Phantom of the Theater

Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time, by Joseph Sobran (Free Press, 311 pp., $25)

JOSEPH Sobran is a devoted reader of Shakespeare, and in his journalism often an astute commentator on the plays. Would that he had given us his comments on the plays themselves, a book of criticism or interpretation. Instead, in the present volume he has occupied himself with trying to prove that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and not Shakespeare, actually wrote the plays.