Book excerpt: 'The Shakespeare Controversy', otherwise known as 'Who Wrote Shakespeare?', has been a literary problem for generations. Countless attempts have been made to show that someone other than Shakespeare, or some group of people, wrote the Plays and The Sonnets. Peck's method of solving this problem was to look for cipher (secret writing) that might reveal the real author. Rather than searching the thousands of lines of The Plays and The Sonnets for ciphers, he singled out the odd original epitaph on Shakespeare's tombstone as a possible source of a concealed message. The peculiarities of the inscription had coaxed others before him to grapple with its strange context. In this exciting book, the author has demonstrated the importance of mathematical probability in support of ciphers. The math is simplified by interesting explanations. With the ciphers, he then answers the question of authorship while tying Sir Francis Bacon to the Tudor family.