(And by the way, it's pronounced "Loney.") I can't add much to the other positive reviews of this ground-breaking book. Written well, convincing...long live the Earl of Oxford--"Though I once gone to all the world must die" indeed!!

Book arrived in the late afternoon, I started reading and didn't get to bed till 10 AM the next morning. A stunning detective story.

This book introduced the revolutionary idea that an aristocrat named Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550- 1604), wrote the works of Shakespeare under a psuedonym. Oxford is now considered the leading candidate for the authorship of the Shakespeare canon largely because of the influence this book has had over a 75 year period. It first addresses the documentary evidence "against" Will Shakspere from Stratford as the author, then presents the positive evidence on behalf of Oxford as author. The evidence for Oxford is detailed and circumstantial: literary and intellectual parallels in the works of Oxford and Shakespeare; parallels in the life of Oxford, his family and friends and the plots of the Shakespeare plays; topical references in the plays that pre-date the time during which Shakespeare allegedly wrote the works; professional, political and historical knowledge displayed in the plays for which the Stratford actor could not have had the training or access; and so on. Exhaustive research; excellent organization of materials; superbly written. A book that academics have not been able to refute since its publication in 1920.

Ever read something in Shakespeare and think, "Now what does THAT mean?" She's got the answer. Those little in-jokes are finally explained. "You are a fishmonger." If you think the glover's son from the boondocks wrote the Plays, you'd be in the dark forever as to what Hamlet meant. If you think that the Plays were written by the Earl of Oxford, the answer is plain as day. And so on. A play-by-play exegesis of unexplainable passages; it's as if the Earl himself is explaining "what he meant."

I bought this book from the publisher, via the Shakespeare-Oxford Society. I don't think I paid as much; seek them out.

This book should be in every library in creation. And your personal one.

Peter Sammartino writes an eloquent, concise view of the Shakespearean authorship question and the case for Edward DeVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. I began my investigation into the authorship question here and I have now read virtually every book on the subject. This is a must read for all those interested in obtaining deeper meaning from the plays and the Sonnets. Highly recommended.

The reason for the existence of this book is the fascinating theory that William Shakespeare didn't really write "Shakespeare's" plays. The theory is that they were mostly written by a man named Edward de Vere, who was the contemporary Earl of Oxford. Like most such ideas, this theory is considered "controversial" by those who believe it, and "a lot of hooey" by those who don't. Eleanor Brewster's interesting book takes the position that the theory is in fact true, and she marshalls an endlessly tantalizing array of known facts, about the women who figured prominently in Edward de Vere's life, to support her contention. She argues that these known, historical, female figures provided the source material for many of the women in "Shakespeare's" plays. She is able to assemble a great deal of material to support her ideas, because most of these women lived some of the most thoroughly documented lives of their time. This is the case because they were considered to be at the very pinnacle of Elizabethan society -- indeed, Queen Elizabeth herself is accorded one of the most interesting chapters in the book. As this theory gains ground in our universities, as I personally believe that it is destined to do, Eleanor Brewster's innovative book can provide a fascinating window into the problem. After all, what greater source of inspiration does any creative person have, than the women in their life??? That would be... none.

This book is laid out as follows. First, there is a helpful introduction, which lays out Brewster's essential claims. She provides useful, carefully compiled information here, to suitably prepare the minds of readers who may not be conversant with the basic de Vere theory. Don't skip the introduction, if you aren't a de Vere buff. It also provides information to help the reader visualize the setting of the Elizabethan period.

After the introduction, Brewster walks us through careful descriptions of the lives, and personae, of the women in de Vere's life. We learn about his mother; his sister; his unhappy first wife; Queen Elizabeth; his mistress; his second wife; and his daughters. Each person is given a chapter, and we see over and over again the range of references in "Shakespeare's" plays which seem to refer to these women. It's usually pretty convincing, frankly. Now and then I feel like Brewster might be reaching a little, in her enthusiasm over the topic, but not often. She does a lot of very impressive detective work here.

The book concludes with sections about Shakespeare's First Folio, and with some issues raised by the known portraits of Shakespeare and of de Vere. There is a very useful bibliography for further reading. Also, each chapter concludes with a subject-specific bibliography, which is often quite useful.

