Well, That’ll Do Wonders For Their Credibility

The scholars who emerge every year or so to reassert that William Shakespeare didn’t write the plays attributed to him are not what you would call the popular kids in academic circles. But that’s never stopped the Shakespeare Fellowship Foundation from calling attention to itself, with its efforts focused mainly on the logical-sounding notion that an uneducated glovemakers’ son simply would not have had a wide enough world experience to write such worldly plays. But at its annual convention this month, the SFF has waded hip-deep into a new controversy, claiming that the man they believe to have written the Shakespeare plays was also the lover of Queen Elizabeth I.