Long years that I spent in Soviet Eastern Europe offered a clue. There too, writers studiously lay low, borrowed plot material and avoided any mention of contemporary politics. And there the reason was obvious: they were resistance writers. Beneath apparently innocent literature, dedicated authors concealed a subversive subtext, attacking an oppressive regime. I discovered a connection between their background and Shakespeare's. Revisionist historians now compare Elizabethan England to a Soviet-style tyranny. I experimented, approaching England's 16th century writers with the mindset of a Soviet dissident, alert for covert allusions. A common resistance code gradually emerged: and guarded allusions made it clear that the acknowledged master of this elaborately subversive art form was Shakespeare himself.

This book revisits the detective trail which lead to this apparently sensational conclusion. It unearths a code that opens the door to a long-lost aspect of Shakespeare's genius, retrieving his own analysis of his times, carefully hidden and preserved for posterity.