Tongue-tied by Authorities: Library of Congress Vocabularies & the Shakespeare Authorship Question

Presented by Michael Dudley, William Boyle & Catherine Hatinguais
Despite the existence of a vast literature reflecting hundreds of years of scholarship questioning the authorship of the works of Shakespeare, conventional Library of Congress Name Authority Files and Subject Headings are unable to accurately describe this literature owing to their assumption that the author was William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon. Adopting a pragmatic, philosophically realist perspective based in social epistemology, this presentation highlights past and current deficiencies in the authority records concerning Shakespeare and proposes changes that would better reflect the nature and purpose of this literature, as well as the historic signifiers of the named persons in question.
Bio: Michael Dudley is the librarian for history, political science, theatre, and urban studies at the University of Winnipeg, and editor of the 2012 ALA Editions book Public Libraries and Resilient Cities. He has published extensively on the subject of the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
Catherine Hatinguais is a graduate of Bordeaux University (France), where she earned a B.A. in Political Science and an M.A. in English. She later studied biology and ecology at Hunter College and trained as a botanical illustrator at the New York Botanical Garden. Fluent in English, French, and Spanish, Catherine worked for 30 years at the United Nations in New York City as a translator and terminologist, creating bilingual glossaries for use by UN interpreters and translators on technical subjects reflecting UN activities, such as military affairs, the law of the sea, and the environment. She became aware of the Shakespeare authorship question in the early 1990s, and upon her retirement she joined the SOF and started writing abstracts for the Shakespeare Online Authorship Resources (SOAR) database of Oxfordian books and articles.
Catherine has attended SOF annual conferences since 2015 and is researching Shakespeare in Italy, relying on Italian sources and focusing on the landscapes and material culture which find echoes in Shakespeare’s plays. She has published three major articles in The Oxfordian: “The Sycamore Grove, Revisited” (2016, freely available online), “Catching the Flood: River Navigation from the Adige to the Po in Shakespeare’s Italy” (2019, freely available online), and “Shakespeare’s Tranect and the Traghetto of Lizza Fusina” (2021, available online for SOF members and available in print on Amazon). Catherine was elected in 2020 to a three-year term on the Board of Trustees. She serves on the Data Preservation Committee, which seeks to encourage Oxfordian researchers to plan for the survival and orderly transmission of their papers and collections to future generations.
William Boyle is currently the Librarian for the New England Shakespeare Oxford Library (NESOL), which he co-founded in 2006 following a 35-year library career managing retrospective conversion grant projects for academic and public libraries in eastern Massachusetts, cataloging serials for the CONSER project, and cataloging legal materials in a law library. In addition to his library work, Boyle has also been involved for more than three decades in writing and presenting on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, editing newsletters for several non-profit organizations, founding and managing several Shakespeare authorship websites in the mid-1990s, and now managing an online catalog/database (SOAR) dedicated to SAQ studies.
This talk was presented as part of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship 2022 Annual Conference in Ashland, OR, on September 24, 2022. Learn more at ShakespeareOxfordFellowship.org.

[@davidjames5517]

Well done!
Strength to your arms!

[@SAVANNAHEVENTS]

Brilliant. Much thanks for this one.

[@brendanward2991]

That's a very interesting point about the man from Stratford being generally known as Shakspere until Delia Bacon launched the authorship controversy, after which Stratfordians took to calling the man from Stratford Shakespeare.

[@ronroffel1462]

It would be a trained library technician to make the first comment on this excellent presentation.
While listening to this informative lecture, I was struck by how Stratfordians could use the existing LC headings to justify claiming that there is no authorship question. They could do this by pointing to any entry for books which doubt the standard narrative and claim that according to the people who run the LC, there is no controversy - everything is subsumed beneath the orthodox narrative.
In short, the authorship issue is buried under false subject headings. The consequence of this is that researchers are duped into believing that no books by reputable scholars who doubt that Shakspere wrote the works have been written.