Sitcom & Tragedy

For a long time, there were few people more identified with TV than Alex McNeil.

The very title of the book that made McNeil's reputation suggests how deep his preoccupation went: "Total Television," a 1,251-page compendium of trivia about sitcoms, soap operas, westerns, variety shows, prime-time dramas, and talk shows. Then there is McNeil's staggeringly comprehensive TV Guide collection -- every single issue from 1953 to 2005 -- which he recently donated to Harvard University.

McNeil knows who played Irwin "Skippy" Handleman, the nerdy neighbor with a crush on Mallory in "Family Ties." He knows when "The Beverly Hillbillies" switched from black-and-white to color. He can tell you which other actors were considered for the role of Perry Mason before producers chose Raymond Burr. (The answers: Marc Price; fall of 1965, three years into its nine-year run; Fred MacMurray, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., and William Hopper.)

But the ultimate TV guy watches very little television these days. McNeil has embarked on a mission that is as far removed from the tube as it's possible to be. He has taken a prominent role in the intensifying effort to prove that Shakespeare was not the Shakespeare -- or, more precisely, that the plays and sonnets were written not by "the Stratford man."

McNeil believes that they were written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Even within the ranks of Shakespeare skeptics, this is not a universally held view. There are many who believe Sir Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe authored the works. But McNeil, a devout "Oxfordian," has argued for his man in scholarly papers, in speeches, and even in a "moot court" he convened before three federal judges (he lost, 2-1). He has served as, and been nominated to be again, president of the Shakespeare Fellowship , a nonprofit educational foundation devoted to the debate over Shakespearian authorship. "Nobody likes to be challenged about core beliefs," says McNeil, 59, who lives in Newton. "But if you try to keep an open mind about it, you find that what is known about Shakespeare of Stratford doesn't fit with what we should expect of the author of the plays."

McNeil was both captivated and persuaded by Charlton Ogburn's 1984 book, "The Mysterious William Shakespeare," which made an exhaustive case for Oxford and against Shakespeare as the true author of the plays. After reading Ogburn's book in 1992, McNeil, with the single-minded focus familiar to readers of "Total Television," proceeded to work his way through all 37 of Shakespeare's plays, all 154 of his sonnets , and even his seldom-read longer poems.

"If you start reading the plays, and connecting the dots, you conclude that all roads lead to Oxford," he says. "And it's only with great difficulty that you can surmise those roads lead to the Stratford man."

Such assertions are hotly disputed, to say the least, by many scholars and Shakespeare devotees. But McNeil has plunged into the hornet's nest of Shakespearean scholarship with a fervor that might surprise those who know him only as a mild-mannered TV historian (and as the longtime administrator of the Massachusetts Appeals Court ). "Oxfordians are getting kind of tired of being marginalized," he declares. "The standard reaction in academic circles is 'These people are nuts. Case closed.' . . . We're tired of being pushed around."

So how did the author of "Total Television" get drawn into this most tantalizing of literary mysteries? The seeds were planted at Yale, where McNeil matriculated in the late 1960s. His class included future TV network dynamo Brandon Tartikoff , cartoonist-satirist Garry Trudeau , and future UN Ambassador John Bolton. A couple of years ahead of them at Yale was George W. Bush, who belonged to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where McNeil and his cover band, the Plastic Visitation, performed. "I'm sure he heard us and boogied to the strains of 'Gimme Some Lovin',' " McNeil says with his customary deadpan.

As with a lot of undergraduates, McNeil's first encounter with the Bard was not a happy one: He got a 52 grade on his midterm and dropped his Shakespeare course. "It was pathetic," he admits. "But for many years I had it in the back of my mind that, as part of the canon of Western civilization, I should be familiar with Shakespeare."

Life got in the way, though, and it was more than two decades before McNeil followed up on his plan.

The weekend of his graduation from Yale, McNeil married Jill Spencer , his high- school sweetheart. He attended Boston College Law School, then worked as a clerk for Allan Hale, chief justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court. (Not the Alan Hale Jr. of "Gilligan's Island," McNeil can't resist pointing out.) Hale asked him to become administrator of the court, a post he has held since then. It is McNeil, in consultation with current Chief Justice Phillip Rapoza , who assembles panels of judges for the 2,000-plus criminal and civil cases heard by the court each year. He also handles an array of statistical, scheduling, personnel , and labor issues at the court.

And what about television, his passion since 1948, when his parents bought a 12-inch TV set, leading to a childhood immersed in "Howdy Doody," "Your Show of Shows," and "The Dick Van Dyke Show"? By the mid-'90s, keeping up with TV had begun to seem onerous to McNeil. First published in 1980 with information on 3,000 shows, "Total Television" had grown by the fourth edition in 1996 to 5,400 shows. McNeil decided to stop updating the book.

"It had ceased to be fun," he says. "The river of programming was too wide. And not having to watch 'Dawson's Creek' was a blessing."

Nonetheless, "Total Television" had so thoroughly established McNeil's pop-culture credentials that Harvard bibliographer Alison M. Scott was thrilled when he offered his TV Guide collection.

" 'Total Television' is the essential research tool for American television, period," says Scott, the Charles Warren Bibliographer for American History at Widener Library . "It still rocks me back on my heels when I meet people whose books I've used." She was not disappointed when she met and talked with McNeil. "Talk about a Renaissance mind," she says.

Now that restless mind is focused on dethroning "the Stratford man" once and for all.

"There is nothing that connects him to a literary life other than his name on the books," says McNeil, adding wryly, "which I admit is a big connection." Still, he insists that there is no evidence that Shakespeare was well-educated, well-traveled, or socially mobile enough to know all the dimensions of life that the author of the plays demonstrably knew. In fact, McNeil says, there is no evidence that he ever even owned a book. McNeil contends that while "untutored genius" can flower in math or chess or music, literary genius requires some grounding in a literary life. Yet the few surviving samples of Shakespeare's handwriting, says McNeil, "seem to show the hand of someone who wasn't sure where you go after the 'h' in 'Shakespeare.' " In his lifetime, McNeil says, Shakespeare was known as a landowner and businessman, not a writer, and did not hold himself out as the author of the plays.

To McNeil, the "single most damaging fact" is that neither of Shakespeare's two daughters could read or write. "If you were the greatest literary figure of your time, wouldn't you want your own issue to be able to read your works?" asks McNeil. "Come on."

The debate is gathering steam. On April 23, the 391st anniversary of Shakespeare's death, a group called the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition announced a project to collect signatures on a "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare." So far, signatories have included Sir Derek Jacobi, the British actor; Mark Rylance, the former artistic director at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London; Charles Champlin, a former arts critic at the Los Angeles Times; and McNeil. The coalition declared that its goal is "to legitimize the issue in academia so students, teachers and professors can feel free to pursue it." Toward that end, the coalition plans to collect signatures until April 23, 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's passing.

McNeil, though, is under no illusion it will be easy to resolve such a long-running dispute. "Academics will circle the wagons," he says. "We have a bit of an uphill fight trying to prove a 400-year-old historical question."

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.