Cannon is among the handful of bloggers you’ll find at the bottom of the bulge affair, one of the originators and prime exponents of the story that Bush was wired in the Coral Gables, Fla., debate. He’s not a typical conspiracy theorist (he says he’s not “convinced” that Bush was being prompted during the debate, only “persuaded,”) and says he’d change his mind if other facts came to light. It’s hard to know whether that’s really the case, but Cannon sounds reasonable enough. And, indeed, many of the other Web-based proponents of this theory seem reasonable, especially when you consider their evidence and take the obvious next step by consulting expert opinion — security guys, in-ear prompter trainers, the people who actually make and use these devices.

What one finds from talking to these people is that the question of whether Bush wears a wire is a real question, one they’re willing to seriously entertain. And while many in the media are quick to wrap it in the damning weave of “conspiracy theory,” equating it with such golden hits of yesteryear as the “Hillary Killed Vince Foster” tale, it’s in fact much simpler and more evidentiary than that. Will we ever really know if Bush was wearing a prompter in the 2004 presidential debates? Perhaps not. But we’re certain never to know if we don’t look at the evidence.

Consider, for instance, the testimony of James Atkinson, the president of the Granite Island Group, a countersurveillance firm in Gloucester, Mass. Atkinson is an expert at wiretap detection and bug sweeping, whose clients include both private companies and the U.S. government. “I’ve done a tremendous amount of work for presidential Cabinets,” Atkinson says. “I’ve worked for Cabinet members, plus staff and advisors … in the [George H.W.] Bush administration, and in both terms of the Clinton administration.” Whenever he’s on a job, he uses a spectrum analyzer, a device used to detect signals from all possible sources — including those used by commercially available wireless prompting systems, the kind frequently used by television broadcasters and actors. When he goes to Washington, Atkinson says he often hears ear-prompting signals coming from the White House. “I have personally sat outside the White House with lab-grade testing equipment — and have cataloged, monitored and confirmed that wireless monitors are being used,” he says. “When you go into a place to check for bugs, every frequency in the spectrum is suspect until you can identify it — and there are thousands of frequencies. I have found wireless mike signals transmitted during [White House] press briefings, with multiple subject advisors. You’ll hear the speaker, and another voice will cut in, like ‘It’s 28 million’ — and the speaker will repeat, ‘It’s 28 million.’ The speaker will institute certain delays or will ask the question again, and will receive a prompt.”

On a Web log of bulge news he’s been keeping at cryptome.org, Atkinson wrote: “When the president visited Boston back in March 2004 he stayed at the Park Plaza Hotel. The signal from the system he was using could clearly be heard 1500+ feet away, and one of his advisors could be heard doing voice checks and then feeding him data about the school he was about to visit.” Asked by Salon who heard the signals, Atkinson said, “I heard it. In Boston I was working a project several blocks away from where the president was speaking. It’s archived. You want to keep archival copies of things because of liability issues — if you sweep for bugs and a bug is later found, you can show that it wasn’t there when you did the sweep.”

Atkinson has agreed to review the recordings in his archive and verify a match with an official video of the event. (Details pending …) “I’ve got a rep for being a straight shooter, whether or not it’s embarrassing to someone. In my profession, integrity is the most important thing — integrity and confidentiality. But this is cheating. It’s one thing if an official has prompting when giving a speech, it’s another if he went to Harvard, say, and had someone else write a paper for him.”

Atkinson also says that it’s not just Bush who’s been coached — Bill Clinton, too, received ear-prompting. John Ashcroft is “quite notorious for using wireless headsets,” and Janet Reno used a system during the siege at Waco, Texas. Atkinson has documented the dozens of radio frequencies that the White House uses for its communications, and has pointed to the make and model of the prompter devices popular in the government. One of these devices is the RC-216 Receive-A-Cue system, manufactured and sold by Comtek Communications in Salt Lake City.

Jon Belgique, sales and marketing director of the firm, would not say whether Comtek sold systems to the government, but said that the devices are common and popular for all sorts of applications. TV people use them so that anchors can get breaking news feeds from producers, and correspondents out in the field can recite polished stories without the aid of a teleprompter. Actors use them to remember their lines, and to listen to “sidetone” — the processed, amplified sound of their own voices. Businesspeople use prompting devices to give great speeches, and politicians and even members of the clergy have been known to do so as well, say several trainers in the use of these things. One ear-prompter trainer told Salon that he’d even coached politicians, but he declined to say who.

Comtek’s prompting system consists of two main pieces — a tiny earpiece and an iPod-size “induction receiver.” The earpieces are tiny, roughly 1.5 centimeters in length, and a centimeter in diameter. Belgique says that Comtek’s earpiece would be visible to those looking directly at the ear of a person wearing the device, but other experts say that newer devices are all but invisible in the ear. “They make them so small these days,” says Rick Plastina, a Chicago-based actor and ear-prompter trainer who is called the “Ear Guru” by friends. “If you get right behind the person and look directly into the ear canal you’d be able to see it — but otherwise you wouldn’t know.” The induction receiver is a small gadget that receives radio signals (coming from the person doing the prompting) and then sends the signals to an induction wire that you, the person who’s being prompted, would wear around your neck. Some people claim to have seen this wire in this video. The neck loop sends audio signals to the earpiece through magnetic induction; no visible wire connects the earpiece to the receiver. (Incidentally, people who suffer from cardiac conditions, such as Dick Cheney, can’t use the magnetic induction systems, according to Atkinson.)

It’s this receiver that folks suspect is the bulge beneath the president’s back. But according to Belgique, the upper back — which is where, in various shapes and sizes, the bulge has appeared in all three debates — is the wrong place to put the receiver. “That makes no sense,” he says. “That makes no sense at all. Usually it’s worn on the side, in the pocket, the small of the back. There’s nothing that would go on the back up there.” Others who’ve used ear-prompting systems concur — you’d never put a receiver on your upper back. It would be awkward there; you’d need to strap it on somehow, and, even if you managed that, it’d be far more visible than, say, in your coat pocket. Why would the president have worn it back there? (Atkinson’s theory is that the president was also wearing body armor, and the upper back was the only place to put the system. The White House told the New York Times that the president was not wearing a bulletproof vest. But this could just be a standard denial, part of keeping the president secure. Calls to Secret Service offices in Miami and Washington resulted in no reply (in the latter case), and in an angry Secret Service man (in the former) saying, “Well, I’m not going to answer ANYTHING.”)

But let’s adjust our tinfoil hats and plunge deeper. Location is not the only reason to doubt the Bush-was-wired story. Indeed, the best reason to be skeptical of the theory is Bush’s performance — abysmal. If Bush was being prompted, why was he so bad? Why the long, awkward pauses with nothing to say? Why did he characterize Iraqi insurgents as fighting vociferously? Why did he repeat himself so much — working hard, hard work, working hard? Who was coaching him, Porky Pig?

