Alden Brooks
Alden Brooks (1882–1964) was an American writer, chiefly remembered for his proposal that Sir Edward Dyer wrote the works of William Shakespeare.
[citation needed] World War I broke out while Brooks was in France, and he became an ambulance driver and subsequently a newspaper correspondent for The New York Times and Collier's.
He served with the French Army and rose to the rank of lieutenant of a field battery,[1] after his petition for transfer to the American forces was turned down on the grounds of poor eyesight.
He saw action at Marne, Chemin-des-Dames, Chateau-Thierry and Meuse-Argonne, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre with a silver star for gallantry while engaged in special missions in France on July 15 and 16, 1918.
[6] In this book, Shakespeare is considered to be a pseudonym, and the sonnets are attributed to Thomas Nashe, Samuel Daniel, Barnabe Barnes and some other editorial hand.
His methodology consisted of specifying 54 criteria or qualifications which worked to the exclusion of the many false claimants the establishment of the true author's identity, only all of which his candidate, Sir Edward Dyer, was thought to meet in "concordance with the pattern".
[9] William Shakespeare was, in Brooks' imaginative reconstruction, little more than a "fool, knave, usurer, vulgar showman, illiterate, bluffer, philander, pander, and brothel keeper" who however acted at the same time as the literary agent of Dyer, the concealed author.
An anonymous reviewer for Time magazine summed up the plot in the following way: He depicts Shakespeare as a butcher's son in Stratford, "a country youth who has to leave school early in order to assist his father in the killing of cattle ... one who sows his wild oats so liberally that he must, first, marry against his will a woman eight years his senior, and, secondly, run away to London, apparently to escape legal prosecution." ...
No one guessed his secret, but for years, says Author Brooks, Dyer had been getting Shakespeare to buy bad plays for him and had rewritten them into the classics we read today.
