This book is dedicated to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who was the playwright and poet we know as Shakespeare, one of the most accomplished, and tragic, figures in human history, who, by an improbable turn of events, was destined to die unrecognized as the flesh- and-blood person behind the Shakespeare pseudonym. He tells us in his Sonnets that "my name be buried where my body is," but he also tells us in these very same Sonnets his own true story, a story of how one of the greatest men in world history wound up dispossessed of his life's work and erased from history. It is a story told indirectly and subrosa, in a unique coded language. But it is there, and it is amazing.