Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Stratfordian quote, offered without comment


"If you were to construct a biography which ticked all the boxes -- if you were to read Shakespeare’s plays and infer a biography from it -- it wouldn’t be Rowe’s [1709 biography of Will Shakspere], it would actually be the Earl of Oxford’s."

--Graham Holderness, University of Hertfordshire, editor Critical Survey

(Holderness reportedly made this statement at the Nov. 28 symposium "Shakespeare: From Rowe to Shapiro" at Shakespeare's Globe in London. Originally reported here and here.)
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1 comment:

  1. Mark3:38 PM

    On March 5, 2010, author Michael Prescott blogged Prof. Holderness's retraction/clarification. He says his remarks are much ado about nothing and that he remains a Stratfordian.

    Some great lines in there too, e.g.

    ---quote---
    One of the great things about conversion narratives is that your pre-conversion life gets revised until it precisely parallels your new one. St Paul was never so zealous a persecutor of Christians as he appeared, retrospectively, to be, after he had became one himself. In the same way, it wasn’t until I blindly stumbled upon the road to Oxford that I became quite so definitively ‘a major Shakespearean scholar’ of ‘considerable reputation and standing’: indeed ‘one of the foremost "orthodox" Shakespeare scholars in the world’.
    ---end quote---

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