It’s long been obvious that William Shakespeare, voted Man of the Millennium by his countrymen eight years ago, has ascended to secular godhood. Shakespeare’s works, like the Christian Bible (and the Sherlock Holmes stories, for that matter) are known as the canon, and form a secular rival to Holy Writ. Harold Bloom, literary critic and high priest in the cult, goes so far as to call “extreme bardolatry” —the burning of incense amid claims the bard actually created humans as we know them—merely a rational response to a figure generally reckoned the world’s greatest writer.  
Mortal god is one thing, but morphing into the secular Jesus is another. More and more, biographical digging into Shakespeare’s life begins to resemble the quest for the historical Jesus. Seekers paw over the same ragtag collection of facts—small Latin and less Greek, crucified under Pontius Pilate—and complain they haven’t enough information. (They have my sympathies in Jesus’s case, less so in Will’s: we actually know quite a bit about him, at least as much as we could expect to know about a non-aristocratic Elizabethan.)
Crucially, a small but indefatigable subset of both quests deny their subjects ever really existed. In both cases that’s because they believe the man they glimpse in the records is simply too small to have given birth to his enormous legacy, whether that's Redeemer of mankind or merely author of King Lear. Hence, the persistent claims that Shakespeare the poet couldn’t have been Shakespeare the glove-maker’s son, but had to have been Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or Good Queen Bess herself.) More than a few obsessives don’t scruple to make up what they don’t know, as their “it’s likely” phrases imperceptibly turn into “he must have” and from thence into “he did.”
Now Ann Hathaway is starting to come out of the shadows, with a spirited and convincing rehabilitation in Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife (M&S). Of course Hathaway is back—really, we should all have seen this coming. Her return is hard on the heels of Mary Magdalen’s emergence as a key player in Jesus’s story (or at least in the alt-Jesus version beloved of Da Vinci Code fans). Both women have always been maligned in the orthodox telling of their man’s story (Mary as a prostitute, Ann as old, ugly and shrewish); in the feminist re-takes they are the “oldest, truest loves.” And why not? Myth tells eternal truths about humans, but it always wraps them in contemporary garb.
It can’t be long now before tShakespearea appears in a piece of toast. Look for it on eBay.