(under construction) What Shakespeare's Sonnets tell us about their author

A discussion of the Sonnets with, as argument, that they are both strongly autobiographical in character as well as internally incompatible with the Stratfordian view of Shakespeare's identity.
In doing so, I'll draw on the work of J. Thomas Looney among others.)

----------------
Special note To those who are newly come to their interest in Shake-speare's Sonnets:

I recommend that you visit Stephanie Hopkins Hughes' website "Politicworm.com" devoted to Shakespeare and to the Oxfordian case for Edward De Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

There you'll find an article on the general importance of the Shakespeare sonnets:

"The Story told by Shakespeare's Sonnets"
--Stephanie Hopkins Hughes, (November 1999)

https://politicworm.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/hughes-the-story-told-by-shakesp...

You can also find at her site pages of detailed explanations which, taken together, set out the entire Oxfordian case and, with that, clear refutations and rebuttals of all the objections raised in the ensuing discussion by those trying to defend the view of the author as William Shaksper of Stratford-on-Avon.

Example:

“What about the line from William Basse’s elegy, ‘Mr. Wm. Shakespeare/he dyed in Aprill 1616’? He says: ‘Sleep, rare Tragaedian Shakespeare, sleep alone.” Basse actually says the guy was a tragedian and attaches a name and a date of death. Why does that not count as evidence?”

See her page on this point:

https://politicworm.com/questions-and-responses/why-is-not-the-basse-eulogy-from...

-----------------

( from J. Thomas Looney's

Shakespeare Identified in Edward De Vere Seventeenth Earl of Oxford)


(from page 376)
...'Now, as to the man who wrote the sonnets: for this is really the most important point. Throughout the whole series he assumes the attitude of a matured man addressing a youth. Indeed, in one of the other series he speaks of himself as being
no 'untutor'd youth,' but that his 'days are past the best.'
The following, from Sonnet 63, is unmistakable:
--

'Against my love shall be, as I am now,
With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn;
When hours have drain'd his blood and fill'd his brow
With lines and wrinkles, etc.'

"We may even detect an indication of his approximate
age in the lines:

'When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field.'

"The next point is the date at which these particular sonnets were written. We find that the first sonnets of the first set are assigned generally to about the year 1590, when Oxford was just forty years of age. The dedication
of 'Venus' to Wriothesley is dated 1593; and as the sonnet which seems to refer to it is number 83, 1590 may be accepted as a reasonable date for these seventeen opening sonnets. This, then, is the situation represented by the poems. About the year 1590 a matured man 'With Time's
injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn,' addressed to the
youthful Earl of Southampton, then only about seventeen years of age, a number of sonnets urging upon him the question of matrimony, and putting in the specially aristocratic plea of maintaining the continuance of his family's succession.

"In respect to these facts we shall first consider the Stratfordian position. In the year 1590, William Shakspere, the son of a Stratford citizen, having become interested in theatres, and thereby
acquainted with a young man just home from the university, and having himself by that time
attained the patriarchal age of twenty-six, suddenly becomes
greatly concerned about the continuance of the youth's aris-
tocratic family, and writes a set of exquisite sonnets urging
him to marry. He also assumes the bearing and tone of a man of large and even painful experience, "past his best,"

(...)

Looney had a strong bias toward the idea that Shakespeare (or Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford as Looney would have us believe) wrote autobiographical elements into his works. Actually, "bias" is too weak a word for Looney's utter conviction about that without any evidence in the historical record to back it up. This in spite of the fact that it wasn't until the beginning of the romantic period in literature around 1800 that writers began doing that. The notion was foreign in Shakespeare's day.

Some scholars have speculated about when the sonnets began to be written, but the first hard evidence of the existence of any of them is in Francis Meres' Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598). (See an extract here.) In it, Meres refers to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends". (This is one of nine references Meres makes to Shakespeare. By comparison, Marlowe is mentioned six times, and the Earl of Oxford is mentioned only once for being good at comedy, probably court masques though none survive.)

Sonnets 138 and 144 were first published in 1599 in William Jaggard's The Passionate Pilgrim, attributed to Shakespeare, though only five of the pieces in the volume are known with certainty to be his. Otherwise, Shakespeare's Sonnets were collected and published in their entirety, as we know them today, in 1609. We have no direct evidence otherwise as to when Shakespeare actually wrote them. Nor do we know whether or not Shakespeare may have made any revisions along the way before they were published. As for Looney's assertion about the maturity of the writer of the sonnets, Shakespeare was 35 in 1599, middle age by the standards of that time.

In spite of the general absence of autobiographical elements in writing back then, scholars (real ones--not Looney) have speculated about whether the sonnets were at least partly autobiographical. Many possible identities for the fair youth, the dark lady, and the rival--not to mention Shakespeare's possible relationships with them--have been proposed. It can't be ignored, however, that setting up pseudo protagonists for poetic purposes was also common back then. The bottom line? We just don't know, and any argument that attempts to claim certainty about the author from the contents of the sonnets is blowing smoke.

Looney's whole purpose was to convince people that Oxford was the author of Shakespeare's works. His argument is mostly based on a whole host of speculative issues like this one which, taken together, don't amount to anything concrete, especially when contrasted with the actual historical record. See How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts.

>2 Podras.:

Welcome to the discussion.

A reminder of this thread's topic and title:

"What Shakespeare's Sonnets tell us about their author". (Emphasis added)

Above, you assert,

..."Looney would have us believe) (E.N.: that Shakespeare) wrote autobiographical elements into his works."

..."it wasn't until the beginning of the romantic period in literature around 1800 that writers began doing that. The notion was foreign in Shakespeare's day."... (2A)*

..., scholars (real ones--not Looney) have speculated about whether the sonnets were at least partly autobiographical." ... (2B)

..."The bottom line? We just don't know, and any argument that attempts to claim certainty about the author from the contents of the sonnets is blowing smoke." (2C)

(*) Note: for future reference, each of my cites of a part your (or others') comments here will have an alpha-numerical reference so that it need not be reposted. "2" denotes your post number; "A" denotes the first of the cites from that numbered post. Unless otherwise indicated, all emphasis is my addition.
-----

First, please cite, if you can, where Looney (as you imply (2C)) "attempts to claim certainty about the author from the contents of the sonnets," or, if you prefer, explain why your comment does not imply that or, if you prefer, retract that implication in your next reply (if any).

Second, (Q3/1*) I ask*: speaking for yourself, when you read the sonnets, do you construe the author's own use of "I", "me", "my" and "mine" to always refer to someone other than himself--or do you usually assume he is referring to himself unless he indicates otherwise in the text of the sonnets themselves?

Third, (Q3/2) do you deny that doing so (as just said above) is generally a reasonable construction of the author's meaning?

