The Bard's Bastard

"Methinks the Bard's blood itself does inform your pen!" Eleanor's teacher exclaimed, as she read the prose scribbled in the margins of the page.
'I don't think so," Eleanor blushed.
"'Tis very like his form."
"What, 'the bloody corpse lay limply in his arms, and grinned'?" She quoted herself from memory.
"The wit, the form and feeling of the piece," Ms Gambol insisted. "Very like."
"If you say so." She didn't add what she was really thinking - Shakespeare is boring. I don't want to write like that. As if she could read Eleanor's mind, Ms Gambol sighed.
"Of course, most teenagers these days wouldn't consider that a compliment. Our mutual friend is not the most... accessible, of our literary ancestors."
Eleanor was torn between grinning and grimacing - Ms Gambol always spoke like that, as though they were comrades in arms, unified by their common love of language. Eleanor had never been anyone's comrade, and she had certainly never felt that words brought her closer to others. If anything, she felt alienated from her peers. How could she be friends with someone who couldn't use a semi-colon properly? How could she have respect for somebody who used language like it was a bludgeon? She didn't mean to be so superior, but there it was. Who can help the way they feel?
"It was such a pity that he never had any children," Ms Gambol continued, sighing again. "Of course a writer's talent is nothing to do with breeding, yet it would have been interesting to see... even if he had raised children, to see how they could have turned out."
"He didn't have children?"
"Not that we know of. Who can say what a man gets up to off the record -" she coughed politely. Eleanor knew what she meant. "But officially there is nothing, and it's highly unlikely that his bloodline ever carried on. It is a pity..."
Eleanor had to agree. Even though she felt just as distant from Shakespeare's works as she did from her classmates, it was a sad thought to imagine a person who lived on only through words.
But what if there had been a child, she wondered, because who could honestly say there hadn't been?