Michael: When did he write any of the works. Not when were they published or began to appear or be staged etc. Some document that could begin to describe any dates for any work specifically tied to Shakspere himself.

Where did he write any of the works. Not assumptions about Shakspere's primary locales being Stratford and London and therefore somewhere thereabouts. Some document that could begin to describe any places for any work specifically tied to Shakspere himself.

Why did he write any of the works. Not assumptions based on events that occurred during a speculative chronology. Some document that could begin to describe how whatever Shakspere himself was doing at whatever place and at whatever time had any direct or even indirect link to any of the works.

How did he write any of the works. Not assumptions based on the works themselves and on that basis speculating that Shakspere must have known such and such and done such and such. Some document that shows his background, his training, his education, his erudition, his habits, his customs, his process, etc. Just any one document that tells us any one thing about Shakspere himself working as the author.

Admittedly, my area of historical expertise isn't this era either. I'm pretty familiar with the sorts of sources one might expect for the modern era, and what one could reasonably find for the ancient and medieval time frames, but the early modern period is a weird, transitional era. It's on its way to becoming our world, but isn't quite there yet. So when I asked “what sorts of sources you expected to find, it wasn't a rhetorical question-- I genuinely wonder what one could reasonably expect to dig up on someone like Shakespeare that isn't there. Off the top of my head, things like personal correspondence or a diary could answer your questions, but none of that survives, if it ever existed. Likewise, financial records of his being payed for his plays might do the trick, although I've already addressed why that isn't likely given that his plays were acted exclusively by the company in which he was a shareholder. Beyond that, I'm kind of at a loss.

After searching through a few sources, it seems there's precious little documentary evidence addressing your questions. I've got a couple of ideas about things that might, however.

1. Some of the early print editions of Shakespeare's plays seem to be taken from his own notes, and show him writing for the actors of his company. The 1599 edition of Romeo and Juliet, for example, has stage directions for Will Kempe (the actor) rather than “The Clowne” (the character in the play. Likewise, the 1600 quarto edition of Much Ado About Nothing has lines for Kemp and Richard Cowley rather than their characters, Dogberry and Verges. That seems to indicate that those printed editions came from manuscripts which were written specifically with the players of the Lord Chamberlain's Men in mind.

2. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece both are dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. Oxfordians tend to discount these dedications, arguing that there's no evidence that Shakespeare even knew Southampton, let alone received money from him to write. I suppose I could buy that for one dedication, as an instance of Shakespeare trying to attract a patron. Two, however, stretches credibility. Why dedicate a second collection of verse to the same aristocrat after striking out with the first? It seems for the poems at least, we get a sense of the answer to “why?” and “how?”

Nothing earthshaking I know, but at the same time, I don't think it's nothing.

One other thing to consider. I believe you said you had read part of Greenblatt's Will in the World. If so, you know there's a rich body of stories about Shakespeare dating from the late seventeenth century onwards (basically from the time he was being posthumously transformed from a successful playwright into “The Bard”). Obviously all of the stories are too late to be taken at face value. Enough time had elapsed for the stories to be stretched to accommodate legend. At the same time, however, I wonder if ALL of that must be considered bullshit. Folks in the 1600s and 1700s were much closer in time to Shakespeare than us, and had access to documents and folk memory that we do not. Even if only 1 in 20 of the stories about Shakespeare is based on something real (to pick a fairly conservative number), we'd still know a fair amount about the guy. Obviously, though, we can't know which story might be the 1 and which part of the other 19, but it's at least something to think about.

I also don't know much about how comparable Shakespeare's documentary situation is to those of other playwrights of the era. I've been browsing Stanley Wells' Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, and the Other Players in his Story, and it seems like there's not an enormous amount of the sort of evidence you're looking for in the cases of the other playwrights discussed. In most of the examples I've had the time to read about, there seems to be only a few isolated pieces of evidence. Only in a few instances—Dekker and Nashe, for example-- do we seem to have copious documentation. In Marlowe's case, it doesn't seem like we'd know much of anything about his literary career at all, beyond his plays and the praise of his peers, had he not been such a libertine and reprobate that he left a paper trail in the criminal court system. Shakespeare seems to have been far less flamboyant a man no matter what his status as an author.

Michael: To say he "worked" for just one troupe is not to say that the record shows he was the exclusive playwright for that same troupe. Oxfordians would want this point to be made explicitly clear. Shakspere may have been directly associated with one troupe at a time but nothing anywhere states that this association was as playwright.

No, but again, it should be kept in mind that Shakespeare was a shareholder and player in this troupe.  That is firmly established by the documents.  It also happens that this same troupe is the only one known to have performed the plays of Shakespeare the author during this era.  That too is established by the documents.

Is that circumstantial?  Sure, but I think it helps to build a collective case for Shakespeare based on the evidence which is far more solid than the case for Oxford or any of the other supposed candidates.