The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0174 Tuesday, 21 April 2009
From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Subject: Recent Wall Street Journal Article
I have received several submissions regarding the recent _Wall Street
Journal_ article about the pronouncements of Supreme Court Justice John
Paul Stevens and the attitudes of other Supreme Court justices about
authorship issues:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123998633934729551.html
The first authorship posting on SHAKSPER that I cannot find appeared on
February 27, 1991: an announcement by Mike Ellwood of a BBC radio
program that claimed that the scroll the Shakespeare figure on the
statue in Westminster Abbey is holding contains a cipher that Francis
Bacon was the author. After a few sporadic posts on the matter, we had,
throughout 1994, a heated discussion of authorship. I called a halt to
such discussions on December 27, 1994. Anyone interested in reading a
record of these debates should consult the SHAKSPER archives and see my
essay in the Winter 2008 Special Issue -- Shakespeare and Information
Technology -- in College Literature: http://www.collegeliterature.org/
Frankly, I am not interested in the so-called authorship problem because
I do not see it as a problem but rather as a wish fulfillment fantasy of
conspiracy advocates who simply cannot accept irrefutable evidence and
who do not adhere to the generally-accepted methods of scholarly argument.
I write all of the above as a reminder that SHAKSPER is not the place
for discussions of so-called authorship matters and I will continue not
to mount either overt or covert posts on the subject.
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