May I make a confession? And I realize that this may be regarded as a heresy by the members of my tribe, by which I mean those of us who were and always shall be nerdy English majors.

I don’t care who wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

I don’t care if they were written by Francis Bacon or Sir Walter Raleigh (or Francis Bacon with Sir Walter Raleigh) or Christopher Marlowe or Queen Elizabeth I. I don’t care if it turns out that they were written by the 20th-century playwright Christopher Fry, who, frustrated when the verse dramas he wrote fell out of fashion, time-traveled back to the Elizabethan age where he would be better appreciated. And I particularly don’t care if they were written by an aristocrat named Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, which is the contention of a new film called “Anonymous” that has raised hackles in academia.

Reiner Bajo/Columbia Pictures

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has registered its discontent with that movie, in a creative protest that involves covering up Shakespeare’s name on signs and pubs in Warwickshire County, where the so-called Shakespeare was supposedly born. And The New York Times has already published scholarly dismissals of “Anonymous” in both its Sunday magazine and on its Op-Ed page.

For the record, if pushed for a stand on this issue, I will say that I lean unimaginatively toward the orthodox version: William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare the glove maker’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon. (This is perhaps partly because, like many people, I have on occasion been the subject of small-time conspiracy-theory whispers, and they have always been preposterously off the mark. Truth may never be pure and simple, but it is usually less complicated than idle minds like to make it.)

Still, I am not about to wade into the cloudy waters of the Who-Was-Shakespeare debate, where I would surely drown as soon as I opened my mouth. That’s because I’ve never really paid the sort of attention I suppose I should have to arguments about Shakespeare’s identity. If someone were to come up with conclusive proof that his plays were the product of an underground cell of Carmelite nuns, I would be, for a moment at least, open-mouthed, awestruck and titillated. But nothing could change the way I already feel about my Will.

This declaration comes from a man who reads literary biographies the way other people read People magazine. I’ve immersed myself in far too many accounts of the nervous breakdowns, love affairs and petty rivalries of poets and novelists. (I am ashamed to say I am more familiar with Robert Lowell’s medical history than I am with his poetry.)

But it’s always been a relief to me that more isn’t known about Shakespeare’s life, that I haven’t had to carry the burden of firsthand accounts of squalid trysts, unpaid bills and drunken brawls into my readings of “Hamlet” and “King Lear.” Sure, I’ve dipped into various collage-style, conjectural histories of the Man and his Time as they’ve come along. But they don’t stay with me. I’ve devoted many, many more hours to reading criticism of the vast and ever-mutable plays and poetry of Shakespeare (or whoever he or she was), written by people who like me can’t get enough of figuring out and arguing about those words and what lies within them.

For me, Shakespeare is to his work sort of what, for others, God is to the Bible: an incredible creative intelligence subject to endless interpretations, none of which are necessarily wrong. I was raised in the church of Shakespeare. My grandfather was a university professor who taught the canon, and he read Charles and Mary Lamb’s “Tales From Shakespeare” to me as bedtime stories, before I had learned to read anything more sophisticated than Hot Stuff (“The Little Devil”) comic books. As I got older, my mother and I read Shakespeare aloud, sometimes an entire play in an afternoon. And ever since lines from the plays and sonnets have bobbed into my consciousness at the darnedest times, annotating events and people in my life in unexpected and enlightening ways.

Having grown up with Shakespeare, I have had the added privilege of seeing his characters grow up with me. Hamlet is a far deeper guy now than he was when I was 17 and both of us (in my mind) wore black turtlenecks and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. And though like J. Alfred Prufrock, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be, the Dane’s articulation of his deepest fears and self-disgust have provided rich comfort to me over the years, when I’ve experienced similar emotions.

I am lucky in that my relationship to Hamlet – and Cleopatra and Lear and Rosalind and Macbeth – isn’t limited to the page. As a theater critic, I see dozens of productions of Shakespeare in a single year. And no matter how good or bad or middling they are, I learn something new from every one. There will be at least one line that I’ll feel I’ve never heard before, as if it had been waiting for centuries for just this particular reading by this particular actor.

In his recently published memoir, “Luck and Circumstance,” the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg talks about the first time he went to watch his mother (the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald) in rehearsal for a play when he was a child: “I felt like I sometimes did in a library or a church, where the walls have been indented by feelings, feelings of intent, concentration, wishes, and maybe, sometimes, fear.” That’s as good a description as I know of the ineffable sacredness that some of us feel when we’re in theaters now.

And, in an odd way, it reflects how I feel whenever I read Shakespeare or see his works performed. Though I like to think that I have a deeply personal and individual relationship with the poet, I know that millions of other people have felt that way, too, for hundreds of years. And sometimes (when I’m in a mystical and moody frame of mind) I have the sense that I’m looking at Shakespeare through a layered nimbus of perceptions past and to come. This is especially true of live performances, where the dialogue seems to exist not just among the actors, or between the actors and the audience, but with so many interpretations that have come before.

Last summer, when I was in London, I attended a one-man show in which Simon Callow took us through a tour of Shakespeare’s life, with apposite quotations read resonantly along the way. This portrait was based in a lot of shaky presumptions presented as solid fact, for theatrical convenience, I suppose. Though I enjoyed hearing Mr. Callow speak the speech, the show didn’t do much for me. But then at intermission, I found myself talking to a buoyant American college student, who said shows like this were just the ticket for making Shakespeare intriguing to his friends, who often needed a personality (or Personality) to latch onto before they took up an artist of any kind.

That’s the culture we live in now, of course, in which people read the lives of celebrities the way their ancestors read novels. The narratives that grip the public imagination are usually “real life” narratives, which usually means gossip writ large and ultimately has surprisingly little to do with the accomplishments of those gossiped about. So maybe, just maybe, the movie “Anonymous” will make Shakespeare, whoever he is, sexy enough to cause young viewers to pick up and read the work of – oh, all right – de Vere or those cunning Carmelite nuns. And once entered with any seriousness, the world of Shakespeare becomes detached from baser considerations of who created it.

“Wouldn’t you like to have met Anton Chekhov?” a friend of mine, a wonderful fiction writer herself, often asks me. No, I wouldn’t have, particularly. The few times I’ve met literary idols of mine I’ve been – not disappointed – but slightly stunned by how little these flesh-and-blood individuals matched the work that had such a profound impact on me. I might like them or not. But they were one thing; and what they had written was something else altogether, much greater than they could every possibly be in their day-to-day existence with others.

For me, that’s the most profound miracle of great art: It is created by mortals and it is immortal. “You were silly like us,” wrote W. H. Auden in his elegy to W. B. Yeats. “Your gift survived it all.” I savor the silliness as much as the next person. But what a luxury not to have to think about that aspect of Shakespeare. And I mean it as the highest praise when I say he’ll always be anonymous to me.

How do you all feel about who Shakespeare was? How much does it matter to you?