This is not news. We know that some of the later plays -- e.g., Pericles, Henry VIII, were written in some or large part by others, John Fletcher, probably. It's likely that there are interpollations in some of the "canonical" plays -- Hecate's invocation and the witches' dance in MacBeth, Act 3, does not have the ring of Shakespeare about them. And the plays as we have them were mostly reconstructed from, in some cases, quartos represeting various people's attempts to memorize and get down the words from the stage.
In the case of the folios, we assume that John Heminges & Henry Condell (the editors of the First Folio after WS's death & WS's partners in the King's Players and the Globe Theater) had access to manuscripts, maybe to fair copies in WS's hand, we don't know, nonetheless they and modern editors have had to reconstruct the plays for publication. Therefore it is certain that many words and lines, some structure and ordering even of what is clearly WS's own work is editorial speculation.
But as to whether WS wrote most of the plays
attributed to him, there can be no rational doubt.
>From the days from Francis Greene's veiled attack on
WS in the 1590s in his "Groatsworth of Wit" pamphlet,
maiking fun of the "Shake-scene" and Henry VI ("a
tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide"), through WS's
fame in his life as the attributed author of the plays
during his tenure with the Lord Chamberlain's, later
the Kings Players at Globe, through the fact that WS's
authorship was specifically acknowledged by lots of
people who personally knew him and the plays, see the
prefactory verses to the First Folio, notably Ben
Johnson; and the fact that his partners and associates
put out a foliuo of plays after WS's death that they
attributed to him; given that in his day and for at
least a generation after, maybe more, there was not a
shred of doubt that anyone raised that he did not
write the plays -- given all this, it is absurd to
suggest otherwise. really.
The anti-Shakespearean, e.g., Baconians like Twain (not that he was exactly as scholar) seem to have been 19th century and subsequent writers who had class snobbery, thinking that it was somehow impossible or improper that a glover's son without a university education should be capaple of producing literary and dramatic madterpieces. (An odd prejudice from Twain, no highly educated scion of the upper classes himself.)
Thus the riduculous attributions to Bacon, who, as an ambitious lawyer and prosecutor, money-grubber and social climber (a) had no time for any such foolishness as writing plays, (b) whose style and attitude and word choice are totally disparate from WS's and who has a lot of wit and wisdom but no touch of poetry (he was after all an attorney), and (c) who could hardly have written some 37 plays for the stage without someone catching on. Sir Edward Coke, the greatest lawyer and judge of his era and a personal enemy of Bacon's who made it his buisness to know everything about his adversary, would certainly have found out and used it to crucify Bacon with ridicule.
Or the attributions to Marlowe (a Cambridge grad), who certainly died (was murderered or assassinated) in the early 1590s and whose style is totally different and his sense of structyure completely lacking. Compare the sprawling mess of Dr. Faustus to the roughly contemporary Comedy of Errors, inferior in poetry but airtight in structure, and tell me that they could have been written by the same person.
WS wrote those plays, with the qualifications above -- some lines and scenes in particular plays, parts of later plays, and editorial constructions. But he's responsible for the overwhelming bulk of those 37 plays -- Hamlet, Othello, Lear, MacBeth, Henry IV, V, and VI, Richard III, Richard II, As You like It, much Ado, All's well, Merchant, Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Anthony & Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, etc.
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