'No one single manuscript has ever been found to identify Shakespeare as the author of these productions'

'prior to the year 1611, a number of plays, tragedies, comedies, and histories, of various degrees of merit, were produced, of which William Shakespeare was reported to be the author, and which undoubtedly were, in some way, the property of the company of actors of which he was an active member. No one single manuscript has ever been found to identify Shakespeare as the author of these productions; nor is there, among all the records and traditions handed down to us, any statement that he was ever seen writing or producing a manuscript; nor that he ever claimed as his own any of the excellent, or repudiated (as unworthy of him) any of the worthless, productions presented to the public in his name.

He seems, at no time, to have had any personal or peculiar interest in them; both during and after his life, they appear to have been the property of the stage, and “published by the players, doubtless according to their notions of acceptability with the visitants of the theatre.”'

William Henry Smith, Esquire
Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry Touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-Writers in the Days of Elizabeth
(John Russell Smith, London; 1857)