I have next to no knowledge on the subject but I do like a good discussion. I have a couple of questions please excuse my spelling..

Did De Vere have any works atributed to him that are in the style of Shakespeare?

Was being a writer/playwrite so below a noble status that being the greatest was to be hidden and would a common man hide it too?

Were these works the blockbusters of their day or were they just another stage performance?

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Yes. When Thomas Looney set out in search of a candidate, one of his prerequisites was that there be work published under the author's own name.

This was how he found de Vere. (In 1622 Henry Peacham published a list of poets who made Elizabeth's a "Golden Age". He placed de Vere at the top of the list, but did not include Shakespeare at all!)

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Was being a writer/playwrite so below a noble status that being the greatest was to be hidden and would a common man hide it too?

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Yup. Mentioned upthread. It was a disgrace for a nobleman to be seen to have a "profession". Plays and poems circulated privately among family and friends was one thing, and many did this. But for the public stage? Shock and horror! Several of de Vere's contemporaries also published under pseudonyms, or anonymously.

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Were these works the blockbusters of their day or were they just another stage performance?

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Shakespeare's plays were hugely popular in their day, and enormously profitable for the companies that owned the rights. Hence the pirate editions. Curiously, the plays fell out of favor for several years, more or less until the cottage industry in Stratford got things going again.

Because I would sacrifice a loved one to see JB tackle Macbeth.

What? I'm just saying...

Keith -

 I had *not* heard of this flick!

Rhys Ifans is an interested choice for the Earl, I must say.

JB mentioned a few months ago an idea he had about Elizabethian England that I'm hoping this might be.

But frankly, he could do a comic about Shakspear's grocery list and I would buy it.

What is the reasoning that de Vere would have some things published but not the works atributed to Shakespeare?

When was the name Shakespeare first connected to the works? When the plays were originally perfromed would an author be announced?

It was stated that there is no record of a Shakespeare being paid for the plays, did writers using pseudonyms recieve payment?

Would a paper trail not regarding financial issues, eg. letters, be less likely for a commoner than a noble?

My understanding is that the life of the man from Stratford has a begining and a end that is documented. Is there missing information about what he was doing for periods in the middle?

One of my favorite bits of, what? Trivia? A few years back the folks at the Folger Library in Washington took a closer look at a portrait of Shakespeare they'd had hanging there for decades, and discovered some overpainting. When that was removed, they found the portrait was actually of. . . Edward de Vere.

Didn't the restoration prove that was Hugh Hamersley?

What little is known is this:

The plays we now refer to as being written by William Shakespeare, were attributed to a "William Shakespeare" at the time.

There was a common man named "William Shakespeare" ( often referred to as Shaksper, though it is pointed out that spelling, even of names, was very "liberal" at the time) from Stratford who was associated with the theatre profession in London at the time. He is known to have acted a little and invested some money in one of the theatres staging plays attributed to "Shakespeare".

There is no record of anyone else named "William Shakespeare"  (or variants thereof) in London or associated with the theatre at this time.

None of the other candidates (and there are many)  in the "authorship controversy" have a similar name.  It then follows that most likely either the man from Stratford is the real Shakespeare or "Shakespeare" is a pseudonym. The majority of the most central scholars on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age do not find the pseudonym theory credible.

The arguments to support the claim of the pseudonym are these:

1) A man as common as the man from Stratford could not possibly have neither the education nor the diverse cultural knowledge of both high and low society needed to write the plays. But a nobleman naturally would.

2) The absence of contemporary mentions in Stratford of Shakespeare's career as a playwright is an indication that he was not in fact a playwright. The absence of any mention of the plays being written by Edward DeVere is because he would have written them under a pseudonym to avoid his peers thinking ill of him. Apparently such concerns are not valid for the man from Stratford, but only for DeVere.

3) When selecting a pseudonym for himself as a playwright, DeVere, instead of creating a unique pen-name, used a very distinct name belonging to a (supposedly) illiterate, uncouth, litigious sometime actor and grain merchant who was so clearly not a playwright that it wouldn't fool anyone for a second. This obviously in an effort to disguise the fact that it was a pen name.

I think that about sums it up.

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There are a couple of dozen poems signed by or ascribed to de Vere, that were published in various collections thru the latter part of the 1500s. Minor, and usually unauthorized, publications like this were not uncommon.

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When was the name Shakespeare first connected to the works? When the plays were originally perfromed would an author be announced?

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The first time the name attaches in print is with the publication of "Venus and Adonis" -- but, curiously, the name does not appear on the title page, where one might expect, but in the dedication.

It has also been pointed out that earliest appearances of the name as the Author spell it with a hyphen, as "Shake-speare". Significance has been read into the fact that it was a theatrical tradition to indicate fake or made-up names with this kind of hyphenation, with a lower case letter beginning the second part of the name. A more common spelling of a real name would have been Shake-Speare.

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It was stated that there is no record of a Shakespeare being paid for the plays, did writers using pseudonyms recieve payment?

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That's probably a "yes and no" scenario -- tho the point here is that if "Shakespeare" was NOT a pseudonym, there should be records of Will Shakspere being paid for writing the plays, as there are records of so many of his other business dealings -- including the buying and selling of plays he did not write (and sometimes did not own!).

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Would a paper trail not regarding financial issues, eg. letters, be less likely for a commoner than a noble?

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Perhaps -- but, again, this would render Shakspere unique as an author. No one, during his entire lifetime -- including himself -- committed to paper a single reference to him as a writer?

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My understanding is that the life of the man from Stratford has a begining and a end that is documented. Is there missing information about what he was doing for periods in the middle?

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The beginning, middle and end of Shakspere's life are quite well documented -- except on the matter of his literary work. There, as noted, there is only a blank.