Tarja-Liisa Luukkanen, Ph.D., is an historian of ideas and learning at the University of Helsinki.
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Being a historian of ideas and learning, it has been self-evident to me that no uneducated man could ever have written the works of William Shakespeare.
It is not only what he wrote, but also how he wrote it — in iambic pentameter! A Shakspear, perhaps an illiterate person altogether and without any surviving historical evidence of his literary activity, could not have done that.
I have Finnish as my mother tongue and was not introduced to Shakespeare in my childhood. Reading Shakespeare in English is not a piece of cake for me.
However, through my work in my own field I have come to the conclusion that the romantic ideas of uneducated, starry-eyed writers can have a strong popular, yet sometimes ill-founded, appeal.
Tradition can turn into argument, and one has to ask who has to gain by maintaining a tradition that cannot be objectively verified.
My own field is the history of ideas and learning and my research concentrates on Finnish history – nothing to do with Shakespeare. He just interests me personally.
In my work I have (kind of) come across him just once, while examining a 19th-century library to learn the reading habits of uneducated commoners in the country. To my surprise the library in question had a Finnish translation of Macbeth, which had been borrowed six times in the 1880s.
I want to thank the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship for making me an Oxfordian. The on-line lectures have been most enlightening.
Greetings and thank you for your email. And once more: thank you for the most interesting Shakespeare/ de Vere lectures available on Youtube.
In this academic system of ours I am a “dosentti”, it is something like a Privatdozent in Germany, at the University of Helsinki. This “dosentti” has no good translation in English. Therefore ThD, PhD, University of Helsinki is OK (my publications are at the university research database, google my name and University of Helsinki).
With greetings and all the best to your Fellowship.
