On a day, yesterday, that saw the further Trooping of the Colour and the BBC showed again the episode of Dad's Army in which Wilson is discovered to be Sergeant The Honourable Arthur, it was fitting to find that more honour was bestowed on Stanley Wells, the guardian of all traditional Shakespeare Studies.
Regalia now adorns his name more than ever before. Many will celebrate the honour and congratulate him and so will I, when he sees fit to engage in scholarly fashion with the theory that appeared on the TLS letters page regarding the parentage of Shakespeare's twins, Hamnet and Judith.
His dismissal of the idea as 'hoping it was a joke' and 'fatuous' was below the standard required of such prestige. No, it wasn't a joke and, looking through the rest of his Twitter account, he is in need of more variegated insults for things he doesn't like than habitually calling them 'fatuous'.
The idea has been derided but not refuted. Mr. Curtis and I are interested in knowing why the theory can't be true and we were hoping that the likes of Stanley Wells would enlighten us.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
