Stott quotes Boswell’s enthusiasm for Garrick’s acting by saying that he made “particles of vivacity” dance within him “by a sort of contagion.” The same compliment is owed to Stott for the manner in which he tells this eccentric story.

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Stuart Kells’s search for Shakespeare’s lost library takes him down highways and byways, which will be fascinating to those obsessed with books and manuscripts but full of unintended comedy for everyone else. He tells us early on that “among Shakespearean researchers (very, very broadly defined), more than one died from arsenic poisoning or narcotics; more than one perished in prison. There are serious whispers of a Shakespeare Curse.” It would be truly hard to come up with a more expansive definition of “researcher.” While sifting through details of how in the course of history someone passed on an obscure quarto edition to someone else, it is hard not to think that the curse is on the reader.

There is an enduring paradox in the centuries of bibliographical obsession with the work of a man who didn’t give a hoot about books. We owe much to the heroism of John Heminges and Henry Condell for collecting Shakespeare’s work, and to Edmond Malone and generations of others for carefully editing it. But it is exhausting dealing with the higher priests of Shakespearean arcana, who believe that because they are enthralled by book bindings, frontispieces and vellum, then Shakespeare must have been too. In the world of these high priests, nothing can be what it seems. Heminges and Condell can’t have compiled the First Folio simply because the historical record says they did; Ben Jonson can’t have approved of his contemporary because he wrote just that; and finally, of course, we tumble into the monumental blindness to reality of the authorship question. Shakespeare cannot be Shakespeare, because he was.

Kells discounts the authorship nonsense efficiently, but not before giving it an unjustified amount of airtime. Two acquaintances in Melbourne, where he lives, were Shakespeare skeptics, an academic choice that Kells is keen to portray as one of living-on-the-edge excitement. To complement their literary risk-taking, we are told of the dangers of their local neighborhood: “Bushfires regularly threatened the district. On the main road, reckless kangaroos jumped precipitously into the path of cars.” Somehow his friends survived the perils of kamikaze marsupials to become passionate supporters of the authorship case of Sir Henry Neville.

Having debunked most of the better-known rival claimants, Kells settles on his own theory, which is that Shakespeare was only a dramatic adapter of previous texts, and a clumsy one at that. Most of the quality in the plays comes from the editing process. In Kells’s surmise this was done by John Florio and Ben Jonson, who “did what editors do today: tighten syntax, enrich vocabulary, improve structure and flow, enhance rhythm and rhyme, and beautify the whole.” It’s hard to imagine that he has ever looked at the First Folio. One of the principal proofs for his argument is that he knows of two Jacobean contemporaries who bought both Jonson’s “Workes” of 1616 and the First Folio of 1623, suggesting that the two volumes were seen at the time as “part of a single endeavor.” This defies belief. A book so determined to chase its own tail in its pointlessness has every right to become a cult classic.

Everyone, as has been frequently commented, makes a Shakespeare in his or her own image. His comprehensive universality, and his ability to match each and every one of us and become uniquely ours, is another of the modes by which he survives — fresh, pertinent and alive. The Shakespearean umbrella is broad and embracing, and it can happily cover egomaniacal actor-managers, and even kangaroo-endangered bibliographers.