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When truth kills truth, O devilish-holy fray!
A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no Identity - he is continually in for - and filling some other Body
- John Keats

There is no anxiety in his painted features, but that is no indication of calm. He may be a player, after all. Every day he looks out, scanning the crowd for the understanders: those members of the audience who would have paid their penny and stood pressed up to the stage, at eye-level with the actors' feet. He's looking for the people who would have seen, from their under-view, the bushy nose hair of a gravedigger, the loose stitching at the crotch of a lover's britches. He's looking for the people who might have smelled the sweat of a sword-fight, the people who might have smelled thespian fear and would not have been sympathetic when things went wrong, when a king tripped over his robe or a fair damsel stuttered. These observers were the laymen, the prostitutes, the poor, and the young, and they knew when an actor was doubling on roles, appearing now as a swordsman, now as a nurse maid, voice modulating between genders, wig sitting slightly askew. The doubling didn't bother them as the fear did: they understood its necessity, its economy. From his perch, the depicted man watches for these groundlings, these understanders, these people who might know him.

But there is no stage at the art gallery. He is a painting in egg tempera, on display in Toronto. A curiosity for tourists and academicians and museum members in the 21st century. He is a head and a chest only, encased, front and back, in glass. Maybe, people say, he is William Shakespeare. Maybe, people say, he is not. Whichever, he is a man on a pedestal, an island in the middle of a vast stretch of grey cushioned carpeting that absorbs sound. Hush. This is a museum, parents hiss as they remove children's sticky fingers from the velvet rope that fences off his island, the rope that keeps the audience from getting too close. He must be preserved exactly as he is. But how, exactly, is he?

In a dimmed room, the soft light shines only on the man in the painting, the deer in the headlights, caught in a frame, unable to escape. Instead of bolting, rather a ridiculous proposition for a painting anyway, he stays perfectly still, straining to sense what he cannot see, his reflection in the crowd. These people are so hopeful, so expectant, and to show that they are not, so cynical. A multitude vibrating with data, their blood streams are rushing with greedily swallowed infobites. They examine the portrait, discussing the dendrochronological analysis that dates the painting no earlier than 1597. They consult about the paint's stratigraphy, which indicates that the date, 1603, was painted at the same time the artist completed the painting. The man on the pedestal, the possible playwright, whose fluffy auburn hair does not quite cover an unusually long left earlobe, knows that facts have long been a hot commodity. People have always liked other people's gout, and heartache, and sin. People like biography, the nittiest grittiest detail. But facts were once harder to control, more pliable and liable to take on unexpected forms. Now they are less messy. Each, hurtling itself through bodies, through air, is shrink-wrapped to prevent spillage. We like cases, of all kinds, to be air-tight. Sometimes these facts will be added up, tested, called to answer. The man in the painting knows that he is being reckoned, his identity being determined authoritatively by experts. Seven years of carbon dating and infrared and radiographic testing have led him to this lookout. He feels nervous, acutely embarrassed by the mathematical equation of his component parts. His cheeks flush pinkly.

"It's him," the people whisper, pausing in front of his pedestal. "Is it him?" What he's heard from guided tours is this:

1. He might have been painted by John Sanders, who might have been a bit player and done scene painting for the King's Men, Shakespeare's theatre company. He certainly ended up, a 33 by 42 centimetre piece of solid oak, underneath somebody's granny's bed in eastern Canada. Now, it turns out, he may be worth millions of dollars.

2. He is wearing a simple moss green tunic, firmly stitched and of rugged fabric. A line of little round buttons runs up the front. It may be (first the tour guides and then the visitors furrow their brows) garb too casual for a successful playwright. By 1603, when the painting was made, Shakespeare had already written Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

3. His hair is soft and lively, receding, unconcerned, at his temples. Wispy sideburns and a beard frame a face of unexceptional features, which manage to associate with one another in such a natural and active manner - lips barely touching, skin drooping slightly under quick, mirthful eyes - that the effect as a whole is captivating.

4. He is thin, which health experts excitedly report as being indicative of a hyperactive metabolism. Other expert heads bob knowingly: yes, that checks out, tabulates, computes. Our prolific bard must have been quite the live wire.

5. Though the top of his head is a bit worm-nibbled, he is fairly good-looking. The other day a group of Catholic high school girls examined him, and about three-quarters agreed that if he weren't dead, they might consider dating him. In their art appreciation notebooks, they marked him down as "luminous."

