Katy Rice says we should not “mess with the Bard” (The Argus, March 24).

I entirely agree in so far as we are talking about the plays, which of course are great works of poetical genius and I recall the pleasures, when very young, of being involved in plays in the schools I attended in Brighton.

However, I have no objection to “messing” with the alleged author William Shakespeare. The great American writer Mark Twain said that all that we know about Shakespeare could be written on a postcard.

In his autobiography, Both Sides Of The Circle (p154), High Court Judge the late Christmas Humphreys wrote: “His death is utterly ignored. He left no single book, no line of manuscript.” Judge Humphreys also wrote: “As for the description of him as the world’s greatest poet, I agree with Henry James [another great American author] who wrote: ‘I am sort of haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world.’”

Judge Humphreys and fellow lawyer Sir John Russell concluded that Shakespeare “was but the mask of someone of such rank that he could no more use his name as a playwright than he could appear in public as a common actor”.

In Simon Heffer’s biography Like The Roman (pages 919-20) the late (Professor) Enoch Powell also pursued in depth his studies of the authorship of the plays.

Powell wrote that they were (Elizabethan) court productions written by several courtiers and their identities remained a secret until they were dead.

The plays were later seen to be profitable. According to Powell, “The pseudonym of ‘William Shakespeare’ was carefully preserved and even given, if not flesh and blood, at any rate dead bones and an identity in a small provincial town. It was an outrageous imposture, but it worked.”

So, of course let primary school children discover and learn the beauty of the language of the plays but, at the same time, also be shown how to exercise their early critical faculties concerning truth and falsehood.

Christopher Fox-Walker, Meads Road, Eastbourne