Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and more than 70 other people suggested as candidates for having written the works of William Shakespeare are subjected to new academic rigour by Stratford-upon-Avon in a book that seeks to debunk popular myths about the Bard, The Australian reported citing The Times.

Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, decided to publish Shakespeare Beyond Doubt to counter the dizzying number of theories that ignore evidence of Shakespeare's authorship in favour of conspiracies that claim he was a proxy for a hidden hand. Dr Edmondson and Professor Wells decided to put together the book, because of the increasingly high profile supporters of the conspiracy theories - including the actors Sir Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance and Michael York.

Dr Edmondson said that he wished to define those who doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon not as "anti-Stratfordian", but as "anti-Shakespeare" because "you can't have one without the other".

"You wouldn't have Charles Dickens without London. You wouldn't have Michelangelo without Florence or Rome, so you wouldn't have Shakespeare without Stratford and London.

"One of the reasons why we produced this book was that we began to be really dismayed by the fact that [authorship courses are] being offered by at least two universities - Brunel has a masters course in Shakespeare authorship studies, and Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, has an entire Shakespeare authorship research centre dedicated to disproving that Shakespeare wrote the plays. We felt that it was time to do what we could to shed some truth on the situation."

The book includes chapters by experts on de Vere, who was the Earl of Oxford, Bacon and Marlowe that explain why, if one places value on historical evidence, they could not have written Shakespeare's plays.