliet. Nobody has yet advanced the claim that each one of Shakespeare's plays was really written by a different playwright that was not Shakespeare, so that the Henry VI plays were written by Peele, Titus Andronicus by Kyd, The Merry Wives of Windsor by Dekker, Much Ado About Nothing by Jonson and so on. Therefore there is no "anti-Stratfordian candidate for Romeo and Juliet".

Anti-Stratfordians generally attack each piece of evidence connecting Shakespeare with his plays to show that there really is no proof that he wrote them. They often add to that that the author of the plays must have been better educated or more aristocratic than Wm. Shakespeare, depending on whether they are intellectual snobs or social snobs.

Picking holes in the idea that Shakespeare wrote his plays is relatively easy compared to finding evidence of the authorship of the plays that does not point to Shakespeare. Nevertheless a number of people have been proposed. Francis Bacon was a strong contender in the nineteenth century, and Christopher Marlowe has had a few votes. The leading contender at the present time is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, notwithstanding the fact that he died before a number of the Shakespeare plays were produced, leading to the theory that he wrote about ten plays in a frenzy just before his death and then had them leaked out gradually over the next eight years or so. This is the leading theory, and it's that crazy.