Yo, Richard, what's the point? I agree with Kathman: it can be a waste of time "debating" true-believers in the HLAS newsgroup. And Dave, to his credit, provides the group with (often) much-needed factual correctives.

This is not take away from your own gadfly contributions, such as the Wool Man thread, and the poem to William Peters (any poet could tell that wasn't by Shakespeare, unless he was trying to write bad poem), and your expose of the (semi-squalid) living conditions in Stratford more than century after the First Folio came out, and the ignorance of the townsfolk as to who William was also stands out. Sure Dave's smugness can be annoying and frustrating at times, but he does a good job of answering queries, and his paragraphs are never gaseous, unlike some, who shall go nameless -- but your guess is (near-rimes gaseous) as good as mine.

signed,
Wynn D. More