Charles Graves learned about the hypothesis that the 17th Earl of Oxford was the real 'Shakespeare' when he read Thomas Looney's exposition of Edward de Vere's poetry. Graves studied the literature published since the 1920s on this topic and wrote the essays which have been included. One of his major contributions about the authorship question: Edward de Vere was a distant cousin of William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon. Graves proposes that William's mother Mary Arden asked the earl (her distant cousin in the Trussel family line) to take William under his wing as an actor. Afterwards the Earl used William as his pseudonym while producing more than forty plays for the de Vere troupe of players.