HISTORICAL RESEARCH YET TO BE DONE.

HISTORICAL RESEARCH YET TO BE DONE. I was thrilled by a sentence in a review by Stanley Wells in the Times Literary Supplement (August 13) of a book about Shakespeare authorship controversies. Wells is replying to a contention that every surviving scrap of paper from Shakespeare’s time has been examined by scholars. Wells says: “In fact, record offices are stuffed with unexamined documents of the period.” Annalisa recognized how pleased I was that there is still so much for scholars to do and reminded me how excited she was by the possibilities she imagined in the landscape and barrows near Stonehenge. And there are all the papyrus fragments yet to be deciphered and published and the mountain of potshards at Mount Testaccio.