Before 1988 I had always believed, like the majority of the population, that Shakespeare was the man who had been born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. I believed this because it was what I had always been told by people who were supposed to know what they were talking about. It never occurred to me to question why so few facts are known about the man or his life.

Then sometime around 1988 I saw a late night television programme about the controversy in the academic world concerning the authorship of the works of Shakespeare. One of the participants in the programme was the American writer Charlton Ogburn Jr., who had written a book in 1984 called The Mysterious William Shakespeare in which he had proposed that the Earl of Oxford was Shakespeare. A few days later I bought Ogburn`s book when I saw it in my local bookshop, and ever since then I have been convinced that the Earl of Oxford is the real Shakespeare.

In 1992 I began to think that the Earl of Oxford might have left a clue to his identity in the Shakespeare plays, and very slowly, over a period of about eighteen months, I stumbled upon the fact that the plays are constructed around puns on the Earl of Oxford`s name, de Vere, and around puns on his family motto.

I wrote a short manuscript which was developed from the introduction to an original 1100 page manuscript that had taken me five years to research and to write. This manuscript, although it is no more than a summary of the original manuscript, was published as De Vere is Shakespeare by The Oleander Press, Cambridge, England, in 1997.

On retiring from teaching music in 2008 I thought that I needed to do something to occupy my time, and so I decided to write a manuscript that would be a little more substantial than the 140 pages of De Vere is Shakespeare. The result of this is The Wit of William Shakespeare.

On completing the manuscript I sent proposals to all of the leading publishers of Shakespearean studies in both Great Britain and the United States. Almost half of them did not reply. The sentiments of those that did reply were almost exactly the same: we find your book is very interesting and well researched but to publish it would unbalance our list. The very first publisher to whom I sent a proposal was at least very honest and forthcoming in his reply: If we were to publish your book it would upset university professors who have been writing Shakespearean studies for twenty years.

It can be seen from these replies that university professors are protecting their reputations and that they, and their publishers, have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth of the Stratford man. None of them have any interest in presenting the truth: that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, is the real Shakespeare.