----------

EDITED TO ADD : THIS SPECIAL NOTE TO THE GENERAL READER HERE:

I advise you to be on your guard against any representations by "podras" in this thread which concern Edward Oxford or the views of Oxfordians. Such representations are in loaded language, calculated to distort the facts and produce a false impression.

>3 proximity1:

Perhaps it's just me, but it seems just a tad presumptuous to "welcome" Podras "to the discussion" after he commented on the OP. Even Tim and the LT staff don't assume that lordly, proprietary tone.

For my part, I find it tempting to ignore a thread that begins with a lengthy, unfocused, "under construction" OP, consisting mainly of pasted blocks of text from Thomas Looney. Besides, past experience tells me that it is pointless to try to engage a convinced anti-Stratfordian in debate. One has a better chance of converting a door-knocking Jehovah's Witness to Hinduism. Besides, many anti-Stratfordians, especially DeVere groupies, have some of the same missionary zeal as the JWs.

If you are trying to make up your mind between the various anti-Stratfordian camps and the orthodox view, that would make a good topic for civil discussion. But if you're staking out some terrain on LT for Oxfordian propaganda, I'm less inclined to be tolerant. In my experience, anti-Stratfordian proselytizers don't want open discussion; they want converts.

>1 proximity1: - >4 Muscogulus:
There is already an LT group devoted to the Oxfordian pov: http://www.librarything.com/groups/edwarddevereandthesh

They tell us he was pretty good at writing sonnets.

autobiography or whatever, I'm not bothered by that so much now.

They tell us he is human, someone that understands love, and experienced in it, empathic. Someone that understands humans, his times, and the limitations of those times (perhaps not in them being published though(?)). Someone for me that understands love is not confined by aesthetic rules that masquerade as ethics. A witty person - willing to explore and think on and reflect on the wit of others. Someone with a very full view. Someone maybe capable of great clarity under emotional pressure, or else if not written near the time of actual events someone of great imagination that can access the processes of love very fully in recollection in a quite staggering way. Someone prepared to let argument into poems and let that develop. Someone interested in form and exploring what it allows - and willing to break convention in it (say 126), stretch and play with it to find how it may meet the real. Someone palpable and real underneath it all, in all the artifice, sharing and communicating and able to allow us all, each of us to respond to have our own reading of what, whether autobiographical or not, accounts for such depth of understanding of love, is willing to share that...or was perhaps only talking so to those he trusted(?). Someone who left off his highly successful career not too long after these were published, which makes me wonder. Someone that Ben Jonson said of him what he said. Someone, whoever, that caught such heights that remain part of the province of being we all may know, and in doing so shows us all 'what we may be', not in just what he drew but that he did, how he did, that this is possible.

>6 TheHumbleOne:

If the "he" you are referring to is Oxford, his poetry can be read online.

He's not remotely in Shakespeare's class and comes across as rather self absorbed. That is consistent with his biography in general.

I should clarify I wrote quickly last night - when I said biographical issues did not bother me so much I meant regarding the story of The Sonnets really.

I fall into the WS was WS camp. It is important to me and reflects back to my final comment - that this is possible in a human being. I sometimes see it as reactionary to assert he must have been some nobleman (whichever). He clearly was on close terms with one at least - it is possible some of the touches others think could not have come from such as he were the result of a kind of mentoring, or maybe friendship. Also that the plays, at least, were developed amongst the troop. He seems to have had a special ability to do things no others see in quite the same way. Ii find it extremely hopeful to think that a person can do this. he's also not really so low - what percentage of the population went to a grammar school then, at all? but I may argue that his status may have been exactly what gave him a realistic view of many parts of society. And just how long did it take for anyone to doubt this? Not a word of it for how long? No actors gossip. I won't get dragged into it, it's unproveable perhaps. But it seems to m his genius has more to do with someone that spends time knowing themself and thinking on experience than that this came from the highest class and education, but amongst other he lived with and knew and was known.

>8 Podras.:

I don't know why anybody would suppose I meant Oxford. Or Marlowe. Or Bacon. Or Dame Judi Dench.

General to the responses so far---

Let's be clear : the Stratfordian view remains, within academia, the “default” view. Everyone who learns anything at all about Shakespeare while in school is taught the Stratfordian picture as the orthodox—and, typically, the only—view. When I was in school, no alternatives were exposed. If conditions at school are different today, then I am surprised and delighted to learn this; but, so far, no one has informed me of this being the case in schooling anywhere between elementary school through undergraduate studies at a university.

Thus, all Oxfordians are converts by definition. They came to their conversion by having been open to considering an alternative to the Stratfordian picture of Shakespeare which they'd already been taught as fact. It was by the force of reasoned argument that they came to abandon that picture. This fact by itself suggests an open-mindedness on their parts which is not necessarily true of their Stratfordian opponents who may never have given any consideration to an alternative view of Shakespeare's identity and biography to that which they were first taught.

It's rather insulting, then, to charge Oxford's advocates with being impervious to evidenced reason; insulting to assert that they have no other interest than the winning of converts. Oxfordians, starting with J. Thomas Looney and continuing with his successors, unlike Stratfordians, expected and accepted the burden of meeting the Stratfordian picture of Shakespeare and showing it up for the farce that it is. This, in fact, they have done. The amazing thing is that so many Stratfordians, with their case utterly discredited, act or try to act as though nothing has happened, as though their case remains in tact. Instead of answering the arguments exposed by Oxfordians, Stratfordians simply repeat now-discredited claims. We are told such amazingly simplistic things as that it is obvious that William Shakespeare is the rightful author since it is his name which is found on the published editions of “his works.” And we are told that Oxford could not be the rightful author since various of Shakespeare's plays were written after Edward Oxford's death—as though the date of these plays' creation is not itself an integral part of what is in dispute here.

It has been pointed out that there is already a thread in the contents of “The Globe” blog here on the topic, “Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?” This was started by a student who was faced with writing a paper for a school assignment and this student is now long gone from the discussion, her paper written and submitted. Moreover, I have read that thread from top to bottom and it is a dreary repeat of the usual bickering past each other which is typical of this subject. There are, in general, no respectable responses offered to Oxfordians' examples of anomalies in the Stratfordian orthodoxy. Instead, readers are again referred to such sites as “Shakespeareauthorship.com,” for “answers.” Once there, the reader finds nothing new. The objections of Oxfordians are not answered, they are ignored and their case, now discredited, is simply repeated. That is intellectually insulting. If this thread does not preesnt a departure from such tactics, it will be a failure.

