It seemed so perfect, so beyond the dreams of every vampire-loving, space-cowboy wannabe and iambic-pentameter aficionado (and we are legion, people), that the whole thing struck many as an elaborate prank. Nathan Fillion as Dogberry? Really? It’s not even our birthday! But after much checking of calendars to make sure this is not the first day of April, fans are slowly switching from guarded skepticism to slavering anticipation. It’s real, all right. The filmmakers promise that the movie, a modern take on the original opposites attract rom-com, “should be completed by early spring and headed for the festival circuit” — because “it is fancy.”

The film is the first production from Bellwether, a “micro-studio” created by Whedon and Kai Cole for “small, independent narratives for all media.” Whedon told Entertainment Weekly Monday that after wrapping up the A-list, Marvel blockbuster-to-be “The Avengers,” he and his wife had planned a nice long vacation. “And she said, ‘Let’s not take the vacation. Make a movie instead.” For the guy who whipped up the Emmy-winning “Dr. Horrible” as a distraction during the writer’s strike, sure, why not?

Shot in just 12 days, “Much Ado” appears to be the greatest Whedon cast reunion ever. Amy Acker is the tart-tongued Beatrice, while Alexis Denisof plays her so-wrong-he’s-right sparring partner Benedick. It’s the Fred and Wesley payoff “Angel” fans have been waiting years for. “Dollhouse” vets Fran Kranz and Reed Diamond are the easily duped Claudio and the wise Don Pedro. “Firefly’s” Sean Maher is the scheming Don John, and even Tom Lenk (“Buffy’s” sweetest bad guy ever) is on board. Newcomer Jillian Morgese plays the beautiful, besmirched Hero.

The idea of Whedon — a guy very comfortable in the milieu of superheroes and butt-kicking — taking on the Bard might initially seem a little … unexpected. But Whedon has brilliantly articulated his regard for “strong women” throughout his career. And they don’t come much stronger than Beatrice, a woman who, unlike Shakespeare’s famous shrew Kate, never gets emotionally abused into submission. The big themes of Shakespeare – family, sex, betrayal, violence and clever wordplay – they are all over Whedon’s body of work. As he told the Hollywood Reporter, “The text is to me a deconstruction of the idea of love, which is ironic, since the entire production is a love letter — to the text, to the cast, even to the house it’s shot in.” Whedon filmed the entire production on his own grounds.

The glory of Shakespeare – and the glory of Whedon – is the depth of passion so beautifully evident in their work, a devotion that’s both touching and deeply inspiring. Whedon, surely the hardest working God among the Comic-Con crowd, told EW that “You make the time and you make it work if you really, really want it.” Desire. Perseverance. Ultimate triumph. Who doesn’t love a story with a happy ending?

As a rule, I’m leery of novels in which one of the characters has the same name as the author. Once upon a time, this seemed a clever gambit, calling attention to (among other things) the too-common tendency for readers to confuse novelists with their creations. By now, however, it’s gotten a bit stale, and provokes many readers into rolling their eyes and muttering darkly about “postmodern tricks.”

Nevertheless, “The Tragedy of Arthur” earns an exemption from such skepticism. This is a novel about authorship — real, false and contested — yet it’s far from the sort of arch and arid exercise in formalist tail-swallowing that most people think of when they refer to “postmodern tricks.” The novel is, indeed, a tragedy of authorship, but it is also the story of a man whose self-inflicted, tragicomic woes are as affecting and wincingly believable as those endured by the hero of any conventional fiction. That Arthur’s spectacular crash-and-burn comes nestled in a web of ingenious and very funny literary allusions only makes it that much more of a treat.

Here’s the premise: Arthur’s narration is the introduction to the play, which makes up the final third of the novel (and is a fine Shakespearean pastiche). Although he once (briefly) believed it to be genuine, he’s now convinced it was forged by his father (also named Arthur Phillips) — no matter what forensic and literary scholars say to the contrary. Trapped in an elaborate legal snare that makes it impossible for him to withdraw the thing from publication, Arthur has, however, retained the right to force his disillusioned introduction into the book and to bicker in the footnotes with the scholarly editor retained by his publisher.

Fuming, Arthur explains how he found himself in this excruciating situation. He describes an early childhood of idyllic companionship with his twin sister, Dana, and his charming father, who beguiles him with a telescope that shows people on Saturn looking back at the boy with their own telescopes. Later, he enlists both children in creating bogus crop circles in a farmer’s field. The father portrays his deceits as a campaign to replenish “the world’s vanishing faith in wonder,” but since he also applies his forgery skills to making a living, he ends up doing several stints in jail, breaking his daughter’s heart, ruining his marriage and enraging his son.

