On the anniversary of his death, researchers – driven by a devotion to plays which have lasted centuries – are still finding, and deleting, works to credit to him
This week, I spent six hours watching Shakespeare plays: as much as four hours of which may not have been written by Shakespeare. The RSC is celebrating the reopening of its spectacularly renovated theatres in Stratford with productions of Cardenio, a previously unperformed work connected with their resident dramatist, and the latest revival of Macbeth, a boldly counter-intuitive choice for introducing a new venue, given the deep theatrical superstitions surrounding it.
Yet, as the RSC documentation surrounding the production commendably makes clear, Cardenio may contain very little by Shakespeare. And new techniques, the literary equivalent of genetic analysis pioneered in pathology, have revealed the hand of fellow dramatist Thomas Middleton in Macbeth.
Saturday marks the 395th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death and, by convention though not historical record, the 447th anniversary of his birth – so to what extent does it matter who wrote the plays of Shakespeare?
This debate will be reignited in September, with the release of the big budget Hollywood movie Anonymous, which credits the core work of the RSC to the Earl of Oxford (played by Rhys Ifans), one of the many alternative authors proposed through history by those who refuse to accept that a glover's son and jobbing actor from the English Midlands could have turned out to be the most sublime dramatic poet in theatrical history.
In his brilliant recent book Contested Will, the American scholar James Shapiro sardonically demolishes all of those (including Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud and Helen Keller) who have insisted that the Shakespeare plays were written by someone else: whether Oxford, Sir Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth I.
But, crucially, Shapiro then endorses a different authorship dispute: the gathering acceptance in academies that William Shakespeare, although an actual and prolific dramatist, worked in a theatre in which collaboration and adaptation was standard and constant. So, while his plays weren't written by Bacon or Oxford or Marlowe, they were co-written with, or rewritten by, John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, George Wilkes and many others.
The increasingly forensic rigour of historical and literary study has resulted, in recent years, in Shakespeare's output fattening or dieting in different areas of the body of work. The 2005 second edition of The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works admitted to the canon The Reign of King Edward III and Sir Thomas More, although the editors acknowledged that only three scenes of the former and one of the latter can be securely attributed to the Stratford man.
And one of the hands that gave soon also took away from our national poet: one of the editors, Professor Gary Taylor, included in his subsequent edition of The Plays of Thomas Middleton three entries that would surprise products of the traditional British educational system: Macbeth, Timon of Athens and Measure for Measure.
So a battle of subtraction and addition goes on. And we end up with the bizarre spectacle of one of our greatest Shakespearean actors, Sir Derek Jacobi, touring the world in one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, King Lear, while confiding in interviews that he is no longer sure who wrote the play. (Jacobi is in the cast of Anonymous, as is another leading Will-doubter, Mark Rylance). Yet, simultaneously, we receive the Cardenio being premiered next week billed as "Shakespeare's 'lost play' reimagined", which derives from a missing 1612 tragedy by Shakespeare and Fletcher. It was subsequently revised by many other authors, including, in the 18th century, Lewis Theobald, who turned the material into a play called Double Falsehood.
The question now, though, is how far this revisionism should go. While no one is arguing that one of our flagship theatre companies should be renamed The Royal Shakespeare Middleton Fletcher and Others Company, Shapiro and Taylor have suggested that it may be sensible to be clearer on posters and programmes about who wrote what. For example, productions of Macbeth still routinely give sole authorship to Shakespeare – although this can be justified in the case of the new RSC production by the fact that the director, Michael Boyd, has cut most of the stuff now generally credited to Middleton.
There's a paradox in this theatrical precision happening when the question of ownership and copyright in contemporary work is increasingly compromised by mashing, file-sharing and free republication. But the fight over Shakespeare is driven, for both bitterly opposed sides, by devotion to the extraordinary plays that have survived for 500 years. As with any great artist, we dream of a lost masterpiece turning up and, while Cardenio isn't it, there's a pleasure in thinking that we might glimpse the flash of his quill in places. Yet, while we hope to end up with more plays by Shakespeare, the pressure of forensic scholarship is towards finishing with fewer.
The mystery continues because it seems both intellectually and logistically impossible that a single mind was behind all these pieces. We will never have "bliss in proof", as it was put by Shakespeare – or possibly someone else.