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Were William Shakespeare's works not actually his own?
Indo-Asian News Service

London, Oct 6 (IANS) The academic debate about William Shakespeare has taken a new turn with new research claiming that his plays were not written by the assumed 17th century English bard but by diplomat Sir Henry Neville.

Neville was also a politician descended from King Edward III and John of Gaunt. 

A British scholar and former university lecturer, Brenda James, and a historian, Professor William Rubinstein, of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, are proposing that the real Shakespeare was an English courtier and diplomat, Sir Henry Neville. 

The issue of who wrote the body of works attributed to William Shakespeare has been hotly debated by academics for centuries. 

There has always a suspicion that Shakespeare, the grammar school-educated son of a Warwickshire alderman, who failed to progress to either Oxford or Cambridge universities, could not have possessed the learning or wit to produce plays such as "Hamlet", "King Lear" and "Twelfth Night". 

Literary rivals including Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe, assorted nobles such as the earls of Oxford, Essex and Southampton, and even the maritime adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh have all been named as the real executors of the classic texts. 

But the new suggestion is backed by a vast amount of startling evidence suggesting that Neville, a man never before associated with the mystery, wrote all the plays attributed to Shakespeare. 

The claims will be published in a book due to be launched this month at Shakespeare's Globe theatre in London by its artistic director, the actor Mark Rylance, reports The Independent. 

The political content and geographical location of the plays are a perfect reflection of the known travels of Neville, a highly educated diplomat and politician who lived from 1562 to 1615 and came from Berkshire. Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616. 

The authors have meticulously traced connections between Neville's travels abroad and the Shakespeare corpus. 

For example, between 1599 and 1600, he briefly became ambassador to France, leading, it is claimed, to the writing of "Henry V", in which some scenes were written in French, a language Shakespeare did not speak. 

As a politician, Neville became involved in an unsuccessful revolt led by the Earl of Essex against the government in 1601. 

Neville was imprisoned in the Tower of London for treason - hence the shift in tone of the plays, which changed abruptly from being mainly historical or comic to being predominantly sombre and tragic. 

The plays also portray many of Neville's royal and other ancestors - John of Gaunt in "Richard II", Warwick the kingmaker in "Henry VI", Part II, and King Duncan of Scotland in "Macbeth" - in a particularly favourable light. 

A further piece of evidence is a document, now known to have been written by Neville while he was a prisoner in the Tower, which contains detailed notes, the contents of which ended up being used in Henry VIII. 

There are also striking similarities of style and vocabulary between Neville's private and diplomatic letters and the Shakespeare plays and poems. In addition, a word frequency analysis reveals a statistical correlation. 

Finally, the authors claim to present direct but long-ignored evidence, in a document discovered in 1867, that Neville practised faking William Shakespeare's signature. 

The document, in Neville's handwriting and with his name at the top, features 17 attempts at practising various forms of Shakespeare's signature. 

The two scholars propose that Shakespeare was Neville's "front man", suggesting that the diplomat could not afford to be seen as the author of the plays because some of them were too politically sensitive and controversial. 

"We have amassed such a huge body of new evidence that the case for Neville being the true author of the Shakespeare plays seems overwhelmingly strong," said Professor Rubinstein. 

"We correlated the chronology of the plays with Neville's life and found that they match perfectly in a way that illuminates the evolution of the plays." 

Brenda James added: "The beauty and eloquence demonstrated in Neville's diplomatic and personal letters display a linguistic liveliness and inventiveness that is echoed boldly in the works attributed to Shakespeare. 

"Examining his letters I have found examples of particular unusual words and constructions not normally found outside Shakespearean literature".