Wall Street Journal: Official Shakespeare Story Wearing Thin
My, my, its been too long since we were able to update this news file, and much has naturally transpired in authorship land since last September. Fortunately, Mark Anderson has been more diligent, so if you want to fill in some of the gaps, try Mark’s blog.
Meanwhile, a 2/16 Wall Street Journal, by Frances Taliaferro, covering two new orthodox biographies by Bill Bryson and Charles Nicholl, got us to to sit up and take notice. Taliaferro starts with a predictable quote from Bryson:
"For most of us ordinary folk, the authorship wars are irrelevant.. and ‘Shakespeare’ means interchangeably the man and his works." Think about it. I tried to, but I failed to grasp what the hell that means. As best as I can figure it out, it means "We are ducking the issue. We won’t take a stand that could prove us wrong in the future. We won’t fall for those nutty conspiracy theories. But we’ll put the name ‘Shakespeare’ in quotation marks, so if it turns out to be someone else we can say ‘Yes, we knew it all along.’"
Sound about right?