Today in Shakespeare's Zoltar Machine news:

Hey, you know who existed? Shakespeare. I mention this because there's this weird conspiracy theory that he didn't and that his plays were secretly written by somebody else and that the entire Elizabethan theatre industry and audiences perpetrated in an elaborate hoax to convince future generations that he did. For some reason. 

"Thank you for coming everybody! And remember, if anyone asks,
tell them that the play you just saw was written by William Shakespeare.
He doesn't exist, we're just trying to troll people in the future."

-Some hilarious actor, 

The Globe circa 1599

You'd think a conspiracy this elaborate
and far-reaching would have sprung
for a better sculpture, but here we are.

Batty nonsense aside, one of the pieces of evidence anti-Stratfordians (that's what they call themselves) like to throw up there is that we don't even know for sure what Shakespeare looked like. And yeah, ok, that's fair, we can't say for sure and there are only two accepted portraits and one of those is his funerary monument and it's, well, it's kind of terrible. The monument, purportedly by a man called Gerard Johnson, is a waist-up sculpture of Shakespeare looking startled and clutching a quill and writing on a piece of paper that's resting on a pillow; a famously excellent writing surface. Anyway, the whole thing looks like the Zoltar machine from Big. According to people who think Shakespeare is a hoax, this monument is actually of someone else and it was altered as part of their dumb conspiracy theory. Yeah, but why would they even think that? You might reasonably ask. 

Because some bloke called William Dugdale drew this sketch of it in 1634:

"Ah-hah!"

-Anti-Stratfordians

Above: this picture of Dugdale can
however be taken as irrefutable evidence
  that he had terrible taste in hats.

See the problem? Yeah, it's wildly inaccurate. According to The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, an organization that believes the Earl of Oxford was secretly the author, this inaccuracy is evidence that Shakespeare wasn't real. The idea is that since Dugdale's sketch seems to show a man giving a belly rub to his pet tardigrade, it must be the original monument and it was later altered by adding a quill and paper. Again, for reasons. And look, I'm not a scholar, I barely know anything about Wilfred Shakeston. I'm just some rando Googling this stuff. And yes, I'll admit that Dugdale's sketch doesn't look a lot like the monument as it is today, and he did probably see it in person, but I'm not sure that the general crappieness of the sketch is so much evidence of the Oxford theory as it is evidence that Dugdale is an outstandingly shitty artist.

"What? Shakespeare scholaring
doesn't exactly pay six-figures."

-Cowen Orlin, having a point

But, it doesn't matter I suppose, because now a professor from Georgetown University says she has new evidence that not only is it totally Shakespeare, but that the playwright himself commissioned the work and that the sculptor knew him in life. And it totally, absolutely has nothing to do with the fact that she has a new book coming out in June. Professor Lena Cowen Orlin, who plans to roll out her findings at a lecture in April, says that the person to whom the piece has been attributed to for centuries, the aforementioned and mediocre sculptor Gerard Johnson, isn't the artist at all, but rather it's his brother Nicholas. Nicholas Johnson was an actual tomb maker by trade and not only spent part of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, but also worked near Shakespeare's theatre in London and so could easily have known him personally.

Is she right? Who can say? At least in April she's going to back up her claims with evidence instead of, you know, wild speculation. And I mean, sure, none of us were alive back then and iPhones weren't a thing until at least the 1700's, so there's no way we'll ever know with one hundred percent certainty what Shakespeare looked like. But her theory sounds way more plausible than a conspiracy involving hundred of participants spanning centuries. And who doesn't love a good Occam Razor?

Of course, while this may be another strike against the Oxfordians, the bad news here
 is that Shakespeare probably looked like that sculpture and not say, Joseph Finnes.