In her new website/weblog The Edward Oxenford Review , Marie Merkel responds to Shaksper electronic Shakespeare conference owner Hardy Cook's plea for strategies to counter interest in the Shakespeare authorship question generated by Roland Emmerich's Anonymous , a film on the topic that will debut September 23, 2011. In her post titled "Academic Response to Anonymous" Merkel presents Cook with a reading list of material and offers in closing: Finally, I suggest that you portray the movie as Opportunity rather than Disaster. Ridicule – of the film, of the authorship question, of Oxford himself – may seem to your students like a nervous defense against a devil you don’t dare look in the face. The way I see it, anything you can say that will send your seeker back to The Bard’s ever-living poetry, with confidence in his or her own ability to discern the truth, may turn out to be a kindness long remembered. Sounds reasonable to me. I must say, when I saw the fury a...
a Michigan group dedicated to the study of the works of William Shakespeare with particular interest in the authorship question