6. He looks youthful. Too youthful, according to the rag paper label on the painting's back. This man looks quick and unpredictable. Could he also be 39? Could he be Shakespeare?

Only two indisputably authentic representations of Shakespeare exist: an engraving by Martin Droeshout, which Ben Jonson urged readers not to look at and which appears as a frontispiece to the 1623 Folio edition of the plays, and the bust on Shakespeare's tomb, which Mark Twain once described as possessing the "expression of a bladder." Though it could be argued that people look like their dogs, not their writing, it would be an argument made in vain. As Virginia Woolf suggested, we would like to believe "that the most sublime speculations of the human imagination are issued from a particular man, whom we can love." Unable to love Droeshout's dour Shakespeare with the starched white ruff squeezing a chubby neck, imaginations lean hard towards the romantic figure on the pedestal, looking out. The pinky hued man seems familiar with the painter and with his audience. The people abuzz with facts, hungry for proofs, are drawn to him, unreasonably. Perhaps it's the shadow between collar and skin, that intimate shading at the back of his neck, which urges the world to give him a name. Shakespeare?

Responding to a recorded message, visitors begin filing neatly out of the museum fifteen minutes before closing. Eventually, the sun sets outside the building and automatic timers instruct the lights inside to follow suit. Quiet descends on the man in the painting. Now and then a yellow circle moon of light slides back and forth across the grey carpet in front of a security guard, who does not look up. He has been walking through this exhibit for weeks of nights and is no longer interested in watching the framed man's unchanging face, now as everyday to the guard as a bag of potatoes. The man in the egg tempera is glad to be forgotten for the moment. Now he may consider himself, alone, in the dark, from the inside.

"In Shakespeare," Harold Bloom wrote, "characters unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking, whether to themselves or to others." Despite an outcropping of self-motivation texts at the turn of the 21st century, reconceiving oneself is now as complicated as ever. An accumulation of facts has narrowed the possibilities for each individual fact; what a piece of information could once speak has been reduced by confining stockpiles of data. The din of directionless and ricocheting information too often obscures the deeper and more meaningful echo a fact may have to offer. And maybe it always did. In another information age (and what age is not, since it is easier to acquire, rather than to lose information?) John Keats named Shakespeare the master of "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." The eighteenth century poet was considering how an artist could create amongst ricocheting infobites, and it was Shakespeare, an Elizabethan, who gave him the answer.

The man in the painting might be a tippling tailor, who enjoyed cockfighting and gambling and consorting with vagabonds. He might be a devout Puritan and cabinet-maker who viewed the theatre as the den of the devil and yelled as much from a soapbox in the bustling streets of London. He might be Shakespeare, playwright on the make, an "upstart crow" according to his curmudgeonly contemporary, Robert Greene. But knowing he was Shakespeare wouldn't help much at all. Mark Twain wrote that Satan and Shakespeare were "the two Illustrious Conjecturabilities" and that any Shakespeare biography was "an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential fact." Of course, one might say the same of any biography, since the form is always one of conjecture. Shakespeare, however, quoted more frequently than the King James Bible, is a special case.

Scholars have been speculating for years over whether the viscount Francis Bacon, a smattering of literary earls, or even Shakespeare's friend, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, could have been the author of the work credited to Shakespeare. Some doubt that Shakespeare's level of education was commensurate with his genius. For centuries academics were genuinely perplexed over the bard's having bequeathed to his wife, Anne Hathaway, only "the second best bed." That wasn't very nice, Shakespeare. That wasn't very Shakespearean. And what about those sexy sonnets he wrote for his patron Henry Wriothesley? Maybe Shakespeare was gay, maybe he was a tight-wad, and maybe he never wrote a line of poetry in his life.

Shakespeare (the tradition goes) created characters as vivid and various as Bottom the Weaver and Juliet's Nurse. He was fond of cross-dressers and identical twins and could revise a script during rehearsal to adapt to audience, actors, and space. His identity (or unpoetical excuse for an identity, as Keats would have it), like every identity, was made up partly of facts, some of which we know, some of which we never will. The rest of his identity was lodged in possibility, in imagination, an endless storehouse about which, through his writing, we know a good deal. If the painted man is Shakespeare, his glass frame, his nearly closed lips, are no impediments to our understanding. We can step right up and recognize him and also ourselves. Maybe, after this exchange, we discover that we are a little different from what we thought. Whoever the portrayed man is, he is himself, and because there is something about him that stirs us, he is us, too. How extraordinary to go on imagining what that might mean, along with, and in spite of, the facts.