The Big Read: Good Will hunting, y'all

There was big news last week when a paleographer named Heather Wolfe at the Folger Library in Washington DC proved that Shakespeare existed.

This may surprise you. What will they prove next? That we spell Ernest Hemingway the same way he spelt it? That sombreros really are big hats? But that's how it is in the world today - as the defences against counter-factual hypotheses and conspiracy theories erode, it's more and more of a triumph just proving that the thing we always knew is in fact the thing we always knew.

Over the years scores of nut-bars and wild-eyed loons - including but not restricted to Vanessa Redgrave - have advanced the theory that a country bumpkin like Bill Shakespeare could not have written all the plays and poems for which he is credited, that it must have been some other skulking eminence - Edward de Vere or Walter Raleigh or Good Queen Bess or perhaps a shadowy cabal of writers, a scribbling parcel of Bilderbergs seeking to warp the Western canon without anyone ever suspecting their presence.

But huzzah for Heather Wolfe, who spent long hours of dusty research among the records of the College of Heralds. (A paleographer, in case you're still puzzling over the second line, is an expert in antique handwriting). She found references to the man Shakespeare, an upwardly mobile arriviste trying to buy a coat of arms, that link him decisively to the Shakespeare who was a performer and playwright.

It lifts my heart to know that people like Heather Wolfe exist, ordinary folk, experts and passionate amateurs who care so deeply about the traces and nuances of finer human endeavour that they dedicate their lives to blowing away the fine layers of time that cover them.

Consider Heinrich Schliemann, a penniless German kid, apprenticed as a grocery clerk, who became interested in Homer when he heard a drunken customer declaiming The Iliad over a barrel of apples. He ran away to sea, was shipwrecked, moved to Russia, memorised all of Homer, taught himself nine languages, made a fortune swindling people in the Californian Gold Rush, made a second fortune cornering the world market in indigo dye, and a third as a military contractor supplying both sides in the Crimean War, then, aged 36, retired from business, which he hated, and dedicated his life to his passion for proving that Homer's tales of Troy weren't legends and folklore but literal history.

Scholars and archaeologists called him mad. Finally in 1873 he dug down through the desolate hill of Hissarlik beside the Dardanelles in Turkey and struck the stones of ancient Troy, all the ancient Troys, built one atop the other then swallowed by the earth and forgotten by time.

But literary archaeology happens more often indoors. In his biography of Shakespeare, Bill Bryson explained the difficulty of finding traces of the man. Only six examples of his signature have ever been found, and one, the best of them, was excavated by Charles and Hulda Wallace in 1906.

They were Americans who took holidays to England to comb through the National Archives in hopeful search of Will. Eventually they moved there to spend 18 hours every day scrutinising more than 10million documents scrawled in long-faded ink, none of them indexed or cross-referenced. Parchment was expensive in the 1600s so every centimetre of it was used - there are no white spaces or paragraphs or margins; the words are smooshed onto the page like spaghetti in a pocket. There was no reasonable expectation that Shakespeare might appear on any of these documents - it was like walking into the Library of Congress and reading every word of every book in the random hope that your great-uncle Simon might be mentioned somewhere.

But hope is beautiful and powerful, even when it's crazy. Hope can make miracles.

After three years of searching they discovered what are now known as the Belott-Mountjoy papers, a minor legal dispute between a wigmaker and his father-in-law in which William Shakespeare, a lodger with the wigmaker, was called to give deposition as a witness.

For bardologists there has never been a greater find. The Wallaces became celebrities. Alas, success spoilt them. Charles became increasingly egomaniacal and paranoid, accusing the British government of scheming to foil his further hunts for glory. They were edged out of the field and finally left England penniless and dismayed. They returned to the US, where Charles decided to apply his skills of searching and hoping to the oil industry. They bought a 160-acre plot in Texas and started prospecting, just drilling and drilling and drilling. Within a year they hit what would be one of the most productive oil fields in the American southwest.

Here's to hope in 2017, and keeping going, and finding Troy, or striking oil, or proving Will.