Ben Jonson eulogized William Shakespeare as “the wonder of our stage” and called him “sweet swan of Avon”. The non-Stratfordians are without exception suffering from cranial-rectal inversion.
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/eulogies.html
To sum up: four years after Shakespeare’s death, he was included in a printed tribute to England’s greatest deceased poets; sometime in the first seven years after his death, a monument was erected to him in Stratford, and another poem, widely circulated in manuscript, suggested that he should have been buried in Westminster Abbey; seven years after his death, a massive edition of his plays was published along with four eulogies, the longest and most affectionate of them written by England’s poet laureate; around the same time (and possibly earlier) another manuscript eulogy was circulating; and over the next twenty years a dozen new eulogies appeared in print, including three in the second edition of his plays and three in an edition of his poems.
It’s true that the magnitude of Shakespeare’s genius was not fully recognized during and shortly after his life, but there were leading indicators. The fact that his reputation is greater 400 years after his death, than 40 years after his death shows is that genius shows in the test of time, not the fads of the day.
The argument I’ve heard is that the family of the actual playwright wanted to publish the plays and used the name of a recently deceased and (barely literate) merchant named Bill Shakespeare. They also convinced Ben Jonson to play along.