Who are these people?

• Oxford's simplified family tree, with all the Cecils and Howards
• Tiny biographies of everyone
• Queen Elizabeth's relationship to Mary Stuart

Where did they live?

Here's a map of Tudor London, vs a modern map.  (The locator dot on the modern map is at Oxford Court.)

How much of this is real?

I have a lot of first-reader friends who have done more graduate work than is good for them. When they looked at Chasing Shakespeares, they all wanted to know more about the background. Did Cecil really do that? Who said so? Did I know I was quoting Donne, not Shakespeare? (Well, duh, of course I did.) And what about that poem?

"It's a novel, guys," I said. "What do you want, like footnotes or something? That's like writing a novel about the Titanic and asking for a lot more about the iceberg."

They smiled glacially.

So okay, okay. Here's your iceberg. Enjoy.

• The footnotes. 48 pages of them in a PDF. Wow. 
• The bibliography  The bookberg. It's so large it's a .PDF too. Sad, isn't it.
  
• The poem "The Paine of Pleasure." It's a real poem, which Joe describes accurately, and it's very interesting. Both Steven May and Alan Nelson have accepted it as Oxford's, which makes me happy. It's now available for the Kindle reader and eReader app, with a new preface.

But wait! There's more!

• Why is there an authorship controversy at all?
  
• Shakespeare's Travels
• Shakespeare's library
• Dating Shakespeare's plays
• When did Shakespeare die?
• The theory behind all this, the Theory of Casual References

AAAAAND... you can read the play version of Chasing Shakespeares right here. (Free registration required.) Alex Chisholm, who has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, suggested this, and he and I wrote it together. 

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