Proponents of the Bush-wired meme say that the president may not have been used to using the system in an occasion such as a live debate. And this, it turns out, is a possibility. Using an ear prompter is something of a trick, because you’ve got to master talking and listening at exactly the same time. If you’re new to it, “What’s hard to get rid of is the deer-in-the-headlights look,” says Don Cosgrove, an actor and ear-prompting trainer in St. Paul, Minn. “I am looking at you but concentrating on what’s in my ear. You get a dead look in the eyes.” Others say that another sign to watch for in ear-prompter novices is excessive blinking. Sound familiar?

Is it possible, then, that Bush’s bad performance was caused by a lack of familiarity with an earpiece? It’s plausible. But also it’s not. That’s because, trainers say, it doesn’t take very long to learn to use one, and almost everyone is able to do it and look natural. Most people master ear-prompting in just one two- or three-hour course, trainers say. “The only person I’ve ever seen who’s had trouble was a very, very intelligent woman who was trying to beat the system,” says Cosgrove. “She was trying to speak with the words as she was hearing them,” when what you’re supposed to do is speak a split-second after you hear each word. It’s virtually impossible to spot an actor who’s using an ear prompter, experts say. The day Salon spoke to him, Rick Plastina, the Ear Guru, had used a prompter on a video shoot — even the director had no idea he was being prompted (from a tape recording of the script he’d set up earlier), he says. “Marlon Brando used it on every movie he made from 1980 until he died,” Plastina says. Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and many other stars have been known to use them.

Bush is no DeNiro, of course, nor even a Nicholson. But if he’s been using prompting systems for a while, as Atkinson and others online have argued, then why hasn’t he learned to use them well? And if he’s so bad with them, why would his advisors have let him use them in a debate?

One imagines that this could all be easily cleared up with a word from the White House. Clearly, there is something weird under the president’s coat. If it’s not part of an ear-prompting system, what is it? Is it a back brace? Does the president have a medical condition? If so, shouldn’t we know about it? Is it a security device — if so, why is nobody in the administration suggesting that? Instead of clear answers, Bush officials only issue bizarre dismissals. “The president is an alien,” Bush-Cheney campaign chair Ken Mehlman told reporters in the Spin Room at Wednesday’s debate. “You heard it here first. The president is an alien. That’s your quote of the day. He has been getting information from Mars. The shock of the debate will be the president’s alien past will be exposed, which is why that box is there.”

Are we supposed to think the White House is hiding nothing when it issues statements like that? “You have the Internet people doing their thing, and the Internet people are letting whatever the rumor of the day is go ahead,” says Chris Shaw, who runs the Bush Wired blog. “But the White House is putting out their stupid rumors themselves, too.”

And the story is hurting Bush. In the last week, Salon has run three pieces on the bulge, and we’ve been absolutely deluged by Web traffic. The story is now a regular feature on late-night comedy shows, and it’s come up in the post-debate spin room several times. Just about the only site on the Web where you can’t find talk of the bulge is Matt Drudge’s — but Drudge’s refusal to link to the story is itself an indication of just how powerful this thing is. Drudge instead pushed a strange, competing story about Sen. Kerry allegedly removing an object from his pocket during the debate — an object that later turned out to be a pen. Nobody knows better than Drudge (who didn’t respond to requests for this story) the value of a good, believable political rumor. The idea that Bush was prompted in the debate — like the claim that Al Gore took credit for inventing the Internet, or George H.W. Bush wasn’t familiar with supermarket scanners — resonates with people.

In politics these days, given what’s happened over the past few years, “there is an anxiety that what we are seeing in public is simply being staged for the purpose of deceiving us, that the whole facade of the political process is simply a paid political message,” says John Pike, a security analyst at GlobalSecurity.org who does not believe that Bush was wired, but sees how others might believe it. “There’s this hope that it is not so comprehensively fake that it is beyond our power to detect the fakery — Toto will detect the little man behind the curtain. Here you’ve got Dubya coming out there acting like Oz, the great and terrible. And people like to think they have seen through this huge deception.” Mark Crispin Miller, author of “Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney’s New World Order,” half-concurs, saying that while he believes the president was probably wired, whether or not the bulge theory is true “doesn’t alter the fact that what [Bush] says is carefully scripted and dishonest.” “In cyberspace,” Miller says, “the Bush regime stands accused of many things they may not have done. What’s interesting is that so many reasonable people in the country are so agnostic on such provocative questions.”

Then you’re in the bookstore and there’s this other book on display called “Bagels: The Story of Human Civilization.” And it’s really interesting. It starts with the cultivation of the sesame seed (circa 4000 B.C.), skimming cursorily over the oft-told tale of wheat farming. You learn of the codification of kosher dietary laws, and of the early trade routes of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), from whose pods come the edible poppy seed. The recurring clashes between lactose-tolerant and lactose-intolerant peoples. The toroid: According to some scientists, the shape of the bagel is the shape of the very universe itself. The very universe. Well, gosh. Bagels — who knew?

Then, some time later, you walk in and there’s a book on display called, “Lint: A Head-Exploding Typhoon of Unlikely Connections, Showing How the Entire Universe Is Made of Nothing but Lint (Including You).” And clearly this trend is getting out of hand. You turn to the last chapter to see what sort of scientists might be saying that the universe is made out of…? Oh, string theory.

I’m just making all this up, of course. But ever since Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” there’s been a small avalanche of books like these; they start with tiny little monads of topics, and wind up trying to account for vast swaths of human or natural history (or both). Some are great, like Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book and Mark Kurlansky’s “Salt: A World History.” Barbara Freese’s book, “Coal,” is really good. Other times, you get books like Steve Jones’ “Y: The Descent of Men.”

Jones is a sharp writer, a British geneticist with a measured style and a dry wit. He’s also known for a certain boldness: His last jaunt was “Darwin’s Ghost,” a chapter-by-chapter revisiting of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” that sought to bring the classic text to a wider readership, while updating it with everything that biologists have learned in the meantime. “Y: The Descent of Men” (the title is a riff on Darwin’s later work, “The Descent of Man”), is a treatise on the Y-chromosome, the microscopic squiggle of DNA that divides maleness from femaleness, and on how it has affected the course of all life on the planet, including all of humanity (including you). Which it certainly has — there’s no doubt of that. And the Y-chromosome’s workings on the cellular level are explained in lucid detail in David Bainbridge’s very pleasurable and absorbing new book on the X-chromosome, “The X of Sex” (about which more anon).

