
"Inventing Shakespeare".
This fine and remarkable book, unfortunately, has a fundamental flaw: It derives its decisive evidences from anagram analysis of long Shakespeare texts that Ayres owes to the "art of deci-phering" of the late Lady Roberta Ballantine (she died in 2008), who bequeathed him her results. Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine that a majority will be comfortable with the idea of extracting evidence from extensive anagram analysis of Shakespeare texts as an acceptable scientific method that can be reproduced independently by others. With Roberta's "obstetrics" Robert Ayres concluded that Marlowe died in 1621 in Venice.