April 1
News from the front:
In
a stunning surprise announcement today the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT)
said that it now wishes to encourage all parties alike--Scholars of any
discipline, amateur investigators, and the general public, to both bring
forward and also to examine together any and all evidence related to the ‘so
called’ Authorship Question of the world’s great Shakespeare works.
Though
in the past 100+ years there have been a few limited endeavors to examine the
many challenges to the traditional authorship story, it is now admitted that
these very sparse efforts have been unsatisfactory to the many thousands of
Shakespeare enthusiasts as well as the Shakespeare specific community of
scholars. To satisfy the increasing demand to solve this long-standing and
frustrating dispute, if it can ever be solved, the SBT wants it known that
it is strongly desired and expected for there now to be an emphasis on
clearing out all the smoke of ambiguity as much as possible and to bring an
end, if possible, to the mystery created 400 years ago.
Though
the SBT notes that it does not expect any change in the final resolution
that all the scrutinized evidence will reveal, it will nevertheless welcome any
new and unexpected findings shedding further light on the whole phenomena of
Shakespeare including all those seeming connections to the plays and poetry by
any of the author’s contemporaries, and most especially of the many
alternative ‘authorship candidates’ of a hidden or ‘masked’ Shakespeare.
“This
is an amazing gift to all us researchers” said one excited and subdued
scholar. “There is so much to investigate in what had been a taboo topic
for us all our careers that now most of us will soon be doubling and tripling
our usual production of published research. They may even need to start a
couple new journals to handle it all.”
Though
details of how this frenzied flowering of Bard fandom may fruitfully fan out
are still unclear, a new website has been suggested, perhaps “FaceBard”,
to collate and share the new possibilities of this “under-discovered country”.
In the meanwhile, as we all enjoy Shakespeare at 400, we can take to
heart our dear doubted author’s silent plea, “Remember me”.
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