Our most famous author, William Shakespeare, is nearly invisible in the historical records. Why? This genius lived in a highly literate metropolitan society, but he appears to have hidden himself among them.

Scholars speculate, but the Elizabethan paper trail connects Shakespeare’s radiant corpus of masterpieces with only shadows. Shakespeare’s Invention by W.S. Gent provides the paper trail revealing the brilliant author. Drawing on many hundreds of documents, often retrieved from centuries of obscurity in archives, this book leads us to the man behind the name. He was William Sterrell, an Oxford professor.

He relied on his virtuoso rhetorical skills to create the works while simultaneously obscuring his own relationship with them. That was necessary. England was teeming with spies, targeted political assassinations, roiling feuds amongst powerful nobles, and the ever-present threat of imprisonment for treason. William Sterrell’s precarious status necessitated that he separate his two fields of action.

The creative pursuits would take place entirely apart from his identity at court: Poet-playwright as Shakespeare. Impresario, spy, secret agent of Jesuits and exiles as Sterrell. His most successful fabrication was to secret himself behind a real-life bourgeois from Stratford, a man dull and avaricious enough to go along with it.