THE WRITER whose lucid, chatty style has helped turn subjects such as science, the English seaside and small-town America into bestsellers has a new target for the popular touch: William Shakespeare.

Bill Bryson, whose science book A Short History of Nearly Everything is currently topping sales charts, has chosen the Bard for his first biography, asking how Shakespeare came to be the world’s most famous playwright.

He is not the only writer to be intrigued by the question — the lack of evidence of how the grammar-school boy from Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire wrote so many masterpieces will be aired next weekend at a conference at the Globe theatre in London.

Researchers will present the cases for alternative candidates who, they argue, wrote the plays but used the actor Shakespeare’s name to conceal their identity. Contenders range from Mary, Countess of Pembroke, to the philosopher Francis Bacon and the playwright Christopher Marlowe.

Bryson — as befits an author who peppered his science book with anecdotes such as the discoverer of Uranus wanting to call it George — will not pretend his book is a serious textual analysis.

“The guy was a genius and I want to find out what made him tick,” said Bryson. “Look, I’m not a literary critic. What impresses me is the range of what he did and the range of human feeling he put into his plays.”

Bryson made his name in the 1990s as a writer of wryly amusing travel books such as The Lost Continent, A Walk In The Woods and Notes From A Small Island. He went back to live in his native America in 1995 before resuming his 20-year sojourn in Britain last year.

Bryson had not particularly planned a book on Shakespeare: “The American publisher James Atlas simply asked who I wanted to write about.” The book will be published in Britain next year by HarperCollins.

Many millions of words have been written on the Bard and Bryson’s planned 45,000 is a comparative drop in the ocean.

“The trouble is that there is nothing much in the records about Shakespeare,” said Bryson. It is thought he went to a grammar school in Stratford, but this has never been proved. His marriage to Anne Hathaway is a fact but his birthday on April 23, 1564, is not.

“I suspect he was self-educated,” said Bryson, who has embarked on reading all his plays as well as watching theatre productions and some movie versions. “I want to understand how he lived.

How he injected humour in one play and tragedy in another. And how he was always such a great poet and had a gift to entertain.”

Bryson starts with the conventional assumption that Shakespeare wrote the plays. But at next weekend’s conference research presented by Robin Williams from Santa Fe, New Mexico, will suggest the playwright might have been a woman.

He says the life of Mary, Countess of Pembroke, the sister of the poet Sir Philip Sidney, coincides with Shakespeare’s, and that her intellectual salon at Wilton House, Wiltshire, gave birth to a literary circle that had the talent to write the plays.

Mark Rylance, artistic director of the Globe and chairman of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust, which is staging the conference, said the evidence was not conclusive for any candidates but added: “I find the idea of Bacon most useful. His insistence that we don’t play games with our intellect but we observe the nature of what is going on around us is in line with Shakespeare.”

Other academics are more certain. Professor Stanley Wells, chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and co-editor of the Oxford Shakespeare, said: “There is no reason to question the authorship. The whole thing relies on conspiracy theories.”

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