Guest Review by Andrew Buckley
Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time (1997) by Joseph Sobran
Rating: 
Joseph Sobran was originally an orthodox (Stratfordian) scholar who became increasingly puzzled by the complete failure of ‘William Shakespeare’ to leave even the faintest trace of his life or personality on the works of poetry and drama bearing his name. Sobran cites numerous ‘biographies’ of extraordinary length( one over 600 pages), all of which has been constructed on factual information sufficient to fill four sides of A4 paper. This is literally all that is definitely known of the man Sobran identifies for clarity as ‘Mr Shakspere’, one of 39 possible spellings. These biographies tend to be filled with suppositions relating to what the person who wrote the Plays must have done, all attempts to make Shakespeare as interesting as even the least of his works fail miserably..