H is academic colleagues have all but ignored his work, but you have to admire professor Roy Neil Graves, who just keeps on keeping on. Graves is a professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Martin who for years has pitched 154 unknown sonnets that were written, he says, by William Shakespeare, but hidden within known sonnets.
Graves gives the deconstruction process a whole new meaning.
As reporter Bartholomew Sullivan of The Commercial Appeal explained, just take the successive fifth lines of the Bard's sonnets 57 through 70, for example, patch them together, and out pops a new poem, as packed with Shakespearean imagery and metaphor and meaning as the sonnets everybody knows. I thought Graves was a pretty distinctive scholar, and that there would probably never be another like him, until I chanced upon the work of another English literature expert, and I'm not sure the two have even met. Like Graves's work, the investigations of Prof. L. 'Bo' Patches of the University of Tennessee at Bucksnort have gone largely unnoticed. Not a single scholarly journal has commented on or even recognized the existence of his most valuable study, an unorthodox analysis of the works of the 16th Century English poet Christopher 'Carpe Diem' Marlowe. Marlowe, in the view of Patches, turns out to have been a greater wordsmith than anyone imagined, as well as a trickster who left clues to his many faceted imagination for future generations to decipher.