Frank Greenall: Finally, it's a wrap ...

WHODUNNIT? Sir Henry Neville, a promising contender as the real 'Shakespeare'.

EARLIER I termed the whole Shakespeare authorship question a "delicious mystery".

Many people - of more august credentials than I - have expressed similar doubts for several centuries now. Like all good "whodunnits", it is a multi-layered combination of complex circumstance and unusual coincidence - exactly why mysteries become mysteries in the first place.

On the one hand we have a Stratford Will Shakspere, for whom the highly scant evidence suggests he was anything but a wordsmith. Then there's a London Will Shakespeare, whose name adhered to the "Shakespeare" writings, but who mysteriously also leaves not a skerrick of evidence of ever having personally penned anything in his life - assuming he had time enough spare from being a busy actor and theatre owner to produce this voluminous canon of masterworks.

Latterly, Sir Henry Neville has emerged as a highly promising contender as true author, for reasons outlined previously.

Just one example of this fascinating multi-layered conundrum: A correspondent mentioned the oft-quoted Ben Jonson reference to Shakespeare as the "sweet swan of Avon". Many see this as proof the Stratford-upon-Avon man was, indeed, the genius in question - but the Avon was also the name of a river that ran through the estate of Henry Neville's old chum and Tower of London cellmate, the Earl of Southampton, to whom "Shakespeare's" two major verse works were dedicated.

One of the few other things Jonson wrote about Shakespeare was as criticism for having "but little Latin, and even less Greek". Another was that Shakespeare "never blotted a line" - in the days of the scratchy goose feather quill, an impossibility.

The inference, therefore, is that Jonson was simply being facetious about Shakespeare, the theatre man he knew. Namely, he never blotted a line because he simply took delivery of already-written scripts.

When Jonson wrote the "sweet swan of Avon" words for his First Folio dedication in 1623 he described himself as "gent, of Gresham College". Gresham College had been bankrolled not long before by the Neville family.

It is not to draw too long a bow to suggest the Neville family wanted to see Henry's works preserved, but still in anonymity, and had employed Jonson to assist in the curating of Henry's original manuscripts for the folio collection.

In the late 18th century, scholar and local rector, James Wilmot, resolved to write a biography of the Stratford Shakspere. Finding nil local evidence pertaining to his literary matters, Wilmot reasoned that such a supposedly learned man must have had an extensive library, which would have dispersed itself around the area after his death.

A subsequent search of bookcases of every country house within an 80-km radius of Stratford failed to turn up a single inscribed "Shakespeare" book, nor so much as a single note to, from, or about him.

People find it difficult to believe that the author of the "world's greatest plays" would seek to conceal his name. But, of course, at the time they were written and first performed, they had not yet attained that hallowed status - they were just ordinary, albeit popular, entertainments.

And, as with Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan England was a place of deadly intrigue and ghastly consequences for those who upset the abiding powers.

The reason the "Shakespeare" works have endured for several centuries is that, at heart, they're ripping yarns - and the questions surrounding their authorship are worthy of the convolutions of a cracking Shakespeare yarn in their own right.

I very much look forward to the next al fresco "Shakespeare" production at the Bason Botanical Gardens.