Oberon Shakespeare Study Group

Michael Dudley,  Indigenous and Urban Services Librarian University of Winnipeg In his complex and comprehensive, nine-page opinion piece in the current issue of Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research , University of Winnipeg librarian Michael Dudley exhorts his fellow librarians to embrace the Shakespeare authorship question: . . . the potential benefits of engaging in this issue are many. This subject has engendered an enduring and high level of fascination which is certain to arouse the interest of our campus communities, as it represents a novel approach to locating Shakespeare and provides professional and amateur scholars alike with new perspective. The historical, multicultural and, most importantly, interdisciplinary interest in Shakespeare—be it through a conventional or skeptical approach to the author—implies that an open-minded approach to the question of authorship would appeal to the widest audience. This engagemen...

The Winnepeg Free Press published Michael Dudley's review of James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?,  "Out, damned skeptics, author fills in blanks with Stratfordian doctrine" , on May 15, 2010. Dudley -- a senior research associate at the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnepeg -- is a long-time Shakespeare authorship skeptic who finds Shapiro's arguments for the traditional Stratfordian candidate to be "time-worn, weak and . . . fallacious". Dudley demolishes the key issue of Stratfordian attribution with one ultra-clear sentence: . . .  Shapiro, nevertheless, devotes the final chapter to setting out his case for Stratfordian orthodoxy, which, like most conventional biographies of "the Bard," consists primarily of conflating all contemporary references to a writer named Shakespeare with the man from Stratford, and filling in the blanks with conjecture. And a scathing analysis: It is difficult to imagine a...