I don’t think this debate is ever going to be solved.
For decades scholars and historians have been debating if Shakespeare is really the boy from Avon, or if he’s one of about half a dozen other Elizabethan figures. I’ve seen people make cases for the Earl of Oxford, Bacon and even Christopher Marlowe, who was murdered in the 1590s.
I’ve always wondered, does lack of information mean that the plays and sonnets must have been written by someone else? Why does this debate exist at all? Why can’t Shakespeare just be Shakespeare?
Most of the debate has to do with the fact that historians, literary researchers, and readers find it hard to believe that someone from a backwater, with no record of a formal education, could write plays that span the range of human education and emotion. The Times article I linked to above mentions that Shakespeare, after he moved to London, could have used booksellers’ shops as libraries, jotting down story ideas and thoughts as he browsed.
My thought about the lack of information is that Shakespeare lived and died in a time that is pretty far removed from ours. Paper rots or gets burned in fires or is damaged in floods. Books, diaries and letters get lost. We may not have found out much about Shakespeare’s life because the evidence is just gone.
Something amusing just occurred to me. I’ve been rereading Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series and in the first book, The Eyre Affair, Fforde uses the Shakespeare debate to create sort of religio-politic factions that actually fire-bomb each other’s meeting places. The current debate isn’t that violent, but I’ve seen some discussion board threads get nasty about it.