Stop Giving Free Ammunition to the Enemy

I’ll say the uncomfortable thing first, and I say it from inside the doubters’ camp: We are not losing the authorship question to the evidence. We are losing it to ourselves.

In any contested claim you are not judged on your best argument. You are judged on your worst argument. The other side gets to choose which of your points to answer, and it will always choose the silliest—then hold it up as though it stood for all the rest. Hand them one bad argument and you have handed them the whole exchange, because the audience arrived with no way to tell your strong points from your weak ones.

And the orthodoxy enjoys a luxury we keep forgetting. It is never actually made to defend its man. Convention has quietly excused the one candidate with no literary paper trail from the witness stand altogether. So the establishment’s entire strategy can be to fold its arms and wait for a doubter to say something foolish—and we oblige, constantly. Every weak argument we volunteer is free ammunition. It wins them the round, and, better still for them, it spares them the single contest they would rather never enter: a straight, side-by-side comparison of the documentary evidence for their man against the evidence for ours.

So the most useful thing a doubter can do is not to dig up one more clever proof. It is to disown our own bad arguments—loudly, in public, before the other side gets the chance.

I’ve been keeping a list of the worst offenders. The cipher hunts. The spear-shaking name-puns. The plays mined as a secret diary. The re-dating of plays to fit a dead man’s calendar. The “a glover’s son couldn’t possibly have” sneer. The relics waved about as smoking guns. Some of these are the arguments we are proudest of. Every one of them is a round of ammunition we keep pressing into the enemy’s hand.

Here is the full field guide—the six arguments every serious doubter should retire, why each one backfires, and the five things to do instead.