In June 2019 I presented on my “Knowledge, Belief, and the Role of Rhetoric” module at the Young Rhetoricians Conference and at two ERWC leadership conferences. Almost any issue can be plugged into this mini-module. For the purposes of these workshops I chose the longstanding controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.  Because time was limited and the articles were long, I provided cheat sheets with selected quotations and summaries. The materials I used in these workshops are linked below. One could make an interesting module about the Shakespeare authorship question from these materials.

What became clear as teachers responded to the various articles was that we all bring a lot of prior experience, knowledge, and preconceptions to our reading of articles on topics about which we already have strong opinions.

Here is the PowerPoint for the workshop in .pdf format: Knowledge and Belief Presentation

The mini-module itself and accompanying handouts can be found in the blog post Knowledge, Belief, and The Role of Rhetoric.

Core Issue Texts

“Was Shakespeare a Woman?” by Elizabeth Winkler, published in the June 2019 issue of The Atlantic.  Although this article suggests that the plays were written by Emilia Bassano, there are links to other pieces that argue for a variety of authors, including William Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.

I prepared a Descriptive Outline and a Cheat Sheet for this text.  The cheat sheet consists of some selected quotations and a section by section summary of the arguments. 

The Winkler article links to a number of other relevant texts.  I chose two of them to supplement the workshop:

“The Case for Shakespeare: In defense of Shakespeare as the author of the Shakespeare works” by Irving Matus.  I produced a Descriptive Outline and a Cheat Sheet for this text.

2 Shakespearean Actors Revive Debate Over The Bard’s Identity. This is an interview done by NPR with Mark Rylance and Derek Jacoby.  I have also provided the interview in .pdf form.

Update: The Winkler article that argues that Shakespeare might have been a woman set off a lot of controversy at The Atlantic and inspired a flurry of letters and articles in response.  See the responses here.