Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time

Queries into the ''real'' authorship of William Shakespeare's plays and sonnets usually read — as former National Review contributor Joseph Sobran admits with good humor — like ''a whodunit with a creaky plot.'' Yet Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time raises legitimate, oh-so-nagging doubts — shared by Walt Whitman, Kenneth Branagh, and others — that the barely educated actor from Stratford was also the great author. Sobran's masked man is the earl of Oxford, a brilliant, well-traveled courtier, poet, and premier patron of drama. Illicit affairs and Elizabethan disdain for publishing figure into his theory — which, if not always seamlessly persuasive, proves deliciously compelling. B+