Amazon.com description: Product Description: This entertaining collection presents a wealth of ideas about a fascinating mystery: who wrote the Shakespeare plays? Alternative answers appear here in 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 page books out of 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 courtly style of language, the intricate knowledge across a wide range of subjects, the deep familiarity with Italian and Greek writing that hadn't yet been translated into English, all this was apparently accomplished through "genius" alone. In the introduction to the First Folio Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the Age," but seven years earlier Jonson had written not a word about his 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 writers Mark Twain, Henry James, John Galsworthy and 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.

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 England in Elizabethan times had very little tolerance for free speech, and many writers published under pseudonyms. Could one of those pseudonyms be William Shakespeare? This book looks at that question from many different viewpoints and serves as an ideal introduction to the subject.