I expect and welcome fair and open and responsible discussion and debate here. I welcome anyone who is open to a fair consideration of all the competing views and the evidence for or against them. I welcome those who are curious about the identity of Shakespeare from whatever their starting point—as long as they are open to a consideration of reasoned and interpreted evidence. But if one cannot or will not defend one's views and responsibly answer objections from opponents, then what is the point of his participation here? No one is obliged to take part. And anyone who wants to take part ought to accept the responsibility for defending his opinions with reasoned evidence and for answering his opponents objections with more than a mere restatement of the same opinions which have been found wanting in reason or evidence or both.

Oxfordians have already been persuaded once of the rightful identity of Shakespeare against an formerly-held view of that identity. Thus, they expect to be shown compelling reasons why their arguments and facts are not valid—in short, they expect to be answered with new arguments and new evidence, if any, which are supposed to overcome the objections that their Oxfordian antecedents have already made against the Stratfordian view.

I intend to respond to the several comments above individually and, where needed, independently of this post.

>4 Muscogulus: :

RE:
" ...but it seems just a tad presumptuous to "welcome" Podras "to the discussion" after he commented on the OP." ...

I take it you read his post. Mine was a reply "in kind"-- and partly done as self-defense.

..."I find it tempting to ignore a thread that begins with a lengthy, unfocused, "under construction" OP, consisting mainly of pasted blocks of text from Thomas Looney."

I explained the reasons for that in the body of the post.
Now, if I could amend the thread's title to remove the "under consrtuction" caveat, I would do that but I think that the title is set once and for all. At this point it's too bad and I'm sorry about that. If you succumb to the temptation to ignore this thread, that's your right and prerogative. No one can force you to read or participate and, even if I could, I would not do that. Please suit yourself.

RE:

"Besides, past experience tells me that it is pointless to try to engage a convinced anti-Stratfordian in debate. One has a better chance of converting a door-knocking Jehovah's Witness to Hinduism. Besides, many anti-Stratfordians, especially DeVere groupies, have some of the same missionary zeal as the JWs."

and

"But if you're staking out some terrain on LT for Oxfordian propaganda, I'm less inclined to be tolerant. In my experience, anti-Stratfordian proselytizers don't want open discussion; they want converts."

I recommend you see paragraphs 3, 5 and 6 of my post >11 proximity1:.

Of course Oxfordians are interested in "making converts" as this indicates the success of their reasoned arguments.

Unlike Stratfordians, we do not rely on primary and secondary school indoctrination into a prefabricated fable in order to find adherents. It is only by listening, considering and becoming convinced of the soundness of the case that people are converted from their former belief in the Stratfordian view. How or why you'd find that process objectionable in principle strikes me as odd. Maybe you could explain it to me.

Can you bring any sound counter-arguments to the Oxfordian case's objections--that is, evidence and reasoning which is not simply are reiteration of what Looney, Ogburn Jr. and others have already demolished as respectable argument? if so, I'd welcome that. But to attempt to belittle Oxfordians as dogmatic and impervious to evidence--when you've presented nothing that hasn't already been debunked--is, in my opinion, cheap and unimpressive as an argument goes.

>5 Crypto-Willobie: :

"There is already an LT group devoted to the Oxfordian pov. ..."

Yes. I see that--though I hadn't seen it before your post since it's apparently such an obscure forum; and I suspect that every one of its comment threads is dormant as was, I suppose, the one in which you troubled to post a simple "." just to reawaken it from its dormant status only yesterday.

>11 proximity1: well, I must say I wasn't drawn to the thread in order to discuss the authorship argument, I was drawn by it's more open title about The Sonnnets, whoever that author may be.

It has become important to me to think that whoever this author was, that such is possible. I find it hopeful to think the man from Stratford was that man. I have Looney's book but have not read it (yet). I find that the tactic of some in politics and academia is always to complicate, that this may divert us from what is most important. It seems to me, and having finished The Two Gentlemen of Verona yesterday, that Shakespeare is extremely good at maintaining his clarity amidst diversity, he is not thrown from his centre...but it is interesting that for me so much that is said of him in fact diverts from that, but then it is also as he opens the world to us all. I like to have faith that a man such a Shakespeare can be Shakespeare. Unless we can summon him or return to watch him I don't think we are going to know. It seems a fallacy to posit the hypotheses of Looney's theories as facts that must be refuted on their terms...they may be responded to. His case is not proved. Think of any of very very many historical theories that change or disappear on the availability of evidence previously undreamt of, we only have a part. But I wonder what Shakespeare may have thought of this need for certainty of authorship. I'm not much fussed beyond that, it can intrigue somewhat, I'd like to think I am open to the argument, but that is different from assuming those that are will be convinced and that if not that they are not open to it. I also think, and this is vital, as any writer knows, that the person of the writer is separate from the words written, the definition of that person does not work backwards from those words and we have only this part of him.

I have not read that other thread, and am assuming you are not writing an essay?

>14 tonikat::

... "I must say I wasn't drawn to the thread in order to discuss the authorship argument, I was drawn by it's more open title about The Sonnnets, whoever that author may be."

I answer:

I am delighted that you were motivated by that and that you chose to comment and, most of all delighted by what you wrote in these first two comments. They are completely in the spirit of the point of this thread's conception.

You need not declare any position of your own here as to the identity of Shakespeare the man and author.

But, if you don't mind my saying so, I find this next particularly interesting and have often wondered about this very thing:

... "I find it hopeful to think the man from Stratford was that man."

and,

" I like to have faith that a man such a Shakespeare can be Shakespeare."

If you could elaborate on why you think so, I would be extremely interested in reading your reply.
Specifically, I would like to understand _why_ for you the idea of the Stratford man as Shakespeare inspires you with hope. Hope for what? Shakespeare--even as the Earl of Oxford-- was, after all, a fallible mortal man--his writings themselves show that. He was not superhuman and nothing he did was beyond the capacity of a brilliant human. It was, however, I'm convinced, beyond the capacity of anyone--nobleman or otherwise--who simply never learned and experienced what, for example, Edward Oxford had as records indicate he well could have but for which there is nothing to leave us the slightest reason to hope for that a fellow like William Shaksper of Stratford could have gained the evident knowledge or experience.

If the hope is in the fantasy that nothing but a little good luck separates any one of us from Shakespeare-like potential, that if only we were ingenious enough, we could, with slight efforts and opportunities, amass all that's needed to produce work at Shakespeare's level, then I see that hope as forlorn and juvenile. Oxford himself, without his book-learning and his travel, should still have been a genius. But even so, he'd never have been able to produce what we kmow of as Shakespeare. That requires both genius and erudition as well as the experiences abroad.

As I say, I have gathered that many think so, have tried to understand just why that is and still I do not understand it.

RE: "But I wonder what Shakespeare may have thought of this need for certainty of authorship."

