Occasionally, Kells’s claims are overstated for rhetorical effect, to create excitement about Shakespeare’s conspicuous absence from the archive. He queries how Shakespeare could possibly have enjoyed ‘such a rapid rise’ to the ‘top of the theatre world’ in London. But of course we cannot tell how rapid his rise may have been. He asks how Shakespeare could purchase New Place in Stratford at a time when his playing company was ‘in financial distress’ (it was not, really; its lease on its regular venue, the Theatre, had expired, but the company moved to its first purpose-built venue, the Globe, shortly thereafter). Marlowe is incorrectly said to have left behind a play in manuscript (perhaps Kells means the ‘Collier fragment’, a single page of dialogue from The Massacre at Paris), but Shakespeare’s three-page contribution to the Sir Thomas More play-text is ‘small’ and ‘contentious’.

Other times, evidence is misunderstood or neglected. There is nothing suspicious about the fact that Rose playhouse manager Philip Henslowe failed to mention Shakespeare anywhere in his diary. Contrary to Kells, there isn’t any evidence that Shakespeare ‘supposedly wrote and acted’ for Henslowe (at best, the companies at the Rose had one or two Shakespearean plays in their repertory). Shakespeare’s absence from other diarists’ accounts of the period is also remarked upon, but the inconvenience of Frances Meres’s praise of Shakespeare in 1598 is strategically ignored for another 150 pages. Nothing is made of Heather Wolfe’s recent discovery of documentary evidence from within Shakespeare’s lifetime (a sketch of his coat of Arms clearly labelled ‘Shakespeare the Player’) confirming that the man who died in Stratford wrote plays in London.

At its best, Kells’s book is not a search for Shakespeare’s library but a book about the search for Shakespeare’s library. Having canvassed a number of possibilities for locating the enigmatic lost library, including tracing provenance through Shakespeare’s descendants, Kells hits his stride with an entertaining overview of post-seventeenth-century attempts to locate Shakespeare’s books. Here we have an erudite and witty account of early editors (such as Nicholas Rowe) misled by anecdote and apocryphal stories; of notorious forgers (William Henry Ireland) whose interventions threw investigators off the scent; and of how the failure to locate any of Shakespeare’s manuscripts or books led some (John Fry) to doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays we attribute to him at all. This genuinely engaging section passes all too quickly, however, and Kells’s own exposure to a raft of anti-Stratfordians and their preferred authorial candidates (Marlowe, Bacon, Neville) informs a significant chunk of the central chapters. Documenting the case for Neville as the true author of Shakespeare becomes a preoccupation of the second part of the book (there are only three parts in total), and even though those cases are eventually critiqued – at length, to be fair – one might question whether the discussion would have been served better without this excursion.

Kells’s ultimate advice to the reader is a reminder that imitation and appropriation, not originality, were essential elements of a playwright’s task in Shakespeare’s day. Shakespeare drew heavily on source texts and in turn reaches us through the heavily mediated process of scholarly editing and publishing. Kells thus refers to Shakespeare’s role as an ‘inbetweener’ in this process; one who collaborated, refined, and adapted, who didn’t need a university education or aristocratic background, and who may not even have owned a library. Accordingly, while ‘Shakespeare’s missing library was a boon for heretics like Diana Price and Brenda James … Shakespeare’s library of sources … is the heretics’ downfall.’ This is, of course, the uncontroversial scholarly consensus on the commercial playwright’s work habits (though it is billed here as a ‘new paradigm’). This anti-climactic rebuttal to the extensive foregoing discussion of authorship theories is further diluted when Kells extends an olive branch to the conspiracy theorists, encouraging the possibility that various frustrated aristocrats silently collaborated with Shakespeare on his writing. Puzzlingly, he alludes to Shakespeare scholars and anti-Stratfordians apparently reaching ‘some kind of middle ground’ or ‘convergence’ on the question of authorship, suggesting that their ‘principal disagreements have withered’. (This simply isn’t the case; see David Kathman and Terry Ross’s helpful website, The Shakespeare Authorship Page.)

Stuart Kells (photo by Sarah Walker)Having eventually conceded that Shakespeare’s lost library is largely a red herring, and acknowledged that ‘one thing we know for certain’ is that ‘Time is a destroyer of books’, Kells offers in his final section a series of fanciful models for what a Shakespearean library might nonetheless have looked like: the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales; Ben Jonson’s own now-dispersed library; a ‘Shakespearean porn library’; Penguin’s promulgation of accessible critical editions as ‘a modern Shakespeare library’. There is much of interest in individual chapters, but this is an uneven book, with flashes of erudition interspersed haphazardly with unhelpful conjecture.