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Media worldwide report that June Schlueter, former provost and English professor, helped identify a new source of 11 of the Bard's plays
Research on the plays of William Shakespeare by Professor Emerita June Schlueter and Dennis McCarthy has gained national and international attention.
“For years scholars have debated what inspired William Shakespeare’s writings. Now, with the help of software typically used by professors to nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, Henry V and seven other plays,” writes Michael Blanding in the New York Times.
“The findings were made by [McCarthy and Schlueter], who describe them in a book to be published next week by the academic press D.S. Brewer and the British Library. The authors are not suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that he read and was inspired by a manuscript titled A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels, written in the late 1500s by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth, who served as an ambassador to Sweden.”
See below for a sampling of coverage in English-language media.
The first woman to hold an endowed chair at Lafayette, Schlueter retired as Charles A. Dana Professor of English in 2008, having served also as provost of the College from 1993 to 2006. Schlueter co-edited Shakespeare Bulletin, a journal of performance criticism and scholarship published at Lafayette, with the late Lafayette professor James P. Lusardi ’55 from 1984 to 2002. She made a previous breakthrough in literary scholarship with her book The Album Amicorum and the London of Shakespeare’s Time.
Lafayette is the birthplace of Shakespeare studies in America – the first college to formally establish a chair for the study of the English language and literature. Francis Andrew March, a member of the faculty from 1855 to 1906, pioneered the study of literary works in the English language, instituting a program at Lafayette decades before the subject was widely established in colleges throughout the nation. Schlueter and her husband, Paul Schlueter, are the editors of Francis A. March: Selected Writings of the First Professor of English.
New York Times
Smithsonian
Los Angeles Times
The Independent
The Guardian
The Telegraph
Daily Mail
Slate
Financial Express
Financial Review