For me, the answers are best found in two places. One, in Hamlet's final--and dying--words
( Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright. To the unsatisfied.")
and, two, in sonnet 66 .

RE:
"I have not read that other thread, and am assuming you are not writing an essay?"

You lost me there. To what thread do you refer? "Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare?" ? No need to read it to participate here.

Am I writing an essay? No. But my objectives here are served by referring at times to the essays of others.

>10 TheHumbleOne:

No offence intended. I'm not familiar with your views and wasn't certain who was meant by the pronoun "he" in the context of a thread in which someone is pushing Oxford. In any case, I thought it wouldn't hurt to post a link to Oxford's extant poetry so that people can see for themselves the writing of the person who is claimed to be able to fill Shakespeare's shoes.

>12 proximity1:

Your rhetoric is in line with my prior experience with Oxfordian zealotry. I have read Oxfordian scholarship and participated politely in online debate. I have yet to encounter an argument that doesn't argue backwards from the conclusion. And it's a rare pleasure to encounter an argument that doesn't waste as many words deriding Stratfordian orthodoxy as it does stringing together an Oxfordian counter-narrative.

Take this thread. Instead of posing questions or presenting evidence, the OP asserts that Stratfordian orthodoxy has already been "demolished," but that Stratfordians are too intellectually timid, as a result of "indoctrination," to face the facts. We aren't told how this demolition occurred. In lieu of Ockham's razor we are confronted with Looney’s scissors and paste.

I have read Oxfordian arguments with an open mind, and I'm convinced there is no persuasive evidence there, just attitude. For the earliest 19th-century dissidents, I believe, the attitude was elitist disbelief that a middle-class scribbler could have surpassed the entire class of scribbling aristocrats in the quality of his productions. But for many more recent converts, especially among the theatrical set, I think the appeal of anti-Stratfordism has more to do with the lure of a romantic tale, or of conspiracy theory, or of transgressing against established scholarly authority.

This stuff doesn't do a lot of harm, I admit. Believing that he is performing a work by De Vere doesn't prevent Derek Jacobi, say, from turning in marvelous, sensitive performances of Shakespearean roles. I only get annoyed when anti-Stratfordians turn to ad hominem attacks on the disbelievers, and other behaviors that remind me of anti-Darwinians and climate-change deniers.

The most fruitful missionary field for Oxfordians and other anti-Stratfordians is among Shakespeare readers who enjoy the plays but don't have any detailed understanding of the historical context of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. If they know less than this, they won't care enough about Shakespeare to follow the arguments. If they know more, they will be more likely to understand how "a glover's son" could become the greatest writer of the age. But if their sense of the period is fairly static and peopled with archetypes of nobles and commoners, they are going to be far more susceptible to the sweeping assertions of Oxfordian theory. Only the Great Man, you see, can produce Great Literature.

I apologize if this summary is a little too much like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, describing readers as "too hot," "too cold," or "just right" for conversion to Oxfordism. I'll stand by it anyway, as anti-Stratfordism is ultimately all about a subjective mood of dissatisfaction with Shakespeare for not having been the person we feel he should have been.

Edit - Decided to take my own hypotheses and speculations down.

RE:
"Only the Great Man, you see, can produce Great Literature."

Never my argument or any Oxfordian I know of. Proust produced what I and many others agree is Great Literature but we don't claim that he was a Great Man. Others, with strong claims on being Great, did not produce Great Literature.

RE: ..."anti-Stratfordism is ultimately all about a subjective mood of dissatisfaction with Shakespeare for not having been the person we feel he should have been."

It's much more than that. The Stratford man is _nothing_ of the sort of person one could reasonably suppose to be the author if his name had not already been linked by deliberate machinations. To judge by the texts alone, the association of Wm. of Stratford with them is simply absurd. Question: where in all of Eng. Lit is a comparable example of such a pairing?

>19 proximity1:

"It's much more than that. The Stratford man is _nothing_ of the sort of person one could reasonably suppose to be the author if his name had not already been linked by deliberate machinations. To judge by the texts alone, the association of Wm. of Stratford with them is simply absurd. Question: where in all of Eng. Lit is a comparable example of such a pairing?"

why so absurd?

Caedmon? Dickens? Blake? Keats? Owen?

His lack of care for posterity in a way is also in line with the writings.

Could it be that any lack of such pairings is actually an indictment?

edit - Rosenberg? or stretching genre, The Beatles? and this one I like, Bob Dylan?

(I hope this is in the spirit of friendly argument)

and a further edit - maybe I seem to push my own part into fallacy, but it is supported by facts as others have suggested...but it has clarified to me how much I think about this man as I read him. And perhaps, as ever how he is open to our own projections.

>11 proximity1:

If my understanding is correct, you argue that people who have changed their views as an adult after orthodox schooling are open minded. Thanks, I didn't know that. Then the people who believe that the moon landings were faked in a studio must be the open minded ones and everyone else isn't.

I can appreciate that you want the base assumption to be that Oxford was the author and for people to try to convince you that he wasn't, while at the same time refraining from pointing out that Shakespeare's name is the one that appears on his works. It must be frustrating to find yourself continually confronted with old facts instead of new arguments. I sympathize. Another old fact that must be frustrating to have to deal with is that the First Folio of Shakespeare's works contains two references to the author as a man of Stratford. Ben Jonson's eulogizing poem does this obliquely by calling him the "Sweet swan of Avon!" In the second, Leonard Digges specifically cites Shakespeare's Stratford monument.

"Shake-speare, at length thy pious fellowes give
The world thy Workes : thy Workes, by which, out-live
Thy Tombe, thy name must when that stone is rent,
And Time dissolves thy Stratford Moniment, ..."

Also inconvenient is that Tom Reedy and David Kathman's article, How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts, contains these and 33 other old facts that collectively establish Shakespeare, the glover's son from Stratford-upon-Avon as the author. While there is commentary included in the article that an open minded person like yourself might address, the facts themselves don't seem to be getting moldy with age.

Another excellent source of information about "The Authorship Controversy" is chapter 3 of Jonathan Bate's The Genius of Shakespeare. It is the best compact source of the issue that I've seen, and one that open minded people might be able to demolish with ease--or not--if they are open minded enough to read it.

There is so much more to respond to, and I may find the opportunity to do so at another time, but for now, I think that I have done a pretty good job of identifying myself as someone who is closed minded and unfair. :-)

(P.S. Strictly in the interest of promoting a broader vocabulary, look up kripkean dogmatism.)

>16 Podras.:
That's ok.

I was just ignoring the Oxford discussion and answering the question. Mind you to be fair it makes a change from the usual sonnet based speculations over who may or may not have been up to one thing or anther with whom.

I am generally suspicious of attempts to reach conclusions regarding the character, background or views of an author based on his or her fictional creations - or indeed vice versa.

