Shakespeare has enemies. Wherever one starts from, the questions and discussions about authorship are basically antagonistic. ‘Kill Will: Hollywood and Rhys Ifans plunge a dagger into Shakespeare’ a headline trumpeted. But the antagonism comes in many shapes and guises.

The statement ‘I have a right to question things with an open mind’, is a perfectly reasonable-sounding starting point until one starts to wonder how there might be any room for doubt given the positive historical evidence in Shakespeare's favour. This is outlined throughout section two of this book and critiqued in Andrew Hadfield's essay. Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Claiming to have a mind ‘open’ to the possibility that apparent certainties may not be quite as settled as they seem to be is no more than a rhetorical manoeuvre in this context and should be allowable only after the positive evidence for Shakespeare's authorship has been disproven (rather than merely ignored). I could say I have a mind ‘open’ to the possibility that the world is flat, but would need to disprove that it is not spherical (more or less) before I started to try to convince anyone else.