It is perhaps the greatest story never told: the truth behind the most enduring works of English literature. Who was the man behind Hamlet, King Lear, and the sonnets? In Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom, critically acclaimed historian Charles Beauclerk pulls off an enchanting feat, humanizing the bard who for centuries has remained beyond our grasp. Beauclerk has spent more than two decades researching the authorship question, and he convincingly argues that if the plays and poems of “Shake-speare†were discovered today, we would see them for what they are—shocking political works written by a court insider, someone whose status and anonymity shielded him from repression in an unstable time of armada and reformation. But the author’s unique status and identity were swept under the rug after his death. The official history—of an uneducated Stratfordian merchant writing in obscurity and of a virginal queen married to her country—dominated for centuries. Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom delves deep into the conflicts and personalities of Elizabethan England, as well as into the plays themselves, to tell the true story of the “Soul of the Age.†You’ll never look at Shakespeare the same way again.
