Nor can Oxfordians provide any explanation for the manifest stylistic differences between Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and his Jacobean plays, or the technical changes attendant upon the King’s Men’s move to the Blackfriars theatre four years after their candidate’s death. Unlike the Globe, the Blackfriars was an indoor playhouse; it therefore depended on artificial lighting; candles would not burn unattended for the full length of a play, so act-divisions were introduced, during which they could be trimmed or replaced (the audience, meanwhile, was entertained with music). The plays written after Shakespeare’s company began using the Blackfiars in 1608, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale for instance, have what most of the earlier plays do not have: a carefully planned five-act structure. No Oxfordian has addressed this difficulty for their faith. Presumably they would say that Oxford wrote a batch of five-act plays just in case the King’s Men one day happened to acquire an indoor playhouse and that he gave instructions on his deathbed for these plays to be kept in a closet until such a day arrived. That there is no record of Oxford ever having had any contact with any of the King’s Men has not deterred Oxfordians in the past and will not deter them in the future.
Jonathan Bate, from The Genius of Shakespeare