The Shakespearean Myth: William Shakespeare and Circumstantial Evidence

In 1881, a New York lawyer and theater historian named Appleton Morgan ignited one of literature's most enduring controversies. The Shakespearean Myth presents a radical proposition: the man from Stratford whom the world calls its greatest writer may not have written the plays at all. Morgan methodically assembles the circumstantial case, pointing to the troubling absence of contemporary documents connecting Shakespeare to his alleged masterworks, to the strange gaps in the historical record, and to the uncomfortable portrait of the Bard that emerges from surviving accounts of his life: a businessman, a bit actor, a man who left behind almost no books, no letters, no evidence of the intellectual apparatus required to create works of unparalleled depth. This is not conspiracy thinking but careful historical questioning, and Morgan conducts it with the rigor of a barrister building a circumstantial case. The book endures because it was the first serious, sustained argument that the Shakespeare authorship question deserved a hearing, and because the questions it raises have never been satisfactorily answered. For anyone who has ever suspected that something doesn't quite add up about the Stratford man, this is where the doubt began.