Jones’ conclusions are, however, somewhat far-reaching. The book says that because the Y-chromosome is really small and contains only a bit of genetic information, compared to the voluptuous female X-chromosome, all males are useless and inferior and destined for the dustbin of history.

Now, let’s just allow that to hang in the air for a moment. Jones is staring at his computer monitor now with his jaw adrop, screaming how that’s not fair and there’s an awful lot more to it than that. And indeed there is. But “Y: The Descent of Men” is being touted as something of a companion volume to Natalie Angier’s “Woman: An Intimate Geography.” And when Jones says “males,” he means not only the abstract principle of biological maleness, but male bodies and male humans. Like Jones and me, for instance, and possibly you as well. Certainly someone you know. We’re talking about going from a microscopic scrap of proteins to a biological refutation of slightly less than half the human race.

He’s screaming again. We’ll settle Jones’ objections later.

The book does that fairly boldly, tending to use terms like “the Y chromosome,” “sperm,” “maleness” and “males” as though they were interchangeable, and giving human motives to cells and reproductive chemicals (and vice versa). Wherever you find that chromosome in nature, it suggests, you find a stadium full of Promise Keepers baying sea chanteys with their dicks out, a Texas barroom full of drunken NASCAR fans with their hands all over the waitresses, a firehose of testosterone and a rain of beef jerky. For instance, in Chapter 1, “Nature’s Sole Mistake,” Jones is writing about the fact that the Y-chromosome doesn’t alter its genetic code from generation to generation: “Males evolved to stop females from degenerating into clones, but in their own intimate selves have suffered the same fate.” From the same chapter, a few lines down: “Males are, in many ways, parasites upon their partners … Like all vermin, from viruses to tapeworms, they force their reluctant landladies to adapt or to be overwhelmed.”

Yow. But here’s how the up-spiral begins that can take you from that one piece of lint in your pocket to the lint-shaped universe: From the level of microscopic proteins we move to the complex reproductive rites of different microbial, plant and animal species. Beetles are drilling holes in each other and sealing sperm inside their victims with plugs. Fruit flies are performing complex transactions. Fish, birds, mammals, etc. It’s all really interesting, actually.

Then we find ourselves abruptly standing amid human history and biology — with citations from 19th century novels and treatises, references to virility-enhancing patent medicines, the rates of boys and girls born in China and India. The economics of primogeniture, the rate of pay for semen samples, artificial insemination, the workings of the human penis, the history of circumcision and castration.

Jones is careful throughout the book to keep noting that sex is not the same as human gender, that biology and sociology should not be confused. But then he keeps imbuing tiny chemical reactions with world-shaking portent, reducing world-historical trends to the business of mating. There’s a long jaunt through the founding of human ethnic populations, as traced by DNA research. That part and a few others seem a bit out of place, actually. Then there’s more on reproduction in different animal species, and then the book concludes with a chapter on the rising rates of human male genital deformity and human male social alienation, in these modern times. Sperm counts are lowering. Women are out-earning their husbands. “Manhood,” it says, “is in full retreat.” The “fate” of the male sex is “encoded on the Y chromosome.”

It seems like a lifetime ago now, but we were talking before about how all Jones’ conclusions spring from the size and mechanics of that Y chromosome, that “most decayed, redundant and parasitic” of genetic structures, that evolutionary blank cartridge. It’s a little scrap of a thing that insinuates itself into the female genetic line, and (like a virus) forces egg cells — genetically complete in themselves — to produce Y-infused offspring. The world has long been unwillingly awash in semen, infested with spermatozoa.

Jones is still screaming. Look, Jones, you’re chair of the Galton Laboratory and a professor of genetics. I think perhaps you were writing a book about, among other things, the science of maleness, of the penis, of the founding of human ethnic populations as traced through DNA, and all that other ordinary but cool man-type stuff that ended up in “Y.” That would have been a good book. But the editor got his or her claws into the project, didn’t she? Or he — it’s possible your editor was a he. “It’s got to be sexier! Think bigger!” she said. Do you know what she said? “Steve,” she said, “men don’t read books.” I’m looking at the introduction now. It says, “This volume should be of interest to at least half the population.” Hmm.

Or maybe I’m wrong. But it’s possible to read “Y” and still not get a clear notion of what that pesky Y-chromosome actually is, how it works, or what it’s really for. David Bainbridge’s “The X of Sex” doesn’t try to be of interest to half the population. It’s for people who want to read interesting, cool stuff about genetics, written in a clear and literate hand with lots of anecdotal examples. Bainbridge is a Brit as well, a lecturer at a veterinary college. According to him, the Y-chromosome is sort of a useful thing.

Briefly, human embryos are female by default. This doesn’t mean that girls are better, or more authentically human, than boys. Bainbridge dismisses that notion right away — it could just as easily be spun as, “Males are more special.” In fact, men and women are exactly the same animals genetically — in our genitalia, our brains and body shapes, our innate potential to play credible lead guitar or even drums. The information on our “female” X-chromosomes is genderless, and both sexes have the same amount of it. The Y-chromosome is merely an extra snippet of genetic code that triggers default female body parts to develop into specialized male ones. Embryos that have the Y develop as males, and can pass it on (unaltered) to other generations. Embryos that don’t have the Y have a duplicate, inactive X-chromosome instead, and develop as females.

Now, you would suppose there might be a reason for this. Despite the practically infinite modes of reproduction that go on from species to species, with beetles wielding drill-bit penises, oysters changing from male to female and back again, fish engulfing their partners, cells cloning themselves through division, etc., the reason to have two sexes is always the same. It’s the easiest way to swap DNA from one individual to another, which is how the evolutionary gene pot stays simmering. If organisms just cloned themselves, random mutation would be the only way for them to adapt and change over time, to split off into new species, to evolve. Most probably, life on earth would still be a lot of blobby algae-like stuff drifting around in the ocean — forever.

So this tiny, obsolete, parasitical scrap of code actually accomplishes something. Somebody could even write a book about it. Moreover, DNA-swapping is the only thing that “maleness” and “femaleness” are consistently about, from one species to the next. All other sex-related differences — size, plumage, salary, behavior, proficiency on lead guitar — are variable over the course of generations, and they are as widely disparate among species as rhubarb plants are different from lobsters. Meaning: Even if the human male is, as Jones claims, of no special utility at this very instant, these last 30 or so years of industrial civilization (a single generation, Mr. Jones!), things have a way of being quite a bit different every few hundred thousand years. And somebody, Mr. Jones, is still going to have to program the DVD player around here. Oh yes, let’s just wait and see who that will be.

