Another scholar, Charlton Hinman, managed to identify individual compositors who worked on the typesetting of Shakespeare’s plays. By comparing preferences of spelling-whether a given compositor used go or goe, chok’d or choakte, lantern or lanthorn, set or sett or sette, and so on-and comparing these in turn with idiosyncrasies of punctuation, capitalization, line justification, and the like, he and others have identified nine hands at work on the First Folio. It has been suggested, quite seriously, that thanks to Hinman’s detective work we know more about who did what in Isaac Jaggard’s London workshop than Jaggard did himself.

Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an academic obsession. A glance through the indexes of the many scholarly journals devoted to him and his age reveals such dogged investigations as “Linguistic and Informational Entropy in Othello,” “Ear Disease and Murder in Hamlet,” “Poisson Distributions in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” “Shakespeare and the Quebec Nation,” “Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?” and others of similarly inventive cast.

The amount of Shakespearean ink, grossly measured, is almost ludicrous. In the British Library catalog, enter “Shakespeare” as author and you get 13,858 options (as opposed to 455 for “Marlowe,” for instance), and as subject you get 16,092 more. The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare-twenty years’ worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day-and, as this volume slimly attests, the number keeps growing. Shakespeare Quarterly, the most exhaustive of bibliographers, logs about four thousand serious new works-books, monographs, other studies-every year.

To answer the obvious question, this book was written not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare as because this series does. The idea is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record.