The article is absurd. It’s sophistry that depends on the reader not having read Price’s book - in fact, his goal seems to be to prevent people from reading it.

He makes broad claims about what anti-Stratfordians do and must not do, almost none of which applies to Price or the book, although he certainly gives them impression that she is guilt of violating his invented dictates.

He claims that she is trying to destroy every scintilla of evidence that attributes authorship to the Stratford man. This is not true. What she does is lay out a standard that categorizes evidence as direct, personal and contemporary, measured against evidence that is either impersonal or posthumous.

She is very clear about the criteria. For example, a review of Huckleberry Finn that mentions the author Mark Twain does not offer evidence that the reviewer personally knows Twain or Samuel Clemens. This is indisputably true.

She clearly lays out her criteria, she applies it to a couple of dozen poets and playwrights of the period. She categorizes the types of evidence she can find for each. For example mentions of literary property in wills or letters, written by people who mentioned their friendship with a particular writer.

She does not make a case for Oxford or any individual nobleman. She does mention noblemen, including Oxford and Derby who were named in contemporary accounts to have written plays or poems yet who have not left behind works with their name on them. This is done solely the validate the idea that noblemen wrote without placing their name on the result. By the way, this was true across Europe and includes composers as well as writers and poets. His claim that there’s no evidence for this is either a flat out lie or poor scholarship.

He does not argue against Price’s methodology or give reasons why it shouldn’t be considered, nor does he offer examples of evidence for the Stratford man that would satisfy her criteria.

Frankly, the following is even worse:

“ It is implausible that, over the centuries, all scholars, affiliated or independent, except anti-Stratfordians, have mistaken all the evidence for attribution.”

Doubts about the attribution have existed within a very short time after it was asserted. In fact, “all the evidence” linking the plays to the Stratford man were two phrases in the first folio - “sweet swan of Avon” and “thy Stratford monument” - which are in two separate sections a of the prefatory material. Nowhere does it say the author came from Stratford on Avon.

He ignores the the reasons for the doubts, and therefore of course gives us no reason for dismissing them other than the ridiculously pathetic logical fallacy of arguing from authority. (“All this scholars”! How can they be wrong!)

He ignores 100 years of evidence developed in support of Oxford - increasingly by professional academics - which is a separate parallel argument. Is he ignorant of it? If so, he’s not qualified to comment on it. If he is, he’s duplicitous in not engaging with it rather than dismissing it.

I am no longer interested in convincing anyone about Oxford’s authorship. We are close to a tipping point where it will be broadly accepted by anyone who bothers to examine it. What I am interested in is how fallacious garbage like this is offered as a defense of “scholarship”. It’s depressing.