Recent calculations suggest that there are more than 66 individual candidates.
These eight candidates are perhaps the most-well known:
Francis
Bacon, Viscount St Alban, (1561- 1626) Edward
de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (?1550- ?1604) Roger
Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland (1576- 1612) Christopher
Marlowe (1564- ?1593) Sir Henry Neville
(1562- 1615) Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess
of Pembroke (1561- 1621) William Shakspere
(1564- 1616) William Stanley, 6th Earl
of Derby (1561- 1642). There is also a group theory relating to the authorship of the plays.
John Michell, Who Wrote Shakespeare?, Thames
& Hudson, 1996
Ian Wilson, Shakespeare: The Evidence, Headline,
1993
E K Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems,
Clarendon, 1989
Reginald Charles Churchill, Shakespeare and his Betters,
Reinhardt, 1958
H N Gibson, The Shakespeare Claimants, Methuen,
1971
Irvin Leigh Matus, Shakespeare, in Fact, Continuum,
1997
S Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, Clarendon Press,
1991