I was a young child, I loved dinosaurs. I had a book about them with illustrations of lots of different kinds: brontosaurus, tyrannosaurus fighting triceratops, duck-billed dinosaurs and many more. The book explained that the dinosaurs were all reptiles and depicted them with lizard-like skins. It also noted that they had all gone extinct some 65 million years ago.
I was interested enough in dinosaurs when I went to college that I took a paleontology course. The university happened to have a natural history museum with a beautiful dinosaur mural that the illustrations in my childhood book appeared to have been taken from. The instructor was engaging and I enjoyed the course, although I didn’t expect to pursue the subject further. I majored in social psychology, studying how we make decisions and form our attitudes and beliefs.
A few years after finishing college, after I was safely married and beginning a family, I read in the news one day that dinosaurs were not extinct, because birds had evolved from them, and there are still plenty of birds. The scientist who had figured this out was . . . my former college professor!
What a shock! It was a complete upending of my worldview. I wondered if there were other “truths” I took for granted that were also delusive. What about the way eastern South America and western Africa’s coastlines coincidentally paralleled each other, as if they were puzzle pieces that fit together? The assumption that there wasn’t really any relationship between them, that it was by chance that the coastlines seemed to match also went out the window when ocean floor research was found to support the theory of continental drift.
So, by the time a friend told me about an idea that the author of works attributed to William Shakespeare were really by someone else, I responded with curiosity, wondering, “What evidence do they have?” After reading the first article the friend referred me to, I became interested enough to go on to read more.
My research led me back to a fundamental question: How do we know the traditionally accepted author wrote the works? All of the answers I could find to that question were weak; they mostly amounted to “because the Shakespeare experts said so.” But if I looked at the data itself, I still thought there was a lot of room for doubt. A LOT! This evidence was circumstantial, but there was so much of it! And actually, once I thought about it, I realized that the evidence on the other side was circumstantial as well, so not any more certain. I started making a list of relevant facts, pro and con, trying to be as objective as I could, and over time, as the list grew longer and longer, I became even more assured that doubt was justified.
From what I learned studying psychology about our human tendency to reject ideas that threaten our power and privilege, I am not surprised that the academic establishment have completely dismissed the authorship question as not worthy of consideration. After all, once they have invested their careers in the traditionally accepted view, we can hardly expect them to cheerfully announce that they might be mistaken. Yet I continue to hold out hope that there are enough open-minded people willing to ask themselves, “How do we know?” and to follow that path wherever it leads.
— Amoret Heise
“How I Became an Oxfordian” is edited by Bob Meyers. You may submit your essay on this topic (500 words or less in an editable format such as MS Word), along with a digital photo of yourself, to: communications@shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org. Also include a sentence about yourself (e.g., “John J. Smith is a businessman in San Francisco.”)
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