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There appears to exist a formal—or at least tacit—agreement within a virtual cartel of Shakespearean academics and institutions that the man from Stratford (→ Wm Shaxpere) is identical with the author of the canon.
This cartel operates through public institutions to enforce its academic pact, using the “sovereign” intellectual neo-statehood of universities to shield the literary alliance from rational challenge. Such cartelisation of thought constitutes an assault on academic freedom itself, as the history of ideas repeatedly demonstrates. Stratford, too, has a vested economic interest in its own → Birthplace Trust, which functions as the shepherd of a tourist economy worth millions of pounds annually.
Modern antitrust theory has long identified the destructive consequences of monopolies and suppressed competition—whether in Canterbury, the ecclesiastical heart of England since Augustine became archbishop in 597, or along the Wilton Avon, where → Mary Sidney and her sons, the Herbert Earls of Pembroke, are understood to have sheltered Christopher Marlowe and his noms de plume.
This intellectual stasis produces a slowing of progress in thought and in “science”—that is, in the cumulative reservoir of human knowledge, including literary history itself. It recalls the paradigm of → market failure: a condition generated not by conflict, but by stagnation—by the moribund and the complacent.
