This reviewer was fortunate to study Shakespeare in college with the last of the Kittridgeians, Whiting in Chaucer and Harbage in Shakespeare. From them, and everyone else in that golden era he, without thinking, accepted the common academic attitude that it was amusing to conjecture that Bacon or Elizabeth or Lucy Negro, or anyone else, wrote the plays and poems.
This long held and not deeply considered opinion was destroyed in the '80s in about ten minutes by an article in the Harvard Alumni Magazine by Charlton Ogburn. It was somewhat like being Saul on the road to Tarsus and arriving in Tarsus as St. Paul. In my opinion anyone who does not have his academic tenure or reputation involved and who has an open mind will have his faith in Shakspere (or Shaxper) of Stratford-upon-Avon completely destroyed in the first chapter of Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare. (Dodd, Mead & Co, ISBN 0-396-08441-9) (out of print, but obtainable through out of print search at amazon.com)
The question of the authorship of the plays has now assumed the dimensions of a Sunni-Shiite holy war. Or the nature of the protestant reformation, more likely. If God is approachable directly what need of the Pope, or in this case the Academy. This is not surprising. Generations of Shakespeare (professional) scholars will have enormous amounts of egg on their faces if and when the controversy is settled. Sydney Lee, Marchette Chute, Peter Quennell, F.E, Halliday, A.L. Rouse, Samuel Schoenbaum--et al--a congerie of scholars (sic) who have written biographies of Shakspere, warping him like Cinderella's sisters feet in order to fit into the slipper of the literary corpus of presumably Shakespeare. How embarrassing.
Ogburn's book is a spell binder for the Shakespearean, amateur or professional. The open minded will have no doubt left unturned. By the end an utterly convincing case has been made for the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. I personally have read this 892 page book avidly three times, not to mention numerous consultations. Those who enjoy mysteries, history, drama, poetry and Shakespeare, the jewel in the crown of our literature, had best hie them to amazon.com or a library to read the best and most fascinating book on the subject.
geronimo bassetti