Wadsworth was probably best known to the public for his The Poacher from Stratford (1958), a popular defense of Shakespeare's authorship and the first such book written by an academic Shakespearean scholar.
[3] Thirty-five years later he reviewed the field in an article published in the Shakespeare Newsletter, "The Poacher Re-Visited," in which he wrote: It is important that we recognize the iconoclasts, particularly those of us who are teachers.
But as Shakespeareans … we should not do it by visiting upon them the disdain of the past but by letting them speak freely for themselves … Our role should be not to suppress debate but to instruct students how to consider the Oxfordians’ (and others’) arguments carefully and thoughtfully.
That exercise will make students not just more responsible as far as Shakespeare is concerned, but also wiser, more critical, more judicial, in dealing with the complex challenges they will face in the difficult decades which lie ahead of them.
We demystify authorship controversies, assassination conspiracies, theories of extra-terrestrial shindigs, even painful social demands, by letting their proponents speak out, not by censoring them.