Director of Research Dr. Barber responds to Feb 23 TLS article
Letter sent to the TLS letters page (but not published by them).
Dear Editor,
Tom Cook’s take-down of Stanley Well’s unevidenced fantasies about Shakespeare is perfect (‘Phantom Author’, 23rd Feb) until he concludes that we should not look into the sonnets to find the man. The long-acknowledged problem of Shakespeare’s biography, a problem entirely unique to that author, is routinely met with either the invention of gap-filling fantasies or the exhortation not to look beyond the texts.
Doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare’s poems began in his lifetime, raised by London writers including the Warwickshire-born John Marston, a friend of the man who would become the Shakespeares’ lodger. Yet rather than acknowledge evidence that doesn’t fit the myth, scholars like Wells continue to make unevidenced assertions that are anathema to the principles of good scholarship. Cook rightly objects, but his solution is to surrender to ignorance. It is a fascinating study of human psychology (specifically, confirmation bias) to see intelligent people doing anything they can to avoid the possibility that the reason why Shakespeare seems ‘unknowable’ is because they have been looking for evidence of the wrong person. They have concluded from their failure to find him that the biographical urge is wrong, rather than their underlying assumption.
Tom Cook gets so close to the issue when he describes the sonnets as “a gold mask, like Agamemnon’s, to be looked at, not through.” If only he could admit the possibility that the gold mask is not the sonnets, but “Shakespeare”.
Yours,
Dr Ros Barber
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The above was shared by Ros on March 23, 2024 from the new official SAT (Shakespearean Authorship Trust) Substack: https://whowroteshakespeare.substack.com/