“I loved him without reservations until reservations were required,” Arthur explains, but the truth is a bit more complicated. Even before the first arrest, he was jealous of the bond between his father and his sister, cemented by their shared adoration of Shakespeare, a writer who leaves Arthur cold. Every so often, the disgruntled son takes a break from his narrative to rant about bardolatry, which he derides as “a trick of perspective, a rolling boulder of PR, a general cowardliness in us, a desire for heroes and easy answers,” and it must be said that some of his jibes deliver palpable hits. Does Shakespeare epitomize what we find great in literature, Arthur asks, or have we cut our conception of greatness to fit his form because we want so badly to believe that “one guy had it all”?

And now a word about the extracurricular attractions of “The Tragedy of Arthur.” Surely the modern world’s most extravagant bardolater is Yale professor Harold Bloom, who, as Arthur puts it, “traveled all the way to the maximalist and insane thesis that Shakespeare invented how people now live, communicate and think.” What Arthur doesn’t explain is that Bloom is perhaps most famous for “The Anxiety of Influence,” a book that advanced the theory that every great writer is locked in an oedipal struggle with the great writers of the previous generation and that these competitive feelings fuel artistic inspiration. Arthur is no exception. “You’re the first person ever to suffer from a double oedipal complex,” is how Dana puts it. “And one of your dads is four hundred years old.”

But if the fictional Arthur fantasizes about surpassing Shakespeare, the real-life Phillips has a different artistic daddy in mind, a writer whose name is never mentioned in “The Tragedy of Arthur,” although he is referred to once, obliquely. Phillips’ novel is, of course, a tribute to Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” which takes the form of an annotated long poem that is eventually submerged in the ravings of its demented and homicidal editor. Phillips’ Nabokovian flourishes are on ample display in “The Tragedy of Arthur,” as when he compares a snail to an “ornate, restless 2″ or worries that his father’s forgery will find favor with an academic champion, “some tenure-famished conniver ready to authenticate to make a name.”

But I’ll stop there, for fear that this will come to resemble Mary McCarthy’s famous review of “Pale Fire,” a piece titled “A Bolt From the Blue,” that is — in my opinion — over-celebrated. The review consists almost entirely of a listing of Nabokov’s literary references, and amounts to little more than McCarthy showing off her parochial-school erudition. (Literary critics, too — even the female ones! — have their oedipal grudges.)

Besides, you don’t need to know all this for “The Tragedy of Arthur” to work as a novel about a man whose refusal to believe that he is sufficiently loved causes him to alienate the people who really do love him. Like a lot of us, Arthur half-recognizes what he’s doing, but just can’t stop himself. “I refused to resemble my father in any way,” is how he describes his attitude at one crucial juncture, and of course that’s exactly whom he ends up resembling. There’s irony in that, but not the facile, sterile irony that many people think of when they talk about postmodern tricks. Instead, this is the hard-earned irony of lived experience, and if it sometimes laughs, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t known its share of tears.

Which is not to say it’s, like, amazing or anything. Taymor approaches Shakespeare’s last play (unless it isn’t; that issue, like everything else about the greatest dramatist of the English tradition, is disputed) with great respect, staying largely true to its impressive text and general narrative outline. Her interpretations and interpolations range from brilliant to indifferent to extremely silly; as Taymor surely knows, there’s nothing especially revolutionary in asking Helen Mirren to play the central role of Prospera (i.e., Prospero), the deposed duke/duchess of Milan turned white-magic practitioner. (Vanessa Redgrave played a gender-neutral Prospero on the London stage 10 years ago.) What it does get you is, well, Helen Mirren performing one of Shakespeare’s most complicated characters, which can make up for a lot of other problems.

The thing about “The Tempest” is that there’s almost no way to bring something new to this tremendously allegorical and ambiguous play, which is highly self-conscious and very much unlike anything else Shakespeare wrote — is it a comedy? a romance? a “masque”? — and may be the most reinterpreted, overanalyzed and deconstructed literary work in the Western tradition. Since the play was first performed in the 17th century, viewers have seen Prospero’s final decision to abjure his “rough magic” and break his staff as a metaphor for Shakespeare’s own decision to end his playwriting career. More recently, Prospero’s relationship with Ariel, his “airy spirit” servant, and Caliban, his deformed, island-born slave, have been understood in terms of colonial and/or psychoanalytic theory: love/hate, black/white, North/South, ego/Id.

