Mr. Bill Continues to Get No Respect

A book to be published this month by a leading academic publisher, with a foreword by Mark Rylance, the artistic director of the Globe, will claim that the greatest plays and verse in the English language were written by Sir Henry Neville (c1562-1615). He was a leading Elizabethan figure, though a minor character in today's history books.

Whether Shakespeare's Stratford-on-Avon birthplace will be consigned to a tourists' backwater, and the vast publishing industry devoted to him condemned to pulp, remains to be seen, but the authors, the academics Brenda James and William Rubinstein, are in no doubt that they have finally uncovered the “real Bard”. They say that Neville, a rotund man nicknamed “Falstaff” by close friends, had the virtue – unlike Shakespeare, who lacked an appropriate background – of being an educated man of culture, a courtier and a well-travelled linguist.

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