who is shakespeare?

Who Wrote "Shakespeare's" Plays? For many years there has been a dispute as to the true authorship of the plays attributed to "William Shakespeare." The orthodox view, of course, is that they were written by a man named William Shakspere (sic) who was born in 1564 in the small town of Stratford-on-Avon and died there in 1616. However, skeptics claim that the known facts concerning William Shakspere make it exceeding unlikely that he was the true author. (…

…carefully. That edition contains (on pp. 152-169) a fuller discussion than given here of the arguments against Shakspere and in favor of Oxford. In A View from the Year 3000, Arturo Kukeni (= Michael H. Hart) includes Edward de Vere in the top hundred, but does not discuss the authorship question in detail, merely saying that now (i.e., in the year 3000) it is generally acknowledged that the attribution of the plays to Shakspere was a hoax.