Skip to main content

CNN quotes Egan

By
Shakespeare Oxford Society journal editor Michael Egan was quoted in a CNN online review of James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?:
"The case for Oxford derives from the fact that almost everything we know about Shakespeare of Stratford doesn't seem connectible to the author of the plays," he (Egan) says. "It's that gap between what we could infer about the author, and what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford, which has raised the questions."
Egan said he was sorry that the author, CNN entertainment producer Todd Leopold didn't use Egan's main objection, that ". . . Contested Will is a profoundly dishnonest book in the sense that Shapiro's book 1599 directly reads Shakespeare's life from his works."


Leopold's article published today on CNN Entertainment,  "Was Shakespeare's Ghostwriter Shakespeare?", numbers the Shakespeare authorship controversy among conspiracy theories such as rumors that Elvis lives. He quotes UC/Davis history professor Kathy Olmsted author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy on the topic:


"When people don't have that information or can't get it, they like to sort of speculate on what the real story is," she (Olmsted) says. "People see those blank spots and they want to fill them in."
Since hard data linking the Stratford man with the Shakespeare plays is non-existent, those who believe the man from Stratford wrote the plays should bear the burden of proving his authorship. Investigating the source of the Shakespeare canon is no more irrational than investigating the source of dark matter in the universe.

Leopold gets a great quote from Shapiro on the Roland Emmerich film Anonymous that will feature Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), as Shakespeare:
"It's going to be a disaster movie for people who teach Shakespeare," he (Shapiro) says. "In the great rock-paper-scissor of movie and book, movie beats book."
Ironically, many alternate authorship advocates also consider the Emmerich film to be a disaster for authorship inquiry because the film promotes an implausible authorship scenario that may damage the reputation of authorship research.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

By
Was King Richard III a Control Freak? Science News ... from universities, journals, and other research organizations   Mar. 4, 2013 — University of Leicester psychologists believe Richard III was not a psychopath -- but he may have had control freak tendencies. University of Leicester psychologists have made an analysis of Richard III's character -- aiming to get to the man behind the bones. Professor Mark Lansdale, Head of the University's School of Psychology, and forensic psychologist Dr Julian Boon have put together a psychological analysis of Richard III based on the consensus among historians relating to Richard's experiences and actions. They found that, while there was no evidence for Shakespeare's depiction of Richard III as a psychopath, he may have had "intolerance to uncertainty syndrome" -- which may have manifested in control freak tendencies. The academics presented their findings on Saturday, March 2 at the University
Read more

What's a popp'rin' pear?

By
James Wheaton reported yesterday in the Jackson Citizen Patriot that the Michigan Shakespeare Festival high school tour of Romeo and Juliet was criticized for inappropriate content -- " So me take issue with sexual innuendoes in Michigan Shakespeare Festival’s High School Tour performances of ‘Romeo & Juliet’" : Western [High School] parent Rosie Crowley said she was upset when she heard students laughing about sexual content in the play afterwards. Her son didn’t attend the performance Tuesday because of another commitment, she said.  “I think the theater company should have left out any references that were rated R,” Crowley said. “I would say that I’ve read Shakespeare, and what I was told from the students, I’ve never read anything that bad.”  She said she objected to scenes that involved pelvic thrusting and breast touching and to a line in which Mercutio makes suggestive comments to Romeo after looking up the skirt of a female. The problem with cutting out the naug
Post a Comment
Read more

Winkler lights the match

By
by Linda Theil When asked by an interviewer why all the experts disagree with her on the legitimacy of the Shakespeare authorship question, journalist and author Elizabeth Winkler  calmly replied, "You've asked the wrong experts." * With that simple declaration Winkler exploded the topic of Shakespearean authorship forever. Anti-Stratfordians need no smoking gun, no convincing narrative, no reason who, how, when, or why because within the works lies the unassailable argument: Shakespeare's knowledge. Ask the lawyers. Ask the psychologists. Ask the librarians. Ask the historians. Ask the dramaturges. Ask the mathematicians. Ask the Greek scholars. Ask the physicists. Ask the astronomers. Ask the courtiers. Ask the bibliophiles. Ask the Italians. Ask the French. Ask the Russians. Ask the English. Ask everyone. Current academic agreement on a bevy of Shakespearean collaborators springs from an unspoken awareness of how much assistance the Stratfordian presumptive would h
Read more