Don Rubin — A Critical Look at the Work of Taylor, Leahy, Florio, and de Vere

The New ‘Field’ of Shakespeare Authorship Studies: A Critical Look at the Work of Taylor, Leahy, Florio and de Vere

The final chapter of William Leahy’s recent volume, My Shakespeare, suggests that “the authorship of the plays and poems traditionally attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford is an enormously complex issue, rife with uncertainty and ambiguity…it is a field in which it is difficult to speak with any kind of authority.” Long a believer that the name Shake-speare was actually a pseudonym for someone or some many, Leahy now feels that his view has been justified by the latest edition of Oxford University Press’s multi-volume edition of “Shakespeare’s Works” because the distinguished team of Oxford editors led by Professor Gary Taylor is now claiming these works were created by a multiplicity of authorial hands. Certainly Edward de Vere’s name remains strong in that conversation but, with other voices being proposed, could the Italian linguist John Florio have been involved as well? The fact is, Florio’s name has been getting a huge amount of attention in the last year or two in France. This paper will look at both this arguably under-appreciated sea-change in academic attitudes toward the whole authorship question and whether Florio—despite significant francophone support—should really be in the conversation.

This talk was presented at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Conference in Hartford, CT on October 19, 2019.

Don Rubin is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at Toronto’s York University. The Series Editor of Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre and Managing Editor of the online web-journal Critical Stages (critical-stages.org), he is a former Pres-ident of both the Canadian Centre of the International Theatre Institute and the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. Until his retirement, Professor Rubin taught courses on the authorship question at York University. Elected to the Board of the SOF three times, he is currently serving as the organization’s Second Vice President. He is a Trustee of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition.

For more on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, visit shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org.