The Shakespeare Authorship Question:a question without an author

Presented by: London Fortean Society

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0	LONDON: The Bell
P	Wednesday 29th April, 2020
N	7:30pm

Event information

Shakespeare is regarded as the greatest writer who has ever existed. His works are famed throughout the world and are on the syllabuses of schools, colleges and universities. But many believe he did not in fact write the plays and that claims about his authorship are founded in a mixture of myth and wilful misinformation. Our cultures seem to be fixated upon the idea of the single author/genius and so, in Shakespeare's case, we fall into a trap of finding the answer we desperately seek despite an almost total lack of evidence. This is also true of the alternative authors posited as the writer of Shakespeare’s works.

Prof William Leahy, vice-provost of Brunel University, explores how we have fallen into this trap, led by an academic community that continues to tell the same old story while knowing that much of it is untrue. He considers the character of the Shakespeare Authorship Question and posits that Shakespeare the author is a myth – as indeed is the belief that any single author wrote the works.