Destro is an actor, director and Kennedy Center award-winning playwright. Destro’s first novel, which has received praise from critics, was shortlisted in the Flash 500 Novel Opening Competition. Jacobi is best remembered for starring roles in I, Claudius, Gladiator and Last Tango in Halifax.

Released by Contempo Publishing, the book is historical fiction, an Elizabethan murder mystery whose solving just happens to reveal the true identity of William Shakespeare. Full of mystery and humor, it touches on the powerful love of fathers, the perils of the plague, an executed printer, a kidnapped actor, pilfering pirates, and the mysterious life and tragic death of the Bard of Avon. Jacobi calls the novel “excitingly powerful and a joy to read.”

Encouraged by fellow actors Mark Rylance and Michael York, Destro has spent more than 20 years researching the question of who really wrote using the pen-name of William Shakespeare, which has also been asked by fellow-doubters from Mark Twain and Walt Whitman to Helen Keller and Anne Rice to Orson Welles and Sigmund Freud. Knowing that Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Stevens, Powell, and Blackmun disbelieved the traditional attribution to the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, Destro personally encouraged Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to join the skeptics. He has lectured on the topic at places like Chautauqua Institution, where he taught a course on the subject, Harvard University, the Edinburgh Skeptics Society, and even in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he stages plays.

Having received his theatre training as a youth in Jamestown and Fredonia, he then moved on to Los Angeles, New York and London, where he founded the Oxford Shakespeare Company, which produces the Bard’s works in their historic settings, such as Hamlet in Elsinore, Denmark, Macbeth in Birnam Wood, Scotland, and The Merchant of Venice in Belmont, Venice.

Ron Destro and Derek Jacobi teaching a workshop.

Destro, also author of The Shakespeare Masterclasses and the play Hiroshima, for which Yoko Ono wrote the original score, currently teaches at the University of North Florida.

Information about the book and audiobook can be found at rondestro.com and at Amazon or other online booksellers.