(7:44) In this excerpt from the opening section of "Much Ado About Something," producer/director Michael Rubbo leads viewers on a brief tour of the Shakespeare authorship mystery, introducing some famous skeptics -- such as Henry James, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Sigmund Freud -- and some of the more popular candidates for the authorship, including Christopher Marlowe, the 16th-century English playwright, poet, and spy.

(Stills of William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.)

(2:13) This excerpt begins with footage from an interview with the late Calvin Hoffman, author of The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare" (1955) and a leading proponent of the case for Christopher Marlowe. Hoffman compiled 30 pages of "parallelisms" between Marlowe's works and those attributed to Shakespeare: that is, lines or phrases of Marlowe's that are echoed, if not quoted verbatim, in Shakespeare's plays. Here, two professional actors trade lines of Marlowe and Shakespeare, illustrating a few of the most striking parallelisms. They're followed by comments from Prof. Jonathan Bate, a Shakespeare scholar and author of The Genius of Shakespeare, who does not find it at all surprising that Shakespeare "should have borrowed a lot, stolen, indeed, from the greatest dramatist of his youth."