"Things are not what they seem to be. Everywhere around us wheels are turning, but we do not see them, or hear them grinding... Until just before they run us down."

This is the story of William Shakespeare, the great Elizabethan playwright.

No, not that grain dealer in Stratford-upon-Avon. He could barely write his own name. 

The other one - the one that just appeared from nowhere in the last decade of the 16th Century. The one widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. England's national poet. The Bard of Avon. The one credited with over forty plays and poems. And who mysteriously disappeared twenty years later.

The man who invented him spent his life being other people. He had many names and disguises. He was recruited in childhood to take part in a religious war that raged across Europe. He was of noble birth, although nameless. A patriot and yet a traitor. A poet and a painter, but also a liar and a spy. 

And the irony of it is that the one thing he was not.... was English.