What's in a name? How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare

Challenging claims of "a vast conspiracy." Some still doubt that the son of a glovemaker who never left England could have created the imaginative universe we behold in the plays and poems. Amussen, a historian at the University of California, Merced, writes a social history of England in the late-16th century to affirm that a man of the theater, a highly literate poet, an acute observer of daily life, and, quite simply, a great literary genius, could and did live to create the great works that traveled under his name. Early modern London had everything: travelers from abroad, artisans, the rich, the poor, the powerful, the meek. Many schools offered far more than they do today. A boy in his teens would have been taught the classics of the ancient world, the history of England, and enough Latin (if not other languages) to navigate the libraries and booksellers of Queen Elizabeth's age. Shakespeare was surrounded by scholars and artists and musicians and poets of skill and learning. His plays were performed by the greatest actors of the time. His poems were dedicated to some of the most powerful aristocrats of the age. He did not have to visit Verona to imagine Juliet's balcony. He did not need to be born to furs and finery to give voice to kings. During his life, Shakespeare was known for his ambition and his range. After his death, the publication of the First Folio edition of his plays cemented his reputation. "There is no mystery about who wrote Shakespeare's plays," Amussen writes. "There is nothing in the plays, or in Shakespeare's life, that is incompatible with what we know of the man from Stratford." The case is closed, the author maintains, and we can love and live inside his work without doubt. A social historian's convincing argument that Shakespeare was the man wielding the pen. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.