I loved this book so much and plowed through fourteen plus hours of audio in just a few days as it was utterly fascinating. I only knew that there was an authorship controversy because of a YA book talk I did twenty years ago in library school, and one of the books I read was about a girl time traveling and discovering de Vere (Earl of Oxford) as the true author. I’ve always been pretty ambivalent about the plays as I jokingly blame my withdrawing from Shakespeare in undergrad as keeping me from having a double major (well that and Medieval Lit…).

Anyway, I didn’t ever realize how absolutely little proof there is about the dude as the writer; Winkler does an amazing job breaking that down along with providing all the other potentials on the board. This isn’t about who else could be the author so much as the people out there who are so obsessed with it being only “the Stratford guy” and thinking anyone else who doesn’t believe it is literally deranged (making them the true villains here it seems). It’s honestly pretty astonishing how much silencing has occurred around anyone contemplating the authorship issue, and if English scholars actually had the funds I wouldn’t be surprised that they’d go in on black helicopters and drop the dissidents in holes somewhere without books.

This quote from Ros Barber (interviewed by the author Elizabeth Winkler) is perfect in breaking down how I feel about it all: ‘“I think the real Shakespeare story is, Shakespeare was an educated person. I don’t care which of the candidates it is. If they haven’t read a hell of a lot of books, they’re not Shakespeare.”’ ( )