Introduction

The Shakespeare Authorship Question began to trouble literary historians as far back as the middle 1700s. But it was not until Victorian times, when the works of 'Shakespeare' were re-discovered and popularised by the great theatrical actor managers of the day, that academics began the search for the man behind the plays. Literary biography was, at the time, a relatively new field of research and they began their task with an almost clean slate.

They looked at the Elizabethan school records of Stratford Grammar - and were disappointed not to find William Shakespeare's name there. The universities too showed a blank. Yet at this time literary scholars had established that the writings of great Roman author Ovid ran through Shakespeare like DNA, the poems and plays displayed such an astonishing classical scholarship that it was hard to believe that an uneducated man had risen to these great heights.

Very little has ever been discovered about William Shakespeare beyond property conveyances, evidence of tax evasion, a modest stake in The Globe theatre and his will. There's no anecdotal evidence at all. Even his son-in-law, Dr John Hall, whose writings were published after his death, had not a single word to say about him, even though, at the time he was writing, 'Shakespeare' was being proclaimed 'the soul of the age' in London.

In over 150 years of research, nobody has ever discovered a single scrap of documentary evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon was a writer. Indeed, the overwhelming conclusion one comes to when examining the known facts of the Stratford man (filleting out all the 'must haves', might haves' and 'we can assumes' that provide 95% of all modern Shakespeare biogaphies) is that he was almost certainly illiterate.

The great prize, of course, has always been to discover manuscript evidence of the poems and plays. And, almost unaccountably for such a great and prolific author, not a single fragment has ever been discovered.

Over the years, many people have asked themselves, well if it wasn't the Stratford man - who was the author? And over the years there have been any number of candidates put forward - from Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon and Sir Philip Sidney, to name but three.

And then a retired schoolmaster by the name of J Thomas Looney, who had taught Shakespeare throughout his career and who had grown increasingly sceptical of Stratfordian orthodoxy, set himself the task of examining the matter in the manner of a forensic detective trying to solve a mysterious crime. By listing a set of 17 requirements (such as possessing first hand knowledge of Italy, intimate knowledge of Court life as a member of the aristocracy and a classical education), he then scoured the Elizabethan record for a man who fitted all requirements.

J Thomas Looney finally published the results of his research in the seminal work, "'Shakespeare' identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford." (Cecil Palmer, London, 1920)

Since then, one after another, all the old candidates have quietly left the field while, at the same time, Oxfordian research has built up such an overwhelming case for Edward de Vere, that the Stratfordian citadels in academia are, at last, beginning to totter on their shaky foundations. Universities in America and Brunel University in England are now, finally, beginning to take the Authorship Question seriously.

In 2005, I began my own research project after it struck me that Oxfordians knew little about Elizabeth Trentham, Edward de Vere's second wife, and nothing about her family. The first part of my short history of the Trentham family "Elizabeth and ffrancis Trentham of Rocester Abbey' was first published in the November 2006 edition of the De Vere Society newsletter, and the second part was published in the Spring of 2007.

In 2007, while completing my short history of the Trentham family, I discovered some remarkable new evidence regarding the provenance of a painting known as the 'Ashbourne' portrait of Shakespeare in the Folger Shakespeare library which, it is believed by many Oxfordians, is the lost portrait of Edward de Vere by Cornelius Ketel. Together with a fellow Oxfordian researcher, Dorna Bewley, we also had the results of our research published by the De Vere Society. This article can be viewed (pdf format) here:

www.deveresociety.co.uk/articles/Essay-Ashbourne.pdf

I have also included on this site a number of letters which I have had published in the national press on both the authorship question but also relating to the Trentham family.