A Thief for All Time
From the book cover: The controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare is two centuries old, and the doubters were numerous: Mark Twain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Sigmond Freud, Charlie Chaplin, even Orson Welles questioned the veracity of Shakespeare as author. For starters, the man had no known education. He was raised by illiterate parents in a rural farm village, where the local school only had three grades. But even that much schooling is in doubt, because there is no evidence he was ever registered there (or anywhere) as a student. He signed his wedding certificate with an 'x'. His will included no books--not even a bible--and his gravestone epitaph is superstitious and illiterate. So who was the true author? Once again, the evidence is extensive and conclusive, and points in a single direction, to a man forced to live in exile sending plays from Italy to the Globe, where Shakespere, whose three roles in the