SOURCE: "Looking for Shakespeare: Two Partisans Explain and Debate the Authorship Question," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 268, No. 4, October, 1991, pp. 43-61.

In this essay, Matus attacks several anti-Stratfordian arguments, explaining some of the apparent gaps in what is known about Shakespeare's life.

The new reading room of the Folger Shakespeare Library is dominated by a huge painting of the sort that Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell might have characterized as being of "more than usually revolting sentimentality." Many scholars who do their research beneath it would share that view. ("I try to keep my back to it," one longtime reader says.) But when it was painted, around 1792, The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions, by George Romney, was a reflection of the fledgling cult that over the next century matured into what George Bernard Shaw would disdainfully dub "Bardolatry."

The origins of this cult are usually dated...