As the world's greatest author, Shakespeare has attracted attention from scholars and laypersons alike. But more and more people have questioned whether the historical Shakespeare wrote the plays popularly attributed to him. While other books on the subject have argued that some other particular person, such as the Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays, this is the first book in over 80 years to comprehensively revisit the authorship question without an ideological bias, the first to introduce new evidence, and the first to undertake a systematic comparative analysis with other literary biographies. It successfully argues that William Shakespeare was the pen name of an aristocrat, and that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a shrewd entrepreneur, not a dramatist.

Price exposes numerous logical fallacies, contradictions, and sins of omission in the traditional accounts of Shakespeare's whereabouts; his professional activities; his personality profile; the play chronology; autobiographical echoes in the plays; the dramatist's education and cultural sophistication; circumstances of publication of the plays and poetry; and the testimony of his supposed literary colleagues, such as Ben Jonson. New or previously ignored documentation is used to reconstruct Shakespeare's career as a businessman, investor, theater shareholder, real estate tycoon, commodity trader, money-lender, and actor, but not a writer. In fact, Shakespeare is the only alleged writer from his time for whom no contemporaneous literary paper trail survives.