==Posthumous reputation and authorship controversy==
Several writers who knew Shakespeare, including Ben Jonson, attest to his authorship in the ''First Folio'', a collection of his plays published in 1623. There is no indication that this claim was controversial, either at the time or for another 200 years. Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan writers were gradually eclipsed by a new generation of playwrights led by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. After Samuel Johnson reissued Shakespeare's plays in 1765, there was renewed interest in the bard, a phenomenon called "bardology." Although researchers discovered Shakespeare's will and several other personal documents, the reading public remained dissatisfied with the amount biographical information available. By the 1840s, Shakespeare discoveries began to dry up and it became apparent that there was no trove of correspondence waiting to be uncovered. In 1857, American author Delia Bacon wrote a book arguing that Shakespeare was a fraud and the real author of his work was Sir Francis Bacon (no relation). This book kicked off the "Shakespeare authorship controversy," which continues to this day. Various late 19th century figures took up Bacon's cause, including Ignatius Donnelly, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and Helen Keller. After 1920, the focus of attention shifted from Bacon to the Earl of Oxford as a possible author of the Shakespeare canon.
In the 1990s, computer style analysis at the Shakespeare Clinic at Claremont College in California established that Shakespeare had a writing style that is distinct from that of Bacon, Oxford, and other Elizabethan authors.<ref>Elliott, Ward E. Y.; Valenza, Robert J., "[http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ571023 And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants]", ''Computers and the Humanities'', v30 n3 p191-245 1996. For a summary, see [http://www.shakespeareauthorship.com/ox6.html here].</ref> Oxford's claim to authorship was comprehensively debunked by further style tests published in 2004.<ref>Elliott, Ward E.Y., and Robert J. Valenza, "[http://www.academia.edu/612631/Oxford_by_the_Numbers_What_Are_the_Odds_That_the_Earl_of_Oxford_Could_Have_Written_Shakespeares_Poems_and_Plays Oxford by the Numbers: What Are the Odds That the Earl of Oxford Could Have Written Shakespeare's Poems and Plays?]. "The odds that either could have written the