If it were thought they came from the quill of a classless Stratford nobody, however, they stood more chance of being acclaimed as patriotic. Bard respectability quotient: **** William Stanley, Earl of Derby, wrote the plays Who? This rival "Will", this shadowy "Mr W.S." grew up in a household that was stiff with nobility but which enthusiastically supported the performing arts. And the playwright and poet George Peele probably revised the deeply horrible Titus Andronicus. Elsewhere George Wilkins, like Shakespeare a member of the King's Men acting company, is thought to have originated or brushed up Pericles Prince of Tyre. So much of Kinsmen is taken to be his work that the play is quietly left out of some complete works editions. He's also thought to have dabbled in Timon of Athens, although this theory is sometimes advanced by Shakespeare fans simply to explain why the play is so gloomy and the plot makes no sense. We know that John Fletcher (the popular and prolific author of The Faithful Shepherdess) wrote a sequel to the Taming of the Shrew to impress Shakespeare, and worked with him on The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII and the lost play Cardenio.

There's evidence that Thomas Middleton (a London playwright, like the Bard) had a hand in the witches' scenes in Macbeth. Bard Credibility Quotient: ** Shakespeare collaborated with many other dramatists Odd though it may seem to modern audiences, whose familiarity with dramatic partnerships is limited to Rice and Lloyd Webber, it was once considered perfectly proper for two playwrights to co-author a whole five-act play, a scene or just a sketch. C S Lewis was suspicious: he said the sonnets were "too lover-like for ordinary male friendship" and it is indeed hard to imagine him exchanging such throbbing sentiments with his pal JRR Tolkien. Elsewhere in the Shakespearean canon, critics detect the occasional use of gay slang. In King Lear, for instance, there's a phrase that has mystified audiences and scholars - when Kent says to Oswald: "If I had thee in Lipsbury pinfold, I would make thee care for me." The "Lipsbury pinfold" may sound like a wrestling hold but, according to the noted psychotherapist George Weinberg (who invented the word "homophobia"), it means oral sex. Many critics read no more into the urgency of the phrasing than passionate masculine appraisal.

The latter repeatedly celebrate the man's beauty and occasional wordplay on words like "prick" have led readers to infer a gay subtext. Twenty-six of the poems are addressed to a married woman (the "Dark Lady") and 126 to a young man (the "Fair Lord"). it's so outrageous Hollywood would love it." Bard Credibility Quotient: *** Shakespeare was bisexual Shakespeare had a wife, Anne Hathaway, and three children, Susanna, Hamnet and Judith but exegetes of the Sonnets have puzzled for centuries over the m?ge a trois that can be detected between the lines. Reviewing the movie, Beat magazine wrote: "The story contains espionage, conspiracy theories, faked deaths, cover-ups, identity theft, homosexuality and sex ...