Catching Our Breath
Much has happened in Authorship Studies in the months intervening since our last update to the NEWS. Over the next few weeks I’ll try to catch up with events as I begin adding new updates. But perhaps it is worth beginning with the news from Germany. Walter Klier, the author of the 1994 Oxfordian study, Das Shakespeare Komplott (Steidl Verlag), has issued a revised and greatly expanded version of the book under a new title: Der Fall Shakespeare (2004, Verlag Uwe Laugwitz).
The change in title from The Shakespeare Conspiracy to The Shakespeare Affair may reflect a bow to the prevailing allergy to the term “conspiracy” among apologists for the official view of Shakespeare. Surely most Germans understand, as Shakespeare certainly did, that the world runs by Komplott of one kind or another. But the change in title also reflects a much deepened appreciation for relevant details of the case for Oxford’s authorship of the Shakespearean canon, as evident not only by the one hundred pages of new material but also in the reference to contemporary scholarship which was not available to the author in 1996.