People who are interested in this subject need to know about the original book that put forward the basic theory. This book was "Shakespeare" Identified as the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford," by J. Thomas Looney, published in 1920. Please don't be too put off by Looney's last name (ha ha) -- his ideas are sane, lucid, and compelling. This idea is sort of depressing to me in many ways -- one likes to think of Shakespeare as an untutor'd genius who simply made up all the plays based on trips to a local library of some kind. Well, for examples of that kind of genius, there are always scientific geniuses like Ben Franklin, Einstein, or Edison! Sadly, Eleanor Brewster has convinced me that Shakespeare can't be counted among their ranks. Oh well. This is still a great book, however, and I give it two thumbs up.

Craig Huston makes a strong claim as he presents evidence, turns inconsistencies to shreds, and develops logical conclusions to support his claim that William Shakespeare was the pseudonym used by the 17th Earl of Oxford and not the William Shakespeare of Stratford and "second best bed" fame. He makes one wonder how one has been fooled for so long and why the "hoax" still persists. I saw and heard the author when he came to Guilford College in 1992 to speak about this book. He was as convincing then as he is in this book.

This book is a NOVEL and presents one possible view of what Edward de Vere's life might have been like as the author of the Shakespearean plays. Although the story is written from the Oxfordian viewpoint, the book makes no attempt to present the Oxfordian case or to refute any other authorship theory. It is just a story of how it might have been - fact mixed together with supposition. Since a little fact and a lot of supposition is all any Shakespeare biographer has to work with, this book reads a lot like some poorly documented Shakespeare biographies - but remember that this author does NOT claim to have written a biography.

I think that Altrocchi created a pretty interesting story. Occasionally the writing is a bit stiff, but overall it is quite imaginitive and believable (if the reader can meet Altrocchi part way and suspend disbelief). The author's own 20th-21st century attitudes definitely infiltrate the story at points, but in other cases he presents ways of looking at events that my "modern" viewpoint would never have thought of. The story flows rapidly and is a quick read. It did leave me wondering what really happened, but we do not know and may never know. Altrocchi leads the reader to imagine.

Being a fan of the biographical novel since Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstacy (Michelangelo) and Lust for Life (Van Gogh), I read this book with marked anticipation and enjoyed it. But as to its veracity there is some question. A far superior book on the Shakespeare-de Vere issue is Charlton Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare. Several of the points made in that book are echoed in this one--de Vere's affair with Elizabeth and their conception of a child who was to become the Earl of Southampton, to name one--but some are not. For instance, Ogburn suggests that the questioned paternity of de Vere's first daughter with Anne Cecil was the result of a deception on her part (probably at the behest of her conniving father)--Anne snuck into Edward's bed when he was expecting someone else, a motif that appears in All's Well That Ends Well. Altrocchi makes no mention of this. A closer connection to the plays themselves would have thus helped this book. But it is a good read and does reveal some interesting insights into the relationship between de Vere, Elizabeth and Burghley. My only complaint is that much of the dialogue seems contrived and artificial. But what can one expect from a medical doctor? Also, this book is missing documentation for the quotes from printed sources, so it is impossible to tell what is actual and what is imagined, unless one assumes that all italicized portions are actual quotes, which is not stated. I expected a more scholarly treatment. Moreover, I suspect Sonnet 146--"Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth / . . . . / And Death once dead, there's no more dying then"--was the last thing Shakespeare wrote, not Hamlet's dying speech. Finally, an epilogue explaining the posthumous printing of the plays, like the 1604 quarto of Hamlet and the 1623 folio, would have added a nice touch.

Wonderful book, Greatly done, didn't want it to end, so informative
and interesting, loved it.

This book is probably the best introduction to the Shakespeare authorship controversy available at the moment. What impressed me most about it was its tone of quiet logic, and its careful, balanced account of the facts and the arguments on both sides. The orthodox Stratfordians are given their due, and their arguments and their objections to the Oxfordian view are discussed in detail. I also liked the way that facts are put into context, rather than just baldly stated.

On the other hand there is a little repetition, and the chapters sometimes give the impression of being written as separate essays, and then tweaked a bit and put into book form. The first half of the book is devoted to the case against William of Stratford, and the second half to the case for Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

I'm certainly not a person who is inclined to accept conspiracy theories. As someone who has always loved Shakespeare and is interested in Elizabethan history, I dismissed the alternative authorship theory for many years as a crackpot idea. However, once I actually started reading the details of the arguments in favor of Edward de Vere (and reading other books on the subject besides this one), I soon became convinced. I think that a careful, objective consideration of the evidence shows that it is far more likely that de Vere wrote the plays than that William of Stratford did. The Stratfordian arguments seem labored and clumsy, and based largely on guesswork, while the Oxfordian view fits into place very easly and effortlessly, and has ample factual evidence to support it. For me this has added a whole new level of insight and understanding to the plays and poetry, and a much deeper appreciation and enjoyment of them.

