This entertaining collection presents a wealth of ideas about a fascinating mystery: who wrote the Shakespeare plays? Alternative answers arise through interviews, essays, fiction, poetry and a lively debate in a pub, with disquieting results for anyone wedded to the traditional story. Dozens of biographers have written about the man from Stratford, dreaming up three hundred pages from a handful of inconclusive facts and a billowing cloud of speculation. The tale that a rustic from an illiterate family in a backward town, whose dialect could barely be understood in London, moved to the city and transformed himself within a few years into the writer we know as Shakespeare requires a hefty suspension of disbelief. The intricate knowledge across a wide range of subjects, the deep familiarity with Italian and Greek writing that hadn’t been translated into English, all this was accomplished, we’ve been asked to believe, without leaving any trace of how he acquired that learning. In his introduction to the First Folio Ben Jonson called him the “Soul of the Age,” but seven years earlier Jonson had written not a jot about Shakespeare’s death. Neither had any other writer- in fact, neither had anyone else. As for the Sonnets, those pieces supposedly written from the perspective of an aging, physically ailing man by someone in his early thirties, the English barrister George Greenwood said it best- “The idea that Will Shakspere, the young provincial, was, about the year 1593, or soon after that date, writing a succession of impassioned odes to the young Earl of Southampton, urging him to marry at once, and become a father ‘for love of me,’ appears to me, in the absence of anything like cogent evidence to that effect, simply preposterous.” Secret Whispers brings together a wide variety of views, sharing well-grounded scholarship and a deeply skeptical attitude. The legend of the Stratford boy genius who left school at thirteen has failed to convince people ranging from Sigmund Freud to Charlie Chaplin, and doubters include Mark Twain, Henry James, John Galsworthy, Walt Whitman, Shakespearean actors and directors John Gielgud, Tyrone Guthrie, Mark Rylance, Michael York and Derek Jacobi, public intellectuals Mortimer Adler and Clifton Fadiman, and Supreme Court justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell and John Paul Stevens. Elizabethan England had very little tolerance for free speech and many writers in that time published under pseudonyms. William Shakespeare was an actor who held shares in the Globe Theatre, and there are records of him lending money and serving as a witness in legal proceedings. But the first canonical play with his name, Love’s Labour's Lost, wasn’t published as “By William Shakespeare” but as “Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare.” Three years earlier Locrine, an apocryphal play not in the accepted canon, had been published with a similar title page that read, “Newly set forth, overseen and corrected by W. S.” In the beginning full claim on the authorship was awarded to him only gradually. Could this be because he owned plays he hadn’t written?To explore more, visit the Secret Whispers website at www.secret-whispers.squarespace.com.