Who Cares Who Wrote Shakespeare ?

Obviously, a great many people, on both (or all) sides of the authorship question, and they care a lot. The real question is why. Proponents of various authorship claimants compete in their protestations of admiration for the plays and poems in controversy. But if these works are in fact so universally and inexhaustibly fertile of significance, why should any admirer of them waste precious time, which might better be devoted to the study of the texts themselves, arguing about an ultimately irresoluble historical puzzle? And why is so much of the discussion conducted at such a relatively high pitch of emotion? In this essay I will argue that the answer is related to the way in which, over many generations, professional Shakespeareans have employed techniques of interpretation which anticipate -modernist literary criticism