Whalen's book is highly recommended for anyone who wants a good summary of the issues and arguments.

Many people don't know that there's a controversy over the authorship of the plays. Many of those that know of the issue ask "why bother? Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare" and that's that." I used to feel that way until I fell in love with the works of Shakespeare in college and wanted to know more about the individual who wrote the plays. Was it Shakspere, the business man from London or Shake-speare (Edward De Vere)?

For me, part of the joy of reading the works of Shakespeare was finding out the history behind them. The more I read about the man, the more I found academia didn't know about him. They had a handle on the times and the events, but not the man. This raised several questions in my mind:

1. Why is there little or no mention of William Shakspere amongst his contemporaries (Jonson, Dryden and Marlow to name a few)?
2. Why is the only written documentation referencing Shakspere concern business dealings. For a playwright and poet as prolific as Shakespeare, you'd think someone would have "something". Yet in the centuries since his passing -- little or nothing.
3. How could an outsider (Shakspere) have intimate knowledge of the aristocracy? (i.e.: Burghley/Polonius) There were definite social boundries in Elizabethan times. Oxford (De Vere) was in that inner circle.

These are just a few of the questions readers of Shakespeare have had about the man from Stratford over the years. Mr. Whalen takes several of these questions and condenses them into a neat little volume, making this a wonderful place for someone interested in the authorship controversy to start.

In this succinct summary of the authorship debate, Mr. Whalen sets for himself a very modest goal: "to persuade the general reader that the controversy is valid and genuinely fascinating, that Oxford may indeed be the true author, and that more research should be done into this most significant of literary problems." It would be a churlish reader indeed who, after reading his book, would fail to grant that the debate at least warrants further study. Anyone who looks at the case objectively cannot but concede its merit, whichever side they eventually come down on.

Before they spout off about it being merely a mad theory of cranks and crackpots, churls should remember that the same was said about Copernicus, Darwin, and Wegener (plate tectonics), and that history has long since vindicated each. They should also note that the list of cranks and crackpots includes: Justice Harry A. Blackmun; Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.; Justice John Paul Stevens; Sir John Gielgud; Leslie Howard; Sigmund Freud; Sir Derek Jacobi; Orson Welles; Clifton Fadiman; Daphne DuMaurier; John Galsworthy; Charles DeGaulle; James Joyce; Lewis Lapham; Clare Booth Luce; Charlie Chaplin; Mark Twain; Malcolm X; Walt Whitman-you get the idea that being labeled a crank lumps you with some pretty good company. Please, then, call me a crank, too!

The author covers a lot of ground very quickly, giving the general reader a broad synopsis of the debate, without getting into the grinding detail that is better left to the specialist. From what I can gather from Mr. Whalen's fine little survey, the crank that came out with the first unequivocal, public denouncement of Will Shakespere of Stratford as the usurper of the Shakespeare canon was one Joseph C. Hart, an American lawyer who wrote in the early 19th century, "It is a fraud upon the world to thrust his surreptitious fame upon us." Hear, hear! Would it were that one day the name of Hart will be in literary circles what the names Copernicus, Darwin, and Wegener are to scientific ones and to the wider public: a voice in the wilderness calling the world to reason.

Kositsky plunges her heroine back into Elizabethan England for a wild, rollicking adventure with an acting company and a theater hanger-on named Will Shakspere, who seems to be taking credit for Shakespeare's plays. Young adults (and not so young) will relish her gross encounters with Elizabethan thugs and her winning ways with the acting company and Queen Elizabeth herself, who bestows an early version of the Academy Awards. Hard-core Stratfordians will object to Oxford as the playwright, but Kositsky's light, spoofing treatment, solidly grounded in the facts of the authorship controversy,easily carries the reader into her version of the world's biggest literary mystery. It's a blast from the past.

The ONLY reason the orthodox Stratfordian view of the authorship of Shakespeare's works has managed to survive is that it is taught to the young with no information about its rickety foundation, or about the persuasiveness of the Oxford alternative. Books like this one may hasten the day when the bizarre Stratford myth collapses of its own weight. An admirable corrective, and a fun read.

