The play’s the thing | 21 August 2004

‘His name is protean. He begets doubles at every corner … On the wet morning of 27 November 1582, he is Shaxpere and [his prospective wife] is a Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagsper and she is a Hathaway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X, cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. Who else? The person who said (not for the first time) that the glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it.’ Thus Nabokov on the mystery of Shakespeare.

The mystery is not that we don’t know much about the man from Stratford, although the facts are barely enough to fill two or three typed pages. The mystery is that, from mediaeval times onwards, there is not any other author about whom such doubts of attribution cling. Yet with Shakespeare there are more than 80 candidates for ‘Shakespeare’ the playwright, of whom about four or five can be taken moderately seriously.