Historian: Those who claim that Shakespeare did not write the plays commonly attributed to him are motivated purely by snobbery. Shakespeare was the son of a glove maker, whereas every other person proposed as the true author of the plays was an aristocrat, and many of those who argue that one or another of these aristocrats wrote the plays are the aristocrats' descendants. The reasoning in the historian's argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that the argument ['makes use of an assumption that one would accept only if one has already accepted the truth of the conclusion', 'takes for granted that anyone who is motivated purely by snobbery cannot also be motivated by legitimate historical evidence', "fails to exclude the possibility that there might be legitimate evidence motivating those who reject Shakespeare's authorship", 'presumes, without providing justification, that a claim cannot be true if those who advance it are motivated by snobbery']