>17 Muscogulus:
"Take this thread. Instead of posing questions or presenting evidence, the OP asserts that Stratfordian orthodoxy has already been "demolished," but that Stratfordians are too intellectually timid, as a result of "indoctrination," to face the facts. We aren't told how this demolition occurred."

But aren't you already well aware of this?

You wrote that,

" I have read Oxfordian arguments with an open mind, and I'm convinced there is no persuasive evidence there, just attitude,"

and that,

" I have read Oxfordian scholarship and participated politely in online debate. I have yet to encounter an argument that doesn't argue backwards from the conclusion," (*)

So how could you possibly be unaware of how the demolition was done?

Anyone who has read either Looney's or Ogburn's work has seen exactly and in detail how the Stratfordian case is demolished as the Oxfordian case is built point by point, brick by brick. Those who have not read one of these texts won't have a full and clear conception of the force of one case and the weakness of the other.

Of course some of them reject the
premises, the conclusions or both. But I don't find them presenting either valid grounds or a better alternative in argument. Though I'd be persuadable if they had such.

Shaksper of Stratford was born in 1564.

Now, in what year do you say he wrote his earliest sonnets? --those addressed to the fair friend whom he urges to marry and produce an heir? (Q23/A)

To whom are these sonnets addressed? We say they're addressed to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. (Q23/B)

Why in the world was this Stratford Shaksper so passionate in his affection & esteem for Southampton? What was the basis of it? (Q23/C)

If Oxford wrote the sonnets, the answers to these questions are apparent. For the Stratford man, the whole affair is an amazing mystery unless Stratfordians resort to fantastically far-fetched speculation-for not a shred of corroborating evidence exists to link the two as intimately acquainted.

Next, what possible reason could the Stratford man have for expressing so deep a sense of loss in his reputation of good standing? What on earth is he supposed to have done? (Q23/D)

Shakespeare states emphatically that his association with the fair friend has also brought this same friend into disrepute. How do Stratfordians account for this when their man's reputation went from rags to estate-owning riches, becoming in mid-life one of Stratford's most prosperous residents. What was the occasion of his deep sense of humiliation expressed again and again in the sonnets?

(*) Both Stratfordians and Oxfordians --as well as anyone else concerend--are going to "work in 'both' directions"--that is, they're going to consider the texts for their likelihood as a reflection of any postulated author (one 'direction') and they're going to examine the what is known (and not knkown about a given candidate's life and character for their compatibility with what the Shakespearean texts suggest about their author. There is nothing wrong per se in these approaches. The problems arise however in the attempts to present the Stratford man as the author of the Shakespearean texts--texts which are accepted by common consent--with some exceptions, it is true--to be "Shakespeare's" or, that is, the person behind that name if it is not in fact a person of that name.

You do not explain to us the cause of your objections to what you term "working backwards." As I say, every scholar in this matter does some of that--Stratfordians and Oxfordians and all the rest. How else, please, are they to reason things out than what I've just described above?

>1 proximity1: What Shakespeare's Sonnets tell us about their author?

That he was a sublime craftsman.

>21 Podras.::

"If my understanding is correct, you argue that people who have changed their views as an adult after orthodox schooling are open minded. Thanks, I didn't know that."

That's a twisted representation of my actual view as stated and it's typical of your manner of debate here. I have yet to see you give an opponent's views their ordinary and straightforward sensible construction. Instead, you indulge in mischaracterizing their point(s). To me that tells us something important about your intellectual integrity and your confidence in your case.

What I actually said was that people who, as Oxfordians have demonstrated, can take an alternative view in a controversial matter, consider it and find it persuades and overturns their own previously-held views, are, yes, examples of having one of the essential qualities of an open-minded person.

I don't contend that a person who is open-minded in one matter is necessarily so in all matters--unfortunately. But my point remains as I have reiterated it here for you--as though you didn't perfectly well understand what I wrote in the first place.

RE :

"Then the people who believe that the moon landings were faked in a studio must be the open minded ones and everyone else isn't."

No. An automatic and unreflexive rejection of an evidence-based opinion--which is the case with the Moon-landing deniers-- does not demonstrate a characteristic of an open-mind. An open-minded person is one who is open-minded to evidence-based reason which stands up to scrutiny--his own and that of others. The Moon-landing deniers are not open to the evidence against their interpretations; in that they resemble Stratfordians. Instead, they refuse to scrutinize their own views' weaknesses and refuse to consider the possibility that their views might be mistaken and their reasoning faulty even when others make a clear presentation of this to them. Those are the hallmarks of a closed-minded person.

See, e.g.:

Bias:
Often mistakenly equated with simply
having an opinion or a preference. An opinion,
however, that results from an impartial review of
the evidence would precisely merit being seen as
unbiased. Similarly, a preference for reviewing
evidence in a fair-minded manner before drawing
conclusions is not a bias in favor of impartiality;
it is a determination to avoid bias. A biased view
distorts inquiry because factors have entered in
(favoritism, ignorance, omission, corruption,
misplaced loyalty, threats, and so on) that
undermine a fair examination. Open-minded
teachers seek to avoid bias in their teaching, or to
compensate for biases that experience tells them
they have a tendency to slip into, except when
they deliberately present a biased perspective in
order to stimulate open-minded reflection.

Critical Receptiveness: Russell's term for the
attitude which makes a virtue of openness to
ideas and experience while guarding against sheer
mindlessness. Open-mindedness would not be an
intellectual virtue if it implied a willingness to
accept an idea regardless of its merits. Ideas
must be given due consideration, of course,
unless we already have good reason to believe
that they are worthless, but the open-minded
person is ready to reject an idea that cannot
withstand critical appraisal. There may be good
reason in the context of teaching, of course, to
postpone critical scrutiny temporarily so that the
ideas in question are properly understood and
appreciated before difficulties and objections are
raised, and to ensure that mutual respect and
trust will allow people to entertain challenges to
their views.

Dogmatism:
Not to be thought of as equivalent to
having a firm view but rather a stubbornly
inflexible one that disrupts inquiry. An open-
minded person may have a firm conviction, yet be
fully prepared to reconsider it if contrary evidence
begins to emerge. The dogmatist fails on this
score, regarding the belief as having been laid
down by an authority that cannot be disputed.

Link: www.criticalthinking.org/pages/open-minded-inquiry/579

RE: "I can appreciate that you want the base assumption to be that Oxford was the author and for people to try to convince you that he wasn't,..."

I want them to bring something reasonable in evidence and argument to rebut what Oxfordians have already ably shown--yes--rather than refusing to recognise how and where their own presumptions have been soundly debunked. But they never do this and I daresay you won't be an exception. The problem is that your case has been exploded and you have nothing else adequate in answer to the case against your views.

