Whatever else its shortcomings, Turkey cannot be accused of a lack of patience. The country that straddles Europe and Asia first applied to join what was then the EEC in 1959. So it was not surprising that when the moment finally came to agree formal accession talks it was replete with brinkmanship and acrimony.

Many of the obstacles of previous decades have been addressed, albeit recently and in some cases reluctantly. The Turkish government has abolished the death penalty, accepted Kurdish as a language in schools, scrapped state security courts, revised its penal code and tightened civilian control over the army. Human rights are still not being observed as they should be, however, and other areas of weakness remain. Turkey's occupation of, and refusal to recognise, Cyprus remain a stumbling block. Nevertheless, the progress is remarkable. It is a testament of how regimes can be changed through diplomatic, rather than military, means.

The admission of a mainly Muslim nation of 70 million people would mark one of the most important milestones in the European Union's history. The western side of the Continent is still struggling to come to terms with the arrival of cheap, and often highly skilled, labour from the former Soviet east. The influx from Turkey, particularly from its poorer eastern parts, will be more dramatic still. But by far the biggest challenge to the club will be cultural. For traditionalists, particularly in Austria and Germany, and to an extent in France, Europe's identity is interwoven with Christianity. This is not a statement of bigotry, nor does it reflect an impending clash of civilisations. For a continent now racially and religiously mixed, such existential angst may be un-founded. But it should not be dismissed lightly.

All this gives rise to a more fundamental question: what is the EU for? The rejection in France and the Netherlands of the constitution, and the stalemate on the budget, have injected urgency into a question that, until recently, very few on the Continent believed needed asking. Britain has played a major role in encouraging this introspection, but not for the reasons cited by our Eurosceptics. The beginning of the end for the old Europe came in 1995, with the admission of Austria, but particularly Finland and Sweden. This marked the first stage of the rebalancing of the Union away from the agricultural states of the south. The arrival of ten more states last year gave rise to even more dramatic change. Next come Bulgaria and Romania. Then who? Croatia has been given the green light. Ukraine wants it, too. One day perhaps even Russia, although that remains a very long way off.

For British diplomacy, European enlargement has always been the most important prize. Our detractors have long suspected it to be part of a perfidious plot to undermine the Franco-German axis on which the original project was built. The more magnanimous interpretation is that it has spread democracy to the outer reaches of the Continent. Both are true. Europe as first envisaged has been diluted and then disempowered, without its citizens being properly consulted. The UK government, along with the United States, has been the prime mover for Turkish membership of the EU. The more the French and the Germans have objected, the more we have pushed.

Far from being made in Brussels, Greater Europe has Britain's fingerprints all over it. We have destroyed the old surreptitiously but spectacularly. We are building the new. But, unaccustomed to the role of European architects, we are working from only the vaguest of design plans.

Brush up your Neville

Welcome to the Royal Neville Theatre, honouring the creator of Hamlet and Twelfth Night in his world-famous home town of Waltham St Law-rence, Berkshire. The birthplace itself unfortunately burned down in 1924, but visitors may learn more about the great man at the Neville Centre, erected by the Neville Birthplace Trust and featuring facsimiles of Neville quartos and folios. Editions of the Penguin Neville series, edited by leading Nevillean scholars, are on sale in the bookshop, along with biographies of Nevillean actors and, for the children, Lamb's Tales from Neville. Tourists returning to London, meanwhile, can pick up the trail at Neville's Globe, a reconstruction of the theatre where the plays were first staged . . .

If Shakespeare really didn't write Shakespeare, as the authors Brenda James and William Rubinstein are the latest to assert, it is certainly going to take a bit of adjusting. Their argument, in case you have missed it, is that, just as the late Ronnie Barker took the non-existent Gerald Wiley as his literary alter ego, so Sir Henry Neville, a diplomat in all the right places (Venice, Denmark, Scotland), used an ill-educated glove-maker's son called Shakespeare as cover for his genius.

In principle we must be open to these challenging ideas. Figures as distinguished as Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud, after all, have been unhappy about gaps in the record about Shakespeare, and about the mismatch between his circumscribed experience of life and the Olympian wisdom of the plays. The playwright was a genius, this argument goes, and the chap from Stratford doesn't match up. Sir Henry makes a better candidate, but if not him it must have been the Earl of Oxford or Christopher Marlowe.

In principle, as we say, perhaps. In practice, no thanks. If Shakespeare really wasn't written by William Shakespeare, then, for the sake of sanity, we prefer to believe it must have been another fellow of the same name.

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