Fight over the bard's ID

It is a battle worthy of Caesar and Mark Antony or Macbeth and Macduff - the present and future artistic directors of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre have clashed over the Bard's true identity.

Mark Rylance, who leaves the Globe at the end of the year, has endorsed a theory that the works were composed by a writing team led by Sir Francis Bacon, the great scientist and philosopher who was Shakespeare's contemporary.

But Dominic Dromgoole, who will join the theatre in Southwark from the Oxford Stage Company, branded supporters of Rylance's theory "snobs". He said: "This theorising about Shakespeare is baloney.

"There is a mass of evidence that shows a working-class playwright from Stratford writing the plays. This other stuff is nonsense. It says more about the people putting forward the theories. People can't accept Shakespeare's father was illiterate and that he wasn't posh."

But Rylance, chairman of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust, said: "I became more and more convinced Francis Bacon was the doorway into it and had to be involved. Shakespeare is involved in the creation of the plays because he is a Globe shareholder, but I haven't seen a convincing argument he was capable of writing them."

In a foreword to The Shakespeare Enigma, a book by Peter Dawkins backing the Bacon idea, Rylance adds: "Theories should be weighted fairly and without resort to slander of the individual proposing the theory."

But Professor Anne Barton, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, told The Times: "This is a product of snobbery. I'm thoroughly fed up with it."