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Foreword
Cold Case
This book investigates a famous murder that took place in 1594. The victim was a man who most scholars believe to have been Shakespeare’s patron. A cold case if ever there was one, nearly 420 years old and counting at the date of this writing. As a Shakespeare teacher, I began examining the mystery more than fifteen years ago, inspired by the realization that there were quite a few extant documents on the case, documents that were written in the 1590s, which no one at the time or since then had ever put together. It would have been impossible, though, for anyone, no matter how famous and powerful or how curious, to compile these documents as evidence at the time of the murder because the documents were private—private letters of nobles, state papers, notes between spies, and so forth. Moreover, no one since that time has pieced these documents together because no one appears to have known that such documents are indeed extant and that they do indeed make coherent sense when studied collectively.