Thanks Renfield!
As TV's Dr. Sheldon Cooper would say, this is axiomatically wrong, because William Shakespeare was the author of Shakespeare's plays. His authorship was undisputed until a nutjob in the 19th century (last name Bacon) cooked this up for the very first time. In Shakespeare's own time, Robert Greene penned a snarky reference about Shakespeare (Shakespeare had just hit it big with one of the Henry VI plays; not a big seat-filler today, one of the three parts of the HVI serial outsold all other contemporary plays combined), and rival and friend Ben Jonson contributed a dedicatory poem to the First Folio which refers to WS by name and calls him "sweet swan of Avon".
This one is interesting, because Amelia Bassano Lanier is generally regarded as the real figure behind Shakespeare's "Dark Lady".
