Academia has certain time-honoured rites of passage: defending your PhD, speaking at your first conference and going on strike.
But for Shakespeareans, there’s a special baptism of ire: being shouted at online by a middle-aged software developer from Washington, D.C. In the field, the joke goes that you’re not a true Shakespearean unless you’ve received dog’s abuse from Alan Tarica, a staunch ‘anti-Stratfordian’ convinced William Shakespeare didn’t write any Shakespeare.
Tarica claims his Eternity Promised, a massive, line-by-line ‘exegesis’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets, is ‘a poetic WikiLeaks’ exposing a centuries-long conspiracy to conceal the love-child of Elizabeth I and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford’ – the most popular of the ‘alternative’ candidates for authorship.
In reality, there is no ‘authorship question’. Bemused English lit scholars, tired of pointing at evidence documenting Shakespeare’s career, largely ignore the pet theories of passionate amateurs.
But Tarica is more compelling than most bores because he’s a terminally online troll. He combs Twitter and university faculty pages, launching obscene diatribes at students, scholars, journalists – anyone who mentions Shakespeare online – raving about his own brilliance and writing articles with titles like ‘Has Everyone Turned Off His or Her Brain?’
I spoke with dozens of writers, all baffled at being targeted. Rhodri Lewis, a professor at Princeton, remembers reading a series of emails from Tarica ‘ranting about small mindedness’ in the mid- to late-2000s; Tarica reached out again after Lewis published work on Hamlet in 2016 and 2017, but Lewis hit delete.
When Jonn Elledge, author of Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them (2022), ignored his emails, Tarica informed him: ‘[It] probably never occurred to you that you are actually an imbecile.’ ‘Because obviously,’ Tarica went on, ‘I’m “crazed” and I thought it would be thoughtful to let you know privately that one day I’m going to publicly excoriate useless, naive, semi-literate dipshits like you.’ ‘Dear Dipshit,’ another email to Elledge began, ‘you just have no concept of what a clueless dumb fuck you are. Which makes you an insanely clueless dumb fuck.’ You have to laugh at his commitment to profanity, finished up with an anodyne: ‘Best, Alan’.
Dennis McCarthy was targeted by Tarica when he tweeted about his book Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare’s Plays, a study of Shakespeare’s source materials (not an anti-Stratfordian thesis). ‘It is astonishing how emotional the authorship issue is,’ McCarthy said. ‘People become absolutely unhinged over it.’
