Oxford adopted the name "Shakespeare" in 1593 when he published the poem Venus and Adonis, which he dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton. Oxford had fallen in love with the handsome teenager, who was being urged to marry his daughter Elizabeth Vere. Southampton is also the "lovely boy" to whom most of the Shakespeare Sonnets are addressed.

When I argued this in my book Alias Shakespeare (published by The Free Press in 1997), I expected to get quite an argument from the academic Shakespeare "experts." To my surprise, they put up no real resistance; without exception, all those who attacked the book tacitly admitted that the Sonnets do indeed describe Oxford much more closely than they describe the legendary William of Stratford.

Of course, being scholars, they tried to disguise this admission with lots of scholarly bluster, but there it was: nobody bothered trying to prove that you can make a case for William of Stratford from the Sonnets, for the very simple reason that you can't.