Few are aware that the actual identity of William Shakespeare, a pen name, represents our greatest cultural mystery. Even fewer realize that Will Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon was an uneducated businessman who never owned a book, knew no foreign languages, never traveled and never wrote a word of poetry or prose.

Shakspere was a front for a complete fraud perpetrated by England s leading politician, Robert Cecil, for reasons of power and greed. The astonishing strength of Conventional Wisdom has kept the ruse going for 400 years, perpetrated by professors of English who, blinded by...