Keevak's other area of interest is forgery, notably the documents created in the late 18th century by the teenager William Ireland. These included, along with a letter from Queen Elizabeth to the poet, a "lost" play. Interestingly, Keevak's next book will be about another fraud, this time by an 18th century impostor who claimed to be Taiwanese, and published a book in London purporting to describe the island, but who had never set foot east of Germany.
Keevak concludes with a skeptical and funny chapter on the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, plus the many books now available offering Shakespeare without tears, Shakespeare for Dummies, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Shakespeare and the like. Once again any suggestion of sexual ambivalence in the great man is duly whited out, as if nothing had changed since the bardolatrous and de-eroticisizing days of 200 years ago.
Indeed, at times Keevak appears wearied of absurdities both ancient and modern. "These are indeed `idiot's guides' in the truest sense of the word," he laments, "and one may well wonder whether they were meant to appeal to the self-described idiot or whether they just make you into one."
As for the war between the traditional critics, who generally take Shakespeare's exceptional verbal power for granted, and the younger ones who are anxious to use him as a quarry for arguments about inequalities of race, class and gender in the modern world, Keevak is tactfully silent, implicitly reserving his position. Also, because he is surveying attitudes to Shakespeare's reputation over the centuries, the actual works themselves don't figure prominently. Hence he is able to remain non-committal about questions of their intrinsic quality, if indeed he believes such an evaluation has any meaning.
This is a book that addresses itself adroitly to both an academic and a quasi-popular readership. It's good to know that English language literary scholarship in Taiwan's premier university is being carried out with such a combination of meticulousness, discrimination, and elan.
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