As a youth Edward took the Oxford Higher School Certificate exam with major subjects English and History (4 papers each) and minors, Economics, French and Latin (1 paper each). He read voraciously and this included many of Shakespeare's plays, his sonnets, and his long narrative poems. The results were gratifying. 4 As in English, 4 As in History, A in Economics. His school Principal told him he was 6th in England in English. From there he won a scholarship to Oxford where he took a degree in English (and read more Shakespeare) He had studied in particular Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and some of the comedies, and read most of the other plays plus books by critics and scholars. Some writers claimed Francis Bacon was Shakespeare and others that it was Christopher Marlowe. He read enough of each to decide in his own mind that their claims were unfounded. If Shakespeare wasn't Will from Stratford Upon Avon he certainly wasn't, Edward thought, one of them. But now, back to the present, and after his fairly extensive reading of Stratfordians and Oxfordians, and renewing his acquaintance with the poems and plays, as someone who has spent most of his life conducting investigations including for the Supreme Court of Ontario and the Ontario Institute of Chartered Accountants, besides being a member of research committees or working sub-committees for the Ontario and Canadian Institutes of CAs..so having spent most of his life in researching and evaluating evidence while operating an international tax and auditing practice, he thought it might be helpful to examine and comment on the Shakespeare identity problem, as his investigative auditing experience in particular may give a somewhat different perspective.
