It seems the venerable term "Anti-Stratfordian" has been squeezed into a semantic box from which it may never emerge unscarred. Mr. Terry Ross now appears to insist that unless someone tagged with this appelation has stood atop Nelson's statue in Trafalgar Square and announced via a bullhorn: "That Warwickshire graindealer who owned no books and didn't teach his children to read did not write "Hamlet" or anything else!" then his credentials as a skeptic regarding this fantastic attribution are open for doubt, regardless of what less explicit but still obvious statements he may have made.

So then: Neo-Shakespeareans! The prefix "neo" gets attached to fields of study when they undergo a paradigm shift, or othewise experience a rite of passage into a new perspective that leaves the old paradigm choking in such dust, that an entirely new name for the field must be coined, as in "the new physics" or "neo-classicism." It connotes that the original root word "Shakespeare" is still valid (there is some evidence supporting the view that Oxford used the name before the Strat-lad came to London, and it is certainly the name by which history will always know our poet), but that a revolution in the field now calls for a label that reflects the unignorable shift.

I would be surpised if Trevor Roper or Powell or Gielgud or Jacoby or Welles or Freud or Chaplin or Twain or Maggie Smith or Justice Stevens or Justice Blackmon or Whitman or Emerson would object. I will begin using the term to describe myself immediately, when such a label is needed. If I am then asked the inevitable question of who the poet really was, a conversation has been opened!

Any comments? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

Feste

Love it, Feste.

Neo-Shakespeareans include Oxfordians, who can also be called Oxford Shakespeareans, those who are dedicated to the proposition that Oxford is Shakespeare. Neo-Shakespeareans are dedicated to the proposition that someone other than Shakspere wrote Shakespeare.

Thus, in the early years of the 21st century, the movement of the Neo-Shakespeareans begins to gather momentum, gradually lifting the veil on four centuries of speculation about the identity of the writer Shakespeare, opening the door to ever greater discoveries of life and art and the relationship between the two.

KC

Or maybe Orthodoxfordians.

Unorthodoxfordians?

I appreciate the thought, but I can't thay that.

KC

And you a dialogue coach.

In the future, the Oxfordians will be the orthodox ones--someone here said they'll say "I knew it all along!" and I'm sure they will. I've known it since 1987; just thought I'd throw that in.

Well, of course. Why don't you register, and join us, before the inevitable happens?

Yeah, right?

I think I said it. You have a good memory, whoever you are. I'm from the class of '78 myself.

KC

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before the inevitable happens

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