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the program. Hello Henry James said of Shakespeare the facts of Stratford do not square with the plays of genius. Charles Dickens said,

It's a great comfort that so little is known concerning the poet. The life of William Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day unless something should turn up.

The mystery may have been a pledge to Dickens but for forges, conspiracy theorists and Shakespeare and scholars, it is tantalizing and has exercised

some fine and some frankly cranky minds for centuries.

Those who dismiss him, as merely the lowborn son of an illiterate craftsman with a meager education say,

how was it that he was able to write with such skill in her edition?

And others say, how did a provincial man manage to become so attuned to the politics of kings the ways of aristocrats

and how do we know that the plays that we have are the right plays written by the right

man and published in the form they were written. With me to negotiate the maze

that's grown up around William Shakespeare is Catherine

Duncan Jones, Professor of English at Somerville College, Oxford, and author of a forthcoming

biography of Shakespeare called Ungentle Shakespeare.

Also with us is John Sutherland, Lord Northgrove Professor of Modern English at University College London

and the textual scholar Graciopolo lecture in English at the University of Reading.

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