Darger’s landlord, Nathan Lerner, was an art-world figure with Bauhaus ties who tolerated Darger with a certain bohemian noblesse — forgiving lapses in rent, ignoring strange behavior and strange noises, and even (if perhaps a bit ironically) throwing all-tenant birthday parties for him. But failing health finally forced the old man to move out in late 1972 (he died in early 1973), and when they opened up his close-smelling rooms and walked the narrow footpaths that wound from door to bed to bathroom through a ceiling-high mountain of clutter, they found the skulls and tibiae of several little girls, polished as though by long fondling.

Actually, no. But we’ll get back to that. They found hundreds of paintings and collages that are now scattered among the world’s museums, and the longest single piece of writing ever known: “In the Realms of the Unreal,” a labyrinthine novel of more than 15,000 closely spaced pages for which the paintings serve as illustrations. Also an incomplete 8,000-page sequel, illustrated, and many thousands of pages of other writings — including a gargantuan autobiography recounting Darger’s troubled and institutionalized youth and his 53-year career as a laborer. In the latter (and this part is crucial and strange), the sole mention that he had any creative leanings at all comes in a passage in which he’s complaining about the chronic joint pain that plagued him in later life:

“To make matters worse now I’m an artist, been one for years, and cannot hardly stand on my feet because of my knee to paint on the top of the long picture.”

That’s the only time it ever comes up, and Darger, who had no known family, apparently never said a word about his colossal creative output to any of his fellow tenants or co-workers. MacGregor’s book makes it clear that like all “outsider art,” Darger’s writings and artworks were an encompassing private world to him, one which the tired dishwasher began to inhabit as soon as he arrived home from one of his 14-hour shifts and sat down at the typewriter or work table. He obsessively built it around himself, night after night, by the acts of writing and painting. And apparently the public Darger and the private one had very little in common — and very little to say to (or about) each other. Their worlds didn’t connect.

Darger’s private world centered around seven little blond moppets called the Vivian Girls, whose adventures include … But it’s a 23,000-page story, and while of course I always read every relevant source in the course of writing a review — and boy, was this one a doozy — it’s a bit involuted to go into in much detail. Actually, not even MacGregor has read more than a representative fraction of Darger’s writing, and it’s safe to say that nobody ever will. MacGregor’s book and Michael Bonesteel’s “Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings” are the only places in which significant amounts of Darger’s prose are available in English, and it might come as a surprise that Darger, despite being a mentally ill laborer with a grade-school education, was actually better than many of the pulp writers working during his formative creative years (“Realms of the Unreal” was begun sometime after around 1910, when Darger was a very young man; he seems to have finished the first volume around 1932), at least in terms of sentences and paragraphs. (It can otherwise be said that his work would not have been weakened by a greater commitment toward concision.) An outstanding passage:

“He paused for a moment, many recollections overpowering him. He seemed to have unlocked the casket of his heart, closed for so many hours, as if all the memories of the past and all the secrets of his heart and life were rushing out, glad to be free once more and grateful for the open air of sympathy.”

But basically the Vivian Girls are seven perfect, radiantly attractive, largely indistinguishable little girls who get into all sorts of children’s-book adventures, often without any clothes on, during a war between their noble and Roman Catholic land of Angelinia and an evil empire of child slavery and child hatred called Glandelinia.

It’s a nearly sexless story in the conventional sense (there’s lots of hugging and kissing), but a ferociously bloody one, in which literally millions of little girls are tortured, strangled or otherwise killed and/or disemboweled in graphic detail, by the evil Glandelinians. Hundreds of millions of children and adults are destroyed by fire, flood, warfare, tornado, massive explosions and anything else you can think of. There are tens of thousands of named characters who sometimes switch names and identities and often have doppelgängers fighting on the other side of the war. Darger himself appears in many guises, with many variant names, including as a “protector of children” and as a Glandelinian murderer.

If there’s a center around which the narrative revolves, it’s the so-called Aronburg Mystery, the incident that Darger writes was responsible for beginning this cycle of war and catastrophe. It was the unsolved theft of a coveted newspaper photograph of Annie Aronburg, a murdered little girl. As MacGregor shows, such an event happened to Darger in real life, and caused him enormous, lifelong anxiety.

That’s a brief redux apropos the “skulls” thing before, for there’s been a huge controversy whirling through the art world over whether Darger was basically just a crabby mentally disturbed gentleman (which would be good for sales of Darger’s work), or was, as MacGregor once famously said, “psychologically a serial killer” (rather likely from the book’s description of his childhood violence and pyromania and other warning signs, but hotly contested by gallerists) — and if the latter, whether he really did molest or murder anyone (MacGregor seems to have wussed out on researching that too deeply, but you really have to wonder). The real-life photo in question was of Elsie Paroubek, age 5, who disappeared in Chicago in April 1911, when Darger, at 19, had recently returned to the city from the mental asylum in which he spent most of his youth. Paroubek was later found strangled in a drainage ditch. Apparently, her photo and a notebook of early writings were stolen from Darger’s belongings at a time when he lived dormitory-style with other hospital workers.

We haven’t even touched on the art yet. To sum up an oeuvre of hundreds of illustrations, scores of which are reproduced here: The naked Vivian Girls, and all female children, are generally depicted with little-boy penises, although this interesting detail seems never to be mentioned or explained in Darger’s text. Darger couldn’t draw, and usually didn’t try, instead tracing, arranging and coloring images clipped from magazines. His compositional gifts and skill as a colorist approached genius. Many of his paintings are rather charming and even childlike, while some are tableaux of tortures, massacres and mutilated bodies.

It’s an incredibly complex and puzzling body of work, more so because of the rather few key elements it contains, repeated in practically infinite combinations: little girls with penises frolicking or carrying weapons; pastoral and military scenes; little girls being choked and disemboweled. What it all meant to Darger, we’ll never fully know, although MacGregor seems to have the core principle nailed down firmly when he says that the artist never outgrew his childhood, never developed adult feelings or desires, and suffered a bitter conflict between his angelic, or “Angelinian,” side and his glandular, or “Glandelinian,” one.

MacGregor is an art historian who specializes in outsider art and is one of the last of the old-time Freudians (he studied with Anna Freud). His analyses of Darger’s art and psyche draw heavily from the Freudian tool kit, and have a lot to do with repression and early-childhood trauma. It’s highly convincing, although it seems to leave a few holes in things. Darger, at age 4, had a sister who was put up for adoption after his mother died in childbirth, and MacGregor identifies this as the signal event of Darger’s life, upon which all his subsequent neuroses and crazinesses accreted. However, the possibility that his parents were assholes is not explored (it seems likely). Apropos the girl-penises, MacGregor writes that Darger might not even have known there was a difference between the male and the female anatomy. That seems pretty hard to credit, given that the young Darger grew up in a rough Chicago neighborhood and later worked summers on a farm.

