It is perhaps the greatest story never told: the truth behind the most-enduring works of literature in the English language, perhaps in any language. Who was the man behind Hamlet? What passion inspired the sonnets, whose words were so powerful that “not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme”? In Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom, critically acclaimed historian Charles Beauclerk pulls off an astounding feat, humanizing the Bard who for centuries has remained beyond our grasp.

Beauclerk has spent more than two decades researching the authorship question, and if the plays were discovered today, he argues, we would see them for what they are–shocking political works written by a court insider, someone with the monarch’s indulgence, shielded from repression in an unstable time of armada and reformation. But the author’s identity was quickly swept under the rug after his death. The official history–of an uneducated merchant writing in near obscurity, and of a virginal queen married to her country–dominated for centuries. Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom delves deep into the conflicts and personalities of Elizabethan England, as well as the plays themselves, to tell the true story of the “Soul of the Age.”