Blue Boar Tavern November 17: Mark Your Calendars!

Sydney J. Harris’ Game of Twenty Questions for Shakespeare Fans

“In response to the many readers who wrote, taking issue with my column on the identity of William Shakespeare, I’d like to propose the following game of 20 questions to see how many of them they can answer satisfactorily.”
— Sydney J. Harris (1917-1986)

More than fifty-two years ago, in July 1974, nationally syndicated columnist and drama critic Sydney J. Harris threw down a challenge to Shakespeare scholars and readers.

In an article entitled Some Knotty Questions for Shakespeare Fans, Harris posed twenty questions about William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon and challenged the “scholars, annotators and English professors” who accepted him unconditionally as the author of the plays and poems to satisfactorily answer twenty questions about the great man from Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Someone we know read Harris’ column that summer, clipped it from the newspaper and kept the clipping for more than half a century.

On Tuesday, November 17, 2026, it comes out of the drawer and into the Blue Boar Tavern.

Since 1974, we have had more than half a century of Shakespeare scholarship, not to mention the arrival of the internet, searchable archives, digitized books and manuscripts, online publishing, Google, and now AI.

So how do Harris’s twenty questions hold up fifty-two years later? Can we answer them now?

The cast of the Blue Boar Tavern will put Harris’s challenge to the test. They’ll take his twenty questions one by one, examine what was known then and what is known now, and offer their answers live from the Tavern.

And this time, you get to play too. Members of our Zoom audience are invited to answer Harris’s questions in the online chat, and challenge our Taverners’ answers with their own.

Come join Taverners Dorothea Dickerman, Pete Frengel and Daniel Crafts, along with everyone’s favorite barkeep, Jonathan Dixon, on Tuesday, November 17, 2026, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern / 5:00 p.m. Pacific.

Fifty-two years later, let’s see how many of Sydney J. Harris’s twenty questions we can finally answer, and who has been keeping that article safe until now!