Death of Shakespeare - Part Two

The Death of Shakespeare is a novel of historical fiction in two parts that shows how the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, with occasional help from the Bard himself. 

Who Doubts Shakespeare Wrote The Plays?

Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, among many others. Henry James thought "the divine William the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world." (Visit doubtaboutwill.org for more.)

The Authorship Question

The Authorship Question is centuries old. It has been given new life this year by Simon & Schuster''s publication of Elizabeth Winkler''s book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature.

Winkler''s book raises provocative questions about who wrote the plays and why they were written. The Death of Shakespeare provides imaginative answers to her questions.

Part One  

The story of how the Earl of Oxford wrote the poetry and plays attributed to William Shakespeare begins in Part One of The Death of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is murdered because he has begun confessing that he did not write them. The next chapter takes the reader back to 1588. The Spanish Armada has been defeated. The Earl of Oxford wants to write plays that will make England famous but Queen Elizabeth has other ideas. She bans him from writing plays. Oxford, frustrated by the queen''s command, agrees to help Shakespeare write a play and the two of them become partners. The queen finds out, of course, but to everyone''s surprise lets Oxford continue, as long as he writes history plays and no one knows he is the author.

Part Two

Part Two continues the story of how Oxford and Elizabeth might be the parents of the Earl of Southampton. If so, the young earl could succeed Elizabeth as Henry IX, but Elizabeth denies she is his mother. Is she trying to protect Southampton from the dangers of the succession? Part Two answers these questions while Oxford writes Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear and the other great plays Shakespeare claimed were his.