Suck a Donkey: the libel of Don Quixote
Mladen Dolar, one of the Slovenian philosophers I enjoy reading from time to time, published a short work called Rumors (2025), navigating from the destructive nature of libel to the liberating function of gossip. Among the authors sampled to explicate his theory are Shakespeare and Cervantes, who some say were the same person(s). Dolar, however, never touches on this rumor, nor the one about William Shakespeare being Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The latter is in fact no longer a full-fledged rumor, and has emerged into the realm of truth through the work of the late Alexander Waugh and the De Vere Society, United Kingdom, and the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, United States. I recently used their work to help riddle the gist of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), a 1000+ page cryptology game inspired by Charlton Ogburn’s tome The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality (1984). Curious if Wallace picked up on the “Wil...