Wikipedia (groan)

Hail and well met. I call your attention to the Wikipedia article on the Shakespeare Authorship Question. It seems terribly POV (point of view) and anti-Stratfordian to me (replies welcome). I am wondering if any attempt at article rewrite is worthwhile (more replies welcome) or if the whole effort is likely to leave me embittered, cynical, and depressed when Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy and celebration.
Your thoughts, sneers or howls of derision?

I assume you're talking about the "Shakespeare authorship question" article in Wikipedia, since you just posted about that in the "Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare" thread. I hadn't looked at that article in a while, but I just did, and you're right -- it's very misleading, making it appear that this is a serious question that's actually debated among academic Shakespeareans, which it most definitely is not. I see on the Talk page for that article that there's been some heated discussion about this, with somebody named "smatprt", who is obviously an antistratfordian, trying to defend this horribly biased article. I don't have time to get involved in editing wars on Wikipedia, but I hope somebody can take on this idiot, because as it stands the article does a great disservice to anybody who looks up the Shakespeare authorship question on Wikipedia. I seem to remember there being an at least somewhat more balanced article there in the past.

Man, that Wikipedia article is filled with BS, and is blatantly written from an antistratfordian point of view, with pro-Shakespeare presented only as caricatures to be immediately "refuted" by antistrat claims. If this was 10 or 15 years ago, I probably would start trying to edit that article into something a little more neutral, but I have virtually no spare time to do that right now. Maybe I'll tell some of the other Shakespeareans I know about it, so that they can maybe at least try to stem the tide of misinformation.

You might as well try to cleanse the Augean stables - the rate at which anti-Stratfordians can fill the space is so impressive.

Basically the whole article could be reduced to a single paragraph on the Shakespeare page referring to this nonsense as a mildly amusing if occasionally irritating insight into the dangers of unsubstantiated obsession.

However to do so would remove a relatively harmless outlet for a group of people whose stability is less than secure already - which would probably, on balance, be a Bad Thing if not dangerous. At least at present they are mainly confining their efforts to this article with an occasional forray to confuse those seeking information on Kit Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford and half of the Early Modern British Isles.

For the life of me, I can't imagine why this 'issue' is of such great interest to anyone who appreciates the plays. It's amazing that one person of genius wrote them all (and few seem to refute that, aside from some minor collaboration); does it really matter who he was?

> 5

Credit where it's due?

>5 Cariola:

Well, yes and no. Beowulf and The Pearl are anonymous but are no less great works for that (though we can only wonder what resonance might be added to their interpretation if we knew anything of their authors).

But what about bringing it closer to home -- how would you feel if your Virginia Woolf discussion group was repeatedly hijacked by folks insisting that Leonard really wrote The Waves? or your African-American lit group repeatedly hijacked by folks insisting that Langston Hughes's poetry was really written by his white friend Carl Van Vechten? It seems that the one thing that "everyone knows" about Shakespeare nowadays is that someone else wrote his plays. Sure, I can ignore them -- and I mostly do -- but it just seems wrong somehow to let ignorance triumph.

I have just finished reading James Shapiro's "Will Contested" - a really well constructed book reviewing the main theories about Bacon and Oxford - but coming down on the Shakespeare from Stratford side - there is contemporary evidence of people talking about him - he wrote for particular members of the acting team - and where is imagination if everything we write about has to be autobiographical? No-one expected other Elizabethan writers to concentrate on their own lives. Shapiro makes an excellent case - and it's a readable book.