Short answers, pulled from the story.
J. Thomas Looney proposed that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare's works in his 1920 book Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Looney argued that Oxford's personality, education, travels, and life circumstances matched the inferred profile of the playwright better than Shakespeare's own biography did.
Edward de Vere died in 1604, while the mainstream chronology places the composition of approximately twelve of Shakespeare's plays after that date. Columbia University professor James S. Shapiro describes the death date as the most compelling single piece of evidence against Oxford's candidacy. Scholars also point to the documentary record, dialect evidence, and computerised textual analysis finding the styles of Oxford and Shakespeare "light years apart".
Oxfordians argue that publication of new and corrected Shakespeare plays stopped after 1604, suggesting the playwright had already died. They contend that plays dated after 1604 by mainstream scholars were either written before Oxford's death or completed by other writers from his drafts. Looney excluded The Tempest from the canon entirely, while later Oxfordians attempted to sever the play's connection to the 1609 Bermuda shipwreck of the Sea Venture.
Charlton Ogburn Jr. was elected president of The Shakespeare Oxford Society in 1976 and revived the movement through moot court trials, media debates, and television. In 1985 he published the 900-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality, with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, which secured Oxford's place as the most popular alternative authorship candidate.
Roger A. Stritmatter studied Oxford's Geneva Bible, now owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library, in the late 1990s. The Bible contains 1,028 instances of underlined words or passages. Stritmatter claimed about a quarter of the marked passages appear in Shakespeare's works as theme, allusion, or quotation. Critics challenged whether the markings can be reliably attributed to de Vere rather than the Bible's other owners before the Folger acquired it in 1925.
Roland Emmerich's drama film Anonymous, released in late October 2011, presented Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Its distributor, Sony Pictures, commissioned high school and college-level lesson plans to promote the authorship question to history and literature teachers across the United States, significantly raising the theory's public profile.