Richard Baker’s companion volume to British Music Hall takes us on a grand tour of variety theatres and stars from the 1920s up to the 1960s, when they finally succumbed to the mass appeal of television.  A wonderfully nostalgic book, about which Roy Hudd OBE writes: “Richard’s research is thorough, immaculate and painstaking, but never, ever boring.  He, like the folk from the exciting, highly coloured world he writes about, makes facts fun.  His love for his subject comes through on every page.”

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Without doubt, the most entertaining, best written and superbly illustrated single volume available on British music hall.  During the three decades prior to the First World War, Marie Lloyd, Harry Lauder, Dan Leno, Little Tich, Ada Reeve, Vesta Tilley, G.H. Elliott, George Robey and many more great entertainers ruled the stages of Great Britain’s Hippodromes and Empires.  Richard brings them all to life again in this glorious book.

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Instead, the most credible candidate is Sir Henry Neville, who certainly did have all the necessary qualifications. A colourful Renaissance man educated at Merton College, Oxford, Neville’s life experience precisely matches that revealed in the plays.

Casson and Rubinstein take us on a breath-taking journey of discovery through the development of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, compellingly drawing close parallels between the works and events in Neville’s life. They reveal how Neville’s annotated library books, manuscripts, notebooks and letters show he was the hidden author, who survived dangerous political times by keeping his authorship secret. The book contains a great deal of remarkable new evidence, expertly presented, that will challenge anyone’s ideas about who really wrote the Shakespeare plays.

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The Only Way Is Essex

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