Here is an engaging, entertaining, and indeed positively delightful romp through the underworld of the Elizabethan theatrical scene -- as witnessed through the eyes of an intellectually precocious thirteen-something (unlucky in love!-Yikes!) named Willow who suddenly finds herself teleported from 20th century Ontario into the grimy candlelight world of London in 1593 where she finds herself rooming with the -- allegedly -- great playwrite "Shakspere."

Only the most dogmatic partisans of the by-now moribund official view of Shakespeare will be offended this linguistically precocious reconstruction of the "might have been" hypothesis of the Earl of Oxford's identity as the real Bard. Indeed Lynne Kositsky has an uncanny knack for anchoring her fictional narrative in detailed and singularly accurate memory for cultural nuance and historical incident. Kositsky also possesses a natural gift for the pulse of language. Her narrator speaks in an energetic and often captivating fusion of Canadian Valley Girl slang and Elizabethen vernacular, which is certain to capture the imagination of many young readers. Is this another J.K. Rowling in the making?

Here's a taste:

Bobby Goffe really hated me, that was for sure: he criticized and cuffed me every chance he got. Shakspere dissed me daily, perchance cos he'd been stuck with me, mayhap cos he feared I'd discovered his secret schemes. And I still needed to keep a sharp look out for that other gig, Beavis, Butthead, and Mystery Guy, at every turn. To cut a long story short, I felt threatened every step I took. At the house, at the Theatre, on the street, a mere whisper would twist my head around, a hint of a hubbub would set my heart to heaving.

(p. 70)

As the reader may detect, Ms. Kositsky's most formidable weapon, like that of her dark hero Edward Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is a razor sharp wit, viz. her biting satirical invocation of the (historically real)duel between actor Gabriel Spencer and actor-playwright Ben Jonson, in which Willow, transporting mysterious packages between Vere and Shakspere, is revealed to be the precipitating cause of the duel:

Galloping gobstoppers, what should I do now? Stand my ground till [Spenser] strangled me, or agree to what he wanted, and then get out while the going was good. I was too scared to make up my mind. He started shaking me again like I was a pair of maracas. And maybe there were two of me at that, cos I was starting to see everything double.

"No, never," I cried at last. "I will never give you anything of Vere's. Do your worst!" I drooped over like a limp lily, and was about to throw up on the villain's boots, really making him mad, when Ben Jonson rushed into the Cathedral. He must have been behind us all the time. In a trice, he realized the mess I was in and shoved his bully-boy face into Spencer's, fixing him with his beery breath. "That's Shakspere's lad, Gabe. Put him down right now, right here, right this minute, before you do him a permanent disablement"......

(p. 102)

The book can be recommended without reserve for all readers between the ages of eight and eighty who love the derring-do world which belongs to "Shakespeare" -- the world which harbored the great voyages of exploration which have made our modern life, for better or worse, what it now is. The author deserves congratulation if not some sort of medal; but one may be sure the further books by Ms. Kositsky are not far from publication.

Critics of this book have an agenda to defend the orthodox position that Will of Stratford was the author of the Shakespeare literature. Ogburn devastates that view, as any impartial reader will realize. Whether the 17th Earl of Oxford was the true author is arguable, but he makes a very strong case. No case is perfect--the Stratfordian position least of all. I say this as a journalist who was asked to evaluate both sides and my assessment appeared in the Dec. 1992 Delta Airlines Sky Magazine. I might add that Ogburn will give you an appreciation for the literature like no other, regardless of your attitude on the authorship controversy.

This is a prodigious attempt to put into one volume ALL of the doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare's works, and ALL of the evidence and speculation concerning the claims of supporters of Edward de Vere. Eminently readable style-- although Ogburn gets his back up and descends into mild ranting occasionally--it's not as long as it looks. Some of the wilder speculations have been pretty much disproven, and some of it reads like second cousin to that of Conspiratorialists (Kennedy assassination, black helicopters, etc.) -- but the sheer weight of concordances between de Vere's life and what can be inferred about that of the Author is so great, that if even 25% of what Ogburn writes can be dismissed, the remainder is unsettlingly compelling. One will read standard biographies of Shakespeare with a great deal more skepticism thereafter. Absent a smoking gun, it's not a battle to be decided in our lifetimes, but this book should be read by people who care about Shakespeare -- even those who disagree with the premise.

