Powell firmly believed that William Shakspere of Stratford on Avon was not the writer of the plays and poems of Shakespeare. He appears on an episode of Frontline, "The Shakespeare Mystery," 19 April 1989, where he said, "My astonishment was to discover that these were the works of someone who'd 'been in the kitchen.' They are written by someone who has lived the life, who has been part of a life of politics and power, who knows what people feel when they are near to the centre of power. Near to the heat of the kitchen." He called the traditional biography a "Stratfordian fantasy." On the subject of Shakspere's will he says, "That is a will in which this great spirit, this man of immense learning and vision, not only bequeathed no books..." but he also neglected to bequeath "the most valuable thing he had to bequeath, the remaining manuscripts of his plays which were eventually to be published seven years after his death." He calls the Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare in the First Folio, and the monument to Shakespeare in Stratford "a mask," "a fix," "a spoof" to conceal the identity of the true author.