The argument is often presented that
“almost all serious scholars” “that do regular research in the relevant fields”
etc. etc. are the only ones whose judgement can be accepted, or something to
that effect.
My
counter-argument to this has been something like this:
Even
such serious respected scholars can be wrong individually or even when they are
in broad agreement because they can be conforming with their peers contrary to
supporting evidence, and they can be ignoring minority scholar views for some
unrecognized or unadmitted motivation.
I
back this up with relevant quotes from such scholarly insiders:
“If you are immersed in a
profession and a culture and all of your colleagues think certain ways about
certain things, then you're not very likely to challenge that… The exact same
phenomenon happens with geneticists and people who do biotech science. They
read the same journals. They get reviewed for promotion… You have to
parrot the same views that your older superiors believe or otherwise they're
going to think you're crazy and not doing good work and won't promote you.”
Philip Bereano is Professor Emeritus in the field of
Technology and Public Policy at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“These privileged scientists
represent 75% of the anthropologists surveyed. Their power and influence
reaches right across the field. They are the main people determining what
research is done, who gets funding, they are training the next generation of
anthropologists, and are the public face of the field as well as the experts
whose opinion is sought on issues like race.”
Darren
Curnoe, Chief Investigator and Co-Leader of Education and Engagement Program
ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, and
Director, Palaeontology, Geobiology and Earth Archives Research Centre, UNSW
Here’s
something very recently printed on how someone became interested in the debate:
“I’ve spent most of my life
in academia, so I know the pressure to embrace the prevailing paradigm and
dismiss facts that don’t fit. I know the rewards you get when you submit and
the punishments you get when you don’t. And I know how easy it is to believe in
your own objectivity while you’re sifting facts to conform to the reward
structure. The unanimity of academics on the authorship question seemed mighty
suspicious to me. It motivated me to check out Oxfordians in their own words
rather than Shapiro’s words.”
Loretta
Graziano Breuning, PhD is Professor Emerita of Management at California State
University, East Bay, and Founder of the Inner Mammal Institute.
Finally,
for this brief counter-argument I ask that readers keep in mind that for a long
time the Stratfordian scholars believed and argued that:
“Dialect words
from the area around Stratford-upon-Avon are present throughout the plays,
according to Shakespeare
Beyond Doubt, a book edited by Stanley Wells and Paul Edmonson,
respectively Former Chair and Head of Research of the Shakespeare Birthplace
Trust. Similar claims were made by historian Michael Wood in his 2004 BBC
series In
Search of Shakespeare.”
Post-Stratfordian scholar Ros
Barber refuted this in the Journal of Early Modern Studies Vol. 7 (2018)
Not only that but she shouldn’t
have even needed to write the article since a respected expert scholar had
already disagreed with the Stratfordian assessment and he too was ignored by
the Stratfordian scholar establishment. He wrote
“Regardless of her [Barber’s]
position on the SAQ, she is totally correct in her analysis. This is precisely
the reasoning that I did not include any references to Warwickshire dialect in
Shakespeare’s Words. Anyone who has studied historical dialectology would
see straight away that the attribution of words to Warwickshire alone has no
basis in reality, and I would never recommend anyone using such a flimsy
argument to support the Stratfordian argument. AFAIK, none of the scholars
in question have any background in historical dialectology.”
David Crystal, author of Shakespeare’s Words, 2002, is honorary
professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. He has written or
edited over 100 books and published numerous articles for scholarly,
professional, and general readerships, in fields ranging from forensic
linguistics and ELT to the liturgy and Shakespeare.
Notice that he says that “none”
Shakespeare scholars “have any background in historical dialectology” but that
didn’t stop them from making their baseless assertions. So to argue that these
mainstream Shakespeare scholars have the specialized knowledge to make informed
and trustworthy judgements is just false. In fact, it seems to me that it's the
subject matter experts outside of mainstream Shakespeare scholarship that have
pointed out the expert knowledge that the great author somehow had attained
that is unexplained by the traditional model. Now, Prof. Barber didn’t have
that background either but at least she was able to do the research and get the
facts correct according to a genuine subject matter expert.
Nor was that the only myth the
post-Stratfordians have refuted. Earlier this year the asserted college level
Grammar school of the traditional author was thoroughly refuted by an
independent scholar:
For some of these myths they’ve
had many decades, maybe over a century to do careful research and they failed.
Their peer-review process can also be
said to have failed, at least on some important questions connected to
Williams’s capabilities or to bearing on the Authorship question itself.
There has even been a research
article concerning conformity in scholarship, recognizing it a feature of at
least some academic research areas:
