The Shakespeare Conspiracies

The Shakespeare Conspiracies

McClinton, Brian, The Shakespeare Conspiracies - Untangling a 400-Year Web of Myth and Deceit,  Shanway Press, Belfast, 2008, pp.472.

Many thanks to Brian McClinton's brother Terry who has generously donated remaining copies of Brian's book to the Society.

Writer and lawyer Christina G. Waldman, states that McClinton's book argues, 'persuasively with reason, eloquence, and wit' and she 'challenged even the most skeptical of skeptics to read McClinton’s book thoroughly with an open mind and not come away convinced that Bacon is Shakespeare, although other hands may have contributed.'

True Philosophers and scholars are fearless investigators of the TRUTH and Brian McClinton and his book perfectly illustrates this sacred principle. It is a brave and brilliant book and thinking of its author it immediately brings to mind the following moving passage quoted below in which McClinton expands upon the divine principle of the truth-seeker:

'If the Shakespeare enterprise was not some narrow religio-political plot but a benign conspiracy to teach in the widest sense, then there is another conspiracy which is more malign. It is collective contempt as a substitute for investigation. Every time the issue of the authorship surfaces in Britain, a 'Shakespeare scholar' steps forward to bury it and debunk the sceptic. "None of the doubters is a literary scholar"; "no academic has ever doubted the overwhelming evidence that the man who wrote the plays was the actor from Stratford"; "denial of William's authorship is akin to holocaust denial"; these are all common scornful dismissals of anything that smacks of heresy. As for us sceptics ourselves, we are systematically labelled as cranks, fanatics, idiots or snobs. That is the level of debate on the subject by scholars who belittle their profession every time they deny the importance of the issue or abuse an opponent.

This second conspiracy is akin to a religious faith in which the priests-scholars make a tacit assumption that part of their role is to propagate and protect the accepted belief. So, if the first conspiracy was a plan to convey the truth through a myth, the second is a collected effort to maintain the myth in preference to a genuine search for the truth. Although a scholar is supposed by definition to be a truth-seeker, it is highly ironic that on the Shakespeare authorship question so many scholars are guilty of betraying their very function. This is the trahison des clercs de Shakespeare - the treason of the Shakespeare scholars - and this work is both a challenge to them and an attempt to sow the seeds of genuine doubt about the greatest of literary problems.'

Brian McClinton

August 2007

See Obituary of Brian McClinton

Read Christina G. Waldman's Book Review

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