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"Academic Issues"
Or, as my original title had it, “Shakespeare as Usual”:
My op-ed in The Montreal Gazette, responding to Oxfordian Keir Cutler’s piece published last Thursday.
Here’s how it starts:
I don’t think Keir Cutler (“There is method in this madness,” Opinion, Oct. 27) and others who believe Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare are certifiably mad. […]
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As I argued in a post last week, academic Shakespeareans need to confront those who make it their mission to convince the public that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays Shakespeare wrote. We can’t afford to ignore these claims, lest we appear scared, indifferent, or silently consenting. But unlike some of my colleagues, I think […]
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For the longest time, academic Shakespeare specialists have simply ignored the so-called authorship controversy. In the face of a steady stream of books proposing one supposed “real Shakespeare” after another, we in the academy have largely shrugged and turned back to the kind of work we consider important, relevant, and worthwhile; and most of that […]
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Last weekend, I had the dubious pleasure of attending the world premiere of Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous at the invitation of a German TV journalist who wanted to interview me about the film. His painstakingly neutral report aired yesterday; thanks to artful editing, I can be seen and heard being far too nice about […]
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On Friday, David Starkey, the TV historian, made a fool of himself on the BBC’s Newsnight. Blundering into the debate over what lies behind the recent riots in England, he suggested that “whites” had become too “black” — that England’s youths riot because they’re trying too hard to be like Ice-T and 50 Cent.
It would be nice to start this post with a semi-snappy line like “Stephen Marche has written a monumentally stupid book about Shakespeare” or “How Shakespeare Changed Everything may be the most ignorant book about Shakespeare published this century.” Neither statement would be inaccurate, exactly. But Marche’s book is so preposterous in its […]
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My forthcoming book as word cloud (via Wordle; click for full-size image):
Having just finished the index, I think this looks like a pretty accurate summary. “Mediation” and “performance” could perhaps be bigger, and I’m surprised Shakespeare and especially Jonson aren’t more prominent, but it’s true that “authority” […]
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If you spend your life working on Shakespeare, sooner or later someone’s going to pop the question: “Did he really write the plays?”
If you are a serious, textual-studies minded Shakespearean, you might respond with something along these lines: “Well. Probably not all of them on his own. He only collaborated on 1 Henry VI, and […]
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Holger Syme's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.Images may be reused as long as their source is properly attributed in accordance with the Creative Commons License detailed above. Many of the photos here were taken at the Folger Shakespeare Library; please consult their policy on digital images as well.
