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CHASING SHAKESPEARES
by Sarah Smith
Atria, June 2003
352 pages
$24.00
ISBN: 0743464826


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Joe Roper, graduate student and protégé of Shakespearean scholars, has been hired to catalog the Kellogg collection, a mass of Elizabethan materials accumulated by a wealthy man and donated to Northeastern University. Sadly most of the documents are forgeries, but he discovers a letter which purports to be from William Shakespeare asserting that he did not write the plays ascribed to him.

Enter Posy Gould, Harvard student, daughter of a very rich man, who knows of the collection and wheedles him into showing her the letter. She insists that it is not fake and hauls Joe off to London to have it authenticated. While in London Joe visits a number of the sites associated with Shakespeare and Posy introduces him to the work of Charlton Ogburn who believed that the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, was the real author of the works attributed to Shakespeare.

The rest of the book involves the attempt to solve a literary mystery, who really was William Shakespeare. A great deal of fascinating and tantalizing evidence is uncovered and we are introduced to information about the period of Shakespeare that is extremely intriguing. In addition we have the pleasure of touring London with Joe, both the London of the industrial/financial present and the London of the Elizabethans for Joe has quite an imagination and in his mind can superimpose the past over the present.

Smith catches wonderfully that moment when an Anglophile first sees England. I remember that time well and Joe¹s emotions take me back to it. The barely alien world, the slightly different smells, the ads, the language all about me that I can, but not always, understand most of the time.

Joe¹s search for truth takes us to many little corners of London the traveler might not find, to the sites of stately homes that now have apartment houses or MacDonald restaurants on them. He goes into the new British Library, gets a card, and actually does research with the rare books there. He goes up to Stratford, of course, and finds it a sham, for by this time he has nearly convinced himself that Posy and Ogburn are correct and the man called Shakespeare only lent his name to the plays, not his genius.

I read Ogburn¹s massive tome years ago and I found it fascinating and tempting, but ultimately flawed. It sounds so good, but I could not believe it then or now. I found it hard to credit that Joe would let Posy, mostly wealthy dilettante, convince him, but like any scholar he was looking for something new, something that would make his name as a Shakespearean scholar. What this theory would do, of course, is destroy him.

But then, what this book is about is not really definitively answering the question of who was Shakespeare. Whoever he was, the genius shines through and the plays are the important thing, not the person. The book is about knowledge and information and how each person can look at a set of facts and draw a different conclusion from them. And this is something we should all think about when we read history. Is it all, really, just a set of agreed-upon lies? I used to have my history student read Arthur C. Clarke¹s short story ³History Lesson² and then from time to time ask them if what we were discussing was simply ³A Walt Disney Production.²

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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