All Shakespeare - All the Time

I would like to share some websites that are very helpful with Shakespearean research :

Absolute Shakespeare
Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet
Notes on Shakespeare
Shakespeare Authorship
Shakespeare-Oxford Society

There were two questions submitted regarding Shakespeare.
1) How many sonnets did Shakespeare write?
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets

2) On what research are the claims based that Shakespeare's plays were actually authored by someone else? Francis Bacon? Ben Jonson? Are there contemporary (current) studies which still support such claims?

The claims that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by a man called Shakespeare, or even that there was never any man called William Shakespeare, stem from the basic premise that there is very little hard evidence that a man called William Shakespeare existed, and if he did exist, he did not have a good enough education and/or life experience to write all the plays that are attributed to him.

I could not immediately find information supporting or refuting that Ben Johnson was a possible author of the plays. Regarding Bacon, I quote from Absolute Shakespeare : "A major proof that Sir Francis Bacon truly authored the the Bard's plays is the 'Northumberland Manuscript'. This bore both Shakespeare’s name and Sir Francis Bacon’s. It also mentions by name the plays Richard II and Richard III. Tellingly, it included the phrase 'by Francis William Shakespeare', and the words, 'essays by the same author'. This has been used to prove Sir Francis Bacon used the name "Shakespeare" as a nom de plume."

There are contemporary studies that continue to investigate the authorship of these plays. The Shakespeare-Oxford Society publishes a scholarly journal, The Oxfordian, annually. This journal, and the Society, is “dedicated to exploring the Shakespeare authorship question and researching the evidence that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550 – 1604) is the true author of the poems and plays of ‘William Shakespeare’.”