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Not knowing the author granted a certain freedom. The professor could analyze the plays however he wished, could find in them whatever meanings seemed good to him. That has been the “right” of literary criticism since at least the 1940s, when the New Critics, a school of American literary scholars, announced that authorial intent was irrelevant to understanding a literary text.
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)