Doubt in the Press
The Shakespeare Authorship Question gets mainstream media coverage
Earlier this week, the Times journalist and anti-anti-Stratfordian Oliver Kamm wrote a letter to the London Library protesting their intention to hold a book event. The book is US journalist Elizabeth Winkler’s Shakespeare Was A Woman and Other Heresies, which has made something of an impression in hardback and is about to hit the shelves in paperback. The event is a discussion between her and one of the finest Shakespearean actors of his generation, Sir Derek Jacobi, chaired by Guardian critic Stephanie Merritt.
Oliver Kamm did more than send his private letter to the Director of the London Library of course. A professional outrage farmer, he posted it on his Twitter/X account and on Facebook. He wanted others to join his howl of protest, and to some extent they did.
Articles in The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, The Week, and The Daily Mail were centred on Oliver Kamm’s accusations of “conspiracy theory”, and many led, at least at first, with headlines suggesting that the book claims Shakespeare was a woman, even though it does not. There was summary coverage in the same vein by The Week.
Winkler’s book documents the canonisation of Shakespeare in the 19th century as a near-religious figure, and the framing of any doubt over the authorship of any canonical plays and poems as heresy. It runs through a history of the authorship question and its suppression, chiefly through career-damaging mockery and, in the last couple of decades, the mischaracterization of Shakespeare scepticism as a “conspiracy theory,” which the UK press this week has reinforced. The true argument of the book, and the fact that it contains interviews with leading Stratfordians as well as doubters, was ignored. Additional cultural commentators weighed in: the humorist Giles Coren in The Times, and Charles Moore in the Spectator. None of these journalists have, of course, studied the question beyond accepting received (and furiously asserted) opinion.
But Elizabeth Winkler has, and this unusual week of mainstream press coverage for the Shakespeare Authorship Question (in the UK at least) ends on something positive; an article summarising Roger Stritmatter’s groundbreaking research on Francis Meres, recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Critical Survey.
Stratfordian scholars often lean on Francis Meres’ 1598 book Palladis Tamia as “proof” that Meres knew Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford were different people because he included both of them in one of his lists. But in this article, Stritmatter makes a strong case that the entries concerning Shakespeare are Meres’s covert declaration that Shakespeare and Oxford are one and the same, making Francis Meres an early Shakespeare sceptic.
This doesn’t mean that Meres was right in his surmise; then as now, there were several ‘camps’ of doubt when the name ‘William Shakespeare’ first began to appear on poems and plays in the late 16th century. It was a dangerous era for writers — who were often imprisoned and tortured by Elizabeth I’s regime — and thus rife with anonymous and pseudonymous publications. So it is hardly surprising that some people, even then, had theories about who was behind what any educated Renaissance Humanist aware of Pallas Athena might see as an obvious pen-name.
As an organisation, the Shakespearean Authorship Trust is aware that more academic work in this vein is in the pipeline. We hope that, in due course, the existence of 16th-century doubt will be widely recognised.
For a tongue-in-cheek reply to Oliver Kamm see Taboo or Not Taboo on Adventures in the Authorship Question.
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Did the SAT pay Kamm to create this incredible publicity whirlwind for Winkler’s softcover release? Priceless!
I am convinced that doubters should finally study at least a little the formidable figure of John Florio, because he is the only one among the candidates for authorship who perfectly fits the glass shoe of the author of those works. I wrote, in Italian, a book entitled "Who wrote Shakespeare" where I indicate Florio as the ghostwriter. I invite Elisabeth Winkler and the Guardian's critic, Stephanie Merritt, to investigate this.