Plot To Overthrow Shakespeare?

If you thought William Shakespeare's plays are only about dressing up in funny clothes and reliving ancient battles, you haven't been paying attention lately.

CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reports for The Early Show that the Shakespearian world is alive with new foes and new battles. Battles about intrigues and secret codes, and conspiracies and treachery, and all the good stuff Shakespeare wrote about.

In fact, the battle is about who William Shakespeare, the author, really was.

Brenda James and William Rubenstein have just written "The Truth Will Out," a book claiming that the author of the most enduring — many say the greatest — body of English literature wasn't William Shakespeare. They point to a previously little known 17th century English diplomat named Sir Henry Neville.

"Shakespeare of Stratford, if you take his life and mesh it up against the chronology of his plays, you get nothing," Rubenstein says.

However, many people disagree — especially the people in Shakespeare's home town of Stratford-on-Avon. They insist the author who wrote Shakespeare's work was Shakespeare.

"I think it is probably the most ridiculous, least well evidenced of all the many anti-Stratford theories that have cropped up over the last hundred years or so," Shakespearian scholar Jonathan Bate says.

The evidence for the Neville case, even the authors admit, is circumstantial but compelling.

How could William Shakespeare, who had never been to Venice for instance, have been able to write plays like "The Merchant of Venice"? Henry Neville, on the other hand, had been there.

"In 1579, Neville went on an historic European tour in which he visited all of the places named in Shakespeare, and got to know the personalities there, whose names find themselves encapsulated in the plays later on," James says.

But do you have to have been to a place to write about it? Critics of the new theory say no.

"Shakespeare never once mentioned that there were any canals in Venice," Bate says. "That suggests to me that it was written by someone who had read books about Venice, but had never actually been there."

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The Neville-promoting authors say that at one point Shakespeare's plays stop being comedies and start being tragedies. Why?

"Something happened in 1601 to wipe the smile off his face," Rubenstein says.

That something, they say, was the fact that Henry Neville was locked up in the Tower of London for his part in a plot to overthrow the monarchy — a pretty good reason to get serious.

The backers of Shakespeare say this theory is based on snobbery.

"The thing about Shakespeare was that he wasn't quite a proper gentleman," Bate says. "He was a provincial; there was a snobbery that emerged. How could this provincial grammar school boy have written such great works — that's what it goes back to."

And the greatest thing about this argument? In the absence of any real hard evidence, nobody can ever win. This is a show (like the plays themselves) that will run and run.

One scholar says she made the connection between Shakespeare and Neville after deciphering a code on the dedication page of Shakespeare's sonnets that revealed Neville's name. Click here to read more.