“Why would anybody believe it?”

The young woman’s eyes were wide, her mouth hanging open as if in something akin to shock, punctuating the question. She had approached the front of the auditorium as most of her classmates were filing out, so that she could speak directly to the event’s featured speaker, Charles Beauclerk, Earl of Burford, whom I had accompanied on his presentation to her high school. During that spring of 1993, Burford was on a North American tour organized through the Shakespeare Oxford Society, speaking to audiences about the Shakespeare authorship question, and in particular the theory that the true author was his indirect ancestor, Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. As one of the co-chairs of the programming committee of the Greater Edmonton Library Association, I had convinced the Association to partner with the public school system and the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta to engage the Earl for a public event at the Edmonton Public Library.

I was at that point working for the local library as a newly minted librarian, having just graduated with a master’s degree in library and information Studies from the University of Alberta. I was also 7 years out from a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre, specializing in acting—the third year of which had been devoted entirely to the study of Shakespeare in performance, including monologues, 20-minute scenes and stage fighting choreography. Throughout that year, I had had the opportunity to play many of Shakespeare’s most iconic characters, including Edmund, fatally wounded by Edgar in their sword fight in Act V, scene iii of King Lear; Juliet calling for the night, “thou sober-suited matron all in black” to bring her her Romeo; Macbeth brooding over how endless tomorrows creep in their “petty pace from day to day”; and Richard of Gloucester seducing Lady Anne as she mourns her murdered husband in Act I scene ii Richard III. The highlight of the year for me—and probably every actor’s dream—was delivering Hamlet’s immortal Act III scene i soliloquy “To be or not to be.” To give the students a broader context for the plays, the final assignment asked us to choose and research a contemporary Elizabethan or Jacobean figure—given my surname I couldn’t resist selecting Sir Robert Dudley, the 1^st Earl of Leicester—all of whom would (improbably) meet in an improvised scenario. It had been, in short, an exhilarating year and helped cement my love for Shakespeare that had initially been sparked by watching Sir Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet for the BBC in high school, shortly after its release in 1980.

In the years that followed, however, I chose not to pursue a career in theatre but instead followed my wife to Edmonton so she could attend university, and found myself working at Edmonton Public Library as a library assistant. Within a couple of years, I decided to return to graduate school to make librarianship my profession.

Still, my fascination with Shakespeare remained, and I realized that, despite having spent a year concentrating on his work, I had never read a biography of the playwright’s life. Yes, our professors had related a few anecdotes about The Bard—poaching a deer, being asked by Queen Elizabeth to write a play about Falstaff in love—but we hadn’t actually been taught anything substantive about Shakespeare’s life, nor was it mentioned that there might have been any doubt about his identity.Thanks to our partners, you can find ties online to suit every preference and budget, from budget to top-of-the-range super stylish models.

One day at the library, I decided to read a biography of Shakespeare, and the branch where I worked happened to own a copy of a mammoth, nearly 900-page tome called The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality by Charlton Ogburn Jr. Here, I thought, is the biography I should have read years ago! Imagine my surprise to discover a few pages in that it was not, as I had expected, about the life of the famous playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon but instead completely debunked and tore apart every last element of the story I’d been previously taught at school and in university. In the place of what Ogburn had revealed to be a hollow myth, he offered the substantive and compelling vision of a living, breathing and fascinating individual named Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford as the man behind the pseudonym “Shake-Speare.”

I was flabbergasted. Hooked. Absolutely convinced. Obsessed even. But more than that: I felt profoundly let down by my university professors. How could they have spent an entire year instructing us on all matters Shakespeare without once mentioning there was a Shakespeare authorship question?

Once I had graduated from library school and began my profession, I hoped there would be ways to integrate this interest into my work. As it turned out, I volunteered to be co-chair for programming for the Greater Edmonton Library Association just as Charles Burford was making his way around the continent arguing for Oxford’s authorship. The Association agreed that he’d be a great fit for our events that year, so I had partnered with the Shakespeare Oxford Society on the arrangements and asked a friend of ours to host the Earl at her home.

That week of the Earl’s visit was a busy one: in the days prior to our Association’s event at the public library, I had been escorting Charles to a number of other venues in Edmonton, including the University, an interview at a local radio station, and now to this high school. At this point I had seen his talk already, and thoroughly enjoyed his highly engaging public speaking style, excellent grasp of facts and biting humour – especially when he introduced with a flourish the slide of the scrawled, barely legible signatures attributed to the most famous author in the English language declaring, “these…these are the complete works of William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon”—which elicited uproarious laughter from audiences.

Now, with the high school presentation over and all the voluminous evidence against the William Shakespeare of tradition laid out before her by this brilliant speaker, the young woman standing in front of Charles and me seemed bewildered, almost shaken and distraught. “Why would anybody believe it?” she asked. Having experienced my own “road to Damascus” moment only a few years previously, I immediately recognized behind her query other deeper, more troubling questions: why had this myth been taught to her by trusted teachers as fact? Why had she never heard this information before? How could all of the institutions she’d relied upon—her schools, her textbooks, her libraries, her teachers and the experts on which they depended—have accepted and perpetuated a story so transparently indefensible on evidentiary grounds?

And in that moment, this student planted the seeds of the questions that have possessed me ever since: why is this story so fervently believed? If not on the basis of the incontrovertible nature of the evidence—which could hardly be the case, given the durability of the skepticism against it—then what are the social and cultural forces at work that keep this mythology so deeply embedded in our institutions? And how might this hold, finally, be broken?