his dirty dealing and underhand passing of coin, all the shabby pretense in the double-faced glutton and roisterer." Meanwhile a grey-haired courtier with "wrinkled visage, deep-set eyes ... walked nervously in the gardens" a stone's throw from Will's brothel. The courtier's name was Sir Edward Dyer, known to literati mainly as the author of a rather smug poem called My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is. 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. He overcame the problem that Dyer died in 1607, several years before Shakespeare's The Tempest is believed to have been written, by arguing that this was early work, which he believed was proven by its appearance as the first play in the 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays. Personal life, death and legacy Brooks married Hilma Chadwick, an artist, at St Ives, Cornwall, England, on 11 July 1908, and moved to France. They had four children. Brooks died in 1964. Brook's vivid depictions of soldiers and war have been highly praised by specialists. Phillip K. Jason argues that he wrote "two of the most intriguing books about World War 1." His researches attempting to reveal Sir Edward Dyer behind Shakespeare have usually been dismissed as fantasies. William M. Murphy writes: To a man who can tell us so much about Shakespeare on no visible evidence, no flight of illogical fancy is impossible. He has, however, decisively influenced one recent independent researcher into the authorship heterodoxy. Diana Price, in her book Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography (2001) writes on her acknowledgements page of "the ground-breaking research of Alden Brooks". Bibliography Escape, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1924 As I Saw It, Knopf, New York, 1930 Will Shakspere: Factotum and Agent, 1937 Will Shakspere and the Dyer's Hand, 1943 Footnotes References 1882 births 1964 deaths American expatriates in France Writers from Cleveland Writers from Paris American male writers Shakespeare authorship theorists Harvard University alumni French Army personnel French military personnel of World War I English male dramatists and playwrights