... "while at the same time refraining from pointing out that Shakespeare's name is the one that appears on his works."

This is pure "begging the question"-- one of the most elementary and common logical errors. The validity of that name on the texts is, of course, as you well know, the whole gist of the dispute. Therefore, you cannot resort to it as evidence for what is itself disputed.

RE: "It must be frustrating to find yourself continually confronted with old facts instead of new arguments."

The "old facts" have been debunked. You refuse to recognise that and you insist on pretending that they have not. That is why Oxfordians make a simple request of the undecided: read the best case for Oxford in the texts of either J. Thomas Looney, Charlton Ogburn Jr (See, esp., Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare : the myth and the reality (link: https://www.librarything.com/work/1351048 ) ) or both. Then, follow their argfuments with a close examination of the accepted Shakespeare canon and then each draw his own conclusions. I am confident that it this is done, the consequences for Oxford's role are safe while the case for the Stratford man will be found woefully wanting.

RE: "I sympathize."

No, you don't. Like most of your claims, this is patently disingenuous and it again tells us about your intellectual integrity--though nothing good about it.

RE:

"kripkean dogmatism"

I looked this up and found these various sites :

What do you do with Misleading Evidence? by Michael Veber
https://www.ecu.edu/phil/vebwhat.html

Dogmatism Repuzzled
http://www.openu.ac.il/personal_sites/levi-spectre/download/dogmatism-repuzzled....

Disagreement, Dogmatism,
and Belief Polarization
https://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/BF2.pdf

Here is the brief statement which several of the papers cite as the (supposed) paradox:

"‘If I know that h is true, I know that any evidence against h is evidence against something that is true; so I know that such evidence is misleading. So once I know that h is true, I am in a position to disregard any future evidence that seems to tell against h.’ This is paradoxical, because I am never in a position simply to disregard any future evidence even though I do know a great many different things."

-- G. Harman, Thought (Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 148.

I am not at all impressed by this as a sophisticated problem of reasoning. All evidence, even the worst, gets an examination on its merits--since, obviously, we don't and can't know the quality of the evidence as being "the worst" until it is examined at least once--and, preferably several times. The poorer the evidence, the more cursory the examination needed to refute it. But it may not be simply rejected out of hand. There is, however, an important point to be made in this regard and it is certainly one that is pertinent here:

Once such evidence has been examined and found faulty, it is not incumbent on every subsequent reader to do more or other than be aware of the evidence and the facts of its prior examination and refutation. Thus, we are not required to reinvent the wheel here everyday. When I say that the Stratfordian case stands refuted and soundly so, I mean that this is sonething that has been done and thoroughly so. I am not taking others' word for this. I have read both the Stratfordian cases' elements and the arguments attaching to them as well as the refutations presented by, e.g., Looney and Ogburn, Jr. When that is done, then so is my responsibility to answer these points to others here who make repeated recourse to them--except as this exercise is useful or interesting as an exposition of the absurdity of the Strafordian case's elememts. And that is sometimes the case. Readers not acquainted with the faults of the Stratfordian case could find such rehearsals interesting enough to lead them to do the primary reading on their own which they may not have done. That's an outcome that of course I would welcome as useful.
____________________________

Note : You remain under a challenge I posed in my post >3 proximity1: where I wrote:

"First, please cite, if you can, where Looney (as you imply (2C)) "attempts to claim certainty about the author from the contents of the sonnets," or, if you prefer, explain why your comment does not imply that or, if you prefer, retract that implication in your next reply (if any).

You continue to ignore this challenge and that suggests to me that you have no satisfactory excuse for mischaracterizing Looney's position. I intend to remind you of this lapse and your failure to address it in every reply I post to your comments.

>18 tonikat:

why so absurd?

Caedmon? Dickens? Blake? Keats? Owen?

His lack of care for posterity in a way is also in line with the writings.

Could it be that any lack of such pairings is actually an indictment?

edit - Rosenberg? or stretching genre, The Beatles? and this one I like, Bob Dylan?

(I hope this is in the spirit of friendly argument)

"(I hope this is in the spirit of friendly argument)"

I see it that way. More about the people cited above later.

With the exceptions of Rosenberg and Owen (which ones?), I think it's a fair exercise to examine each of these authors closely and test, with each, the thesis that their personal histories and experiences--to the extent that we can know them--will be reasonably well and faithfully borne out in their writings--again, such as we have of them.

Thus, Blake, Dickens and Keats had literary knowledge which was consistent and commensurate with their writings. In certain cases this knowledge was obtained outside of formal schooling. But that does not indicate that they skipped the time and efforts required to gain that acquaintance. Blake and Dickens served their apprenticeships--Dickens, for pity's sake had twenty years' experience as an editor.

We have neither the evidence of nor the temporal space for such a formative grounding in the case of Shaksper of Stratford. If we had such, then of course the entire picture would be fundamentally altered and there would be good reasons to argue that Shaksper had in his experience the chops to have produced work of the calibre we have--from one educated as Oxford had been.

There was a time in which I thought that I was prolix (and often still am). I was clearly a rank amateur.

Here is a brief (and coherent) definition of Kripkean dogmatism: Refusal to engage arguments or evidence inconsistent with one's preferred position. This often goes hand-in-hand with confirmation bias. See http://www.constitution.org/col/logical_fallacies.htm.

Speaking of evidence, here are some fun facts that might be amusing:

1: The will of Augustine Phillips, a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men which later became the King's Men includes a 30 shilling bequest to his fellow William Shakespeare. Phillips passed away in 1605.

2: The will of William Shakespeare of Stratford includes a bequest of 26 shillings 8 pence each to "my fellowes" John Heminges, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell to buy rings. My understanding is that money for mourning rings was a common practice. One currency calculator translates that into £128 in 2005 money. Burbage was the lead dramatic actor in the King's men. Heminges and Condell were also members of that company and published Shakespeare's First Folio. Shakespeare's executors may have been expected to know who the three men were since the will didn't included that information.

3: (copied from How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts)

'In a copy of the First Folio now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the following poem is written in a hybrid secretary-italic hand from the 1620s:

Here Shakespeare lies whom none but Death could Shake,
And here shall lie till judgement all awake,
When the last trumpet doth unclose his eyes,
The wittiest poet in the world shall rise.

The same hand has on the same page transcribed the verses from Shakespeare's monument ("Stay passenger why go'st thou by so fast") and his grave ("Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear"), so he is obviously referring to William Shakespeare of Stratford. Apparently, somebody went to Stratford and transcribed the poems off the monument and the tombstone, then transcribed them into a copy of the First Folio along with another epitaph. This writer seems not only to have believed that the man buried in Stratford was the author of the First Folio, but that he was "the wittiest poet in the world."'

