John’s review of Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature > Likes and Comments

An articulate critique, John. It's helpful to me to learn more about your perspective, since I've been deeply involved in Oxfordian research and publications for 24 years.

Friends are often surprised to learn just how nasty the traditionalists can get when you question their authority. A former mentee who is an English professor once said in exasperation in our book group, "The professionals know it's not legitimate to connect a work of fiction with its author."

Okay, that was pretty mild. So, another example, among many. Shakespeare professor Gary Taylor learned that an Italian Shakespeare journal invited me to update my article on the psychology of Stratfordians. He then led a coup, ousting the journal's two editors, and taking it over himself. He emailed me that he did this to block the publication of my article. Rejecting it, Taylor told me that questioning Shakespeare's identity was equivalent to denying the Holocaust.

When a journalist at the Times of London (who was researching academic freedom) heard about this, he interviewed Taylor. In a feature article in the education supplement of the Times, Taylor defended comparing me with Holocaust deniers.

But in your comments on the New York Times website, you alleged:

To his credit, [Stephen] Greenblatt admitted in his talk that he felt embarrassed by some of the speculation in his 2004 book [Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare]. He later apologized to me for having insinuated on NPR that authorship skeptics are similar to Holocaust deniers.

Now you say it wasn't Stephen Greenblatt, but Gary Taylor who specifically singled you out as being like Holocaust deniers and that he was unapologetic about it ("Taylor defended comparing me with Holocaust deniers"). How many scholars are comparing you with Holocaust deniers? You seem to attract them—or else you're making up your stories of academic resistance (which, consistent with the egotism of the man imagining them, take the form of wounds to his amour propre).

And since I know that no "journalist at the Times of London" could occupy your imagination other than Oliver Kamm, I searched for this alleged interview in the Times Higher Education Supplement. Lo and behold, I found absolutely no mention of you, but I did find this (quoting from the "deep dive" Google AI Pro summary):

In 2006, Oliver Kamm and Gary Taylor engaged in a public dispute through the Times Higher Education Supplement (now Times Higher Education) regarding literary scholarship and the authorship of Shakespearean texts.
The interaction included:

The Initial Review: Oliver Kamm wrote a critical review of a new edition of Shakespeare's works, specifically challenging the "Middletonian" theories championed by Gary Taylor, one of the general editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare.

The Debate over "A Funeral Elegy": The controversy centered on Taylor's previous advocacy for the poem "A Funeral Elegy" (signed by "W.S.") being written by William Shakespeare, a claim that was later debunked and retracted in favor of John Ford.

Kamm's Critique: Kamm used the Times Higher Education Supplement to criticize Taylor's editorial judgment, characterizing certain stylistic and statistical methods used by Taylor as "pseudoscientific".

Taylor's Response: Gary Taylor responded to these critiques in the same publication, defending the rigor of modern Shakespearean attribution studies and the collaborative nature of Renaissance drama.

So it appears that you weren't the subject at all, and that you're inserting yourself, Walter-Mitty-like, into someone else's controversy.

In any case, as I said to you in the comments there:

And he shouldn't have apologized (assuming he did), because Holocaust deniers and Shakespeare deniers do have several aspects in common: they are led by motivated reasoning to always confirm and never disconfirm their prior assumptions; they have very slight to no historical knowledge and awareness, so they constantly make presentist assumptions; they tell technical truths in order to convey substantive lies; they treat the historical record as something to be quote-mined instead of studied with a synoptic approach of looking at ALL of the evidence; and they both employ conspiracy theories to explain away inconvenient evidence.