Shakespeare by Another Name: The Biography of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Was Shakespeare

Margo Anderson

Nov 2011 · Untreed Reads

About this ebook

The debate over the true author of the Shakespeare canon has raged for centuries. Astonishingly little evidence supports the traditional belief that Will Shakespeare, the actor and businessman from Stratford-upon-Avon, was the author. Legendary figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Sigmund Freud have all expressed grave doubts that an uneducated man who apparently owned no books and never left England wrote plays and poems that consistently reflect a learned and well-traveled insider's perspective on royal courts and the ancient feudal nobility. Recent scholarship has turned to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford-an Elizabethan court playwright known to have written in secret and who had ample means, motive and opportunity to in fact have assumed the "Shakespeare" disguise. "Shakespeare" by Another Name is the literary biography of Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare." This groundbreaking book tells the story of de Vere's action-packed life-as Renaissance man, spendthrift, courtier, wit, student, scoundrel, patron, military adventurer, and, above all, prolific ghostwriter-finding in it the background material for all of The Bard's works. Biographer Mark Anderson incorporates a wealth of new evidence, including de Vere's personal copy of the Bible (in which de Vere underlines scores of passages that are also prominent Shakespearean biblical references).

About the author

Journalist and author Mark Anderson devoted more than a decade to researching the life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, publishing articles on de Vere in Harper’s, The Boston Globe, and on PBS.org. Holding a masters degree in astrophysics, he has also written articles on science, technology, the environment, the arts and politics for Rolling Stone, Wired, Discover, Science, New Scientist, Scientific American, and National Geographic online. He lives in Massachusetts. "Shakespeare" by Another Name (Gotham Books 2005; ebook ed. 2011) was his first book. Anderson's second book is The Day the World Discovered the Sun: An Extraordinary Story of 18th Century Scientific Adventure & the Global Race to Track the Transit of Venus (Da Capo, 2012).