"Was Shakespeare a fraud?" asks the poster for the new Hollywood blockbuster Secret, which counsels the most famed lines in literary history come from the quill pen of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Today, the devere name lives on, attached to the planet's largest independent investment advisers "services Edward, whose debts were legendary and troublesome, may well have benefited from as one of the richest men of his time.

Edward devere was born in April 1550, the successor to one of England's oldest hereditary titles, the office of Lord Great Chamberlain and giant estates, especially in Essex.

After his father's death, the young de Vere was brought up in the home of Sir William Cecil, one of Queen Elizabeth I's nearest advisers, a giant of the filthy, deadly world of Tudor politics and founding figure behind a political dynasty which produced 2 Brit Prime Ministers.

While he got the finest education in the Cecil household, Edward wasn't to become a political big player himself, it was rather with the humanities that he really made his mark in society.

The life of a Tudor noble was one of high status but also high risk. At only 17 Edward finished his first man, an unlucky Cecil servant who got in the way during fencing practice. Before the age of 21, when he took his father's seat in the House of Lords, he'd served in the military in Scotland and was known as a talented jouster.

Edward drifted in and out of favor at court, never truly hitting the heights but also staying well away from the executioner's axe. He travelled, virtually losing his life when his ship was taken by pirates, and let a fortune run through his fingers.

Only a few of that cash was wasted though, and it's as a patron of writers, actors and composers, that Edward de Vere is best recollected. Thirty three books were dedicated to him as Earl of Oxford and 2 firms of actors, one of them boys, bore his name, as well as a troupe of musicians.

He released his own poetry and literary scholar George Puttenham rated his comedies as the very best of their kind from the Elizabethan court.

Nonetheless Elizabethan courtier poets "regardless of how learned "don't usually trouble Hollywood directors of the prominence of Autonomy Day's Roland Emmerich. J Thomas Looney (his publishers pleaded in vain for him to utilize a nom de plume) is the reason why Edward devere is on our radars today.

The assumption that William Shakespeare "an easy actor from a little provincial town "couldn't be the person behind 37 plays of phenomenal range, style and skill had been around since the mid-19th Century. How could so little be known about this genius, scholars asked, and even mocked the 'illiterate scrawl ' of his known signatures.

More than 70 names have been put up as alternate Shakespeares. The most enduring have been brilliant polymath Francis Bacon, classy playwright and the sixth Earl of Derby, fast living dramatist Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere.

Looney's Shakespeare identified in Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was published in 1920 and opened a new chapter in Shakespearean conspiracy ideas which remains interesting to this day.