This book, which is a collection of 20 essays on events and people from history, first seriously caught my attention when I started reading the piece about Shakespeare. Of course, I’d always had the nagging sense, on the fringes of my mind, that some people questioned Shakespeare’s authorship. Eccentrics and attention-seekers, I’d always assumed. And here, I saw that they refer to themselves, rather grandly, as ‘anti-Stratfordians’.

So, why do these people think that the man named William Shakespeare, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1516, and who died there in 1564, did not write the plays and the sonnets, then? Well, say the anti-Stratfordians, Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein, lots of things don’t add up. For a start, he grew up in a provincial town, in an illiterate family. He left school at the age of 12. Until then, he couldn’t have met more than a few educated people. Neither his parents nor his children could read, let alone read a complex work of literature.

But anyway, let’s just assume that this man was brilliant, that he became an actor, that he spent time in London, that he educated himself to a high degree, and that he managed to write drama and verse with far more power and subtlety than anybody before or since. That’s just about possible, right? In contemporary terms, it’s as if somebody from a council estate made 30 movies that put Spielberg to shame, as well as being Poet Laureate and winning the Nobel Prize for literature. But still possible, just.

So why, then, ask James and Rubinstein, did Shakespeare not have a grand funeral when he died? Why, in fact, is there no record of his funeral at all? Why, ‘after a quarter-century allegedly at the centre of one of the world’s greatest cultural renaissances in London’ did he slink back to Stratford for the last five years of his life? And what happened to his library? He must have had a library — so where were all the books? Again, there is no record of any library or any books.

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