Despite the incredible depth of MacGregor’s research (and it is incredible), he’s apparently known in the art-history field as a bit of a character, and he jokes about having picked up some of Darger’s creative habits during the 10 years he researched his subject. (He wrote much of it sitting alone in Darger’s own room, occasionally talking to the absent artist.) It’s true: His work would not have been weakened by a greater commitment toward concision.

The book’s text is also organized a bit like Darger’s writing, which is to say, you rarely get everything in a straight line. If Darger’s prose is liable to start in one place, meander up and down the hall for a while and then run around the block whooping for several hundred pages (literally) before circling back as though nothing had happened, MacGregor’s only goes around the block for a page-column or two at a time. That doesn’t at all keep “In the Realms of the Unknown” from being an engrossing read, although it’s hard to get a synthesis on Darger and his work when you have to keep skipping back and forth through 720 pages, trying to clear up details that aren’t where you’d think they’d be — names and dates, context, chronologies. The index is sparse and somewhat crude, as though the indexing person got a migraine and gave up. It’s a book that demands to be read either hard and thoroughly, or several times at leisure.

So, the tough question: Did Darger ever kill anyone? The answer is, we’ll probably never know. Darger’s ex-landlords, the late Nathan Lerner and his widow Kiyoko, seem to have managed the Darger estate in such a way that nobody who wants access to their material is allowed to ask the wrong questions, or to give the wrong answers, and MacGregor seems to have acceded to all their wishes. Eyewitness accounts have differed over whether Darger gave them his work or asked that it be thrown out — MacGregor doesn’t address the issue of ownership.

After Darger’s death, the Lerners cut apart his self-bound volumes of artwork, scrambling their context as illustrations, in order to sell the pieces individually. MacGregor notes this in passing, in the passive voice, as though nobody in particular had done the cutting. And the cataloguing of the Darger work that was sold seems to have been so lax that nobody knows what paintings might’ve ended up where. MacGregor doesn’t address that either.

Researchers, including MacGregor, have had to agree not to look for any surviving relatives of Darger’s, who might possibly claim the estate. MacGregor didn’t look for any — including the lost sister. And most signally, the research on Elsie Paroubek, and on other children who might have disappeared in and around Chicago during Darger’s time there, stopped when the police records on the Paroubek case couldn’t be found. MacGregor gives no details on the case, which was elaborately reported in the Chicago Daily News; gives no possible scenarios; describes no other leads or competing bits of evidence; and doesn’t show that he ever sifted Darger’s writings in a prosecutorial frame of mind. If you were MacGregor, wouldn’t you be curious? Hmm.

MacGregor does, however, begin his volume with this inscription, which precedes an introduction by Nathan Lerner — suggesting that inner conflict is among the habits of Darger’s he picked up during his 10-year immersion in his life and work:

All the Gold in the Gold mines
All the Silver in the world,
Nay, all the world,
Cannot buy these pictures from me,
Vengeance, thee {terrible} vengeance
On those who steals or destroys them.

— Henry J. Darger

Hmmm.

The academy is finally catching up with that one. There’s long been a rich vernacular literature on stupidity, including such titles as Michael Shermer’s “Why People Believe Weird Things,” and Charles McKay’s 1841 classic, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” But recently, a couple of academic works on the topic have appeared, so that stupidity studies would seem to be something of an emerging field — an academic trendlet. Avital Ronell, the post-structuralist theorist perhaps best known for the naked photos of herself in the Re:Search “Angry Women” collection, had a book out last year called, simply, “Stupidity.” (It wasn’t clear whether she was for or against it.) Psychologist Gene F. Ostrom’s “Why Smart People Do Stupid Things” came out last year as well (he’s against it).

Now Robert J. Sternberg, IBM professor of psychology and education at Yale and the hyperprolific editor or author of more than 60 other books, has compiled and edited “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid,” a volume of scholarly papers on the subject.

Sternberg’s premise is that stupidity and intelligence aren’t like cold and heat, where the former is simply the absence of the latter. Stupidity might be a quality in itself, perhaps measurable, and it may exist in dynamic fluxion with intelligence, such that smart people can do really dumb things sometimes and vice versa. Each of the 10 contributors (or teams of contributors) examines the nature and theory of stupidity from a different angle, coming up with different notions of what it is and how it works — and making the book, on the whole, a rather compelling treatment of what could be humankind’s oldest and most persistent problem. That said, there also seems to be something rather odd about the book and about the way it frames its subject.

But more on that anon. The appearance of the smart and canny Ronell amid the fray gives a hot tip as to where this small explosion of stupidity literature might be coming from. These days, when complex academic works such as Ronell’s and Sternberg’s cross over to a readership outside academia, all slicked-up and flashy of cover, it’s often less because of what’s inside than because of the immediate hook of the title — and the lower the hook is aimed, the better.

Ronell’s titles include “Crack Wars” and “The Telephone Book” (both post-structuralist treatises unreadable by civilians), while the grand exemplar of the trend is the late Dominique Laporte’s “The History of Shit,” issued in translation (in a deluxe black-velvet-bound edition) by MIT Press a couple of years back. Why this might be, nobody knows. Like many stupid things, it’s mysterious. But one tries in vain to avoid picturing the editorial meeting behind Sternberg’s book:

The editor at Yale University Press leans back in his chair, puts his arms behind his head.

“OK, Bob,” he says. “I need crossover titles like you wouldn’t believe, but everything’s been done. ‘History of Shit’ is taken; there are books out on piss, armpits, you name it. University of Illinois Press just did a collection of papers by a classics professor on the pugilistic tradition of a certain Greek island, called ‘Lesbian Double Fisting.’ Your last thing on the psychology of love was good. What else have you got?”

The professor leans forward intently, hands in a professorial clasp. “Well, I’m also working on the psychology of hatred, and on a theory of what you’d call negative intelligence …”

“Hey, great!” the editor says. “Title: ‘You’re Stupid and I Hate You: Why Everyone Hates Stupid People!’”

“Well,” Sternberg says, “actually, they’re separate research topics …”

“OK, ‘You’re Stupid’ and ‘I Hate You.’ Two books. Let’s hear about the first one.”

You have to watch out for these flashy crossover titles, basically. But “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid” is a serious book. We’re having lots of fun with it, but it’s a serious book.

Contributor Carol S. Dweck believes that stupidity is located in the beliefs of certain smart people about the nature of intelligence — false beliefs, including that “intelligence is a fixed trait rather than a potential that can be developed,” that “learning is risky,” and that “effort is only for the incompetent.” Which is unconvincing: I’m a smart person who does a lot of stupid things, and I’ve never believed that intelligence is a fixed trait, et cetera.

