There is ample evidence to link the London playwright back to the Stratford lad. We know that he bought the second-best house in Stratford, swung a spurious coat of arms for his father and was a canny businessman. Only those who can’t bring themselves to believe that a low-bred semi-literate could have mastered courtly language go for the Elizabethan nob theory of authorship. “Like so many English questions,” Bate comments, “it all comes down to class,” obsessively pursued in a lot of “fat, bad, sad books”.But the Stratford man was far from a low-bred semi-literate. As Bate points out, it would be easier for an actor like Shakespeare – who played at court – to depict that world than it would be for a toff like the Earl of Oxford to pick up the argot of the taverns. In any case, chronological problems with the Oxford theory involve the Earl having written some of the plays after he was dead – a kind of immortality at which even the most grovelling of Bardolators might baulk.

The enigma is why anyone should have thought that his identity was a mystery in the first place Nobody did, in fact, for 200 years after his death. Shakespeare is a riddle rather in the sense that crop circles are to those who haven’t encountered a bunch of boisterous young farmers, or as UFOs are to those who don’t work at top-secret military bases in the Nevada desert.Seeing the man Shakespeare as a shadowy figure fits well enough with seeing his plays as meaning all things to all readers. If this protean drama seems to have no solid core of identity, projecting itself with equal imaginative ease into the mind of a Milanese magician and a depressed young Dane, it seems fitting that its author should be so elusively low- profiled.In fact, as Bate remarks, we know more about the man Shakespeare than we do about most of his fellow dramatists. Delia Bacon, who not surprisingly promoted the Bacon-as-Shakespeare hypothesis, ended her days in a small private asylum, appropriately located in the Forest of Arden.There is indeed an enigma about Shakespeare, as Jonathan Bate points out in this splendidly readable book. The Genius of Shakespeare

by Jonathan Bate
Picador, pounds 20There have been many solutions to the riddle of Shakespeare’s identity. He was Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, the sixth Earl of Derby, the third Earl of Southampton, Sir Walter Raleigh, a butcher’s son, Queen Elizabeth I.

Shakespeare was a lawyer, an actor, a sailor, a schoolmaster, a high-placed courtier, a callous husband, a closet Catholic, a boy-lover. His knowledge of Italy suggests to some that he was Italian, even though in Two Gentlemen of Verona he seems to think you can get from Verona to Milan by sea.One advocate of the theory that he was the Earl of Oxford was an Edwardian schoolmaster named J Thomas Looney, who proudly refused his publisher’s desperate plea for him to adopt a pseudonym. Sue Anderson, from the Council of Mortgage Lenders, says: “We should be asking why the take-up of such cover is so low and how we can tackle this. There is a view that the state doesn’t cover enough.”Despite the lower prices, whether more mortgage holders will adopt the new schemes available from the private sector or risk surviving without one, remains to be seen.. Royal Bank of Scotland offers four years of free cover against unemployment. Full insurance against accident and sickness is also free for three months, and mortgage holders are not forced to continue the scheme when that free period runs out.After four years, the charge is pounds 6.03 per pounds 100 for full cover, and pounds 2.84 per pounds 100 to protect against unemployment only.With only one third of new borrowers taking out insurance on their mortgage and one fifth of mortgage borrowers using the policy, many feel not enough is available for mortgage borrowers. The scheme also allows borrowers to insure additional payments, such as service charges or council tax, in blocks of pounds 50.

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