No one who has seen Shakespeare in Love can forget the scenes in which Joseph Fiennes falls for Gwyneth Paltrow while writing Romeo and Juliet - a clever-clever storyline for this most postmodern of romcoms. But the film's really interesting affair, suggests Helen Hackett, doesn't concern the star-crossed lovers, or even their supposed real-life equivalents: it's between Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. Paltrow's character, you'll recall, departs for the newfound shores of America at the film's end. For playwright and monarch, however, it's clearly just the start. "Tell Master Shakespeare: something more cheerful next time," declares Judi Dench's queen just before the credits roll. "For Twelfth Night."
In Hackett's well-informed if sometimes crowded account, this is merely one in a long line of narratives in which the real-life queen and the player king become fatefully entwined. Even the most austere biographers speculate about how they might have met, and versions of their relationship spill across an astonishing range of fictional tales, from bodice-ripping novels to burlesques, films and TV adaptations. "There is something about the imagined meeting between Shakespeare and Elizabeth," Hackett writes, "that we want to cling to."
Imagined is right. As Shakespeare in Love artfully acknowledges - Dench's character arrives at the theatre incognito - Elizabeth never deigned to attend the public playhouses. And although Shakespeare's company played at her court reasonably frequently, a private audience for a mere actor was never on the cards. Perhaps just as well: Elizabeth was aware of Richard II, and irritated by its depiction of a vacillating monarch, while the few references to Elizabeth that survive in Shakespeare's writings are ambiguous where they are not actively impolitic. In fact, Shakespeare had a much more productive connection with her successor, James I, whose influence colours plays such as Measure for Measure, Macbeth and King Lear, which flattered his interests in governance, witchcraft and the nascent Great Britain.
But where's the romance in that? As early as the 18th century, Hackett points out, historians were busy supplying colourful stories in which Elizabeth and Shakespeare collide. Often they built on burgeoning gossip about a fondness for favourites (hers) and a jack-the-lad roguishness (his). The two come together in a long-lived legend about the young Will being arrested for poaching deer, only to be spared, according to early biographers, by Elizabeth's intervention. The event is supposed to have formed the basis for Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, which was reputedly composed so the queen could see a play about Falstaff in love - a tissue of semi-truths it has taken centuries to untease. When William Henry Ireland published his magnificently improbable Shakespearean forgeries in 1796, it was little wonder that alongside the "forgotten" manuscripts he claimed to have found there should be a flirtatious letter sent to Shakespeare by "my moste gracyouse Ladye Elyzabethe".
Into the 19th century, the relationship became more chaste, but no less charged. Walter Scott, elsewhere so obsessive about historical research, deliberately faked Shakespeare's age in Kenilworth (1821) so that the queen could demonstrate intimate knowledge of his plays and poems. And paintings of Shakespeare and Elizabeth - two eminent Elizabethans for the price of one - became a full-blown genre in the Victorian period. Invariably, these images depicted the playwright declaiming his works to an enraptured monarch; a tradition craftily subverted by Punch in 1895, whose cartoonist imagined Elizabeth testing her own verses on a playwright about to expire from boredom.
The question of what drives the obsession flits through these pages, but is never satisfactorily pinned down. Nationalism comes into it, Hackett suggests: a validatory double myth of national poet and virgin queen. Sexuality, too, plays its part - an urge to straighten out a married man who may have been gay, and an unmarried woman who touted her masculinity (how much better if they could simply get together). Or perhaps there's a form of idle wish-fulfilment at work, the fantasy that if two people are celebrities they must surely be best of friends.
My favourite section of the book, though, concerns various 19th-century conspiracy theorists, some of whom argued that Elizabeth was Shakespeare's mother, others that they were one and the same - the idea being that Elizabeth simply wrote the plays herself and used "Shakespeare" as an alias. Both rumours have reappeared in recent years. The affair isn't quite over.