Royal Shakespeare Company Artistic Director Gregory Doran said in 2020: “Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? I don’t care. I think he was running a stable of writers. Like a Hollywood stable turning out films, they were turning out plays.”

Isn’t it odd how that possibility, for many people, inks a stain on a cherished image of the great writer alone in a candlelit corner somewhere, pouring his unique heart and universally empathetic soul out on his parchment for an eternity of admirers?

I don’t know how it makes me feel. All I know is that whoever it was, they have kept me in work for 30 years, helped pay my bills and inspired me beyond what I thought possible.

Anthony Gooley as William Shakespeare in Sport for Jove’s Venus & Adonis. Photo supplied

I think I’m excited by the idea of a collaborative spirit in the man and can certainly see a merciless magpie in him – patently so in his mining of multiple disparate mythologies, cultural references and philosophical ideas from different epochs, places and people, to produce the desired effect.

When I picture him writing in my mind’s eye, it is...