Frank Greenall: William, wherefore art thou?

WHO DID THE DEED? A scene from Macbeth as performed at the Bason Botannic Gardens last month.

IT WAS good to experience a spot of Shakespeare live at the Bason Botanic Gardens recently, as local performers served up "The Scottish Play" with al fresco relish.

And in the gloaming, did one even glimpse an incorporeal Bard of Avon, himself, twitching the near shrubbery as he too surreptitiously joined the audience? On the one hand casting a critical eye over the production, but on the other exuding warm satisfaction on his work being strutted in distant corners of the globe.

After all, Mr Shakespeare is in familiar territory - just a bit up the road is another Stratford.

This Stratford took its name from the maestro's birthplace, in its earliest incarnation actually officially gazetted as Stratford-upon-Patea in 1877. This was on the motion of a William Crompton - a man of literary bent who had divined a resemblance of the Patea River to England's River Avon.

It didn't stop there ... the Shakespeare allusion led to 67 Stratford streets being named after characters from 27 of his plays. Extraordinarily, so I'm told, New Zealand's only glockenspiel clock tower plays the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet three times a day (I hope someone's not pulling my leg).

However, if indeed a spectral Bard was lurking at the Bason, I must confess that I too am one of those who find authorship claims of the "Shakespearean" canon equally wraith-like. No, I don't think a Mr Bacon was involved, but here I hunch my shoulders in anticipation of the inevitable slings and arrows of outrage.

Let us be clear. A person or persons of great talent and wisdom put together the words that have diverted and inspired the punters for centuries. But the mysteries and mirrors that have resulted in the ascription of exact authorship to the Avon man would do a David Copperfield proud.

I think much of the situation derives from the English love (not unique) of a sterling silver hero. A few years after great Norwegian pathfinder Roald Amundsen had conquered the South Pole in 1911, he was in England for a speaking engagement.

The young son of the friend with whom he was staying asked what he did for a crust. Amundsen let slip that he was recently back from the Pole, at which, with his team, he had been first to arrive.

The young master informed him that this couldn't possibly be correct, as his class just happened to be studying the subject. Incontestably, the first explorer there was the valiant Captain Scott, who tragically perished with his companions on the return journey in the service of King and Country. It was all there in the lad's text book, with no mention whatsoever of any jumped-up Norseman.

In much the same way, over the course of several centuries, a literary super-hero has been cobbled together - one who bestrides the stage like an all-conquering colossus. Whole libraries have been created and countless academic careers scaffolded on the life, times and glories of this man-of-genius. Alas, most of it is hugely speculative, if not outright (Shakespeare In Love) fictional.

Indisputably there was a Mr Will Shakespeare, prosperous Stratford merchant, and a Mr Will Shakespeare, London theatre owner and actor/manager. But apart from a couple of tantalising shreds, there is next-to-nothing to link one with the other.

While we have over 900 provenanced letters of Cicero, the Roman polymath of two millennia ago, the man portrayed as the greatest wordsmith of all time has left not a scrap of any provenanced literary material.

The Shakespeare family - or, indeed, anyone else in Stratford - were somehow blissfully unaware that the man in their midst was supposedly England's superstar playwright and poet.

It is a delicious mystery and, of course, regardless, we still have the priceless inheritance of the works themselves. But whence they came ... ?

Ahh, therein lies the rub, which we shall burnish next week.