In yesterday's London Telegraph contributor William Langley wrote an interesting essay on Sir Derek Jacobi's decision to play Shakespeare's King Lear at long last. Langley's mini-bio is titled "Sir Derek Jacobi: Bard to the bone" with the subtitle: "Sir Derek Jacobi doesn't believe Shakespeare wrote King Lear -- but he's still given one of the greatest performances in the role, says William Langley." Jacobi's anti-Stratfordian viewpoint is given some prominence in the article: In recent years, Jacobi has emerged as a leading Shakespeare sceptic, taking the view that a semi-educated country boy from Stratford-upon-Avon couldn’t possibly have written the great works attributed to him. Three years ago, he co-launched the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition – a group dedicated to proving that the plays must have been penned by others, and later, in a speech to a like-minded American research organisation, declared: “The only evidence of S...
a Michigan group dedicated to the study of the works of William Shakespeare with particular interest in the authorship question