Professor Cedric Watts discusses 25 puzzles presented by the works of Shakespeare. For instance: The Sonnets - autobiographical or fictional? What is the plot of the long-lost Love's Labour's Won? What are the 'glass eyes' in King Lear? Prospero's epilogue: it is really Shakespeare's farewell? Repeatedly, these challenging discussions reveal and resolve problematic features of the works, and demonstrate the linkage of minor and major concerns. Cedric Watts, Emeritus Professor of English at Sussex University, was co-author (with John Sutherland) of the acclaimed book, Henry V: War Criminal? and Other Shakespeare Puzzles. This new selection of puzzles was first published in Around the Globe, the magazine of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London.

'Shakespeare loves loose ends; Shakespeare also loves red herrings.' Stephen Orgel Loose ends and red herrings are the stuff of detective fiction, and under the scrutiny of master sleuths John Sutherland and Cedric Watts Shakespeare's plays reveal themselves to be as full of mysteries as any Agatha Christie novel. Is it summer or winter in Elsinore? Do Bottom and Titania makelove? Does Lady Macbeth faint, or is she just pretending? How does a man putrefy within minutes of his death? Is Cleopatra a deadbeat Mum? And why doesn't Juliet ask 'O Romeo Montague, wherefore art thou Montague?' As Watts and Sutherland explore these and other puzzles Shakespeare's genuius becomes ever more apparent. Speculative, critical, good-humoured and provocative, their discussions shed light on apparent anachronisms, perfromance and stagecraft, linguistics, Star Trek and much else. Shrewd andentertaining, these essays add a new dimension to the pleasure of reading or watching Shakespeare. 'Few modern academics are doing quite so much as Professor Sutherland to connect the "common reader" with great books' Independent

Few are aware that the actual identity of William Shakespeare, a pen name, represents our greatest cultural mystery. Even fewer realize that Will Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon was an uneducated businessman who never owned a book, knew no foreign languages, never traveled and never wrote a word of poetry or prose. Shakspere was a front for a complete fraud perpetrated by England's leading politician, Robert Cecil, for reasons of power and greed. The astonishing strength of Conventional Wisdom has kept the ruse going for 400 years, perpetrated by professors of English who, blinded by traditional dogma, refuse to accept the remarkable and growing body of evidence in favor of Edward de Vere. Volume 8 of the Anthology Series, Building the Case for Edward de Vere As Shakespeare, documents the quickening pace of Oxfordian discoveries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These present massive problems for professors of English to combat in a convincing manner. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, 1991: "For present purposes, I shall confine my analysis to the Sherlock Holmes principle that sometimes the fact that a watchdog did not bark may provide a significant clue about the identity of a murderous intruder. "This concern directs our attention to three items of [the Shakespeare authorship controversy]. First, it is of interest that there is no mention of any library, or of any books at all, in his will, and no evidence that his house in Stratford ever contained a library. "Second, his son-in-law's detailed medical journals . . . contain no mention of the doctor's illustrious father-in-law. "Finally is the fact that is most puzzling to me--the seven-year period of silence that followed Shakespeare's [Shakspere's] death in 1616. Until the First Folio was published in 1623, there seems to have been no public comment in any part of England on the passing of the greatest literary genius in the country's history. "It does seem odd that not even a cocker spaniel or a dachshund made any noise at all when he passed from the scene."

Originally published in 1989, this book focuses on the handling of the relationship between the onstage world and the offstage world, between the world that Shakespeare shows us and the one he tells us about. It is developed in two parts. Initially examined is the way reports are used in Shakespeare to relate the offstage and onstage worlds, building from simple examples within individual scenes in various plays to related sequences of reports which can be evaluated as part of broader strategies effecting the structure of a whole play. In the second part the author examines the ways in which several, or all, of these strategies work in individual plays, and what combined effect the prominent employment of them has in shaping the effect of the plays. In all cases the author is concerned to indicate why Shakespeare chose to handle matters as he does rather than in other ways available in the sources or in the speculative alternative methods which can be imaginatively constructed.