I always picture some future scholar declaring that the song “Yesterday” couldn’t have been written by this McCartney fellow, this 22-year-old from a backwater like Liverpool who couldn’t even read music.

Heck, intact copies of printed theatrical texts from that time are rare. It took Jonson (and his ego) to produce a big fat Folio, before plays were really considered Works to be shelved in a library; and it took post-Restoration actor-managers to start collecting playtexts.

No, there isn’t, since there are very few ms copies of any Renaissance plays, and almost no autograph copies.

I guess what irritated me most in the summary of Rubenstein’s argument was the claim that Shakespeare didn’t speak French. In the first place, it’s impossible for anyone to know this; in the second, the scenes in H5 hardly require an extensive knowledge of French, not least because they’re supposed to be intelligible to an English audience. In 1H4 a character speaks and sings in Welsh; could Neville do that?

I think the parallels between intelligent design and anti-Stratfordianism are very close, down to the remarkably respectful treatment both groups get in the popular press. For scholars working in the field, it seems a solution in search of a problem, which is one reason why a more precise defence of Shakespearean authorship isn’t always made.

But what struck me was the lame arguments of the Shakespear-ites. It was mostly “pshaw, aw c’mon, I mean really.” When countering the DVs claims about all the connections in the plays to De Vere’s real-life experience that S. didn’t have, well, they sounded like Creationists today. The Creationists, when confronted with anything tricky in the geologic record pull out the same explanation everytime – The Flood. There was The Flood, you see, and that would’ve done such and such… Well, when confronted with the familiarity, knowledge and experience the author of the plays “must have” had (so say the DVs), the Shakespear-ites said, “Genius.” No impressive school record – geniuses often don’t show themselves in school. Experience in court affairs – well, his Genius was such that… Knowledge of shipwrecks – Genius. Foreign language and affairs – Genius, etc, etc.

That and the elitist claim. Since then I have read more people who characterize the entire realm of Shakespeare doubters as “ELITISTS” According to them Shakespear must’ve written Shakespeare because it is the anti-elitist choice, therefore, automatically right.

I don’t really care who or how the plays were written, but I have also read some much better arguments online for Shakespear writing Shakespeare and think that Harper’s definitely did a poor job of picking people to support that side of the story.

Perhaps, like Thomas Campion and Francis Bacon, Shakespeare was illiterate.

The answer to the question in 40 is that there is a genuine puzzle as to why no manuscript copies of any of Shakespeare’s works exist.

(What about Hand D? Has consensus credited that to Shakespeare yet?)

Similarly, of course, I believe there is a single extant example of Christopher Marlowe’s handwriting. (I’ll happily be corrected if I’m wrong.) It’s not much of a puzzle, Daniel. Intact copies of Elizabethan theatrical manuscripts are very rare.

This really does bear a passing resemblance to the intelligent design debate; you can cherrypick evidence that sounds quite convincing if you want, but academics interested in serious scholarship—operating in their period, unlike Prof. Rubinstein—have studied and generally answered these questions. (I am not one of them, and I don’t claim to have read Honigmann and Brock’s Playhouse Wills, 1558-1642, but shakespeareauthorship.com is a useful resource for this sort of thing; 11 of the 14 playwrights, including Thomas Campion, whose wills Honigmann and Brock studied made no mention of books, which were generally lumped in with general household bequests of the period.)

As I said, I’m neither a historian nor a student of theatrical culture of the period; as an interested reader without a terrible amount of grounding in the period, I’m quite willing to accept the weak form of Daniel’s argument: the Shakespeare plays were more collaborative than simply slapping “by W.S.” on the front might indicate. (Two Noble Kinsmen and, if Hand D was Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More certainly suggest that script doctoring is not a twentieth century phenomenon, and the First Folio was printed from working copies that may well have been much revised.) But I don’t think my stance is particularly novel, either; certainly the current academic ideas about authorship (and ownership) in early modern manuscripts, if not theatrical culture, are as gloriously muddled as Daniel seems to want.

Baconians and Oxfordians are fruitcakes, I don’t know about the rest. William F Friedman, the greatest American cryptographer of WWII, was asked to assess the “Baconian cypher”, and contrived to extract the following message from Shakespeare’s texts:

“Theodore Roosevelt wrote these plays, but I, Shakespeare, stole them. Friedman can prove it by means of this cock-eyed cypher.”

Mark Rylance certainly takes the debate seriously, and he has been rumoured to put on the odd play or two.

what’s to stop him from buying and reading books on his own account?

aye, and having bought them, what’s to stop him leaving them in his will? The answer to the question in 40 is that there is a genuine puzzle as to why no manuscript copies of any of Shakespeare’s works exist. Although as I say, I think that the “Authorship Debate” is orthogonal to a much more interesting debate about authorship in general. Whatever the specific cuts and pastes £ made to the drafts of The Waste Land, there is a larger point that TS Eliot would never have written anything which remotely resembled TWL at all if he hadn’t been in the £ sphere of influence.

Well, no. The only history plays that deal with Plantagenet kings are King John and Richard II. Both are portrayed as incompetent and are ambivalent characters at best.

The remaining history plays deal with the Lancastrians, the Yorkists and the Tudors. If you wanted to stretch a point, you could say that the usurping Henry IV was a Plantagenet on his father’s side.

That doesn’t help the book’s argument, though. HENRY IV depicts its title character as a cold, paranoid man and a controlling father. Henry V is a paragon king, admittedly, but icily ambitious. Henry VI is incompetent.

The dynasty Shakespeare was most concerned to glorify was, of course, the Tudor.

“When Neville was imprisoned in the Tower for his part in Essex’s rebellion, the plays suddenly turn from being light to being sombre.”

That would be 1601, right? Well, Hamlet, certainly one of the gloomier plays, was probably performed first in 1600. Julius Caesar also likely predates the rebellion. Yes, the other great tragedies were written after, but so was Alls Well That Ends Well. So I don’t think this point really holds much water either.

And as for the alleged improbability of Shakespeare’s classical knowledge, it is actually entirely probable that someone of his status, at that time, would get at least a minimal grounding in the classics at school – and what’s to stop him from buying and reading books on his own account? Holinshed, Ovid (in translation) and Plutarch were not at all hard to get hold of…

Quite: I can’t think of too many working playwrights and directors who jump on the antiBillum bandwagon.

And, of course, Shakey was working with a knowledge of how certain things were shown on stage. He wasn’t making a version of ‘The Office’. If you watch/read ‘The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, my favourite play of the period, you’ll see those expectations sent up something rotten.