Inside the Secret Society Decoding Shakespeare's True Identity

Stuart Kells contributes an article about "21st century Shakespeare studies" to the pages of Literary Hub. It's an excerpt from his new book, Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature published by Counterpoint Press. At Literary Hub, he writes, "Bear pit. War zone. Mad house. My first serious contact with 21st-century Shakespeare studies was during my doctorate at Monash University. Rumor had it that the Clayton campus was the main recruiting ground for Australia’s spy agencies. It was also a hotbed of Shakespeare scholarship—mostly unorthodox and not confined to the English department." From there: 

I met at Monash an experimental pathology professor who studied coded messages in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In another faculty, a philosophy professor studied the same sonnets to trace arithmetical, musicological and Platonic patterns. Across the university there were Shakespeare scholars whose backgrounds looked like an implausible case study in multidisciplinarity: law, geography, medicine, nursing, mathematics, French Renaissance studies, commerce, music history, librarianship, drama therapy. In every department and every cafe, it seemed there was a scholar with a new take on Shakespeare and his work.

In this milieu I encountered several breeds of Stratfordians (those who accept the standard Shakespeare biography) and a multitude of anti-Stratfordians (those who reject it): Baconians, Oxfordians, Marlovians, Derbyites, Rutlanders, Groupists. One sub-species was especially well represented. Monash was home to the world’s richest concentration of Nevillians: people who think Sir Henry Neville wrote Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Landing in this parallel universe of unorthodoxy was an unsettling experience. Finding out you’re surrounded by Shakespeare skeptics is like discovering all your friends are Scientologists, or swingers.

Read more at Literary Hub.