John Leslie Hotson was a scholar of Elizabethan literary puzzles.
10 Facts About Leslie Hotson
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Leslie Hotson was born at Delhi, Ontario, on 16 August 1897.
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Leslie Hotson went on to hold a number of academic posts.
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Leslie Hotson had a number of notable successes, but not all of his "decodings" have been accepted by other scholars.
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Leslie Hotson discovered the identity of Ingram Frizer, the killer of Christopher Marlowe, and reconstructed the shape of the original Shakespearean theater.
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Leslie Hotson unearthed the letters that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to his divorced wife Harriet; produced evidence of Shakespeare's father as a wool dealer; illuminated Shakespeare's early years in Stratford-upon-Avon; and identified John Day as the killer of Henry Porter, a minor Elizabethan dramatist.
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Leslie Hotson claimed to have identified one Nicholas Colfox as the murderer of Thomas of Woodstock by "decoding" Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale.
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Leslie Hotson claimed to have identified Mr W H, the person to whom Shakespeare's sonnets were dedicated, as a William Hatcliffe of Lincolnshire.
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Leslie Hotson later argued that a miniature colour portrait by Nicholas Hilliard depicted Shakespeare as a young man.
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Leslie Hotson died on 16 November 1992 in North Branford, Connecticut.