President Eisgruber sets a high bar for the faculty: “A great faculty is driven by a quest for truth and scholarly achievement ... Its members should be constantly curious and unsatisfied with conventional thinking and their own opinions.”
I would hope Princeton’s Shakespeare specialists take this advice to heart. When Princeton’s distinguished alum Elizabeth Winkler ’11 published her 2023 book on the Shakespeare authorship debate (Simon & Schuster), none of them supported her as she challenged conventional thinking about the real Shakespeare. I wrote to four of them, but got no reply.
Sadly, there is little scholarly investigation of the “eminence-based” traditional theory that a Stratford businessman with no documented education wrote our finest works of literature. President Eisgruber’s definition of a great faculty collides with the anti-intellectual forces of groupthink, which may be even more pernicious in the humanities than they are in the sciences.
It was a 2002 New York Times article that alerted me about pivotal evidence in the 1570 Geneva Bible owned and annotated by the Earl of Oxford. These annotations showed that Oxford was interested in the very biblical passages that are echoed in Shakespeare. More recently, professor Roger Stritmatter of Coppin State University has complemented his Ph.D. research in the 1990s on that Geneva Bible with hundreds more annotations in Oxford's handwriting in rare books in the Audley End library in Britain, showing Oxford’s mind at work as he was writing some of his Roman plays which were later published with the “Shakespeare” pseudonym.
Professor Stritmatter realized “conventional thinking” about Shakespeare is badly mistaken, and his curiosity and quest for truth led him to challenge eminent Shakespeare scholars with convincing evidence that they are mistaken as to Shakespeare’s identity.
President Eisgruber sets a high bar for the faculty: “A great faculty is driven by a quest for truth and scholarly achievement ... Its members should be constantly curious and unsatisfied with conventional thinking and their own opinions.”
I would hope Princeton’s Shakespeare specialists take this advice to heart. When Princeton’s distinguished alum Elizabeth Winkler ’11 published her 2023 book on the Shakespeare authorship debate (Simon & Schuster), none of them supported her as she challenged conventional thinking about the real Shakespeare. I wrote to four of them, but got no reply.
Sadly, there is little scholarly investigation of the “eminence-based” traditional theory that a Stratford businessman with no documented education wrote our finest works of literature. President Eisgruber’s definition of a great faculty collides with the anti-intellectual forces of groupthink, which may be even more pernicious in the humanities than they are in the sciences.
It was a 2002 New York Times article that alerted me about pivotal evidence in the 1570 Geneva Bible owned and annotated by the Earl of Oxford. These annotations showed that Oxford was interested in the very biblical passages that are echoed in Shakespeare. More recently, professor Roger Stritmatter of Coppin State University has complemented his Ph.D. research in the 1990s on that Geneva Bible with hundreds more annotations in Oxford's handwriting in rare books in the Audley End library in Britain, showing Oxford’s mind at work as he was writing some of his Roman plays which were later published with the “Shakespeare” pseudonym.
Professor Stritmatter realized “conventional thinking” about Shakespeare is badly mistaken, and his curiosity and quest for truth led him to challenge eminent Shakespeare scholars with convincing evidence that they are mistaken as to Shakespeare’s identity.