A few days ago the "After Deadline" column at the New York Times ran a feature called "Mangled Shakespeare." The column covers issues of grammar and style in the paper, and this piece focused on the (mis)quotation of Shakespeare in the pages of the Times. At the risk of delivering a pedantic response to a purposefully pedantic column, I'd like to defend the mangling of Shakespeare here.
Anonymous Marlowe
A week ago I attended the annual MLA conference in Seattle, where I gave a paper called "Anonymous Marlowe," which gave me a chance to not only de-face the famous portrait of Marlowe below, but to argue (kind of) that Marlowe did not write everyone's favorite Renaissance lyric, "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love." Because this was the first time in a while that I've given a truly provisional, in-progress, and perhaps speculative paper at a conference, and because I found the Q&A and post-panel feedback so helpful and illuminating -- not to mention the fact that I'd like to participate, if only meagerly, in opening up a big conference like the MLA to a wider audience (search for the hashtag #mla12 or simply read this) -- I'm posting some of what I said here, along with some of the images I used in what otherwise would have been an ephemeral PowerPoint show. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.
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