‘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.
Happily for us, Rodney Bolt takes nothing seriously, except what it is that history means. His starting point is Mark Twain’s essay on Shakespeare. Writing a biography of Shakespeare, Twain thought, was similar to reconstructing a brontosaurus. The avid palaeontologist has ‘nine bones and 600 barrels of plaster of Paris’. Rather than adding yet another bucket of muck to this misbegotten animal, Bolt skips the might-have-beens, the perhapses, and the almost certainlys. Taking them all for granted, he starts with the premise that Marlowe was not killed in a brawl at a Deptford tavern, but instead fled to the Continent and wrote the body of plays we know as ‘Shakespeare’.
‘What if’ history is very popular at the moment, but most of it is written to support an already held thesis.
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