About the Author Helen Heightsman Gordon, Ed. D., has been a professor of English at Bakersfield College in Bakersfield, California, and an editor in the College of Engineering at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She holds a Master’s Degree in English Literature and a doctorate in higher education administration. Now free from the demands of the classroom, she spends her time in researching, writing, and traveling. About Shakespeare's Secret Love Story Professor Gordon has studied the Shakespeare authorship question for the past fifteen years, concluding that our traditional assumptions about the life of the author leave too many questions and rely too much on pure supposition.  The man from Stratford had a similar name, but he never spelled it “Shakespeare” as the author did.  He owned no books or manuscripts, and he did not teach his daughters to read.     After reading vast numbers of books and articles about other proposed candidates -- including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley, Edward Manners, and even the Countess of Pembroke, Mary Sidney -- Dr. Gordon has concluded that the most likely candidate is Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.  The most credible theory, she believes, is that of Charlton and Dorothy Ogburn, two Shakespearean scholars who wrote an impressive biography of Edward De Vere, This Star of England.  Their work was continued by their son, Charlton Ogburn, Jr., in his groundbreaking work, The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality. The Ogburns and other Oxfordians have identified many parallels between events in the life of the Earl of Oxford and the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Gordon builds upon their work by finding clues in the sonnets that the author was deeply in love with the queen, that they had a love child who became the Third Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, and that he had a “Dark Lady” mistress and several rivals for her affection and the Queen’s favors. Oxford used a pen name to hide his identity and protect the privacy of his loved ones.    Edward De Vere was a Freemason and a Rosicrucian, whose secret codes he used in his Dedication to the Sonnets.  Read Dr. Gordon's solution to the puzzle of the Dedication in the second edition of The Secret Love Story in Shakespeare's Sonnets [Xlibris, 2008].