The question may be met with chagrin by traditionalists, but to some, the identity of William Shakespeare is not positively decided.

They have trouble squaring the Bard’s works with the life of the presumed author from Stratford-upon-Avon, holding that only an aristocrat – which he was not – could have penned such elevated prose. Oxfordians point to Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who was the most flamboyant of the courtier poets of the time and a theater and literary patron.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Felicia Hardison Londré delves into the sensitive question of authorship in an illustrated presentation. The Curators’ Professor of Theatre at UMKC, she is the honorary co-founder of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival and was the founding secretary of the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America.