WHO? Legends, Forgeries, and Hidden Codes: What the Documents Really Say About Shakespeare

WHO?

Legends, Forgeries, and Hidden Codes: What the Documents Really Say About Shakespeare

One night in 1856, an American woman sat beside Shakespeare's grave with a lantern until dawn. She was certain the proof that he never wrote his plays lay under the stone. She never lifted it.

In 2016, archaeologists finally looked underneath, using ground-penetrating radar. The skull, they concluded, is most likely missing.

WHO? is a fast, story-driven investigation of the most famous authorship mystery in literature. Did the glover's son from Stratford really write Hamlet? Or was "William Shakespeare" a mask for a philosopher, an earl, or a playwright who faked his own death?

Every chapter opens with a real scene. Then it sets the legend beside the paper trail. You'll meet:

• The herald's clerk who wrote Shakespeare's new family motto with a stray comma, so that it read "No, without right."
• Shakespeare himself in court, in the one record of his spoken testimony. Asked about a dowry he helped arrange, he says he can't remember.
• A Detroit doctor who dug up a riverbed on the Welsh border, hunting for Francis Bacon's buried manuscripts.
• A Chicago judge who ruled in 1916 that Bacon wrote the plays.
• A teenage earl whose rapier killed a cook in the house of the man many believe inspired Polonius.
• Christopher Marlowe's coroner's report, where a twelve-pence dagger appears again and again as "the aforesaid dagger."
• Two codebreakers who demolished the Bacon ciphers and later left a hidden message on their own headstone.

Bacon, Oxford, Marlowe, the Earl of Derby, Mary Sidney, Emilia Bassano and others each get their strongest case, along with the problem their supporters still have to answer.

Inside the book:

• Introduction, 10 chapters, and a conclusion (about 22,000 words)
• A timeline of the life and the doubts, 1564–2016
• A side-by-side table of the main candidates
• Annotated suggestions for further reading

What you get: two files: the PDF edition (84 pages, clickable table of contents) and the EPUB edition for e-readers.

No scholarship required. This book is for anyone who loves a historical mystery, reads Shakespeare for pleasure, or has wondered what's behind the authorship debate.

By Cedric Bennett, author of the Scene-by-Scene Shakespeare guides.