I was just looking back over some sections of Otto Rank's Art and
Artist (in English; Knopf, 1932), a book filled with fascinating
consonances and dissonances vis-a-vis Nabokov, and stumbled
upon a passage that I think gives a potent context for the present
discussion:
". . .it can hardly be chance that the greatest creations of the
human spirit, such as the New Testament, the Homeric poems, and
Shakspere's [sic] plays, should, on the one hand, have been centres of
academic disputes as to authorship and, on the other, should have
inspired the imagination of whole centuries in favour of one author"
(382).
It is probably also worth bearing in mind that Timon of Athens
is, or at least at one time was, one of the plays considered even by
non-Baconians (i.e. Stratfordians)
to be of disputed, or perhaps mixed, authorship. I don't have time to
chase references on that one, sorry. Any annotated edition should have
the details. And maybe Sam Schuman can chime in with more details?
Stephen Blackwell