Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, found that a comparison of phrases in The Reign of King Edward III with early works by Shakespeare "proves conclusively" that the bard wrote it in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, a popular contemporary playwright, the newspaper says.

Vickers used the software called Pl@giarism to compare the text from the play, which was anonymously published in 1595, when Shakespeare was 32 years old, with other plays of the period. He found that there were 200 matches of "linguistic fingerprints" -- phrases of three of more words -- between the play and works by Shakespeare published before 1596. Likewise, there were a large number of matches in other scenes of the play with works by Kyd, The Times says.

A portrait painted 400 years ago and kept anonymously in an Irish home for much of the time since is now believed to be the only painting of William Shakespeare created during his lifetime.

The image reveals a wealthy Shakespeare of high social status, contradicting the popular view of a struggling playwright of humble status, according to Stanley Wells, a professor who chairs London's Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Wells, a distinguished Shakespeare scholar, arranged for three years of research and scientific testing which confirmed it was painted around 1610, when Shakespeare would have been 46 years old. "A rather young looking 46, it has to be said," Wells said. Shakespeare died in 1616.

The Cobbe portrait -- named after the Irish family that owns the painting -- shows Shakespeare with rosy cheeks, a full head of hair, and a reddish brown beard. The most common portrait of Shakespeare is a gray image showing a bald Bard with a small mustache and beard, and bags under his eyes. The identity of the man in the portrait was lost over the centuries -- until Alec Cobbe saw a portrait from Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library. That painting, which fell into disfavor as a Shakespeare portrait about 70 years ago, turned out to be one of four copies of Cobbe's portrait.

The portrait "shows a man wearing expensive costuming, including a very beautifully painted ruff of Italian lacework which would have been very expensive," Wells said. "It establishes, for me, that Shakespeare in his later years was a rather wealthy, a rather well affluent member of aristocratic circles in the society of his time," Wells said.

The collection includes a copy of the first folio, the earliest collection of Shakespeare's plays, as well as second, third and fourth editions of the folio. Published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, at least 750 first folios were printed, of which only about 230 are known to be in existence. The book is valuable from a theatrical point of view because it included 18 plays that have otherwise disappeared, and copies have grown increasingly expensive in recent years: Sotheby's set a British auction house record in 2006, when it sold one for £2.8m. The world's largest collection of first folios is kept at the Folger Library in Washington, which owns no fewer than 79.

Wolfson's donation, to be made after his death, also includes a multi-million-pound selection of works by Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Thomas Middleton and John Ford, among others.

New York-based Wolfson has himself written plays, some of which have won local awards in the US, although he is little-known in the UK. He began buying antiquarian books and early play texts in the early 1970s. The Globe was unable to confirm Wolfson's age, but he is believed to be in his 50s.

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Wolfson said: "What happens to most collections, unfortunately, is that they get broken up. Having witnessed the break up of many collections, I consider myself fortunate to have found a place for my books at Shakespeare's Globe. Here it will be possible for the collection, which I have put together, to remain together, and to be used to great advantage by students, scholars and educators for generations to come."

People who love the church and its place in British literary history want to fix it -- provided they can do so without digging up Shakespeare's remains and facing the mysterious threat. "We're avoiding the curse," said Josephine Walker, a spokeswoman for the Friends of Shakespeare's Church group. "We are not lifting the stones, we are not looking underneath, and the curse is for the bones underneath, so the curse is irrelevant for this work."

"It's our wish that we conserve this without anyone knowing we were there," said architect Ian Stainburn, who is working on the project. "We want to conserve it as it is and slow down the natural process of decay but we don't want to recut it. It's really a challenge."

The restoration work is delicate because the church, 100 miles northwest of London, is not only a functional house of worship where Shakespeare was baptized in 1564 but also a treasure popular with visitors from around the globe.

"We get 100,000 tourists a year, but they don't walk on the stones," Walker said. "But the clergy have to when they give communion, and the stones are flaking away, the surfaces are coming off. We want to clean the surfaces and then very gradually ease in some transparent grout and hold the surfaces together. Then we want to move the altar rail so that when the clergy give communion they don't have to walk over the stones."

Readers can even plug in words, such as "to be or not to be" from "Hamlet," and immediately be taken to that part of the play. The site, which was introduced in conjunction with Google's sponsorship of New York City's "Shakespeare in the Park" performance series, also provides links to related scholarly research, Internet groups and even videos of theater performances of Shakespeare plays. It also encourages users to "take a literary field trip" by searching for London's Shakespeare's Globe Theater on Google Earth, which combines satellite imagery, maps and a search engine to find historic locations around the world.

Google Book Search, the Google product which houses the Shakespeare site, allows users to view books or parts of books through their Web browsers if the copyright has expired or a publisher has given permission to do so.