I suppose in offering a traditional rendering, or nearly so — it’s set on an island, with characters more or less in Elizabethan dress, Ariel (Ben Whishaw) as a naked holographic sprite and Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) as a near-naked, mud-encrusted African — Taymor is allowing us to pick up the story and run in whichever direction we choose. But I can’t help wishing this “Tempest” had more of a distinctive personality. Instead, it waxes and wanes with its cast, some of whom are fully up to the task posed by Shakespearean dialogue and some of whom just aren’t.

Hounsou gives a powerful physical performance, but simply can’t be understood speaking Caliban’s difficult blank verse about half the time. It’s no good being a proto-Frantz Fanon colonial rebel if we can’t make out what you’re trying to say. (He’s better when quieter, as when reassuring newcomers: “Be not afraid, the isle is full of noises/ Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”) Felicity Jones and Reeve Carney, as the young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand, are merely dull. Some of the best scenes in the movie involve stage veterans like David Strathairn, Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming, playing the nefarious if subsidiary trio of King Alonso of Naples, Prospera’s brother Antonio and the Iago-lite Sebastian.

If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ll know that English comedian and not-quite movie star Russell Brand shows up as the buffoonish Trinculo, playing him as yet another of Brand’s Cockney rock-star caricatures. Thing is, that fits pretty well with the dimwit character, who briefly becomes — along with his drunken buddy Stephano (Alfred Molina) — an instrument in Caliban’s planned insurrection against Prospera’s rule. Those enjoyments aside, this “Tempest” is all about Mirren, who plays the aging female mage with a mixture of conqueror’s arrogance and motherly sadness, lending her final words about the rebellious Caliban — “this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” — a tragic ambivalence. (She does not call him a “demi-devil” and “bastard” in the same breath, as Prospero does in the play.)

Lovely as it is to hear Mirren read some of the most challenging lines ever written in our language, Prospero does not look, to our eyes, like an entirely sympathetic figure (not that he necessarily did 400 years ago either), and making him female does not relieve him of the white man’s burden. Ultimately Taymor’s reading of “The Tempest” is more dutiful than exciting, and it’s strangely bereft of the visual imagination and diabolical machinery for which her theatrical productions are known. Perhaps more than any other Shakespeare play, this one has evaded successful translation from stage to screen. Derek Jarman’s homoerotic reimagining from 1980 and Paul Mazursky’s lightweight modern-language version made two years later are all but forgotten. I admire Peter Greenaway’s “Prospero’s Books” for what it is, which is a self-referential digital art project using Shakespeare’s text as one of its elements (along with lots of naked flesh). But none of those films really comes close to capturing the dense and nettlesome mysteries of “The Tempest,” and this earnest effort doesn’t either. Is “Forbidden Planet,” the 1950s sci-fi reworking, with Robbie the Robot as Ariel and an invisible, perhaps imaginary Caliban, still the best movie version?

James Shapiro’s penetrating new consideration of the debate, “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” is misleadingly subtitled; Shapiro, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of the acclaimed history “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare,” does not doubt the Stratfordian view himself. But he does differ from his colleagues in insisting that the quarrel ought to be publicly addressed. Until now, most Shakespeare experts have treated the anti-Stratfordians much as the mainstream of science has handled the proponents of intelligent design theory: that is, as a crackpot fringe who will only be encouraged and legitimized by any response. And we all know how well that strategy has worked out.

The Internet, that vast greenhouse for growing conspiracy theories, has naturally been a godsend to the anti-Stratfordian cause. Every era has chosen a candidate of its own flavor for the real author behind the façade of “the Stratford man”; in the 19th century, the erudite Sir Francis Bacon was preferred. The 20th century saw the ascendancy of the sensitive, conflicted Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford. Currently, the Oxfordian school is enjoying a Web-enabled boom, but the Marlovians, who favor the playwright Christopher Marlowe, have made a good showing in the new century, as evidenced by the 2002 “Frontline” documentary “Much Ado About Something.”

This may seem like well-trampled ground, but wait: “My interest,” Shapiro writes, “is not in what people think — which has been stated again and again in unambiguous terms — so much as why they think it.” What is it about Shakespeare that causes so many intelligent people to conclude, without hard evidence, that he was a fraud? There are some obvious answers: Very little direct documentary information about the Bard’s life survives, and what we’ve got is dispiritingly bureaucratic: wills, deeds, records of legal disputes and so on. Surely the supreme genius of English literature would have left a more distinguished paper trail?

