Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides… —Cordelia (King Lear, I.1.282) The quest for the real William Shakespeare is akin to a detective story in which the Shakespearian biographer is cast in the role of a literary sleuth, pursuing his quarry like a latter-day Sherlock Holmes. One of the problems is the presence of red [...]
We live in a mad, mad world where anything goes and many things have gone. One of the things that appears to have gone is a sense of sanity. Take, for instance, a recent essay in The Atlantic which claims to show that William Shakespeare was in fact a woman.[*] The essay itself, which was written [...]
Whether a man named William Shakespeare actually authored the plays attributed to him is a question that has been raised by many observers since at least the nineteenth century. Notable figures, such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud, all found persuasive the theory that someone else wrote the plays. Group theories of authorship—that [...]
My book Alias Shakespeare has come under attack from Stratfordian scholars and critics, as one might expect. Most recently it has been the target of a long, captious review by Alan H. Nelson of Berkeley in The Shakespeare Quarterly (Fall 1999), that bastion of Shakespearean orthodoxy (published, of course, by the Folger Shakespeare Library). But [...]