The Shakespeare Game: The Mystery of the Great Phoenix Book

Who was Shakespeare? In an intellectual sensation that went through three printings in the first year, a Moscow scholar presents a solidly documented work showing how, and why, the 5th Earl of Rutland wrote most of the Shakespeare oeuvre. Gililov has studied watermarks and printer's type, registration dates, and documented biographical details of Shakespeare contemporaries, considering the physical evidence as well as the personalities and motives of the suspects

Publishers Weekly

Among the candidates for author of Shakespeare's works, Roger Manners, the earl of Rutland (1576-1612), is not the most popular. In arguing for Rutland, Russian Shakespeare scholar Gililov also suggests that the earl's wife, Elizabeth (daughter of Sir Philip Sidney), was a literary collaborator and co-hoaxer in attributing their oeuvre to an illiterate theatrical hanger-on from Stratford-on-Avon. Gililov's assertions about Shakespeare's illiteracy rest on dubious grounds: the disappearance of manuscripts, the absence of an estate library and the sloppy signatures on Shakespeare's will. Nor does Gililov convincingly explain how an illiterate could have risen in Elizabethan theater to become a shareholder in its most popular playhouse. Moreover, he overstates the plays' linguistics and erudition (often a factor in arguing the identity of the plays' author) and underrates the possible level of Shakespeare's education in order to contend that only someone as well educated and well traveled as Rutland could be their author. The centerpiece to Gililov's tendentious theory is the anthology Love's Martyr, which includes the poem dubbed "The Phoenix and the Turtle." Confusing evidence as to when it was originally published allows Gililov to conveniently postdate the poem to appear to be a coded elegy on the earl and countess. In post-Soviet Russia, where Shakespeare studies are no longer under government-controlled orthodoxy, Gililov has won some popularity with his theory of "a Great Game" regarding the author of Shakespeare's works, but he might be playing it with himself alone. Illus. (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.