And he freelanced, taking a hand in plays that now bear others' names or no name at all. In the stretch run of his career, he teamed with John Fletcher for his last plays. His coworkers, friends, and fellow writers remembered and valued him.
As Shapiro gently insists, this constant, vigorous collaboration, just by itself, makes it vanishingly, crushingly unlikely that anything like the conspiracy, or misprision, or switcheroo, invoked in the supposed "controversy" ever happened.
Shakespeare is not a particularly mysterious figure. It's amazing, at four centuries' remove, that we have as much trace of him as we do, more, possibly, than of any other person of his era who did not hold public office. Of course, and again of course, there's much we'd like to know. His vast achievement fascinates. Like almost everyone else who writes about him, who reads him, who sees his plays, I, too, want to know more.