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I have a theory of “quotation attraction”. It explains my observations that a good saying from someone relatively obscure often gets misattributed to someone more famous, especially someone witty such as Dorothy Parker. Any famous, witty person will have a bunch of cool quotations attiributed to her that were actually said by someone else.

> My favorite is how, even in the realm of conspiracies that Shakespeare didn't write his plays, the posited true author is invariably another famous Elizabethan personality, e.g. Francis Bacon.

Surely, if such conspiracy theorising is to be anything other than random guessing, one needs some sort of corpus of the proposed author's work to which to compare. It's probably less than people don't think that a nobody could have written them than that there's no reasonable way to test that hypothesis.

>My favorite is how, even in the realm of conspiracies that Shakespeare didn't write his plays, the posited true author is invariably another famous Elizabethan personality, e.g. Francis Bacon.

Counter-example: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/amelia-bassano-william-sha...