Dr Samuel Johnson provides in his famous Dictionary several definitions of the word “genius” – all of which have weathered the 250 intervening years, but for the casual sexism of their day. Read “person” for man and these reflections hold up well:  a man endowed with superior faculties; mental power or faculties; disposition of nature by which any one is qualified for some peculiar employment; Nature, disposition . . .

The study of genius prompts reflections on what those faculties and disposition might consist of; less often is the genius measured by the intensity of its force or application, or the context within which it is exercised.

Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate begins his fascinating study of “The Genius of Shakespeare” with an extended quotation from an allegory of The Bard’s life written by no less a genius himself than Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote:

“History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: ‘I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.’ The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: ‘Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”

Implicit in this notion of the Alpha Genius is the instant refutation of the “authorship controversy” on which scholar Bate devotes so much space and time in his book: as if the attributes of such genius as could write those plays could not rise above the constraints of learning Latin in a middling provincial town rather than at Oxbridge; as if there is not a considerable literature based upon people who have risen above humble origins to attract the admiration of posterity; as if indeed there are not thousands of people in England alone who were well-born and better-educated and yet never wrote a play.

Of the definitions offered by Dr Johnson, the one not quoted above was perhaps the most intriguing and so, possibly, was listed first: “the protecting or ruling power of men, places, or things”. There cannot be anything of genius inherent in those things or the cities in which they are collected. It is the men (and the women, Dr Johnson) who bring their collective faculties, natures, and dispositions to bear upon the fashioning of a place as a proving ground of genius.

The fascinating questions about Shakespeare are not who might have been the better genius if they’d been born a Lord or learned Latin in a better school. His birth and schooling were sufficient to ensure that he was no flower “born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” His genius did the rest.

Far more interesting is what made London the fertile ground of collective genius over centuries, from Shakespeare through Sir Isaac Newton, Edmund Burke, and Dr Johnson to Charles Dickens and goodness know who else, still living?