WHAT DOES THE authorship controversy have to do with fictional portraits of Shakespeare? On the surface, not a great deal. There are not a great many fictionalized stories about a Shakespeare who is a fraud or beard (although more than one might expect). There are a number of short stories or novels about discovering “the truth” behind the centuries-long cover up, but almost all of these are about the person who finally figures out or stumbles upon irrefutable evidence rather than presenting the man from Stratford himself. This makes intuitive sense; why go to the bother of creating a fictionalized version of someone who is not, in fact, outstanding in any way, someone who was merely used as a front man for the real genius? Most of the people who are interested in disproving Shakespeare's authorship are focused on the debate—they want to make a convincing argument, not tell a compelling story. Certainly none of these authors believe “Will Shaxberd” is a genius (often quite the opposite) and so there seems to be little purpose to creating a fictional portrait of the man they believe is just the cover.

From another angle, the authorship controversy is intimately connected with understanding genius. Furthermore, I would argue that the authorship controversy is specifically interested in Shakespeare's genius, or, more exactly, in understanding the genius that created the plays most people call Shakespeare’s. The motivating factor of the authorship controversy—whether Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford, or some other candidate is put forward as the real author—is that the genius who wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare simply cannot be the man born in Stratford. “Once his writing became regarded as the repository of wisdom on all manner of human affairs, it became increasingly difficult to square ‘Shakespeare’ the sublime poet with the relatively mundane facts of Shakespeare's middle-class life.” Whether the objection is to his middle-class upbringing, his supposed lack of education and travel, his mundane interest in business and legal cases, or his retiring from the theatre and returning to Stratford to die in his bed, the reason that these things function as proof Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him is the core belief that such behaviours are simply incompatible with true genius.