Fun fact of the day, and something to ponder as Roland Emmerich prepares to unleash his latest go-boom cinematic act of terror, Anonymous:
The origin of the bizarre theory that someone other than William Shakespeare authored the plays and poems generally attributed to that name comes from a nineteenth-century work with the fantastic (yet grammatically questionable) title The Romance of Yachting: Voyage the First.
Wikipedia provides us with two pithy reviews of the book:
Despite the title the book has little to say about yachting and has been described as a ‘kind of horn book of digression’.
&
A gossipy account of a voyage ot Spain.
So there you have it! A gossipy account of a voyage to Spain that skimps on the practicalities involved in nineteenth-century yachting in order to try to out-Shandy Tristram Shandy! What does this mean? This means that Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro is going to be doing this a lot in the coming months. Poor bastard.
