New York Times Vrs. Times Literary Supplement
Within less than two weeks major publications on opposite sides of the Atlantic have published reviews of recent Shakespearean books which portray radically different perspectives on the authorship question.
In today’s New York Times William Niederkorn contrasts Mark Anderson’s Shakespeare By Another Name with Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004), in a review which leads with the comment that “The controversy over who wrote Shakespeare’s works has reached a turning point of sorts. A new biography of the Earl of Oxford improves on the unorthodox argument that he was Shakespeare, while fantasy has now been firmly established as a primary tool of other, more traditional Shakespeare studies.”
But on the other side of the pond, in an August 17 Times Literary Supplement review of four books on authorship by Brian Vickers, Chair of English Language and Literature at the Centre for Renaissance Studies, Zurich , fantasy still reigns. Vickers, reviewing Great Oxford, The Case for Shakespeare, Peter Dawkins’ The Shakespeare Enigma, and a Marlovian edition of Hamlet edited by Alex Jack, delivers a what Niederkorn describes as a” fire-and-brimstone academic sermon attacking the Shakespeare-must-have-been-someone-else scholars” and denouncing anti-Stratfordians as blinkered conspiracy theorists.
Vicker’s review is headlined, “Why Not Shakespeare?” One might answer the question from the refreshingly balanced review of Charlton Ogburn’s Mysterious William Shakespeare published by the Folger Library’s Shakespeare Quarterly eighteen years ago: “Doubts about Shakespeare came early and grew rapidly. They have a simple and direct plausibility. The plausibility has been reinforced by the tone and methods by which traditional scholarship has responded to the doubts….”
Plus ça change … plus c’est la même chose.