Pity poor William Shakespeare. When our national poet and greatest playwright isn’t being accused of perpetuating white supremacy or illegally hoarding grain, he’s told he did not write a single one of his 154 sonnets or 38 plays. A small army of university-educated Elizabethan intellectuals and noblemen — most notably Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford — have long been touted as the real writers for whom Shakespeare was but a pen name. A middle-class boy from the provinces with only a grammar school education could not, Shakespeare truthers reckon, have produced such works of genius as Hamlet and Macbeth.
Pity more the Bard’s contemporaries, on whom conspiracy theorists have hardly bothered to cogitate at all. The frustrating paucity of archival evidence about the Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon seems rather a treasure trove of information compared to the skeletal biographies that can be penned of his colleagues.
No one has ever debated the existence of John Webster, a popular dramatist of his time who, like Shakespeare, did not attend university. He is best known today for his appearance in Shakespeare in Love (1998) as a street urchin who plays with rats — a depiction which explains, if not with any factual grounding, his penchant for the depressingly macabre. (T. S. Eliot wrote that Webster “was much possessed by death/And saw the skull beneath the skin”.)
Though Webster’s diminished popularity has been mercifully buoyed by the inclusion of two of his plays — The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil — in the A-Level English Literature syllabus, virtually nothing is known as to what Webster was really up to as a boy. His death is only presumed to have been some time before 1634 because another playwright’s work from that year refers to him in the past tense.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the world’s most iconic revenge tragedy, but it would not exist without Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, written more than a decade earlier, which introduced the genre to England. A major new edition of his plays more than doubles the number of works attributed to Kyd from three to eight. One is the tragedy Arden of Faversham, which some scholars had previously assigned to Shakespeare, in what is surely a telling sign that the Bard’s writing was not so astronomically better than his contemporaries’ as to rule out confusion.
Whatever the gulf between the literary merit of Shakespeare and that of his peers, it should not be forgotten that without them his brilliance could never have been fully realised. Thomas Lodge, John Lyly, George Peele, and Robert Greene — remembered chiefly for his supposed rebuke of Shakespeare as an “upstart crow” — were the pioneering dramaturgical scientists of Elizabethan London. Experimenting with practical effects, including pyrotechnics, and tinkering with the foundations of popular stagecraft, they left literary marks on Shakespeare which are much-debated by scholars but never denied.
And what of the printers and publishers who disseminated the dramatic works of all these playwrights in black and white? Thomas Dekker liked to see his plays in print and haunted the bookshops of London; like Greene he was as much a pamphleteer as a playwright. Shakespeare owes thanks to these businessmen too. Without the diligent work of the printer-publisher William Jaggard and his son, Isaac, alongside the labours of bookseller Edward Blount and two of the Bard’s actor colleagues, 18 of the plays preserved in the First Folio (1623) may have been lost forever.
Ben Jonson, probably the best known and most admired of the contemporaries, contributed a commendatory preface to the collection. A portrait of this voluminous playwright, poet, and court entertainer is on display in the National Portrait Gallery — positioned exactly behind the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare on the other side of the wall. Jonson, it seems, still has the Bard’s back.
Where is a theatre-goer today supposed to turn to enjoy the toils of this supporting cast’s labours? The Royal Shakespeare Company’s schedule for 2026 does not include a single play by a Shakespeare contemporary. Their last was Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, which ran until April 2025 and was well-reviewed. Kit, as the enigmatic Marlowe is sometimes affectionately known, is at least occasionally in the public eye because his rip-roaring life of spywork, atheism and alleged homosexuality ended in a fatal stabbing under mysterious circumstances at a pub in Deptford.
Last year, the play Born With Teeth — starring Edward Bluemel and Ncuti Gatwa as Kit and the Bard, respectively — was staged in London’s West End, imagining a saucy relationship between the two dramatists. What a fall from grace for Marlowe. Once his dramatic genius packed the playhouses of early modern London; it is doubtful the theatrical repertoire will ever again be well-stocked with his plays. The sad truth may be that rising production costs have made theatres anxious about staging plays which cannot rely on Shakespeare’s fame or, apparently, the allure of his imagined involvement in a steamy romance with a now long-forgotten contemporary.
