Professor AN Milton said it was simply inconceivable that a self-taught small-town American from Des Moines, Iowa, whose father used to take the family on holiday in a blue Rambler station wagon, could have sufficient appreciation of the society in which Shakespeare moved, or of the subtleties and nuances of his work, to be able to write such a convincing narrative.

‘I’ve nothing against Bryson,’ he said, ‘and I’m quite willing to believe he could pen the odd travel piece or organise a litter campaign, but beyond that he is not the man that he would gladly make show to the world he is. The true author has to be another. ‘

‘A first edition Kindle would not normally attract a great deal of interest,’ explained secondhand Kindle dealer Rupert Foster, ‘because there are millions of them. But a slightly foxed Kindle is rare.’

Recently a Kindle (‘slightly creased screen with faint pencil notes in the margins’), was sold on eBay.

The value of a Kindle can depend as much on its content as on its physical condition, according to experts.

‘Recently we were unable to reach the starting price on a Kindle containing 3,500 books because most were Jeffrey Archer novels,’ said a Sotherby’s spokesman.

Last month the secondhand Kindle market was rocked when a Japanese dealer bought a Kindle, said to contain a rare copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, which was later exposed as a clever forgery.

It was the mystery that had everything: love, intrigue, murder, insanity and feuding, all at the highest levels of society. But the drama that has fascinated all of Europe came to a swift conclusion yesterday, as police in Elsinore swooped to arrest Denmark’s Prince Hamlet two counts of murder.

Initially, police had regarded the drowning of Ophelia, daughter of royal minister Polonius, who was been widely dubbed the ‘Blonde in the Pond’, as suicide prompted by her father’s death. Hamlet became a suspect once it emerged that Polonius had been stabbed to death at the palace and had been in love with Ophelia himself.

‘I can confirm that we are treating her death as suspicious, Superintendent Stefan Jorgensen told the press. He added, for the benefit of the British tabloids: ‘Yes, she was young, blonde and beautiful. Yes, her first name was Ophelia. No, her surname was not ‘Tits’. Do grow up.’

According to rumours on Twitter, Hamlet had been driven mad by the death of his father two months ago, following which his uncle Claudius had usurped the throne and married his mother Gertrude. Hamlet’s increasingly eccentric behaviour had driven the royal couple and Polonius to spy on him and attempt to send him to England, before tragedy struck. Or something like that.

The Prince’s lawyers have dismissed talk of him pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. ‘Our client is but mad north-north-west. When the wind is from a southerly direction, he knows a hawk from a handsaw,’ said defence counsel Henrik Rasmussen. ‘No, me neither. That’s what he told me to say. No more questions please.’

A royal source, speaking anonymously, expressed relief that the prince had been arrested. ‘If this had gone on any longer, he might have sailed off to England, had the two school friends we sent to spy on him murdered, got kidnapped and released, come home and fought a duel with Polonius’s son in which he stabbed his uncle, his mother drank poison by mistake and they both ended up dead after being scratched by a poison-tipped sword. Well, it could happen, couldn’t it?’

Hamlet himself has vigorously denied any role in Ophelia’s death. ‘I didn’t even fancy her – I told her to get her to a nunnery once,’ he told reporters shortly before his arrest. ‘Well all right, I did fancy her a bit, but not as much as my mum. Oh shit, you won’t print that will you?’

‘I really needed infinite time and an infinite number of typists,’ said Zephir, ‘so it was always going to be an uphill struggle to turn things around within six months when sometimes I could hardly even find eleven fit monkeys at one time, never mind any that understood the basics.

‘One dominant pool in the North West has a supervisor who’s actually been there an infinite length of time, while another is succeeding by spending an infinite amount of money. In our case the interest payments meant we couldn’t even afford paper to practice with.’

With no money to hire monkeys who could get a single piece of paper into a typewriter at all, still less hit the keys in any kind of organised fashion, Zephir was left with a squad that spent their days throwing erasers and unravelling their ribbons and their nights in treetop shrieking and display rituals.

