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).

Argues that the Bard was actually Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, in a portrait that identifies the earl as a courtier, scholar, and prolific ghostwriter whose life events mirrored and inspired themes in Shakespeare's plays.

The debate over the true authorship of Shakespeare's body of work began not long after the death of William Shakespeare, the obscure actor and entrepreneur from Stratford-Upon-Avon who was assumed to be the author. Being an uneducated son of a glover who had never left England, the chances that William Shakespeare produced infamous works like Hamlet are slim. This is the first complete literary biography of Edward de Vere, and finds in his history all the background material found in Shakespeare's plays. A truly fascinating study.

This erudite and entertaining work of literary detection sets out to solve the most puzzling mystery in all of literary history: Who wrote Shakespeare's plays? Presenting his case for a swashbuckling Elizabethan courtier, Sobran vindicates a long list of prominent skeptics, among them the great Shakespearean actors, Kenneth Branagh and Sir John Gielgud. of photos & illustrations.

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.

Shakespeare by Any Other Name is a collection of two-act plays for teenagers. Set in different time periods and places, their plots, nevertheless, mirror the story lines of five favorite plays by Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, Midsummer Nights Dream, The Tempest, As You Like It, and Cymbeline. Circle Dance delivers the zany bewilderment of love that one might see in Shakespeares comedy Twelfth Night. Bob Weaver and the Teen Angel takes its characters and plot from Midsummer Nights Dream. True to the setting of the play, all of its musical numbers are top of the chart songs of the 1960s. The Gentle Art of Reappearing, which parallels Shakespeares last play The Tempest, involves a different kind of storm on the island of Galveston, Texas. Games gives the audience a modern look at Shakespeares As You Like It with a delightful romantic romp through another Forest of Arden, the piney woods of East Texas. As a spin-off of Cymbeline, Imogens War takes place in 1918 in England and France at the end of WW I with the signing of the Armistice and the resolution of a family feud. For adolescent lovers of Shakespeare, these plays offer a twist from the classic versions of his plays. Not to be confused as alternativesthe Bard is inimitableShakespeare by any other name might still seem as sweet.

Our guide to the life of the Bard is an actor by the name of Robert Reynolds, known also as Pickleherring. Pickleherring asserts that as a boy he was not only an original member of Shakespeare's acting troupe but played the greatest female roles, from Cleopatra through Portia. In an attic above a brothel in Restoration London - a half century after Shakespeare has departed the stage - Pickleherring, now an ancient man, sits down to write the full story of his former friend, mentor, and master. One by one, chapter by chapter, Pickleherring teases out all the theories that have been embroidered around Shakespeare over the centuries: Did he really write his own plays? Who was the Dark Lady of the sonnets? Did Shakespeare die a Catholic? What did he do during the so-called lost years, before he went to London to write plays? What were the last words Shakespeare uttered on his deathbed? Was Shakespeare ever in love? Pickleherring turns speculation and fact into stories, each bringing us inexorably closer to Shakespeare the man - complex, contradictory, breathing, vibrant.