The birthday of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), which we celebrate on the 23rd of April, prompts us to meditate on everything we know about the man, which isn’t all that much. What we don’t know, on the other hand, presents a seemingly inexhaustible source of speculation: what religious convictions he held, what sexual tastes he entertained, whether he or somebody else wrote the plays and poems attributed to him, whether William Shakespeare, poet and playwright, existed at all, or whether his name signifies a conglomeration of geniuses whose own names have been lost to amnesiac time.