But Shapiro sees this lack of data as merely the seed of the trouble. He blames Shakespeare experts themselves for creating an environment conducive to the flourishing of anti-Stratfordian fancy, beginning with a fateful choice made almost two centuries after the Stratford man’s death. Edmond Malone, the great Shakespeare authority of the late 1700s, opened a “Pandora’s box” that “could never be closed again” when, in 1780, he wrote a commentary on Sonnet 93. In a departure from the fact-based historical approach that had previously defined literary scholarship, Malone speculated that the poem’s reference to a “deceived husband” pointed to jealousy and perhaps infidelity in Shakespeare’s personal life.

That may not look like a momentous point to contemporary readers, but Malone knew that by 18th-century standards he was going out on a limb. For, as Shapiro insists, “we have no idea to what extent Shakespeare is writing out of his own experience or simply imagining a situation involving two fictional characters.” Previous generations of historians would not have concluded that a poem lamenting a lady’s inconstancy was autobiographical — in fact, the idea would probably have struck them as foolish, like asking Hugh Laurie to diagnose a mysterious illness just because he plays a brilliant physician on TV.

We now take it for granted that a poet penning love verse must be opening his heart on the page. But that’s not how the writers of Shakespeare’s time conceived of their work. The belief that the proper subject of literature is the contemplation and revelation of the self is a fairly recent one, dating back to the birth of the Romantic movement, which was — not coincidentally — around the same time that the authorship controversy arose. Before that, scholars were frustrated by the lack of data about Shakespeare’s life, but they did not look to the plays and the poems for evidence of what he did, experienced and felt.

Malone changed that, ushering in a new way of interpreting Shakespeare’s work that persists to this day. And although he was no anti-Stratfordian, Malone’s innovation proved to be the thin end of the wedge. If great literature is autobiographical, then it seems reasonable to conclude that these great plays must point to a grander biography than the prosaic one we have for William Shakespeare.

All of this coincided with a climate of overheated bardolatry in which Shakespeare was virtually deified in the popular mind. Shapiro astutely links skepticism about the Stratford man with revolutionary developments in biblical and classical criticism; this was the same time that philologists and other scholars were demonstrating that the Old and New Testaments (as well as the epics of Homer) were patchwork texts, written by many authors from different historical periods.

Soon, the magpies began pecking at the reputation of England’s idol. Lawyers claimed that only another lawyer could have exhibited as much knowledge of the law as is evident in Shakespeare’s plays, snobs maintained that his scenes of kings and dukes betray an intimacy with the courtly life that a “grossly commercial wool-stapler” and “stupid, illiterate, third-rate actor” could never have possessed, and so on.

“Contested Will” resembles a series of not unsympathetic profiles; it could be called “Eminent Anti-Stratfordians.” Shapiro admires some of the individuals who have campaigned for Bacon or de Vere — most notably the much-maligned Delia Bacon — for their vigor and eloquence. Each had his or her own reason for picking the underdog side in the authorship controversy.

Freud, for example, formulated his Oedipal theory in part on the belief that “Hamlet” was written soon after the death of Shakespeare’s father. When this was later found not to be the case, he switched to de Vere, who was more conveniently fatherless. John Thomas Looney, a pioneering Oxfordian, came from a reactionary mid-20th-century philosophical milieu that longed for a return to feudal hierarchies and medieval values; the 17th earl of Oxford fit his idealized picture of the Bard much better than the bourgeois Shakespeare.

Of course, it’s paradoxical that such a forceful and well-grounded argument against biographical interpretation should forever be rummaging through the life stories of its subjects in search of motivation. And one of the sophisticated pleasures of “Contested Will” is the way that Shapiro will pause on occasion to observe similar ironies. For example: “The forces of democracy and equality and the overturning of hierarchy [that is, the Internet], the very things that drove Looney to argue that Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays, now, ironically, have come to the rescue of the movement he had founded.” So I don’t doubt that Shapiro is exquisitely aware of his own self-generated irony, even if he refrains from pointing it out.

We now live in a self-reflexive, autobiographical age. Shakespeare did not. We long to see ourselves in him, but, as Shapiro writes, “the greatest anachronism of all [lies] in assuming that people have always experienced the world the same way we ourselves do.” When he finally gets around to laying out the evidence for Shakespeare as Shakespeare, Shapiro makes the excellent argument that, despite the anti-Stratfordians’ contempt for what James called the “supremely vulgar” life of a professional actor, it just might have been the perfect preparation for the author of those immortal plays and poems. Whatever the actor’s profession lacked in breadth of experience, it surely made up in its embrace of the imagination. Who else makes a regular habit of imagining himself into other people’s skins?