Alias Shakespeare
The debate over the true authorship of Shakespeare's plays has raged for more than a century, fueled by fans like theNational Review'sJoseph Sobran, who cannot accept that a country bumpkin like William Shakespeare could ever have written the rich plays full of high literary references, intimate knowledge of court politics, and familiarity with personalities in foreign lands. Like many before him, Sobran fingers Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Where Sobran makes a useful addition to the so-called Oxfordian debate is his sober, Holmes-like laying out of the evidence, especially as found in two useful appendices that contain the full text of the real Shakespeare's flatfooted will, contrasted with specimens of Oxford's own acknowledged poetry, which contains many locutions similar to those found in Shakespeare's plays.