Hamilton, a manuscript dealer and collector, embarks upon an old-fashioned excursion into ``literary detectivism'' in his latest book. Hamilton uses his experience with penmanship and documents to glean biographical ``discoveries'' (Shakespeare was a lawyer; he was murdered by his daughter Judith and her husband Thomas Quincy; he served as secretary or assistant to Francis Bacon and may have written Bacon's Essays ; etc.). These speculations rest unsteadily upon dangerous and ill-supported assumptions; Hamilton never footnotes, and his reading relies overmuch on obscure and outdated criticism. There are numerous, interesting illustrations, but the captions sometimes misrepresent the picture and are infected with the same sloppy scholarship which damages the text.