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Richard Bachman is a well-known author of several successful novels. Inexplicably, conspiracy theorists invented the improbable scenario that another person secretly wrote his books. This would mean that numerous people are keeping silent about the true author. So no rational person could believe such a preposterous idea.
Actually, as some of you know, several years after the first Richard Bachman novel appeared,4 a perceptive bookstore clerk found evidence linking these novels to the best-selling author Stephen King, and King then confessed that he did write them. This is just one of the countless, endlessly fascinating stories of pseudonymous authorship that are receiving more attention during the past decade.
It is true that William Shakspere of Stratford was once the “most plausible contender” (p. 30) for authorship of the Shakespearean canon. The name “William Shakespeare” (often hyphenated) appeared on some early editions of the canonical plays and poems. Ben Jonson listed “William Shake-Speare” (as he spelled it) as an actor in the first performance of Jonson's play Sejanus. And Jonson's poem in the 1623 First Folio of collected plays is widely thought to prove Shakspere's authorship. Diligent research in the early nineteenth century uncovered many letters by Shakspere to his patron, the Earl of Southampton. But the plausibility of Shakspere's authorship was strongest before these letters were exposed as forgeries5; before scholars (e.g., North 2003; Starner and Traister 2011) began recognizing the frequency and complexity of anonymous authorship in Elizabethan literature (e.g., hyphenated authors' names often signaled that they were pen names); and before solid research undermined every other foundation of the theory that Shakspere of Stratford wrote the works. Scholars such as David Riggs (1989), himself a “Stratfordian,” have shown convincingly that Ben Jonson was a master of ambiguity. The Shakespearean scholar George Steevens