“Taught he was the height of greatness, they’ve somehow mistaken his birth for a kind of literary Second Coming, thinking every word he wrote must be perfect and without sin. … [And] once you declare that a god has walked the earth, satanic forces must instantly spring up to deny him. … [Thus] a counter-assumption was born: A lowly actor from a small-town background, like ‘the man from Stratford,’ could not possibly have written these extraordinary plays.”