Há um monte de histórias sobre viajantes do tempo voltando para descobrir quem escreveu as peças de Shakespeare, como "The Comedy of Eras" de Henry Kuttner e "Much Ado About Pending" de Nelson S. Bond; mas o que você descreveu é "The Muse" por Anthony Burgess da Laranja Mecânica fama.
Este foi um conto em que um viajante do tempo - pode ter sido um professor de inglês
"You're quite sure," asked Swenson for the hundredth time, "you want to go through with this?" His hands ranged over the five manuals of the instrument console and, in cross-rhythm, his feet danced on the pedals. He was a very old man, waxed over with the veneer of rejuvenation chemicals. Very wise, with a century of experience behind him, he yet looked much of an age with Paley, the twenty-five-year-old literary historian by his side.
- viaja de volta à Inglaterra elisabetana para determinar de uma vez por todas quem escreveu as peças e os sonetos de "William Shakespeare".
"We have to check up on history," said Paley, mumbling a little. His own quest seemed piddling: all this machinery, all this expertise in the service of a rather mean enquiry. "I have to know whether William Shakespeare really wrote those plays."
Ele chega a uma sociedade onde todos desconfiam de todos os outros, onde os informantes podem denunciá-lo à polícia secreta real e o sentimento dominante é o medo. Finalmente ele conhece Shakespeare, mas não é uma descoberta feliz. Aparentemente, o famoso dramaturgo é um alienígena do espaço ... e não do tipo amigável.
"'Tis not seemly to read a gentleman's private papers lacking his permission." Paley spun about to see, dancing in the air, a reproduction of the Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare, square in a frame, the lips moving but the eyes unanimated. He tried to call but could not. The talking woodcut advanced on him—"Rude, mannerless, or art thou some Privy Council spy?"—and then the straight sides of the frame bulged and bulged, the woodcut features dissolved, and a circle of black lines and spaces tried to grow into a solid body. Paley could do nothing; his paralysis would not even permit him to shut his eyes. The solid body became an animal shape, indescribably gross and ugly—some spiked sea urchin, very large, nodding and smiling with horrible intelligence. Paley forced it into becoming a more nearly human shape. His heart sank in depression totally untinged by fear to see standing before him a fictional character called "William Shakespeare," an actor acting the part. Why could he not get in touch with the Ding an sich, the Kantian noumenon? But that was the trouble—the thing-in-itself was changed by the observer into whatever phenomenon the categories of time-space-sense imposed. He took courage and said:
"What plays have you writ to date?"