The man who Shakespeare was not (and who he was)

Orthodox scholars and critics tell us flatly that Shakespeare was a Stratford man of humble beginnings. But the accumulated evidence seems to bear out Henry James's suspicion that this notion is "the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world."

by Charlton Ogburn

Harvard Magazine

November 1974

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shakespeare/debates/ogburnarticle.html