	As many Shakespearean scholars know – and all lament – not a single one of the original manuscripts of Shakespeare’s works survived the travails of time. Instead, Quartos of some (but not all) of his plays were published later, sometimes years after the first performances. Therefore, when we look back to determine the time of writing of the Shakespeare plays, we don’t look for a date of publication, but for the first performances. In this pursuit to document the plays performances, one of the most helpful sources of information are the documentation of payment to the Bard’s troupe. When we begin to interrogate the authorship question, it is possible that these same documents – legal, business, and monetary – can help us determine the position that William Shakspere occupied within the Lord Chamberlain’s, and later the King’s, Men.
	The first question to address is, why should we examine the payments made to Shakspere’s troupes? Pursuing the line of monetary recompense may seem like an odd way to determine Shakspere’s role in the plays’ productions. However, it follows a frequent line of thought about Shakspere’s known life and potential involvement with the plays.
	First, we must admit that no matter what evidence is lined up against him, William Shakespeare’s name is the one listed on many of the plays attributed to him. If we wish to examine the possibility that he did not write them, we first have to explain why this is. One possible explanation lies in the documentary evidence we do have on William Shakspere’s life. Most of the documents surrounding his life – excepting the ones that record his birth, marriage, and children’s baptisms – have to do with his business prospects. Documents on Shakspere detail his loans to some acquaintances and debts to others, his failure to pay taxes, his hoarding of grain, his purchase and selling of property and, in his will, his fastidious bequeathing of possessions.
	This documentary evidence lines up to give us the picture of a man who cared about and frequently dealt with money. It suggests to us that Shakspere was a businessman, who focused on economics. In her book Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, Diana Price agrees, writing that the evidence around Shakespeare’s life seems to point to him being a proprietary and business-focused man, not an artist. Even Delia Bacon, in the first serious examination of Shakspere’s candidacy for authorship, felt that the man as we see him in history is more concerned with money and the distribution of the plays than their content or artistic value. Here, both Bacon and Price – though centuries apart – converge on the idea that Shakspere may have been involved in the business of distributing, producing and publishing the plays, rather than in writing them. This explanation does us the double service of justifying Shakspere’s name on the plays – he would have been the person handling them and their production – and matching the historic evidence we possess about him.
