Let's settle this once and for all

The Wikipedia coverage of the Shakespeare authorship problem is breath-taking. Here are the key articles:

• Main article - "Researchers cite 'Shakespeare's sonnets', which appeared with 'our ever-living Poet' on the title page, words typically used eulogizing someone who has died, yet become immortal." [In fact, the non-Stratfordians claim this would be the only documented historical instance in which the phrase 'ever-living' used to refer to someone who was still alive.]
• Shakespeare's Life
  
• Oxfordian theory -Favorite bit: "Mark Twain, commenting on the subject, said, 'Many poets die poor, but this is the only one in history that has died THIS poor; the others all left literary remains behind. Also a book. Maybe two.' "
• Baconian theory - Favorite bit: "Questioning Bacon's ability as a poet, Sidney Lee asserted: '[...] such authentic examples of Bacon's efforts to write verse as survive prove beyond all possibility of contradiction that, great as he was as a prose writer and a philosopher, he was incapable of penning any of the poetry assigned to Shakespeare.' "
  
• Marlovian theory - Favorite bit: "At least two Marlovians—William Honey and Roberta Ballantine—have taken the famous four-line "curse" on Shakespeare's grave to be an anagram. Unfortunately, the fact that they came up with different messages demonstrates the weakness of this approach."

The authorship debate has been well underway, according to the main article, since the early 1700s, which is long enough. I shall now settle this.

1. Shakespeare, whomever he was, started out a commoner. A commoner may become educated, become a famous playwright, and may even rise to eminence at court. Ben Jonson actually did it. But for a nobleman to go the other way 'round - start with a university education then go out into the workaday world and learn the details of a multitude of common lives and trades without being observed - that's a very tough sell.
   
2. Shakespeare, whomever he was, was an extremely skilled stylist and brilliant rhetorician. Synecdoche, anacoluthon, pleonasm - he knew all the tricks, and featured them prominently in his work. In all of human history, probably the best place for an English speaker to acquire those skills was...Elizabethan grammar school, like the King's New School in Stratford. Every upper middle-class kid in the country went to those grammar schools, and one of them happened to be a monstrous genius who utterly mastered the material. He probably had help - this article notes that "all the headmasters while Shakespeare was growing up were university graduates with good reputations; one of them, John Brownsword, was sufficiently well-known as a Latin poet to be mentioned by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia thirty years later --- on the same page as Shakespeare."
3. Shakespeare, whomever he was, got around and talked to a lot of people. There is no doubt he was an actor, because Ben Jonson was putting him in plays. Twain objects that he must have been a lawyer, overlooking that Shakespeare was hanging with lawyers at the Inns of Court almost from Day 1. The only evidence we have that Twelfth Night was performed at all comes from the diary of a law student who saw it there (the play makes a lot more sense once you know that). One reason there's a lot of Baconian thought in the plays is that Bacon was a very influential thinker in those days. One reason Southampton's biography is all over the plays is that he was Shakespeare's patron. One reason there's a lot about Italy in the plays is that he talked to a lot of people (e.g., Southampton) who'd been to Italy. Maybe he even went himself.
4. Shakespeare, whomever he was, made up a lot of cool words, about 1,500 by this author's count. Actually, he was probably just the first to write a lot of them down. Unencumbered by a university education, he had no problem recording slang or slapping together a compound word he liked. None of the proposed alternate authors had a reputation as a neologist, probably because they were well-educated and knew better.
5. Shakespeare, whomever he was, wasn't buying what the Establishment was selling. Jonson (notoriously) tried to write to classical forms and improve his audience. Francis Bacon, had he written a play, could not have resisted mentioning his contempt for Cardano, Paracelsus, Agrippa, and other assorted philosophical ne'er-do-wells. Southampton might have been a skeptic (who knows?) - but some of the deepest, most skeptical plays, e.g., Lear (1606) were performed years after he was in the ground.
6. Shakespeare, whomever he was, was working with the actors and developing the plays from performance experience. Macbeth, for example, appears to have been written or modified for an indoor performance at Blackfriars. These plays weren't written by a philospher, they were written by someone who was planning to have them performed, and was thinking like a professional dramatist about the space, and the strengths and limitations of his players.

There is one odd mystery in connection with this. During Shakespeare's lifetime, an ordinary actor no one had ever heard of became a partner in a theater company and gained significant wealth, even though he didn't have much of a reputation as an actor. How could an ordinary actor make enough money to get himself a coat of arms, retire, and buy the biggest house in his home town?

By writing awesome, commercially successful plays, perhaps?