Hidden In Plain Sight

Shakespeare scholars and professors whose life profession is Shakespeare freely acknowledge that the Sonnets remain a deep mystery. The scholars who have attempted glosses of every sonnet universally understand the sonnets to be written by the traditionally understood "Shakespeare" of Stratford to a younger man (sonnets 1-126) and to a woman (sonnets 127-152), who also figures prominently in many of the first 126 sonnets as well. The ostensible story as told by all authors is of a very weird love triangle between the older man (the poet), the younger man (that most agree is the 3rd Earl of Southampton), and the woman, about whose identity there is no unanimity, and no convincing candidate. It is a story of fickleness, betrayal, forgiveness, separation, and frequently disquisitions on irrelevant topics (like wig-wearing or cosmetics), with strong overtones of homosexuality (between the men) and undefinable relationships between each man and the woman.The miasma into which conventional scholarship has fallen, resorting to an internally inconsistent, often non-sensical or contradictory, narrative, betrays that all conventional critics suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the sonnets are about. Such basic agreement on such manifestly erroneous premises within the academic community can only be possible if, as Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" described the phenomenon, all scholars are operating from a fundamentally flawed paradigm-what he calls a "paradigm shift" is the only solution to such a conundrum.Hidden in Plain Sight reveals the true meaning and context of the entire sonnet series to be profoundly political, that of the succession to Elizabeth and the fortunes of the Earl of Southampton who the sonnets reveal had a claim to the throne. With this paradigm shift, the Sonnets becomes, after 400 years, intelligible, as line after line in sonnet after sonnet can now be read as parts of a consistent, reality-based narrative. The insights in Hidden in Plain Sight are based on the pioneering research and discoveries of dedicated researcher Hank Whittemore, who deserves the credit for realizing, 400 years after the original publication of the Sonnets what the sonnets are about, the results of which he has published in several volumes, most notably "The Monument" (2005). The current volume adds original material and interpretations of many sonnets, and additional contemporary evidence supporting Whittemore's ground-breaking new paradigm, but it also presents the entire case for that paradigm in a forensic manner, working from the most easily deciphered clues as to the real story progressively down to deeper and deeper levels of meaning, making the case for the new parameter much easier to follow and comprehend.While a majority of conventional critics agree that Sonnet 107 refers to the accession of James I in April of 1603, and to the almost immediate release of Southampton from the Tower of London, not one draws the required conclusion that there must therefore be a sonnet documenting when Southampton first entered the Tower. Whittemore found it (Sonnet 27), thereby establishing the intervening sonnets as written while Southampton was under arrest, making sonnets 27-126 "prison sonnets." With that huge shift as a key, a multitude of references in these sonnets at last became clear.The other required paradigm shift is to realize that the traditional candidate to be "Shakespeare", Shakspere (his usual spelling of his own name) of Stratford wasn't, and couldn't have been, the author, and that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was "Shakespeare." The Sonnets contain a multitude of passages that reveal that the author of the Sonnets HAD to be Oxford, and also many that prove that Shakspere of Stratford COULDN'T have been the author-and therefore couldn't have been Shakespeare. Read Hidden in Plain Sight to finally understand these most exquisite poems for the first time.