This is fascinating! I would have been so much more invested in slogging through these plays in high school if I had known they were part of a mystery greater than “he may not have written them” and “all of his signatures are different.”
A long time ago, when I was the chief information officer of a small company - my analyst team was overwhelmed with “report requests” that came in from all over the business….(this was in the days before there was anything even faintly like effective data warehouses or data marts, let alone “self service analytics” and you basically had to have a very skilled programmer/developer in order to get any real information out of all the transaction processing systems…)
We couldn’t keep up. So, the first step was to implement a set of requirements for each request, so my poor team had some hope of prioritizing the business needs as they decided which requests to fill and when.
It didn’t really help and it wasn’t really anybody’s fault - the technology hadn’t yet caught up with the demand for information. And our business wasn’t big enough to support the number of programmer developers it would have taken to satisfy all the requests…
But. To meet the business need - I had to “deprioritize” (okay, eliminate) all the general interest and idle curiosity requests. It hurt my heart, but whenever the justification began with “it would be interesting/important to know…..” the request was a candidate for deprioritization….unless followed by a compelling “because then we could ….”
That’s kind of how I feel about the Shakespeare author question. Of course it would be interesting to know - but why? Because we want to know who really wrote them? Because we want to know how such an effective concealment conspiracy could be perpetrated? Because we want to know why such a deception was made? Who benefitted? Who was harmed? And then that ever present concern….what about space aliens?
Thanks for these posts. I’m having fun thinking outside my normal boxes
This is fascinating! I would have been so much more invested in slogging through these plays in high school if I had known they were part of a mystery greater than “he may not have written them” and “all of his signatures are different.”
I love a good historical literary mystery.
A long time ago, when I was the chief information officer of a small company - my analyst team was overwhelmed with “report requests” that came in from all over the business….(this was in the days before there was anything even faintly like effective data warehouses or data marts, let alone “self service analytics” and you basically had to have a very skilled programmer/developer in order to get any real information out of all the transaction processing systems…)
We couldn’t keep up. So, the first step was to implement a set of requirements for each request, so my poor team had some hope of prioritizing the business needs as they decided which requests to fill and when.
It didn’t really help and it wasn’t really anybody’s fault - the technology hadn’t yet caught up with the demand for information. And our business wasn’t big enough to support the number of programmer developers it would have taken to satisfy all the requests…
But. To meet the business need - I had to “deprioritize” (okay, eliminate) all the general interest and idle curiosity requests. It hurt my heart, but whenever the justification began with “it would be interesting/important to know…..” the request was a candidate for deprioritization….unless followed by a compelling “because then we could ….”
That’s kind of how I feel about the Shakespeare author question. Of course it would be interesting to know - but why? Because we want to know who really wrote them? Because we want to know how such an effective concealment conspiracy could be perpetrated? Because we want to know why such a deception was made? Who benefitted? Who was harmed? And then that ever present concern….what about space aliens?
Thanks for these posts. I’m having fun thinking outside my normal boxes
The previous post addresses the question of "why" - definitely give it a read!