ABSTRACT
Who is the author of Shakespeare’s plays? To many scholars and admirers of Shakespeare, this question has the rhetorical status of the question “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” It is greeted by orthodox Stratfordians with umbrage, derision, and contemptuous dismissal of so intense an order as to inevitably raise another question: what is at stake here? Why, in other words, has the doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship persisted so tenaciously, and why has it been so equally tenaciously dismissed?