One comes away from this book with a sense of discovery and exhileration! Read for yourself about the ludicrously weak case made by scholars who are entrenched in the mythology of the man from Stratford, contrasted with the man who in every way in his life and background fits the Shakespeare of the poems and plays. Join Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles, Sigmund Freud and many other creators and thinkers who have disbelieved the authorship of the man from Stratford. Read Ogburn's magnificent book to see why Freud said, "The man of Stratford ...seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, while Oxford has almost everything." This is the most extraordinary literary dective story of all time. And when that time comes, as it must someday, when Oxford is rightfully acknowledged as the author of Shake-speare's works, Ogburn's deeply felt and thoroughly researched book will be a classic that true scholars of Shakespeare will be indebted to and treasure. If you love Shakespeare, read this book.

The evidence Sobran presents makes it hopelessly clear that judging from the evidence available to us, de Vere wrote the works of "Shakespeare". Skepticism that a rural burgher could have written such cosmopolitan plays doesn't sit well with today's egalitarian spirits, but then this is but one sliver of Sobran's comprehensive argument, which finds its conclusive strength in the sheer accumulation of clues all pointing in one direction. We will most likely never know the details of the arrangement between de Vere and "Shakspere", but this does not belie the powerful case Sobran makes itself. The works of Shakespeare are among humankind's greatest achievements, but they were not written by the workaday actor from Stratford. Sobran convinces us of this in a concise, entertaining, and masterly piece of work. He is right that if de Vere's authorship were finally accepted, then Shakespearean studies would be inestimably enriched by our finally being able to connect the works with an author whose life actually corresponds with them -- something Shakespearean scholars are unique in forgoing out of mere discomfort with the classist air of denying Shakspere's authorship. This is, really, something of a shame.

Joseph Sobran has written an elegant and persuasive condensation of the case for Edward de Vere's authorship of the Shakespeare canon, updating the previous efforts of passionate and intelligent students of the Shakespeare question such as Charlton Ogburn Junior, Bernard M. Ward and John Thomas Looney.

The book deserve five stars for cogently and persuasively presenting a much-maligned theory which counts among its recent adherents such intellectual lights as Derek Jacoby, Michael York, John Gilgud, Mortimer Adler and Supreme Court Justices Blackmun, Powell and Stevens.

As other reviewers have noted, it does not matter so much whether Sobran's arguments are correct -- this reader finds many of them persuasive -- as that the subject itself warrants serious and sustained attention. At present champions of the orthodox Shakespeare retain their intellectual monopoly within higher education primarily by means of excluding non-specialists such as Sobran from the debate over the Shakespeare question and vociferously denying, against a host of contrary evidence, that the subject even exists.

On the contrary, anyone who cares for the future of literary studies should acquaint themselves with the arguments made in this book. Not all of them are, in my opinion, equally valid. But that is no cause to ignore or belittle Mr. Sobran for tackling an important question which (sorry) ain't going to disappear just because a few powerful Shakespeare industry insiders insist on feeling threatened by it rather than seeing it as one of the greatest boons which could befall a shrinking intellectual discipline.

"Shakespeare" has never been more interesting or more real than he is in this book.

For readers in search of a compact, intelligent, entertaining introduction to the authorship question -- a question which is only now, after many years of suppression and neglect, beginning to come into its prime as one of the great questions of our day -- this book is a great place to begin.

Roger Stritmatter

I had never even heard of the Earl of Oxford before picking up the book. I likend the authorship question to fantasies like 'Where is Elvis' and 'Roswell, New Mexico.' Sobran presents a good deal of circumstantial evidence for Oxford. History records little circumstantial evidence for Shakspere, other than he shares the same name with the bard and he was an actor in some of these plays. Ghost writers are common. As a nobleman, Oxford had two reasons to stay quiet. 1) It was beneath his dignity to write plays 2) He could more easily satire his court friends (and enemies) with anonymity.

Oxford's experiences seem to reflect the experiences of the playwright in many cases. Numerous phrases from Oxford's private letters, appear again in Shakespeare's plays. Sobran offers better and more specific arguments than these. If I were a Shakespeare scholar, I would no doubt be angry at any probing book debunking the accepted theory, but this study is a well-made case for the Duke of Oxford.