The Daily Telegraph reports on a newly released book, Enter Pursued by a Bear, by Dr. John Casson, an independent researcher and psychotherapist who claims to have unearthed Shakespeare’s “first published poem, the Phaeton sonnet, his first comedy, Mucedorus, and his first tragedies, Locrine and Arden of Faversham. He also explores the plays Thomas of Woodstock and A Yorkshire Tragedy, and claims to prove that a ‘lost play’ called Cardenio is a genuine work by Shakespeare and fellow playwright John Fletcher.”

Actually, most of these works have been attributed to Shakespeare long before this, and Cardenio was first reported as a Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration in, oh, 1653. As for Dr. Casson’s proving the attributions, there’s one problem (at least). It seems that Dr. Casson’s arguments are, in part, an extension of Brenda James’ theory in Henry Neville and the Shakespeare Code that Sir Henry Neville was the “real” Shakespeare.

So you have to swallow that first.