Two competing op-ed articles in the Washington Post today got me thinking. One is for the idea that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays, and one is against:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/16/AR2007031602692.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/16/AR2007031602690.html

Of course this is the epitome of an academic argument, and I shouldn't get too worked up about it. But I have to say that the idea that Shakespeare couldn't have written the Merchant of Venice without having been to Italy is absurd. If the play was bout daily life in Venice, it would be different, but it isn't. It's not hard to imagine that the playwright chose Venice for the local of his play because it would be seen as an exotic and enticing locale to his audience. And remember that a play, especially in Elizabethan times, was not a movie. The sets were sparse and relied heavily on the viewer's imagination. Verisimilitude was not important.

Anyway, this battle of the op-eds pretty much convinced me that there was no cover-up, that Shakespeare's plays were written by none other than the Shakespeare of Stratford. The reason I am so convinced, and the reason that it seems important, is that this invented controversy highlights the tendency of people to see controversy where there is none. I am thinking especially about the scientific non-controversies du jour of evolution and global warming. Those controversies were invented for political reasons as, perhaps, the controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare's plays was. The idea that a little known commoner with sparse experience of the high society and far-flung lands of which he wrote could not only write about them, but write more beautifully about them than any other speaker of English may be offensive to some and may prompt them to look for a different, more elaborate explanation. They have a perfect right to do so. But they shouldn't cry foul when others choose to ignore them and look at the facts.