Here's my two cents for Lawrence Gerald's question:

"Is Shakespeare Dead?" was one of the texts that I read when I bought my
set of the Oxford Mark Twain--I decided to read first some of Mark Twain's
works that I had not in the past.

What struck me was how much of MT's effort was directed not at the plays
of Shakespeare themselves but rather the extravagant claims that
commentators on Shakespeare had made, e.g. Shakespeare had to be,
virtually, a lawyer and a sailor (a tinker and a tailor and everything
else) to write his plays. Mark Twain takes dead aim at those claims and
suggests how wild they are.  Then he concludes that Bacon had to write the
plays--apparently not considering the other conclusion--that the claims of
the commentators are not sound and that a man of modest formal education
like William Shakespeare could be a superb dramatist.