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Dienstag, 23. April 2019

The Ongoing Obsession with Shakespeare’s True Identity / Stuart Kells. In: Lit Hub April 23, 2019

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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