Brenda James

I have to grant one thing to the anti-Stratfordians, that the best of them tend to lay out their arguments with calm and patience, in contrast to the often contemptuously dismissive flaming of Shakespeare-as-sole-author proponents. Nevertheless, both sides suffer from their uncompromising and unyielding, black-and-white, mirror-image, boxed-in positions. The Oxfordians have to twist themselves into knots in order to explain how the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, could have penned The show more Tempest, which was almost indisputably written in 1610-11, if he had died in 1604. Brenda James solves this particular difficulty by proposing a different candidate altogether, Sir Henry Neville (1564-1615), and amasses quite a bit of circumstantial evidence for her thesis, which however began to pall on me by the end, with her penchant for repetition. But my impatience with all of the anti-Stratfordians stems from a deeper issue: a failure of the imagination, shared by the Stratfordians themselves, a failure to understand that 1) the authorship question may never be solved, and 2) it doesn't have to be since the potential solution is staring us right in the face. If, that is, it cannot be explained how Shakespeare singlehandedly could have amassed so much esoteric knowledge that made it into his plays which he could not possibly have been privy to with his provincial background, it may be because his plays were a collaborative effort among some or all these historical figures (Neville, Bacon, Jonson, Marlowe, etc.), who apparently knew each other, with Shakespeare the actual author and the others contributors to his project in the form of ideas, books, libraries, and the like. show less

I was pretty much convinced by this book that Shakespeare could not have written the plays attributed to him, and persuaded by the arguments for who likely wrote them. I really enjoyed this book. And it didn't diminish my respect for the plays or poetry of whomever wrote them.

Although I find wading through Sakespeare sonnets and plays a huge bore (It must be me, I understand he is well regarded by others) reading about the authorship I do find very interesting. From the books I've read, I don't see how he could have done so much writing at the same time buying/selling real estate, theaters, ect. But then again, what do I know? Anyway, I liked the theory of book, it seemed to make make sense.

Piffle. Not a shred of direct evidence linking Henry Neville with Shakespeare except two or three admittedly interesting linguistic coincidences. Only reccomended for Shakespeare industry junkies (sadly that includes me)