Richard K. Wagner gets into managerial theory in his chapter, “Smart People Doing Dumb Things,” treading on territory claimed by Mortimer R. Feinberg and John J. Tarrant in their 1995 treatment of Wall Street incompetence, “Why Smart People Do Dumb Things.” (Note to prospective authors: Despite the combined efforts of Ostrom, Feinberg/Tarrant, Wagner and Sternberg, the title “Why Smart People Can Be So Dumb” remains unclaimed.)

Then we start to really get rolling with David N. Perkins’ fleetly written, deftly argued chapter. Stupidity, for Perkins, is best thought of as a failure of adaptiveness — as “folly.” And folly “in a strong sense involves recurrent foolishness that seems, in principle, within the intellectual reach of the person to discern” — a matter of faulty switching in one’s mental processes. Basically, Perkins says, you can be really smart but not know when to engage your smartness, and the extent to which this happens is “stupidity.”

Perkins lists eight deadly sins of the stupid smart person, which seem to sum it all up rather elegantly: impulsiveness (doing something rash), neglect (ignoring something important), procrastination (actively avoiding something important), vacillation (dithering), backsliding (capitulating to habit), indulgence (allowing oneself to fall into excess), overdoing (like indulgence, but with positive things) and walking the edge (tempting fate). That sounds like my entire life, actually. Yes, that explains a lot.

Diane Halpern contributes a study of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, which has (apparently) preoccupied stupidity researchers since the writing of Ostrom’s book, and Keith Stanovich gets into a whole game-theory thing that is fascinating if jargonesque. Game theory has long recognized that people habitually make suboptimal decisions when confronted with choices that work out cleanly on paper. But, says Stanovich:

“A substantial research literature — one comprising literally hundreds of empirical studies conducted over nearly four decades — has firmly established that [...] people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of utility theory, they do not properly calibrate degrees of belief,” and so on for another several lines.

After reading Stanovich, the proper utility of game theory seems to be, not the study of human interactions, but the study of why game theory doesn’t work in real life — to wit: the study of human stupidity, including the stupidity of those who keep trying to apply game theory to real human behavior. Stanovich also contributes the excellent term “dysrationalia.” A word to keep and to use.

Elena Grigorenko and Donna Lockery’s chapter, called “Smart Is as Stupid Does,” spins the whole thing into a discussion of historical attitudes toward the learning-disabled, including attitudes toward their sexuality, as expressed in popular films. The sort of thing second-string academics are always doing. The first chapter note reads: “1. Cockney refers to lower-level working class in Great Britain.” Oh. Wait, in certain parts of London, you mean? A combination of “overdoing” and “neglect,” it looks like (pace Perkins). But whatever.

Are you getting tired now, too? It’s not supposed to be fun: This is a serious book.

But it’s difficult not to train the lens on Sternberg himself. Sternberg downplays the notion of “stupidity,” equating smart people’s unsmart behavior with “foolishness” (as opposed to “wisdom”) — which torpedoes the whole premise from the get-go (suggesting that the Yale University Press book editor really did have his thumb in the pie the whole time). (Next Sternberg book: “Why Assholes Think They Can Shit All Over You: The Psychology of Evil Motherfuckers.”)

And yet … Well, this is what they call “going deep” in one of those sports like football or hockey, but “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid” seems to be something of a magnum opus for Sternberg, whose interest in intelligence research began in grade school, when he was found to score low on IQ tests and was shunted into the slow classes. His faculty bio tells the story of a child, and then a young man, subsequently obsessed with aptitude testing: He designed his first, which he called the Sternberg Test of Mental Aptitude, in seventh grade, and got in trouble at school the same year for surreptitiously testing his classmates with the Stanford-Binet. Sternberg’s summer jobs were with entities such as ETS, the company behind the SAT. But his troubles continued. In college, he majored in psychology and nearly flunked, then switched majors to math and did even worse. Somehow he got back into psychology and graduated with honors. And, as he relates in the third person, “The summer after the first year, he got his ideas for componential analysis, and so began his career as a serious psychologist!”

This book seems something like a magnum opus because you have to wonder about Sternberg a bit in terms of the smart/stupid question. Despite several honorary doctorates and a C.V. stuffed with prestigious positions and awards (he is, among other things, a Guggenheim fellow and the president-elect of the American Psychological Association), he seems unduly excited, as a middle-aged Yale professor, to be a “serious psychologist!” Despite an outstanding body of work on theories of intelligence and aptitude testing, his career has consisted in large part of collaborations and the editing of other people’s stuff. He seems like what you’d call a hard worker. For example, his chapter in the present book begins like this:

“According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1992), a person who is stupid is ’1. Slow to learn or understand; obtuse; 2. Lacking or marked by lack of intelligence’ (pp. 1784-1785). A person who is foolish is ’1. Lacking or exhibiting a lack of good sense or judgment; silly. 2. Resulting from stupidity or misinformation; unwise.’ (p. 707). The two definitions refer to quite different kinds of entities.”

Yes, it’s the old “according to the American Heritage Dictionary” opener, known and dreaded for its ubiquity and universal inappropriateness by graders of undergraduate papers throughout the English-speaking world. “Hmm,” your basic college sophomore will think, “I’m supposed to write a paper — but where do I start?” And 75 times out of 100, the solution will be found by looking up a key term (such as “psychology,” “narrative” or “Machiavelli”) in the wise old dictionary and saying what it says, thus committing a crime against sensibility and reason equalled only by the scream-inducing “since the dawn of time” opener, which … well, not to go off on a tangent here or anything.

What this is, besides a cardinal stylistic sin, is reasoning from usage — a logical fallacy of sorts. Ostrom, the author of “Why Smart People Do Stupid Things,” does the dictionary thing too, on the first page of his book (oddly enough), except he uses Webster’s. But if Ostrom were to jump off the Empire State Building, wouldn’t it be “stupid” to … Well, never mind; it’s just tangents everywhere. Anyway, this is simply not the sort of thing you’d expect from an acclaimed professor of psychology and education with more than 60 books under his belt. By the time one graduates from college, one learns to at least swipe from Bartlett’s.

But essentially, I believe Marcus Aurelius summed up the point in, as I recall, “Meditations,” Chapter 6, Verse 5: “The controlling intelligence understands its own nature, and what it does, and whereon it works.” “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid” suggests a man at the verge of that great and humane understanding: Imagine that the young Sternberg had instead gotten run over by a school bus and had found himself one day, decades later, manning his perch at Yale’s Department of School Bus Studies, at the very pinnacle of the school bus academy, surveying the achievements and the awards strewn about him (as a star bus driver, an ace bus mechanic, an acclaimed designer of buses, with his first bus designed in seventh grade). “But … it is all as bitter ashes,” he thought. And he set to work, at long last, on a book called “Why Kids Can Be So Careless Crossing the Street.”

