Whatshisface

Whatshisface alludes to the “authorship question”: the theory that William Shakespeare may not have personally authored some or all of the plays and sonnets attributed to him. In other words, people think “Shakespeare” is a pseudonym for someone else. Wolfson addresses the authorship question when he tells Cooper, “You’re speaking of the theory that some of Shakespeare’s works were written by other playwrights of the time. It’s all nonsense, of course. No serious scholar believes that” (137). Yet many prominent people, including the American novelist Mark Twain and the American activist Helen Keller, believed that another person wrote some or all of Shakespeare’s work.

Though he wrote myriad plays and sonnets, Shakespeare left behind no drafts, personal writings, or letters: a cause for suspicion. People also wonder how a person from a working-class family with a meager education could create such a varied oeuvre. People who doubt the authenticity of Shakespeare’s authorship believe that he could be the aristocratic scholar Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth I, or the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. People who believe that Shakespeare himself is the author can accuse these doubters of classism. After all, a person doesn’t need money or a formal education to make art. Concerning the absence of drafts, they point to different standards of preservation in the late 1500s/early 1600s. Maybe Shakespeare didn’t think that his personal papers or drafts required saving. Alternatively, they could have been lost in the centuries since his death.

In the story, Roddy doesn’t doubt the existence of Shakespeare or his role as a playwright. Roddy meets him at the shop and detests him, describing him as a fraud with only “a teaspoonful of talent” (74). In real life, the issue isn’t plagiarism but whether Shakespeare was a real person and/or the person who wrote the famous works attributed to him.