Six Hundred Barrels of Plaster
Here's Richard Byrne's new profile and review of Stephen Greenblatt and his new biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Although my ardor for things Shakespearean has cooled lately, it's always interesting to see how full of shit the orthodoxy is about the Bard. To wit:

Literary sleuths have proposed a number of eminent Elizabethans -- including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere, and Queen Elizabeth I herself -- as the true author of the plays and verse. To this day, news media stoke this controversy, in spite of a virtually unanimous chorus of literary scholars who dismiss the so-called "authorship question" as nonsense.

"No serious person who is engaged in the historical record can have any doubt" that William Shakespeare wrote the works published under his name, says Mr. Greenblatt. "He was famous in his lifetime for writing them. It would have required a literally unbelievable conspiracy to pass these plays off as his when they were someone else's."

And, yet, "serious people" (i.e., know-it-all shills employed by major universities and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, among others) are always having to answer Those Pesky Questions. That wouldn't be because they're valid questions, of course.

And, in the course of this review, Byrne manages to mention several of the problems with how Shakespeare is understood by the mainstream academics, but without little sense of irony or circumspection:

In Will in the World, Mr. Greenblatt's creative suppositions about Shakespeare's life often win out over certainty. Anecdote and coincidence mix easily into his narrative, which also draws heavily on a close reading of the works for clues about the writer.

Well, we're often told that "close readings" (i.e., looking for autobiographical clues in the works themselves) are to be avoided, lest subjectivism creep too far into our cold interpretations. Yet, stylometry (which I hold is a form of autobiographical revelation) is at once defended by these orthodox Stratfordians if they think it will make the case for their latest lost (and found) work by Shakespeare.

Thus far, it's been a flop.

Just remember what Mark Twain once said of Shakespeare: "He is a brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster."