The Unmasking of Shakespeare

It is not an original proposition that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and poetry attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon.

The Unmasking of Shakespeare takes that argument to its logical conclusion, based on the life of Lord Oxford and the many intersections of that life with the works written by the bard. True, there are elements of imagination in the telling of this story, but all in all, the book is meant to suggest a number of likelihoods that follow from historical, biographical, and literary evidence.

The narrator of this tale tells us how Oxford squandered so much of what he by right of birth possessed, how he fathered a bastard child with the queen of England, and how he was murdered by agents of King James I. This fiction based on facts is told with bias but also with conviction.

Lord Oxford was not always a good man. On the other hand, he surely was not as bad as some have suggested. But however we view him, the man could write with passion and understanding about the universal human predicament, to our everlasting entertainment and delight.

The truth will eventually be known, and it might begin here.



Larry Sklenar: author of To Hell with Honor: Custer and the Little Bighorn (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000)