Percy Allen was the most brilliant of that intrepid band of independent-minded scholars and researchers who suddenly appeared in England in the 1920s and 1930s to challenge the entrenched dogma held by professors of English that the uneducated and probably illiterate William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon was the great playwright and poet William Shakespeare. Analyzing the evidence free from the restraints of authority and conventional wisdom, Allen and his like-minded colleagues showed that the principal author of Shakespeare’s works could not possibly have been anyone other than Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford and the Lord Great Chamberlain of England. This seven-volume collection of Percy Allen’s works includes nine books, five booklets or pamphlets and 120 shorter works on the Shakespeare Authorship question that showcase his formidable research and logical and lucid eloquence that shocked the staid academic Stratfordian world, all introduced and edited by Shakespeare scholar James Warren. In Volume 5 Allen draws on his intimate knowledge of French history and culture to show how deeply Shakespeare—Edward de Vere—was influenced by political and religious developments in France when writing many of his best-known plays, including Twelfth Night and King Lear .