Relax: Professors Believe in Him
When New York Times culture desk editor William Niederkorn, who has written for the Times on Shakespearean topics including the authorship question at least since 2002, initiated an online survey for academicians to measure their views on authorship last month, some of the respondents were practically apoplectic that anyone would bother to ask them about a subject they know doesn’t exist. Now that the results are out, the professors can heave a sigh of relief. Or can they? The survey of 265 professors who teach Shakespeare in English departments of public and private four years colleges and universities, selected randomly, reveals that 82% say that there is no reason to question the traditional account of authorship. Only 11% say there is “possibly good reason” to question authorship, while a measly 6% say there is good reason to do so. Sounds like a slam dunk for the “stubborn bear, authority,” doesn’t it?
But wait. It wasn’t that many years ago when, according to Caltech Professor Jenijoy La Belle, in her 1993 “Happy Birthday William” column in the Los Angeles Times, assured us that 99.99% of all Shakespearean professors knew that anyone who questioned Shakespeare’s authorship was a “noodle” — a word apparently used in some English departments to signify an “errant addle-patted miscreant.” If Labelle’s statistic is valid (and, after all, as a reputable Shakespearean scholar, she must have known what she was talking about, right?), that means that the decline in support for the traditional view of authorship within English departments is nothing short of precipitous. Alternatively, hiring committees have for over a decade done a pisspoor job of keeping the loonies out of the institutions.