He is best known as an authority on Shakespeare, but also wrote about aspects of Brooklyn's history such as the Vitagraph Studios,[1] and developed a method of modelling baseball statistics.

He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1958, and briefly studied commercial art at the Pratt Institute in New York.

Tom Seaver relied on this standard yardstick in evaluating a pitcher's performance, that he is doing well if he throws about 15 pitches per innings.

Matus would read the history plays together with biographies of the kings they featured, and discovered, from earlier period tourist brochures, an article by A.L.

After a brief trip to England for roughly six weeks in 1984, he and his brother Paul sold their home on Long Island, and Matus used his proceeds to finance his research project on this topic—which entailed a second 6-month journey in a camper van—to examine buildings on-site and interview archivists, preservationists, and historians.

"[8] suggesting a possible source for Shakespeare's metaphor, in "The Tragedy of King Richard III",[9] of the "worm of conscience" in the Doomsday play of the Drapers' Guild in 1561.

Matus went on to defend this position against the Oxfordian theory,[b] in the October 1991 issue of The Atlantic Monthly as part of a print debate written by advocates of both sides.

[d] Writer Scott McCrea has praised it for its "original and valuable scholarship",[21] while James S. Shapiro has recently referred "those interested in the strongest arguments in favor of Shakespeare’s authorship" to Matus's book.

"[4] Dover Books reissued Shakespeare, In Fact in 2013, with a new introduction by Thomas Mann, former reference librarian at the Library of Congress.

The play turned out to be the playhouse copy of Thomas Middleton's "The Second Maiden's Tragedy," and Matus reviewed Hamilton's book for the Times Literary Supplement.

His brilliant conversation, gentleness with fellows and with the creaturely world, and resolute integrity in the face of hard circumstances, is fondly remembered by those who had the opportunity to know him.