2021 Oxfordian of the Year Richard Waugaman wrote the following letter to The Washington Post which published it recently:
Michael Witmore has been an excellent director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. The photograph of him behind a pile of skulls that accompanied the June 29 Style article “Folger Shakespeare Library director to step down in 2024” was intriguing, but the skulls were not explained. I would speculate they are the skulls of Shakespeare authorship skeptics. The Folger’s $80 million renovation seems designed primarily to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare by displaying its treasure trove of first folios — as the equivalent of pieces of the true cross — to increase faith.
When Witmore arrived at the Folger, its website changed to include an open-minded statement about the controversial authorship issue: “If the current consensus on the authorship of the plays and poems [of Shakespeare] is ever overturned, it will be because new and extraordinary evidence is discovered. The Folger Shakespeare Library is the most likely place for such an unlikely discovery.” It was disappointing when this commitment to true scholarship was deleted — especially because the extraordinary evidence in question has been discovered, as reported in the New York Times in February 2002. It is the 1570 Geneva Bible purchased and annotated by the principal alternative authorship candidate, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Its many annotations closely match biblical echoes in Shakespeare’s works.
Has the “current consensus” on the authorship question changed? Well, yes and no. A growing consensus among Shakespeareans is that the author doesn’t really matter that much. Having explored the authorship issue for 21 years, I believe that the claim that “Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare” has little other than tradition and authority to support it. For one thing, scholar Marcy North has proved that the Elizabethan era was a golden age of anonymous authorship. And Elizabeth Winkler’s new book “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature” is devastating in showing that the most prominent Shakespeare scholars are astonishingly unaware of the abundant evidence that undermines their implausible theory.
I hope all members of the Folger’s Board, as they deliberate about choosing a new director, will carefully read Winkler’s paradigm-shifting book.
If the Folger continues to glorify the traditional author while ignoring the long history of plausible doubts, it is de facto in noncompliance with the intentions of its founder Henry Folger. He was, after all, a member of the Francis Bacon Society. And he purchased the Earl of Oxford’s Geneva Bible after getting a telegram from one of his London booksellers in 1925, telling him the book would interest him because it was owned by the man thought by some to be the real Shakespeare.
Many of us want the Folger to become a truly scholarly institution, committed to academic freedom, critical thinking and evidence-based research, even when it leads to controversial and “unlikely” discoveries.
