The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question.

The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question. By Scott McCrea. Praeger, 2005 (296 pages).

Don't believe the subtitle of Scott McCrea's book.

It's a deliberate falsehood, no doubt a marketing ploy. He himself says in the final pages the authorship question will never end. "Never" may well turn out to be too strong, but meanwhile, as McCrea himself admits, his book does not end the authorship question, despite its subtitle.

He does make a valiant attempt. The Case for Shakespeare is only the second heavily researched, book-length polemic for the Stratford man and against Oxford as the true author. The first was Irvin Matus's Shakespeare, In Fact (1994), which promised factual evidence but failed to deliver it. (See review in the winter 1994 issue of the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter.) McCrea dismisses Matus's book as a good try but "scattershot" and quotes him only once on a minor matter.

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