Tongue-Tied by Authorities: Library of Congress Vocabularies and the Shakespeare Authorship Question

Abstract

Despite the existence of a vast literature reflecting hundreds of years of scholarship questioning the authorship of the works of Shakespeare, conventional Library of Congress Name Authority Files and Subject Headings are unable to accurately describe this literature owing to their assumption that the author was William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon. Adopting a pragmatic, philosophically realist perspective based in social epistemology, this article highlights past and current deficiencies in the authority records concerning Shakespeare and proposes changes that would better reflect the nature and purpose of this literature, as well as the historic signifiers of the named persons in question.