Waugh currently favors anti-Strat position

English author and composer Alexander Waugh named Tony Pointon's The Man Who Was Never Shakespeare (Parapress, 2011) as one of his favorite reads of 2011 in Waugh's reply to a Wall Street Journal article published December 17. With dry humor, Waugh said that he has vacillated in his response to the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and added:

Mr. Pointon's book sets out to prove that "William Shakspere" (an illiterate player and tradesman from Stratford) never wrote the poems and plays credited to the pseudonym "William Shakespeare." The book's strength is that it doesn't attempt to peddle any of Mr. Pointon's own theories as to who actually did write them. His evidence is clear and compelling. So I am currently on Mr. Pointon's side against the Stratfordians, enjoying my gullibility and looking forward to re-reversing my views many more times in the coming years.

In the article titled "Twelve Months of Reading", the WSJ asked 50 luminaries to nominate their favorite reads of 2011; Waugh -- author of The House of Wittgenstein (Doubleday, 2009) -- nominated Pointon's anti-Stratfordian book along with Sophie Ratcliffe's P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters and Tim Bonyhady's Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900.

Resources:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204466004577102800650505034.html?mod=WSJ_Books_LS_Books_8
http://www.parapress.co.uk/books/man_never_shakespeare.html

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