Knowledge Ill-Inhabited: The Subjugation of Post-Stratfordian Scholarship in Academic Libraries

Abstract

Since 2000 there has been a surge of scholarly and popular publishing supporting the proposition that the name “Shake-Speare” was a pseudonym disguising a nobleman named Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, while the Stratford “Bard” of traditional biography is mere legend. However, this “post-Stratfordian” literature is at present poorly-represented in Canada’s academic libraries, while Library of Congress indexing has long marginalized it. For this paper, holdings of post-2000 Shakespeare biographies in Canada’s university libraries were analyzed, as were relevant LC classifications and subject headings, revealing a powerful normative bias against post-Stratfordian publishing.