Primrose Road

Two ultra-Orthodox newspapers in Israel have digitally altered a photo of Israel's new cabinet, blacking out the two women in the cabinet because viewing a picture of a woman would constitute "a violation of female modesty."

The other day, as I was telling my Intro to Lit class about how Shakespeare became "The Bard," "The Best Playwright in the World!!!," "The First English Novelist," etc., one student asked, "Ms. P., do you actually *like* Shakespeare?"

Yes, it's possible to *like* Shakespeare outside the context of Bardolatry.

Irvin Matus' Shakespeare, In Fact (1994) presents an exhaustive amount of documentary evidence demonstrating that William Shakespeare of Stratford is the man behind William Shakespeare's plays and, perhaps more importantly, that the "authorship" question simply does not make sense in the context of Early Modern culture. Chapter 5, "Questions About the Writing of the Plays," clearly explains why the argument that one man wrote another man's plays is not valid in this context and also challenges those who would view Shakespeare as a story-inventing novelist.

He also suggests that those arguing for alternative theories of authorship have set up a straw man in the figure of the "orthodox scholar": so-called "orthodox scholars," he claims, are perfectly aware that William Shakespeare did not write every word that was attributed to him.

In a chapter on the dating of the plays (in which he does note that dating methods are not always ultra-accurate), he points out just how conspiracy-theory-like the Oxfordian view is, noting that

"According to the Oxfordians, the traditional chronology of Shakespeare's plays -- from 1589 at the earliest to 1614 at the latest -- is merely something tailored by scholars to suit the lifetime of the man they presume to be the author and nothing more -- a very strange accusation when one considers that the Oxfordian chronology is tailored to suit the lifetime of the Earl of Oxford" (145).

Yet, the sole purpose of this book is not merely to critique the Oxfordian view; Matus also discusses some of the ways in which the rise of this view and the fact that people are buying into it suggest problems with the ways in which scholars have (or have not) argued the case for Shakespeare.

This is worth reading alongside the more recent The Case For Shakespeare for those seeking an understanding of what "authorship" was in Early Modern English culture.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education blog, the "wrong database of recipients" was selected when sending out acceptance letters to incoming freshmen at UC San Diego earlier this month, leading to 28,000 acceptance letters being sent out to students who had not been accepted.

I can't wait to hear about the lawsuits. ;)