The ale-pushing hand of Kit Marlowe’s ghost; metaqueen Elizabeth the zeroth; Prospero, of whom Shakespeare is the lightly fictionalised equivalent; a passing bear; they are a group effort and ongoing in-joke of the time travelling community; they are the work of trees trying to decipher human behaviour, each peer-reviewed by more than a dozen larches; Bacon (two slices of); Sir Thomas More; Sir Thomas More than that; Sir Thomas Most; Stonehenge but with fingers; Don Quixote; you (having the advantage that you may have read them first); the dark lady; a vague but pen-having sense of patriotism; in a stunning twist, it was the anthropomorphic personification of the authorship question itself; Shakespeare.
