Education cannot be advanced without new editorial research for this new electronic medium. Encoding must seek to document, if not reproduce, the character sets of these originals. Each generation of readers also deserves a fresh annotation. The Internet needs to have its own editors volunteer from the ranks of English Departments. Yet academe does not hire or promote supporters of, and research granting agencies do not give grants to, enterprises in public education unless something new is in the offing.
Journalists raise that nontrivial question repeatedly because almost everyone has an opinion.
For most teachers and researchers, the biographies by Samuel Schoenbaum and Stanley Wells settle an already-closed issue. The man named Shakespeare wrote the works surviving under his name. However, many well-educated common readers and potential students remain unsure because public media selectively present historical evidence, omit things that are important, and fail to discriminate reliable methodologies from the rest. Fortunately, most come from public archives and libraries, not private collections. Donald W. Foster's analysis of the parts that Shakespeare played and of the books he read is based on a computer textbase, Shaxicon , and on Foster's own Vassar English Renaissance e-text library.