You may not be persuaded by the doubters and their often bizarre conjecture and convoluted reasoning, but producer Michael Rubbo, who wrote and narrates the program, keeps the controversy light and entertaining.
Why would sensible people believe that anyone other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays of William Shakespeare? Good question.
The evidence on Shakespeare's side is very strong, and his partisans, an overwhelming percentage of the scholarly community, point out that the only reason his authorship isn't irrefutable is that the Elizabethans were so casual in their record-keeping. Especially when it came to actors and playwrights, whom authorities regarded as riffraff.
There are many gaps in our knowledge of Shakespeare's life. The sparseness of the documented facts has left a vacuum that invites speculation from the plausible to the preposterous.
Disbelievers make Shakespeare's origins the heart of their case, and there is an element of snobbery in their suspicions. How, they demand, could a man from provincial Stratford with a rudimentary education and a limited social milieu command the knowledge of everything from court life and faraway lands to mythology and Latin and Greek that is obvious in his plays?
Just about everyone but Shirley MacLaine in a previous incarnation has been advanced as an alternative author of the plays. "Much Ado About Something" trots out the usual suspects - Sir Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Derby - and lands squarely on Christopher Marlowe as the most credible.
With works under his own name such as Dr. Faustus, Edward II and The Jew of Malta, Marlowe was the only playwright of Shakespeare's era remotely in the same league as the Bard.
