We tell students that they should not make assertions without providing evidence. I was recently explaining that I had found a great website with a long article about the Shakespeare controversy. It criticised a couple of other authors for blithely ascribing half of Shakespeare’s plays to a woman, Emelia Bassano Lanier, without providing sufficient (any?) evidence.
Now, I’m not a Shakespeare scholar. (I did study some of his plays for A-level, a very long time ago – that doesn’t really count!) In recent years, I have become aware that some experts query whether he did write all the plays ascribed to him. That, in summary, is really all I can say about the controversy, because I simply don’t know enough to make further comment.
I was, however, quite taken with this website’s argument. The authors they were criticising had proposed Emilia Bassano Lanier as the author of a number of ‘Shakespeare’ plays. The justification for this assertion was apparently that Emilia hadn’t written much in her own name before middle-age, due to the fact (?) that she had been busily writing some of the plays that we now consider to be by Shakespeare, before that. It seemed a very shaky assertion!
You need to back up your statements with firm evidence, I insisted in my seminar. Well, I was right in that advice.
However, we also talked a bit about being accurate in our references, and checking where our information came from. Very important, as everyone will agree. And here, I’ve come unstuck. Because, if you wanted to cite the Oxfraud website, the first thing you find is that there’s no date of publication at the bottom of the page, and no obvious sign of who the authors are – or whether they have an institutional affiliation. (Don’t try googling, “Who is responsible for Oxfraud” – it thinks you’re asking about monetary fraud.) Indeed, there is also an Oxfraudfraud website and a ShakespeareAuthorship website, and I’ve no doubt I’ve only scratched the tip of the iceberg. But I shan’t be delving any deeper. I don’t need to cite it.
In the circumstances, it’s probably a good thing that, as a musicologist, I don’t actually need to know about the Shakespeare controversy!
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 