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"Customer Reviews * Rating Most important work on Shakespeare in a century Aug 5, 2005 (48 of 56 found this helpful) It is gratifying to read so many other reviews that agree on the importance of Hank Whittemore's latest book, The Monument, on Shakespeare's Sonnets. What Whittemore has accomplished is nothing short of breath-taking. He has achieved in the literary realm what Thomas Kuhn so excellently described for science 40 years ago: a paradigm shift, where it takes a totally fresh view, unemcumbered by the assumptions and prejudices of a given field of inquiry, to solve what are otherwise perceived in the profession to be unsolvable questions. Einstein's Special Relativity Theory, coincidentally exactly 100 years ago, is the best example of such a paradigm shift, where the only solution to the conundrums plaguing physics was Einstein's assertion that time itself was not constant, and neither was mass. The difference in the case of Whittemore's work is that despite massive evidence that Shakespeare's Sonnets remain to this day a virtually totally impenetrable enigma, very few mainstream scholars even appear to recognize this fact. I have recently read the work of the only four scholars, so far as I am aware, in the last 50 years who have published either a paraphrase of, or extended comments on, ALL 154 sonnets. They are to be commended for recognizing the importance of treating the entire sonnet sequence as a whole, but in each case, in my view, they are a miserable flop at explaining the meaning of the sonnets. What Whittemore recognized is first, that the sonnets are ONE unified, coherent, internally consistent, document. Whatever is said in one sonnet MUST relate to all the other sonnets. So long as there are (apparent) contradictions between one's interpretations of different sonnets, so long is that interpretation fatally flawed. Second, he not only agreed with many scholars that Sonnet 106 is about the death of the Queen, the pea

Four hundred years after the premiere of Hamlet, the authorship question remains a mystery

The Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship holds that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), wrote the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

It is simply clan instinct to believe and cogitate in terms that are acceptable, to fit in, to feed and run with the herd, to sniff which way the wind is blowing, sense what direction the closest hooves are shifting, as it is very often a matter of personal advantage and survival. Rebellion can be fatal to iconoclasts. On the other hand, clay pots crack and crash on their own after a time.