Identity Crisis

Regarding Charles Champlin’s Feb. 8 column on who wrote Shakespeare’s works:

A group of graduate students, under my direction, have unearthed several dust-covered documents and pursued various phililogic and textual theories that have revealed an historic fact: Charles Champlin does not exist.

One of my students has drawn up a lengthy article that shows, upon philological and semiotic analysis, that much of “Champlin’s” articles are but a compilation of others: a snippet of Michael Wilmington’s attitude, a graft of Kevin Thomas’ esoterica, a collocation of Sheila Benson’s critical vengeance.

We don’t know much about “Champlin’s” origins. It surely cannot be that he had an uneventful childhood and adult life. A conspiracy of silence is going on in the Calendar section, and I have arrived to clear the air.

JOSEPH R. PUTERBAUGH, Santa Monica