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 his reply to Matus 's essay (above), Bethell counters Matus 's Stratfordian arguments, maintaining that evidence of the connection between Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford cannot be dismissed.

Irvin Matus has performed a useful service by disposing of some of the weaker anti-Stratfordian arguments.

I agree that the Stratford man was at no time "packed off to his home town, that Lord Hunsdon was the patron of the Chamberlain's Men, and that Elizabethans did not think holograph manuscripts worth keeping. Philip Henslowe's failure to mention Shakespeare doesn't concern me. I am pleased to hear that plays were classified as "riffraffs" by literary folk: this would help to explain the use of a pseudonym by a play-writing nobleman.

I agree that Shakespeare's reputation was not by...