David Leonard Roper

Shakespeare: to Be or Not to Be? David Leonard Roper

This book examines and analyses the evidence proposed in support of Shakespeare as the author of the plays and poems published under that name. The evidence is compared to the alternative proposal that Shakespeare acted as an allonym for the Earl of Oxford, whose homo-erotic Sonnets addressed to the teenage Earl of Southampton, and the plays characterizing members of Elizabeth's court, made it imperative that he should not be identified with their content. Confirmation of this truth is confirmed by Jonson, Nashe, Chettle, Thorpe, Marsden, and Digges, who relied upon innuendo, puns, and the latest discovery in cryptology by the mathematician, Cardano, to assert what had happened. In this age of censorship, William Camden also confirmed the existence of a conspiracy by the present powers to extinguish this memory from future generations.