SHAKESPEARE’ SECRET Read Online Free PDF Page B

different spellings of his name.”
    â€œHe couldn’t even spell his own name?” Hero considered this. “Okay, so maybe he didn’t write the plays.”
    Her mother laughed. “You were easy to convince. He’s the greatest figure in English literature! Think what that would mean, if Shakespeare wasn’t the author of those plays.”
    Hero shrugged. “But it wouldn’t change the plays. I mean, they’re still the same. Does it really matter who wrote them?”
    Her father smiled at her. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet / ”
    â€œWell, yeah. But, Dad, why do they think that other man, Vere, was the real author?”
    Her father leaned back in his chair and loosened his tie. “Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. We call him Oxford, although you’re right, his descendants go by the last name of Vere. Actually, the whole thing is hotly debated in my circles. Most academics still favor Shakespeare as the true author of the plays, barring proof to the contrary. But over the years, Oxford has emerged as a real possibility.”
    Hero could sense her father drifting into one of his lectures. She straightened her homework sheets impatiently and took a pencil out of her backpack. “But why?” she persisted. “What makes people think he’s the secret Shakespeare?”
    â€œWell, he has the right background,” her father said. “The perfect background, really. He was clever, well educated, well traveled, a great favorite of Queen Elizabeth’s, and frequently at court. Certain events of his life bear a fascinating resemblance to events in Shakespeare’s plays. And recently, scholars discovered that Oxford’s personal Bible was annotated—it had notes in the margins—and the marked passages correspond with important verses in Shakespeare’s work.”
    â€œBut did he write anything else? Could he spell his own name?” To Hero, that seemed a fairly basic test of a writer’s skill.
    Her father laughed. “Yes, indeed. Oxford left behind many literary documents. He was a well-known poet whose talent as a playwright was widely praised. But—and here’s the other piece of the puzzle—historians have been unable to discover any plays published under his name. To some, that suggests he might have had a secret life, creating plays under a pseudonym: Shakespeare.”
    Hero looked at her father, balancing her pencil on her knuckle. “But why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he want people to know he wrote those great plays?”
    Her father stood, his chair scraping the floor as he pushed away from the table. “That’s the key question, and no one’s found a good answer to it. Some believe that it was beneath Oxford to publicly reveal himself as the author of the plays. They think that since he was a nobleman, his reputation would have suffered if his name were linked to the lowly pursuits of the theater. Playwriting was considered unworthy of the nobility.”
    â€œDo you think that?” Hero asked.
    Her father paused. “Well, there was some prejudice against it, but it was fading during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. And it’s not as if he were royalty.”
    â€œSo you don’t think he’s the real author?”
    â€œTo be honest, I don’t know. There’s a case to be made, absolutely. But I have to admit, I’m reluctant to give up the man from Stratford. The idea of a simple, unschooled merchant stringing together some of the most beautiful phrases in the English language . . . now that’s inspiring.” Her father’s face creased in a smile. “Still, as Shakespeare himself would say, the play’s the thing.”
    Hero glanced down at her math worksheet, with its orderly march of numbers followed by blanks: the promise of crisp solutions. “So nobody knows anything for sure,” she said,