WHO?

One night in 1856, an American woman sat beside Shakespeare's grave with a lantern until dawn. She was certain the proof that he never wrote his plays lay under the stone. She never lifted it. In 2016, archaeologists finally looked underneath with ground-penetrating radar. The skull, they concluded, is most likely missing. WHO? is a fast, story-driven investigation of the most famous authorship mystery in literature. Did the glover's son from Stratford really write Hamlet? Or was "William Shakespeare" a mask for a philosopher, an earl, or a playwright who faked his own death? Every chapter opens with a real scene, then sets the legend beside the paper trail. You'll meet a herald's clerk whose stray comma turned Shakespeare's family motto into "No, without right", a Chicago judge who ruled in 1916 that Bacon wrote the plays, and two codebreakers who demolished the Bacon ciphers and left a hidden message on their own headstone. Bacon, Oxford, Marlowe, the Earl of Derby, Mary Sidney, Emilia Bassano and others each get their strongest case, along with the problem their supporters still have to answer. Includes a timeline from 1564 to 2016, a side-by-side table of the main candidates and annotated suggestions for further reading. About 22,000 words. PDF (84 pages) and EPUB, instant download. No scholarship required.