Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford: Touchstone to the ELR

The solution to the Authorship Question has not been easy; were it so we would have had an answer long ago. For one thing, so much is missing from the record that it's been impossible to treat the issue as an ordinary problem in historiography. The gaps between mainstream socio/political history and literary history, particularly as the latter relates to the birth of the London stage and press, are simply too many and too broad to base a functional narrative on ordinary methods of fact accumulation. Beyond the obvious, that these two immensely important institutions did get born somehow and at almost exactly the same time, what facts exist are simply not sufficient to provide us with a believable picture of how it happened and who was involved. Here, Hughes examines who wrote Shakespeare.