of this. She fought Dad on his own terms and hit him where it hurt. She took chances. I was just sullen, and so required much longer to achieve a safe and healthy adult indifference and separation, and I
still
couldn’t make it last. She stormed into battle. She threw herself into something, this massive research project: she had charts up on her bedroom walls, like a Mafia investigator, showing the whereabouts of all her suspects in different years (“1599: de Vere is all over London—why???”), and she was obviously letting the unimportant stuff sag. I was much too worried about the unimportant stuff—grades, college applications—which is why I outperformed Dana in school, though she was, by any real measure, quite a bit smarter than I. False modesty, O coy memoirist? Not at all. Let’s call in the real greatest writer in English literature: “My dear Watson, I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.”
Dana wasn’t a fool. She soon saw how feeble all the anti-Stratfordian arguments are, but she wouldn’t give up. Like all anti-Strats, she was driven by something other than logic. Unlike them, she had a first-class mind and enough creativity to develop her ideas along unexpected paths. Since none of the existing theories worked, she devised her own. Forced to deal with school, she channeled her anger at Dad (and his playwright friend) into her academic work and produceda series of papers and extra-credit assignments that pulled her out of the ditch she’d dug herself into over the previous months. A clever revision of those papers carried her through her college application essays, and she still recycled and refined her work even through some freshman courses at Brown. (The part about the banking system over centuries became a freestanding paper in her Economics 1 class, and mine as well, with my thanks.)
Whenever a teacher pointed out particularly weak scholarship or blatant wishful thinking (“Really, Miss Phillips, what possible source do you have for the bet?” or “Dana, I think you’ve gotten ahead of yourself here” or “Why would Shakespeare agree to that?” or “If you’re right, do you stand to make a fortune in the year 2014?”), she revised and tried to smooth the newest wrinkle.
Her complete project was a strange and beautiful hybrid of historical research, literary interpretation, parody, and outright fiction. She cast her anger into ammunition and—never denying that she loved the plays—she opened a withering barrage of ordnance upon the man credited with writing them and the convict who stood next to him, claiming special friendship.
Starting with a close analysis of the use of
you
versus
ye
, she argued that a preference for one in some plays but not others could not be explained by fashion or formality or topic. They seemed to vary by personal choice. “There is only one conceivable explanation,” she asserted with the barking dogma of the frothing scholar. “The plays were written by more than one person.”
While many canonical Shakespeare plays were collaborations (
Pericles, Henry VI, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen
, etc.), Dana’s view was starker: “Two separate men wrote all of these plays, individually, and, for reasons we will explore, allowed an obscure actor to take the credit.” This was a unique argument, as far as I know. All the other revisionists handed out Shakespeare’s work to
one
of the fanciful alternatives. Dana had a dynamic duo working to write “Shakespeare.”
Her theory is, in the end, unprovable, of course, but she insisted (as all anti-Strats do) that it is no more unprovable than the absurd patsy we call “Shakespeare.” Her version goes like this:
In 1589, or a little earlier if necessary, a nobleman—Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford will do
still
couldn’t make it last. She stormed into battle. She threw herself into something, this massive research project: she had charts up on her bedroom walls, like a Mafia investigator, showing the whereabouts of all her suspects in different years (“1599: de Vere is all over London—why???”), and she was obviously letting the unimportant stuff sag. I was much too worried about the unimportant stuff—grades, college applications—which is why I outperformed Dana in school, though she was, by any real measure, quite a bit smarter than I. False modesty, O coy memoirist? Not at all. Let’s call in the real greatest writer in English literature: “My dear Watson, I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.”
Dana wasn’t a fool. She soon saw how feeble all the anti-Stratfordian arguments are, but she wouldn’t give up. Like all anti-Strats, she was driven by something other than logic. Unlike them, she had a first-class mind and enough creativity to develop her ideas along unexpected paths. Since none of the existing theories worked, she devised her own. Forced to deal with school, she channeled her anger at Dad (and his playwright friend) into her academic work and produceda series of papers and extra-credit assignments that pulled her out of the ditch she’d dug herself into over the previous months. A clever revision of those papers carried her through her college application essays, and she still recycled and refined her work even through some freshman courses at Brown. (The part about the banking system over centuries became a freestanding paper in her Economics 1 class, and mine as well, with my thanks.)
Whenever a teacher pointed out particularly weak scholarship or blatant wishful thinking (“Really, Miss Phillips, what possible source do you have for the bet?” or “Dana, I think you’ve gotten ahead of yourself here” or “Why would Shakespeare agree to that?” or “If you’re right, do you stand to make a fortune in the year 2014?”), she revised and tried to smooth the newest wrinkle.
Her complete project was a strange and beautiful hybrid of historical research, literary interpretation, parody, and outright fiction. She cast her anger into ammunition and—never denying that she loved the plays—she opened a withering barrage of ordnance upon the man credited with writing them and the convict who stood next to him, claiming special friendship.
Starting with a close analysis of the use of
you
versus
ye
, she argued that a preference for one in some plays but not others could not be explained by fashion or formality or topic. They seemed to vary by personal choice. “There is only one conceivable explanation,” she asserted with the barking dogma of the frothing scholar. “The plays were written by more than one person.”
While many canonical Shakespeare plays were collaborations (
Pericles, Henry VI, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen
, etc.), Dana’s view was starker: “Two separate men wrote all of these plays, individually, and, for reasons we will explore, allowed an obscure actor to take the credit.” This was a unique argument, as far as I know. All the other revisionists handed out Shakespeare’s work to
one
of the fanciful alternatives. Dana had a dynamic duo working to write “Shakespeare.”
Her theory is, in the end, unprovable, of course, but she insisted (as all anti-Strats do) that it is no more unprovable than the absurd patsy we call “Shakespeare.” Her version goes like this:
In 1589, or a little earlier if necessary, a nobleman—Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford will do
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