Most people enjoy a good detective story, and often a favorite detective as well, such as  Sherlock Holmes. Readers enjoy a tantalizing mystery  which teases the brain, and happily follow clue after clue leading to the solution  to  the mystery. Yet when it comes to real life situations, we inexplicabley  forsake our sense of adventure and cling to old beliefs and habits with a zealotry that is often quite out of character with how we otherwise approach life. Take the case of Shakespeare. For most people it is settled that he, William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon, wrote the great poetry and plays many of us have enjoyed since high school. We take it for granted that he did, and look askance at those who seem somehow dubious that an unlettered man could write such erudite, deep, meaningful plays. After all, talent is talent, genius is genius. And believing that talent and genius can reside even in an unlettered man, we applaud his achievement and simply ascribe it to Fate. “He was destined to be great,” and that is that.

There is a modern-day Sherlock Holmes of the british literary world, named Brenda James. She, like Holmes, possesses an indomitable belief in her abilities in solving mysteries—more specifically, the greatest literary mystery of all time: Who really  wrote the drama and poetry we attribute to William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon? This was a mystery she seemed destined to solve from childhood. And did Shakespeare, in her researches, really write what we all believe he wrote? Not a word of it.

She was first attracted to the well-known mystery of the Dedication to The Sonnets. This mystery has long puzzled scholars and afficianados alike. Who is WH? Who is the “Begetter” of the poems, who the “Everliving Poet”, who the “Well Wishing Adventurer”? And why the phrasing, why the added periods, why the strange language?

She became a cultural historian and an expert on Shakespeare and his culture, and tirelessly worked on what she came to believe was a coded message in the dedication itself. Years later her efforts bore fruit. There was indeed an encrypted message in the dedication. And with deductive genius worthy of the great Sherlock himself, she unlocked the door that led to her breathtaking solution to this age-old mystery of Shakespeare’s authorship. Her finding?  Shakespeare was really the great Sir Henry Neville and not William of Stratford-Upon-Avon.

She has now written two books in which she lays out some of the evidence (so much evidence is there!), and it is not just convincing beyond a reasonable  doubt, it is convincing (in my opinion) beyond all doubt. I had chanced to mention this to a friend who had a Ph.D in English and she poo-pooed it without even hearing one single piece of evidence (let alone two books full)!  Such, alas, is the way of the world: Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein—such (and they are in every field of endeavour) had to fight to have their views taken seriously. For some people evidence is not enough: one must somehow break down the door of prejudice (pre-judging) and allow facts as they are to speak for themselves without the tint of preconception let alone ardent conviction.

I won’t even try to summarize the evidence—it would take a complete re-telling of  James’ own work to do so—other than to say that ALL the pieces of the puzzle fit together hand-in-glove. We now have explanations of how the venues of the plays originated, who many of the plays’ characters are modeled after, why Neville suddenly switched from histories to tragedies, and literally hundreds of other puzzle-pieces which scholars have been perplexed by for centuries. Let me say again: The game is up; the mystery is solved: Our Everlasting Poet is Sir Henry Neville, perhaps the greatest man of his age even without this literary attribution.  And he is indeed exactly the kind of man we would reasonably expect from someone who wrote so profoundly, so passionately, and so poignantly about life and death and the meaning of life.

Now, enjoy your—Neville! For he is indeed the man.

Len Sive is a freelance writer.