Most people are completely unaware that the Shakespeare authorship question is the greatest cultural mystery in Western Civilization.
Few realize that Will Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon was an uneducated grain speculator and real estate investor who could not read or write, yet he was chosen as the front man for a fraudulent conspiracy perpetrated by Queen Elizabeth's chief counselor, Robert Cecil, for reasons of monarchial succession, greed and power.
The astonishing power of Conventional Wisdom has kept the ruse going, perpetrated by Professors of English who cannot break the tenacious shackles of their guild mythology and thus refuse to believe the reams of authoritative evidence discovered in the past century in favor of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as Shakespeare.
Volume 10 of this anthology series--Moniment-- contains eighteen brilliant, compelling articles by highly qualified authorship experts who convincingly reinforce the case for Edward de Vere and annihilate the completely impossible candidacy of the illiterate Stratford Man.
Judge Philip Howerton, Jr. BA, JD:
"It doesn't take an 'academically based' person to realize that the quarter page of known facts of William Shakspere's life can be mastered by a twelve year old and that all the rest of the stuff that has been written--in the attempt to connect his 'life' and the works--by [Professors] Brown, Chambers, Chute, Rowse, Schoenbaum, et al, ad nauseam, is, and always has been, as Vladimir Nabokov once put it, in another context, 'thirty-two percent nonsense and fifty of neutral padding.'
"[Scottish Author]Josephine Tey called it 'tonypandy' [a nonsensical, untrue story grown to legend and accepted by the public in the face of all evidence to the contrary]."
Michael H. Hart, Ph.D. in Astrophysics, Princeton. Author of The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History:
"I made a serious error in the first edition when, without carefully checking the facts, I simply 'followed the crowd' and accepted the Stratford man as the author of the [Shakespeare] plays. Since then I have carefully examined the arguments on both sides of the question and have concluded that the weight of the evidence is heavily against the Stratford man and in favor of de Vere."
