Shadow language.(poetry)(Critical Essay)

Of all the theses advanced to explain the incomparable abundance of Shakespeare's language, perhaps the most audacious--and certainly the wackiest--is that propounded some forty years ago by an Iraqi professor at the University of Baghdad. In a massive tome, the professor argued that the lone survivor of the shipwreck of an Arab merchant vessel washed up on the shores of Elizabethan England and made his way, wet, bedraggled, and famished, to the nearest village where he found hospitality and shelter. Establishing himself, there our mariner quickly mastered English and in short order was churning out remarkable poems and dramas. Relocated to Stratford-on-Avon and London, he ...