Finis: As far as I can tell, none of these historical facts have been demolished. They and much more are still out there and very much intact.

I have the following at second or third hand, so take it with a grain of salt. Perhaps someone can verify it.

Some people have deduced information about T. S. Eliot's life from his poetry. Eliot was said to amused and/or annoyed at how incredibly wrong they were.

>25 proximity1:

Thanks for the reminder. I had been waiting for a concordance and linked index for assistance in decoding your post (>3 proximity1:) before responding. However, since you have boiled the issue down to one item ...

You wrote (without the screaming): "First, please cite, if you can, where Looney (as you imply (2C)) "attempts to claim certainty about the author from the contents of the sonnets," or, if you prefer, explain why your comment does not imply that or, if you prefer, retract that implication in your next reply (if any)."

Here is the statement if mine (from >2 Podras.:) that you appear to be responding to: "... any argument that attempts to claim certainty about the author from the contents of the sonnets is blowing smoke."

Note that it is a generalized comment, not, as you perceived, explicitly directed at Looney. If fact, I didn't have Looney in mind when I wrote that. It was made in response to your original post (>1 proximity1:) in which you stated: "A discussion of the Sonnets with, as argument, that they are both strongly autobiographical in character as well as internally incompatible with the Stratfordian view of Shakespeare's identity."

Argue away if you want, but I stand by my statement, smoke and all. (See my post about T. S. Eliot above.)

>26 proximity1:

"With the exceptions of Rosenberg and Owen (which ones?), I think it's a fair exercise to examine each of these authors closely and test, with each, the thesis that their personal histories and experiences--to the extent that we can know them--will be reasonably well and faithfully borne out in their writings--again, such as we have of them.

Thus, Blake, Dickens and Keats had literary knowledge which was consistent and commensurate with their writings. In certain cases this knowledge was obtained outside of formal schooling. But that does not indicate that they skipped the time and efforts required to gain that acquaintance. Blake and Dickens served their apprenticeships--Dickens, for pity's sake had twenty years' experience as an editor.

We have neither the evidence of nor the temporal space for such a formative grounding in the case of Shaksper of Stratford. If we had such, then of course the entire picture would be fundamentally altered and there would be good reasons to argue that Shaksper had in his experience the chops to have produced work of the calibre we have--from one educated as Oxford had been."

Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen. (I wonder if I am right to mention either, I was thinking more of more humble roots)

You've not touched on Caedmon?

Excuse me for maybe being ill informed of the Looney argument - but what evidence do we have, at all, that there is no evidence of such development in Shakespeare? I can think of none at all. he attended a Grammar school - yes he withdrew, but maybe as he was adept and interested he maintained some reading (which in my experience usually turns out to be vital in education, at least arts educations). And he had plenty of years to do this. Some evidence suggests he was well educated enough to teach. I tend to think that someone of such achievement may have talent on the scale of a Mozart - they are just good at this thing, always have been, it is something we find inexplicable even in the best known.

He then seems to get into the theatre business - what better place to learn of drama. reading of The two gentlemen of Verona we may even wonder if he had been involved locally long before any time in London. I think of Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry then as a hotbed of talent and exploration. No modern diversions - plenty of time to think, to talk with others - time was experienced differently. Perhaps he also knew how to use his well, the plays suggest so.

he seems to have had links to noble patrons - he may have benefitted from conversation with such, one may have been intimate, more? Maybe he was wise enough to be able to use wise things he heard from others. He is knowing enough to steer a safe path even as he tackles difficult things.

I see nothing that indicates this is not possible.

Isn't there a true story of a man in the nineteenth century in India who read one maths book and derived much of maths theory. Such people seem to exist.

He also was part of a company which may have afforded a range of experience and insight and opportunity to mentor him.

Perhaps he had enough nouse to seek out what he sought.

>29 Podras.: :

Yet more disingenuous stuff from you. You snidely imply that I left the bases of my objections less than completely clear--

What else is this supposed to mean?, (Q30/1)

..."Here is the statement of mine that you appear to be responding to: ..."

There is no place for feigned "doubt" about what I was responding to since I cited your own words back to you. Are you really so dense as this?

Do you seriously expect us to belive that by the time you come to write this,

"... any argument that attempts to claim certainty about the author from the contents of the sonnets is blowing smoke." (2C)

you no longer had in mind what appears a mere twenty sentences above it!? (Q30/2) Namely,

......"Looney would have us believe) (E.N.: that Shakespeare) wrote autobiographical elements into his works."

followed by these where you again (2B) expressly mention Looney by name?! :

..."it wasn't until the beginning of the romantic period in literature around 1800 that writers began doing that. The notion was foreign in Shakespeare's day."... (2A)

..., scholars (real ones--not Looney) have speculated about whether the sonnets were at least partly autobiographical." ... (2B)

You contend that,

..."that it is a generalized comment, not as you perceived, explicitly directed at Looney. If fact, I didn't have Looney in mind with I wrote that."

Seriously!? Then you could make a frank retraction of clearly implying that Looney had ever claimed "certainty," your words falsely attributing to him a position he never asserted rather than what you do.

Instead, you end by telling us that you ..."stand by {your} statement, smoke and all."

I call that last a telling Freudian slip. And I call your lame attempt at a rationalization "weasel words. "

24>

Well at least we answered the question as set. That should be worth a bare pass at the very least.

>32 TheHumbleOne: I like to think I did too (>7 tonikat: )

>32 TheHumbleOne: >33 tonikat:

You both did. After all the blather, those are the kinds of things that matter the most. Thanks.

>30 tonikat:
"You've not touched on Caedmon?"

I only just read a bit about him at Wikipedia following your mention. Do we know enough about him and his life to say that his writings present something like the anomaly of that between the Stratford guy and "Shakespeare" 's writings?

While you offered names, you offered no examples drawn from his writings and from the facts of his life, no citations of _any_ sources where one can find being advanced the argument on which you Implicitly rely: unalloyed genius is sufficient to account for any works of art, absent any evidence of study, training, apprenticeship since, we're to assume, the products of genius demonstrate the fact of it.

{ Readers please note this retraction of the immediately forgoing italicized text }

"I think that on reflection my characterization of your position was unfair in this inaccurate respect: you do not consider unalloyed genius as always--or perhaps as ever--sufficient in itself to account for artistic masterworks. "Unalloyed" was my term rather than yours. I formally retract that here.

Are you suggesting that I ought to go and study Caedmon in order to confirm or refute the named you present as real or potential evidence that genius needs no other supports in order to produce literary masterpieces? Before I do that, I'd appreciate your comments in reply to the following.

