Dark and creepy

The Folio Book of Historical Mysteries, edited by Ian Pindar

This book, which is a collection of 20 essays on events and people from history, first seriously caught my attention when I started reading the piece about Shakespeare. Of course, I’d always had the nagging sense, on the fringes of my mind, that some people questioned Shakespeare’s authorship. Eccentrics and attention-seekers, I’d always assumed. And here, I saw that they refer to themselves, rather grandly, as ‘anti-Stratfordians’.

So, why do these people think that the man named William Shakespeare, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1516, and who died there in 1564, did not write the plays and the sonnets, then? Well, say the anti-Stratfordians, Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein, lots of things don’t add up. For a start, he grew up in a provincial town, in an illiterate family. He left school at the age of 12. Until then, he couldn’t have met more than a few educated people.