LAME? William Shakespeare? The brilliant wordsmith, father of English literature, flawed of frame? Yes, he said it himself, even wrote it in a bitter pun: "Speak of my lameness and I straight will halt".

That’s from a sonnet, the medium in which the great poet revealed personal loves, fears and resentments. In another he confesses he was "made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite" and sees himself as a decrepit father.

Ah, but did he mean it literally, or merely as poetical whimsy? The experts are still debating. Here’s what Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago:

Sonnet 37: As a decrepit father takes delight/To see his active child do deeds of youth,/So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite,/Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

Sonnet 89: Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault/And I will comment on that offence./Speak of my lameness and I straight will halt,/Against thy reasons making no defence.

Certainly, nobody can deny that Shakespeare was ‘lame’ in these two sonnets, yet did his condition stretch beyond the imagined? Cripples and lameness often crop up in his plays.

Critic George Wilkes (1882) claimed Shakespeare had a lame back, citing Sonnet 87: And so my patient back again is swerving. W.J. Thoms, 1865 (Three Notelets), asserted Shakespeare was wounded while soldiering in the Netherlands. Another alleged expert of old averred that Shakespeare injured his left leg in a fall while acting at the Fortune Theatre ("Fortune’s dearest spite"). In 1889 it was suggested that Shakespeare usually acted as old men because of his disability. Author Pemberton (1914, Shakespeare and Sir Walter Ralegh) contended that Shakespeare was Raleigh who wounded his leg at Cadiz in 1596.

In recent times, Professor Rene Weis was certain of the lameness (Shakespeare Revealed − a biography, John Murray 2007). Professor Weis, English and Language lecturer at University College London, said Shakespeare’s works reflected the man’s life. Phrases often regarded as figurative should be taken literally, he said. This surely adds new avenues of speculation to the many that have grown over the years.

For instance, was Shakespeare, himself a player, ever cast in the role of Richard III without need of a faked humpback? Did he have a club foot, or a crooked knee, or an odd limp? The one known fact is that nobody knows. Among the many wild Shakespeare disputes is that he never existed but was a pen name for someone else.

Unfortunately, Shakespeare never got around to penning his memoirs. Had he explained himself, it would happily have aborted centuries of blah-blah.

Away from the learned brawls, a battalion of fiction writers has captured the lad from Stratford in their own conjectures. Notably The Shakespeare Curse, by J.L. Carrell, was a popular hit last year, although falling short of Ann Morven’s page-turner, The Killing of Hamlet.

Morven’s plot deftly ties Shakespeare to present day murders. At the same time, she invents plausible answers to the most common inconsistencies surrounding the Bard. She gives her heroine, bumbling folksinger Sheil B. Wright, a fright or two along the whodunit trail. Hoping to collect olde English madrigals in an historic village, Sheil collects arrest instead, accused of a murder witnessed by scores of people.

Highly recommended. Happy reading! from Cathy Macleod at booktaste.com, 9 September 2011.