Perhaps that bit of humor was “impulsive.” In any case, it would be a case of “neglect” not to say that “Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid” is a valuable addition to a valuable new field of inquiry, and Sternberg is to be commended for initiating its … But I’m “vacillating.” It’s an interesting book, and it’s not “overdoing” it to say that it “walks the edge” between  …

… Um, since the beginning of time (backsliding)  …

The film is about the so-called Marlovians, the folks who say that Marlowe was the guy, as opposed to Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, et al. Or, for that matter, the rustic actor named William Shakespeare who commonly holds the laurels. Rubbo is an Australian filmmaker best known for the 1974 Castro documentary “Waiting for Fidel.” He started out wanting to document the Marlovian apostasy because of all the interesting characters involved (they might as well have been flat-earthers instead). He entered intrigued, but as a skeptic — and was swayed.

Indeed, something odd seems to be ado, Shakespeare-wise: Mark Rylance, the somewhat dashing, hat-affecting artistic director of the Globe Theatre, speaks lavishly on-camera on how he thinks it was really Marlowe. Jonathan Bate, probably Britain’s leading orthodox Shakespeare scholar, appears all postmodern-unflappable in the film but helped award it a major prize and blurbs it in the press.

But back to my paradigm. Pre-Rubbo, I used to think the same as most semi-educated people about the Shakespeare-authorship controversy: that everyone knows the guy wrote his own stuff and we can totally prove it and it isn’t really a controversy at all but part of a common urge to find conspiracies all over the place. There are lots of people out there, for instance, who believe in a secret government conspiracy to create hypnotically programmed killers, like in “The Manchurian Candidate.” Of course, that actually happened — it was called MK Ultra and was, fortunately, unsuccessful, otherwise there might’ve been a rash of assassinations by lone, deranged gunmen beginning in the early ’60s — and there’s the rub: “Conspiracy theory” is a scare term, but real conspiracies happen all the time, especially wherever you find spies and government dirty-tricks bureaus. If they’re doing their jobs right, it’s sometimes very hard to tell where facts leave off and the conspiracy-nut surmise begins.

Rubbo’s film shows that Her Majesty’s Secret Service (the original, Elizabeth I version) might have been involved in the Shakespeare thing up to their Elizabethan ruffs. While “Much Ado About Something” begins by showing the Marlovians as harmless eccentrics, mostly of the English Miss Marple and Colonel Mustard variety, it also shows them as holding that rarest of patents in the conspiracy-buff field — an idea that keeps looking more compelling the further you get into it.

So, Marlowe. The film shows us a man who was the most eminent playwright and the finest writer in English of his day. A young guy, handsome; we have his portrait. He’s the guy, as even the orthodox scholars say, who would have been Shakespeare, if not for having been killed, in May 1593, at age 29, in a sudden brawl at a rooming house. Marlowe was an authentic genius, a polymath, and it turns out, an apostate freethinker with a warrant on his head from the church, and an upcoming date with the torture chamber. And according to the evidence the film shows, he was a highly ranked secret agent for the queen, sent on missions overseas to stir up trouble and dig up information.

His patron, Francis Walsingham, was certainly one of Elizabeth’s spooks, and Cambridge, Marlowe’s university, was a recruiting ground for young agents. A letter to the regents at his college shows that the queen had taken a keen interest in keeping Marlowe out of trouble. The college thought he’d gone to France to cavort with Catholics, a bad thing indeed in those days. The palace demurred on France, but vouched for Marlowe’s valuable service there to the crown.

But trouble struck. Church authorities got a line on Marlowe through an informer, and accused him of atheism, homosexuality and a number of other problematic things (mostly true, it seems). Marlowe scholar Charles Nicholl tells the camera that he believes the brawl, which happened a week after the warrant was served, was actually an assassination meant to keep Marlowe from spilling crown secrets. He was in the rooming house for eight hours, alone with three other men. One was a spy for the queen en route to deliver a diplomatic packet to London; another, Ingram Frizer, was employed by Marlowe’s own patron, Walsingham; and the third was a sort of Elizabethan Ratso Rizzo type. The official story, reenacted in the film, is that they argued about the “ley” (the bill for the food and booze), whereupon Marlowe grabbed Frizer’s dagger and struck him on the head with it from behind. Frizer turned, disarmed Marlowe and backhanded him with the same dagger, whose blade caught him in the right eye. And exeunt. But more on that anon.

Shakespeare has been a problem for centuries. The film begins at Poet’s Corner, at Westminster Abbey, scanning the memorial stones and reciting misgivings that the interred poets expressed about whether the man from Stratford really wrote all those works. “It is a great comfort,” Charles Dickens said, “that so little is known concerning the poet. The life of William Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something should turn up.” Thomas Hardy, also buried there, was similarly nonplussed. Coleridge wasn’t too bullish on it all either.

Nor for that matter were Mark Twain, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud and a host of other prominent doubters. Much of this was due to the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare vogue that began as early as 1785, but something seems to have been ado even during Shakespeare’s lifetime. “There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” the poet Robert Greene wrote in a broadside published in 1592, “That with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde [a steal from two plays, one by Marlowe, and one later published as Shakespeare's], supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum [read: errand boy, Stepin Fetchit], is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” Hmm.

“Much Ado About Something” covers the obvious holes in the pro-Shakespeare thesis: We have no paper trail of Shakespeare as a playwright or poet, no correspondence, manuscripts, personal library or ephemera. We have numerous notices of him as an actor and as a bourgeois landowner, but only a few mentions in lists of contemporary poets (Greene’s is by far the most lavish). Most except Greene’s are merely title-page evidence, where it’s mentioned that such-and-such a play was published under such a name.

There are six extant Shakespeare signatures from banal documents, all crabbed and variant, as though he had difficulty writing his name. There’s no record of his having attended the village school, or of his having donated a penny to it in his wealthy middle age, although, as the film shows, he lived literally across the street. His daughters were, it seems, illiterate, in sharp contrast to the practice among educated Elizabethans (and in the ethics on display in the Shakespearean plays). We do know that William Shakespeare composed the oft-quoted inscription on his tombstone:

Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blese be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And curst be he yt moves my bones.

It really kind of stinks.

Of course there’s more: Many of the plots of the dramas were borrowed from sources in French or Italian, where there was no English translation and William S. couldn’t read the original. Q: Why do so many of the plays display knowledge of locations in Marlowe’s home district of Kent, and never of Warwickshire, where Stratford is (Marlowe’s sister’s tavern even turns up in “Henry IV”)? Why are many set in Italy, and why do so many feature exiles as characters? Where are all the early works? Why do the sonnets refer to disgrace and a stain on one’s name, when William S. was apparently jollying it up in Stratford and, later, London the whole time?

