Bear pit. War zone. Mad house. My first
serious contact with 21st-century Shakespeare studies was during my
doctorate at Monash University. Rumor had it that the Clayton campus was
the main recruiting ground for Australia’s spy agencies. It was also a
hotbed of Shakespeare scholarship—mostly unorthodox and not confined to
the English department.
I met at Monash an experimental pathology
professor who studied coded messages in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In
another faculty, a philosophy professor studied the same sonnets to
trace arithmetical, musicological and Platonic patterns. Across the
university there were Shakespeare scholars whose backgrounds looked like
an implausible case study in multidisciplinarity: law, geography,
medicine, nursing, mathematics, French Renaissance studies, commerce,
music history, librarianship, drama therapy. In every department and
every cafe, it seemed there was a scholar with a new take on Shakespeare
and his work.
In this milieu I encountered several
breeds of Stratfordians (those who accept the standard Shakespeare
biography) and a multitude of anti-Stratfordians (those who reject it):
Baconians, Oxfordians, Marlovians, Derbyites, Rutlanders, Groupists. One
sub-species was especially well represented. Monash was home to the
world’s richest concentration of Nevillians: people who think Sir Henry
Neville wrote Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Landing in this parallel
universe of unorthodoxy was an unsettling experience. Finding out you’re
surrounded by Shakespeare skeptics is like discovering all your friends
are Scientologists, or swingers.
At Monash I absorbed the doctrinal distinctions that
define the Shakespearean sub-groups, just as hair-splits and sore points
separate Trotskyites from Leninists. A Baconian offshoot, for example,
claimed Sir Francis was the bastard son of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl
of Leicester. An Oxfordian splinter claimed Henry Wriothesley was the
lovechild of busy Lizzie and the Earl of Oxford. Quickly I worked out
which topics were taboo, which researchers were on friendly terms, and
which were on “no speaks.” I acquired the jargon of Shakespeare heresy.
Already able to tell my Folios from my Florios, I learnt to speak in
shorthand about Quiney, Looney, “Wrizzley” and Knollys, and to cite from
memory the Tower Notebook and the Northumberland Manuscript. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-ongoing-obsession-with-shakespeares-true-identity/
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