Shakespeare was a Stratford man of humble beginnings. But the accumulated evidence seems to bear out Henry James's suspicion that this notion is "the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world."
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While this web site advances the cause of the Oxfordian theory of the Shakespeare authorship, it is a resource for all.Its home page offers a rich network of Internet resources on Shakespeare and the authorship question: reading lists of Oxfordian works, Stratfordian works, and works in response to the authorship debate; links to interesting sites about Shakespeare; discussion groups, a list of films based on Shakespeare, and more.
Somewhere in Europe in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the greatest craftsman ever to mould the English language into works of art created his masterpieces of poetry and drama.
Beyond that simple statement, little can be said about the man known as William Shakespeare that will not arouse somebody's indignant scorn. Charlton Ogburn, a modern researcher, noted: 'As curiosity about the dramatist began to grow in the 18th century, so, before long, did doubts about the Stratford man's authorship.' Ogburn rightly adds: 'A vigorous and acrimonious controversy over the issue is now in its second century, leaving deposits of scores of millions of printed words. There has been, so far as I know, nothing like it in history. And it has left the disputants as far apart as ever.'
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