The Marlovians believe the fatal brawl was a setup, all right, but in a different way. They believe that Marlowe was not really killed. Research has shown that the fateful rooming house was a kind of safe house, owned by a woman with connections to the queen’s personal escort. It was also right next to the river — the contemporary equivalent of having a meeting at the airport. After the incident, the case was taken over by the crown, whereupon the queen rapidly pardoned everyone involved and directed that all further inquiries be set under her own jurisdiction.

The avowed killer, Frizer, who was employed by Marlowe’s own spymaster and patron, kept his job. Another man in that same circle of Royal Secret Service men who was stationed at Dover, on the south coast of England, transported a group of agents to France the next day. He subsequently returned to London via Cambridge, Marlowe’s hometown. To the Marlovians, all this suggests that their man was sent off in exile, first to France, then to Spain and finally to Italy, where he lived out the bulk of his years before (possibly) returning home. They think Marlowe used the actor Shakespeare as a front man, so he could keep publishing in England. They believe this was more or less an open secret at the time.

It might seem too Elvis-lives to be true. But an epic poem in the Marlovian style, first registered to “anonymous” in the Stationer’s Register, was re-registered 13 days after this hypothetical flight would have taken place, in the name of William Shakespeare — the first time that name had ever appeared there. The title page carried a two-line quotation from Ovid, whom Marlowe himself had translated into English. The verse in question concludes:

The living, not the dead can envy bite,
For after death all men receive their right.
Then though death rakes my bones in funeral fire,
I’ll live, and as he pulls me down mount higher.

Hmm.

Many readers and scholars have wondered how Shakespeare got an inside view of court intrigues in Scotland (“Hamlet” and “Macbeth” are based on actual people and events there, including the court of James VI). And how he knew about life and politics in Italy (consider those Italian plays: “Romeo and Juliet,” “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “The Merchant of Venice,” etc.). There’s also a longstanding problem with Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” and how it was translated into its masterful English edition. The Marlovians see a single hand behind these apparently unrelated literary conundrums, and further suggest that Marlowe was among the 47 translators who rendered the King James Bible into such remarkable English.

Maybe that seems to wrap everything up far too neatly. But hold on: Diplomatic records place a man named Marlowe in Scotland several years before the fatal brawl, engaged as a tutor (and double agent, in the queen’s service) in the court of James VI. And what’s this? Christopher Marlowe actually reappears in the diplomatic records, postmortem. He was in Valladolid, Spain, in 1599 — at the same time Cervantes was, and just a few years before the initial publication of “Don Quixote.”

The “Quixote” translation — which, in fairness, did not appear until 1612 — was long attributed to a Thomas Shelton, brother-in-law of the spymaster Walsingham (hmm). Except there was no such person as Thomas Shelton; it was a nom-de-plume. In 1602, a communiqué from Valladolid says that Christopher Marlowe is planning to return to England the following year, a full decade after the supposed death of the famous writer by the same name. And there we pick him up again, in prison records, with his bills charged to Robert Cecil, another member of that same Cambridge spy ring. That same year, James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England — and Marlowe’s not in jail anymore. Somehow the King James Bible appears, translated by the 47 mystery men. And that’s about where the research tapers off.

Well, except for the papers of Washington Irving, he of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” who once served as an American diplomatic attaché to Italy, and who alludes in his papers to a 17th century document about an English poet named Marlowe, exiled and under the patronage of the Gonzaga family. The Marlovians say that there are still unresearched archives in Italy that might hold crucial evidence. In his film, Rubbo interviews the most likely such Italian librarian, who says that in all the decades she’s been there, nobody has yet come around asking to look at the Gonzaga family papers.

The weirdest bit, however, is something that the film mentions but doesn’t explore fully. Peter Farey, a British Marlovian with a sort of hobbyish civil-servant aspect, gets lots of screen time in the film. Among other things, Farey says he has decoded the famously obtuse inscription on the Shakespeare plaque in the Stratford chapel, placed there to commemorate the First Folio, which was published after Shakepeare’s death. It reads:

Stay Passenger, why goest thov by so fast,
read if thov canst whom enviovs Death hath plast
with in this monvment Shakspeare: with whome
qvick natvre dide: whose name, doth deck ys Tombe,
Far more, then cost: Sieh all, yt He hath writt
Leaves living art, bvt page, to serve his witt

Farey’s interpretation is more literal than many. Allowing for the peculiarities of Elizabethan punctuation and diction, he interprets it thus: “Read if you can whom envious death has placed within this monument to Shakespeare: with whom his [the real poet's] quick [living] nature died.”

That part seems pretty straightforward. When Shakespeare died, so died the living envoy of the real poet; so died his front man. But why would anyone, or anything, be placed there? It’s just a plaque.

“Whose name doth deck this tomb, far more, then cost?”

As for the second part, the only name on Shakespeare’s tomb (which is outside, in the yard) is that of Jesus Christ. Christ, far more, then cost — cost, such as the aforementioned “ley” presented by the innkeeper on that fateful night. Christ-far more-ley. Which is creepily close to the way Christopher Marlowe signed his name Christofer Morley) “Sieh all” is, Farey says, a common Elizabethan cipher: Nobody spelled “seeth” like that, especially on a plaque for a poet. Any literate Elizabethan, Farey claims, could have interpreted this as “he is,” in reverse, or, in the parlance of the time, returned. He is, returned, with the word, “all”: “He is returned with all that he hath writ.”

As for the last line, we scarcely need to ask who Farey thinks is the “page,” now gone, who served forth Marlowe’s wit. That would be the rustic actor Shakespeare, a mere “Johannes fac totum.” There is a bust of Shakespeare above the plaque (famously derided by Mark Twain as looking like a bladder). It shows the man with a quill and a piece of paper, writing on a pillow. It was renovated in the 18th century; early engravings show that the Bard of Avon was once effigied holding a sack of grain, like many another wealthy provincial landowner. Both the bust and the man, Farey would say, are but a figurehead. And what’s this about someone, presumably Marlowe, having “returned with all he hath writ”? What might be “placed” in the floor beneath the plaque? Nobody has ever thought to look. Hmm.

There’s more to the case as well: Funny references in the plays, Marlowe’s own motto woven into texts, a rustic boob named “Falstaff” (as in, Shake-spear) — stuff like that. But the question remains: Does it matter who wrote Shakespeare? As the scholar Touchstone (get it? It’s another, ruder pun) says to a rustic boob in “As You Like It,” “When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child Understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”

A little room, perhaps, by the riverside on May 30, 1593. If you don’t “tremble,” as Dickens did, at the prospect of finding out some uncomfortable things about the Western canon, you can’t help wondering what would happen if scholars ignored the injunction on Shakespeare’s gravestone and started digging that dust and moving those bones.