You're quite unusual, I think,
in the sense that you're an
academic in an English department who came from a Stratfordian position and,
in fact, wrote in defence of
the Stratfordian position and then essentially, changed your mind.
I think that's quite rare.
What is the difficulty that scholars have in accepting doubt?
Or why are they unable to look at this with the kind of, the critical eye that it really requires,
because mostly it's just dismissed, isn't it?
It's always the case with received knowledge,
if you like, that it's easier to go with it,
and to research and investigate within its constraints,
than to try and research and publish outside of those constraints.
Because you are naturally putting yourself at some kind of disadvantage,
and you are questioning all of your colleagues,
so on and so forth.
I think generally, the problem that Shakespearean scholars, Orthodox scholars
suffer from, if I say that,
is what everybody suffers from when Shakespeare is questioned.
That's to say, they are as tied to
the romantic idea of the individual author as anybody is.
And that to question that concept is enormously powerful and seductive concept,
the idea of the romantic individual author.
And despite various modernist and post-modernist criticism,
we haven't drawn ourselves away from this romantic ideal.
And I think that's what Orthodox scholars suffer from.
Is that, they are seduced by that idea,
and that seduction does lead them to
become - I suppose one could almost say that they are like fans of Shakespeare.
And this is why I know you, and myself included,
we receive hate mail from people who feel
personally in some way attacked when you or I say
we think Shakespeare didn't write all of the plays.
They have a kind of personal investment in Shakespeare in the same way that,
I don't know, a Taylor Swift fan has a personal investment in them.
And when you do -
for example, if you were to say,
actually, Taylor Swift doesn't write any of her songs and it's not really her singing,
they will feel personally slighted because they've invested a lot of their life,
a lot of their emotion, a lot of their time,
a lot of their identity, in that figure.
And I feel at a more sophisticated level the same sort of thing is
happening with Shakespeare, and Shakespearean scholars.
And the only thing I think that will draw them away from that,
and it's happening now, is counter-evidence.
And the evidence that they're willing to accept is the evidence of computer analysis.
So this is the big new thing really?
It's the part of Shakespeare studies that's really kind of hot,
and moving forward, and making news,
and that is the co-authorship of plays. Around a quarter of the First Folio plays
are now reckoned to be co-authored.
And not everyone agrees obviously,
there are people who disagree with some of the studies that have been done
through kind of stylometric analysis.
So this idea that you can measure
a writer's style through certain things like function words,
and the way that they're used, they're all kinds of
different measures that are used in these tests.
Do you want to talk a little
bit more about that in the work that's being done on that front?
Well, it's not new in the sense that
this sort of very close analysis of the language and,
as you say, various forms of language, feminine endings
and so on and so forth, it's actually got quite a long history.
But the computer analysis,
very complex computer analysis,
really began in the 1980s.
And of course, with the recent developments in technology,
it's really taken off,
whereby you can get the software to do
a lot of the analysis rather than having to be a technological expert, as it were.
And various schools and individuals are
mobilizing the software to analyze all of the language,
and all of the uses of language of all of the authors,
and prose writers and so on,
for some period of time -
let's say from 1560 to 1650.
That's all fed into the software,
and then analyzed in terms of the ways that various authors used to use language
and what the likely outcome are then when you analyze a play -
shall we say, the first Henry VI
Part 1 - of who wrote which sections,
which authors were responsible for what, so on and so forth.
So, what that's led to, for example, is that
it's now thought that there were perhaps
four authors involved in the writing of the first Henry VI.
Not all at the same time.
And for example, Gary Taylor believes that
Shakespeare acted as a kind of editor after the fact.
And so it is throwing up all sorts of interesting things.
And I would say it's leading us to reconsider what the First Folio actually represents,
given that the First Folio was published in
the name of William Shakespeare, and thus far,
about a third of it is now felt to be not the work only of William Shakespeare
and indeed, the first Henry VI,
it's difficult now to really call that a Shakespeare play.
Because even the best estimates are that he wrote maybe a fifth of that play.
So it's throwing up all of these really interesting things.
Now, what's the most interesting thing for me is that I've always
felt that the First Folio is not
an accurate register of what was written by William Shakespeare.
So that seems to be the case.
And then, secondly, what is throwing up is this idea that it's a kind of mess, you know,
the authorship of the plays or the attribution of authorship of the plays,
it's a kind of mess.
And we don't really know where we stand,
and one school using software
will come up with different conclusions to a different school using different software,
and that's an emergent subject area.
That's what happens when a subject is emerging,
you will have all of these conflicts and differences.
But what it throws up for me is the complexity,
the mess, and that we should embrace that.
That that's a positive thing.
That a subject area that's in flux,
and that has a great deal of uncertainty is a very live subject area.
One which scholars come together,
and ascertain of what happened is dead,
it's lifeless, it's gone.
And all that happens is that,
as I feel has been happening in Shakespeare scholarship for many decades,
is that it's almost like they're just circling around
this certainty, tweaking it here and there but throwing up absolutely nothing of interest.
And what we have now is a subject,
the Shakespeare authorship question,
which is enormously interesting, enormously alive,
and may I say in my own experience,
enormously interesting for children,
for school children, and for students in universities.
My own students absolutely love this subject,
the Shakespeare authorship question.
Yeah. It makes Shakespeare interesting
again, in a way that it just wasn't when I was in school.
Absolutely alive. Absolutely alive.
Ros BarberDr
