Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem

As the world’s greatest author, Shakespeare has attracted attention from scholars and laypersons alike. But more and more people have questioned whether the historical Shakespeare wrote the plays popularly attributed to him. While other books on the subject have argued that the plays were written by some other particular person, such as the Earl of Oxford, this study revisits the authorship question without an ideological bias using new evidence and undertaking a systematic comparative analysis with other literary biographies. The work argues that William Shakespeare was the pen name of an aristocrat, and that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a shrewd entrepreneur, not a dramatist. The author exposes numerous logical fallacies, contradictions and sins of omission in the traditional accounts of Shakespeare’s whereabouts; his professional activities; his personal profile; the play chronology; autobiographical echoes in the plays; the dramatists education and cultural sophistication; circumstances of publication of the plays and poetry; and the testimony of his supposed literary colleagues, such as Ben Jonson.