You are aware that de Vere died in 1604, and Shakespeare published 13 plays between then and his death in 1616? Among those 13 are some of his best works, like King Lear and Macbeth, so it's not like he was running out of 'A' material in those years either.
>Maybe the plays and sonnets read like late Tudor court poetry because they are late Tudor court poetry?
I imagine you as some sort of cartoonish stereotype of a British noble, twirling your moustache as you say: "Because surely, a mere commoner could never have written such great works!"
The fact is that Shakespeare worked at the Globe Theater as a playwright when these plays were produced, and received much critical acclaim for his writing. No one disputed that during his lifetime. Furthermore, his father was an alderman, the rough equivalent of a town councilman in Stratford, so although Shakespeare was not a noble, he did come from an educated family.
Of course, hundreds of years later, people can make up all sorts of stories to explain why someone would pour hours of work into writing poetry in iambic pentameter, see them praised, give credit to a random bum, and continue to do this for decades (even from beyond the grave, apparently). There is, however, not a shred of evidence to back any of this. The fact that the writer of those plays was clearly very talented is not evidence against them being written by William Shakespeare. The fact that "to [your] ear" they sound like something de Vere wrote is not evidence of anything either.
Shakespeare conspiracies are literally Ancient Aliens level history. "There are some details we don't know about history, so therefore aliens!" is replaced with: "there are some details of Shakespeare's life we don't know, so therefore it must have been some sort of crazy conspiracy!"
The dating of the Shakespeare plays is incredibly arbitrary and unknowable. Are you aware how thin an evidentiary foundation our knowledge of these issues rests on?
By "no one questioned" you mean "no one even referred to." Except for the preface of the First Folio.
A 16th-century alderman in Stratford is not an "educated" status. Most experts of any persuasion agree that Shakespeare's father was probably illiterate. He signed his name with a mark:
The classical education received by a top-tier nobleman of the time was far superior (at least in terms of Greek and Latin) to anything available today. The number of Englishmen who received this quality of education was incredibly small.
A better analogy might be, say, NFL quarterbacks. If I see someone who can win the Super Bowl at quarterback, and I'm not sure about his identity, I can be pretty sure he's spent most of his life training as a QB, was a high-school star and probably a college star, etc. That's going to be a pretty small set. If I have a data point that tells me that someone with a biography like mine was named Super Bowl MVP, my Bayesian trust in that data point is going to be pretty low.
>Maybe the plays and sonnets read like late Tudor court poetry because they are late Tudor court poetry?
I imagine you as some sort of cartoonish stereotype of a British noble, twirling your moustache as you say: "Because surely, a mere commoner could never have written such great works!"
The fact is that Shakespeare worked at the Globe Theater as a playwright when these plays were produced, and received much critical acclaim for his writing. No one disputed that during his lifetime. Furthermore, his father was an alderman, the rough equivalent of a town councilman in Stratford, so although Shakespeare was not a noble, he did come from an educated family.
Of course, hundreds of years later, people can make up all sorts of stories to explain why someone would pour hours of work into writing poetry in iambic pentameter, see them praised, give credit to a random bum, and continue to do this for decades (even from beyond the grave, apparently). There is, however, not a shred of evidence to back any of this. The fact that the writer of those plays was clearly very talented is not evidence against them being written by William Shakespeare. The fact that "to [your] ear" they sound like something de Vere wrote is not evidence of anything either.
Shakespeare conspiracies are literally Ancient Aliens level history. "There are some details we don't know about history, so therefore aliens!" is replaced with: "there are some details of Shakespeare's life we don't know, so therefore it must have been some sort of crazy conspiracy!"