(391) The Shakespeare authorship and Shapiros haughty ignorant attitude!

James Shapiro

On the occasion of  his new book "Contested Will" James Shapiro had an interview with Dana Gioia , Director of the Harman-Eisner Program , Aspen Institute on the Shakespeare Authorship.-(Astonishingly Gioia  confessed that his Champion is Christopher Marlowe.-)

Dana Gioia

At the beginning Gioia asked Shapiro to summarize the evidence why Shakespeare was Shakespeare (see blog 102)
Shapiro expressed: „ The truth is: I am not very interested in what people think (which is a terrible thing to admit, but I‘ll admit it), because those of you who are engaged in arguments with anyone (wether arguments about abortion or creationism or wether the holocaust exist or hundred of other arguments)  you learn pretty quickly what positions are, that positions are fixed and no discussion of any issue that I have ever encountered are positions more fixed and might less easily changed than the authorship question. Why do smart people think dum(p) things (….) why they are saying it? because – unlike questions   like holocaust, creationism or even abortion  and other contested issues--  it‘s very hard with those issues to track historically when ideas developed to the point where a theory emerges.- But with this particular case I was able to say with great confidence no one was able to think that somebody other than Shakespeare wrote the plays until  the eighteen-forties 200 years after Shakespeare left ……

What a haughty ignorant attitude! Shapiro is not interested what people think, i.e. in their arguments, (2 centuries of an immense  history of thoughts and arguments), since their positions are fixed, their ideas have developed to the point of a theory. It‘s absolutlely ridiculous to claim with great confidence that no one was able to think that somebody other than Shakespeare wrote the plays  until the 1840th.- Isn‘t Shapiro’s position fixed beyond recognition?

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