Here are more experts who don't believe that Will Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him, and a theory about who did.
[A] new book claims that the real Bard was Sir Henry Neville, an English courtier and distant relative of the Stratford Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself was simply a front man, claim Brenda James and William Rubinstein in The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare.James, an English literature lecturer, said Neville ''wanted [the plays] to go under another name and wanted a poor relation to have a hand up.''
James and Rubinstein, a professor of history at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, argue that Shakespeare of Stratford, who came from a modest background and did not attend university, could not have had enough knowledge of the politics, foreign languages and European cities described in the plays to have written them.
Neville, in contrast, was well-educated, had traveled to all the countries used as settings in the plays and had a life that matched up with what ''Shakespeare'' was writing about at the time, the book says.
''The more we looked into his life, the more convincing the matchup became,'' Rubinstein said.
James said that she began exploring the connection between Shakespeare and Neville about six years ago when she deciphered what she believes is a code on the dedication page of Shakespeare's sonnets. The code revealed the name Henry Neville.
Nice work if you can get it, I guess, peddling such notions, and an even easier sell during these Da Vinci Code days. But other experts don't buy it. Nor do I
''Like most previous theories that challenge Shakespeare's authorship of the plays, this claim makes the mistake of assuming his education and general knowledge of the world were very limited,'' said Roger Pringle, director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford. ''There is plenty of evidence to suggest Shakespeare received a thoroughly good classical education at the Stratford grammar school and then, for well over 20 years, was involved in artistic and intellectual circles in London.''Posted by Alan at October 21, 2005 08:21 PMJonathan Bate, a professor of literary studies at Warwick University and author of ''The Genius of Shakespeare,'' said, ''There's not a shred of evidence in support of the argument; it's full of errors. There's no reason to doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.''
Bate said the authorship question emerged more than 100 years ago ''out of snobbery.''
''People began to say, 'How could a middle-class grammar school boy from the provinces write these plays?''' he said. ''It shows how Shakespeare has become such a cult figure. The moment Shakespeare becomes regarded as the greatest of all writers, inevitably heresies start emerging.''