“What about Sir Francis Bacon? Couldn’t he have written some of the plays? He was a shareholder in the Virginia Company so he definitely would have known about the Sea Venture. There are accounts that claim that Shakespeare wasn’t educated enough to have written them, couldn’t write well enough … he was just the front man, to speak for others in power to express their political opinions anonymously.”

“Without proof,” Tana said, “at the Folger we believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. So far, no one has come forward with anything to the contrary. Definitive proof, that is.”

I nodded and she continued, “Look, I’m not saying something’s not out there. But after all this time it seems doubtful.”

“I get it,” I said.

In the elevator back to the first floor, she said, “Of course, there’s always Project Dust Bunny.”

“Project what?”

She smiled as the door opened and we stepped out. “The technical name is ‘proteomics,’ which is the study of proteins and their interactions to learn about the past.”

“Sorry, I’m lost.”

“Do you remember a news story a few years ago when the body of Richard III, the British king who also happened to be one of Shakespeare’s great villains, was discovered under a parking lot in Leicester, England?”

“I do.”

“The archeologist who identified the body as King Richard came to Washington to talk about it. Her visit started a conversation about whether there might not be an easier way to get DNA samples than digging up bodies buried under parking lots,” she said. “And what we at the Folger specifically wondered was whether or not there might be DNA traces left behind in old books. After all, people lean over them, turn pages, handle them—meaning they deposit skin and hair on those pages, right? And then they put the book away, usually in a cool place where that DNA remains intact and essentially in the dark. It can be left undisturbed for centuries.”

“You’re saying you can find DNA in old books?”

“Actually we did find it,” she said. “We took a four-hundred-year-old Bible and used a Q-tip to swipe the gutter, which is the seam where the pages come together. Then we sent it off to the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. And guess what?”

“They found something.”

She nodded. “It was incredible. Not only did the scientists at NIH manage to sequence the mitochondrial DNA of two individuals, they were also able to discover their haplotype, which means the region they were from—in this case, northern Europe. They even managed to find bacteria that suggested those two people had acne.”

I knew my mouth was hanging open. “Do you mean you might be able to find out if Shakespeare had acne? Although if it’s true, I don’t think I’d want to know. It would ruin some of the magic and the aura around him.”