Peter Ackroyd, author of Shakespeare: The Biography, did not even want to hear about Neville: “I don’t want to know the evidence. William Shakespeare is William Shakespeare. He went to a very good school and had a good education. There’s no reason in the world to think he was deficient in his classical learning.

“He had a better education than most undergraduates today and you can see the line in his life in the extant plays and references to him.

“There is no doubt in my mind that he was William Shakespeare.”

Professor John Spiers, a former trustee of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust: “This book seems certain to provoke new discoveries which will finally resolve the most perplexing, the most abiding, and the most important of literary riddles.

“This publication may prove to be an event of genuine worldwide importance which will radically change our understanding of the source and course of the English literary and cultural renaissance.

“There will be resistance, but the difficulty for the resistors is that Bill Rubinstein isn’t some fruitcake. He’s an established and serious historian.”

Mark Rylance, artistic director of The Globe and chairman of The Shakespeare Authorship Trust: “This is a pioneering book.

“No one has considered this candidate before as the author of the works attributed to Shakespeare, so you will not be alone in having your image of the author shaken by these pages, as I have.”

Jonathan Bate, Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick: “There is absolutely no reason to suppose that anyone other than William of Stratford wrote the plays. There is a snobbish idea that a provincial grammar-school boy couldn’t have written them.

“How could an aristocrat have known about the villages around Stratford? Or about glovemaking (Shakespeare’s father’s trade). There are lots of technical references to leather and glovemaking.

“Neville was a highly educated diplomat and courtier. He noted that Neville excelled in Latin and French, but was too highly educated to make some of the basic mistakes made in the plays.”

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