Watching the pool’s woeful behaviour yesterday was Trevor Simian, revered in his typing days for writing the entire first quatrain of Sonnet 18, spoiling the result only by including, ‘Thou art more lovely and more temperate than a banana,’ a typical lapse that led to him representing his country less often than many thought he should.

Zephir could only watch helplessly as rival pool the Red Arses settled quickly into their iambic pentameter, producing a winning, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question,’ although critics say their style of typing one word each in rapid succession makes it difficult to maintain consistency.

A resigned Zephir said he might try his chances at producing the works of Dante in the Italian Olivetti League, saying he was finished in England. ‘The game is up. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Thereby hangs a tale. Once more unto the breach, dear friends. Fuck this for a game of soldiers.’

Dr Miller told a gathering of critics at a preview: ‘I wanted to confound people’s expectations of this Bernstein masterpiece by taking it as far as possible away from its 1950s New York context. And it works! In my earlier productions, I found it easy to give Rigoletto a Mafia-based interpretation or to set The Elixir of Love in America’s diner culture, but I felt I was getting lazy and needed a new challenge.’

Miller explained that in resetting the passion of ‘Romeo and Maria’ in Renaissance Italy, he had found many resonances which brought added frisson to Bernstein’s work. ‘It’s uncanny how well it works in the medieval context, with its setting of squares, high walls and balconies.’

After seeing the preview, Rupert Christiansen writes in today’s Daily Telegraph: ‘Verona at the height of the Renaissance was a vibrant centre of culture and commerce, but the rivalries between noble families and the degree of violence exhibited by the citizens of the city state far surpass the rather tame themes of teenage gang warfare in Bernstein’s original.’

The production features another new departure for Miller, with members of the chorus standing in rows at the back of the stage to avoid detracting from the unfolding story of Romeo and Maria. He explained: ‘You can only do so much with having characters standing around informally, pretending to chat about interesting things, or even dancing for God’s sake, but I wanted to inject a note of realism and have crowds standing around looking bored, like they do in real life.’

Miller said he was particularly pleased with the ending. ‘Instead of just having a street shooting, I’ve given it a really atmospheric setting in a family crypt. There’s this terrific twist where one of them takes a sleeping potion, and then…but I’m not going to spoil it by giving the end away.’

But the monkeys are furious at what they regard as an enormous snub of their creative endeavours and are already threatening never to reveal the outcome of Lydia’s Chlamydia test. ‘This is bloody typical of a writer’s lot – you file something way ahead of the deadline and everyone’s still whinging,’ said dominant male, Mr Tickles. ‘If we’d written another Complete Works we’d have been accused of plagiarism.’

‘It’s very worrying,’ said Gerald Norton, an expert on spammers and phishers. ‘This guy can spell words like ‘bank’, ‘security’ and ‘password.’ He can also construct a correct sentence from ‘link’ ‘to’ ‘confirm’ ‘your’ ‘password’ ‘click’ ‘on’ and ‘the’. So far, punters have always been able to recognize phishers by their appalling language skills.’

George Watson, 56, said he was completely taken in by the phisher, who has been dubbed ‘Shakespeare’ by bloggers. ‘You see, when I got this email I noticed that all the words were spelled correctly and the sentences were OK. So, I thought it was from my bank. If these phishers and spammers are learning to spell and write correct English, we’re in deep trouble. I have always relied on the fact that they can’t spell for toffee.’

But a successful phisher claimed the phishing community was unfazed by Shakespeare.  ‘Most of our target audience can’t spell for toffee either, so they won’t notice the difference. If a monkey took up phishing, it would make a million. No problem, period.’

A nursery in Milton Keynes is one of many institutions singled out for criticism. ‘Children were asked to read The Iliad,’ the report states, ‘but failed to show even the most basic understanding of Homeric Greek.’  However the report does end on a positive note, pointing out that most European toddlers have an even poorer grasp of English than British pre-schoolers, although the gap narrows in later years.