This reasoning of yours amounts to supposing that, since "Shakespeare's" works are widely accepted as the work if a literary genius, it follows that whomever one might care to designate as that author is and must be, ipso facto , a genius. But, as I hope you notice, it doesn't follow.

That's fine except for one detail: you take it for granted that the Stratford guy is in fact our rightful author. Thus, again, this is to beg the question at issue.

No one is denying that the work of "Shakespeare" is the product of genius. We're disputing where the credit for that genius properly belongs.

That seems to me to be the fault which can rightly be called "arguing backwards"-- starting with a result and then presupposing its undemonstrated cause in the person of your favorite candidate.

Oxfordians don't do this. Instead, they ask: whose known biography best reflects the kind of genius which "Shakespeare's" work evidences?--and vice versa.

..."what evidence do we have, at all, that there is no evidence of such development in Shakespeare?"

I ask you to reconsider this question's logic. Restated, it asks,
"Why do we suppose that there is no evidence of such development in Shakespeare? "

Oxfordians have looked for it and found that where it's claimed to be found there is instead stuff that has indications of or at least clear opportunities for being trumped up or there is foolish misinterpretation if evidence which more reasonably points to others.

"I can think of none at all. he attended a Grammar school - yes he withdrew, but maybe as he was adept and interested he maintained some reading (which in my experience usually turns out to be vital in education, at least arts educations)."

How do you know that the Statford guy was "adept and interested"? Aren't you simply assuming that he wrote "Shakespeare's" works and therefore he "must've been" adept and interested? That is circular reasoning--another way to say that it begs the question.

And he had plenty of years to do this."

Yes? Well, as I've already asked you--which years specifically were
these? In which years did the Stratford guy write the earliest sonnets? --those which address the "fair youth"?

Did he actually learn Greek, Latin and French or merely sow some of these or evidence of a knowledge of them in his poems, plays and sonnets? If the former, then where, when and how and how did he learn these languages?

"he seems to have had links to noble patrons - he may have benefited from conversation with such, one may have been intimate, more? Maybe he was wise enough to be able to use wise things he heard from others. He is knowing enough to steer a safe path even as he tackles difficult things.

I see nothing that indicates this is not possible.

The question is rather, why are such speculations (note your italicized comments) the most likely, the most probable of all the things which are merely possible ? The questions are: is there, and if so, where, the evidence to support these speculations and why should we assume them in the absence of that evidence?

--------

On the comparison of giftedness in music and mathematics, I think these are special cases which are not comparable to some of the other kinds of genius. Literary genius is a gift in a different sense from math and musical prodigies. While some are actually born with amazing gifts for math and music which appear as soon as they are first introduced to numbers and to music, no one is born with a gift of writing masterpieces. Writing talents are part of natural gifts but what can be done with those gifts is completely dependent on the resources which such a gifted person acquires from experience and the chance-given possibilities for being exposed to models of the best literature. In these cases, the genius is going to take those resources, those opportunities and use them in his or her own creative way. But there is implied in all that a basic opportunity to be exposed to the literature itself in the first place.

I cannot doubt that there have been many people over the course of human history who were born with a potential for literary genius and yet never achieved it due to the simple lack of opportunities for the early exposure to literature, to reading and to a chance to practice and exercise their genius on these resources. And, yes, that is a very great shame.

There is a great deal of study on the matter of "the neurobiology of giftedness". I'm sure that some of it is rather poor or bogus but I think that it contains a core of truth in its basic findings.

E.g.

Roeper Review
, 32:224–234, 2010
ISSN: 0278-3193 print / 1940-865X online
DOI: 10.1080/02783193.2010.508154
UROR

NEUROBIOLOGY,
PRENATAL
DEVELOPMENT, AND PRODIGIOUSNESS

The Neurobiological Foundations of Giftedness
The Neurobiological Foundations of Giftedness

Martin Mrazik and Stefan C. Dombrowsk
http://www.helsinki.fi/~tjrinne/artikkeleita_neuroI/Mrazik_Dombrowski_Roeper_Rev...

Genius: The Neurobiology of Giftedness
Irma Iskandar
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro01/web2/Iskander.html

>34 Podras.:

That >24 LesMiserables: is one of the better posts here --I can agree.

Yours, on the other hand, are full of bad-faith argument showing that you're not really open-minded on these topics---others, please see this >25 proximity1: @ Bias, Critical Receptiveness, Dogmatism

Since your mind is obviously closed on these topics, your participation is a waste of our time. I won't engage in further comments with you.

As for your claimed intact "facts" @ >27 Podras.:,

..." As far as I can tell, none of these historical facts have been demolished. They and much more are still out there and very much intact,"

--the point is you can't tell : those "facts," like all the others, have been answered and debunked in Looney's work and in Ogburn's. There is nothing left standing of the Stratfordian edifice.

>35 proximity1: I'm taking a pause. I commented on this thread as it was about the author of The Sonnets, not to get into an argument on the author question.

I'd suggest we all take a pause. I'd also find it helpful if you'd review what I wrote and consider whether your interpretation of what I said is wholly accurate, whether other interpretations are possible. I'll consider my meaning too. Then having responded I'm out of any consideration of this.

>37 tonikat:

I need no more pause or break than I get in the course of a day and a night. You may and if so, then please, by all means feel free to pause and return or not as it may suit you to do.

For me, this is a marathon, not a sprint. I have every good reason to look forward serenely since Oxford's place as the most reasonable candidate for title to authorship of "Shakespeare's" work is so far quite secure.

My purposes and interests here are with those who have an open-minded interest in the matter. I grant that this is not the most important thing in the world; but it is a very important thing to the literary world and especially to the world of English literature.

RE:

"I'd also find it helpful if you'd review what I wrote and consider whether your interpretation of what I said is wholly accurate, whether other interpretations are possible."

Yes, I can willingly do that.

I think that on reflection my characterization of your position was unfair in this inaccurate respect: you do not consider unalloyed genius as always--or perhaps as ever--sufficient in itself to account for artistic masterworks. "Unalloyed" was my term rather than yours. I formally retract that here and I shall append this part of this post to the earlier one-- so that my retraction of an improper characterization is noted in the same post where the offence occurred.

In case it may be that you had not only that but also something else in mind as deserving of correction: If so, I have overlooked it--not deliberately but because I do not recognize another similarly serious misrepresentation. For that, I'd need your pointer.

{All the foregoing I laboriously typed and re-typed on a tiny little not-so-smart-phone--a second time when the first effort was lost through a misstroke.}

Here, a general note on the issue of nature's gifts.

It is no part of the Oxfordian view to argue or suppose that nature favors any one social class over another in the haphazard distribution of intelligence-genius or other.

There are about the same number of geniuses among equal numbers of "commoners" and "nobility." "Shakespeare's" genius is rare no matter what his social class.

As comments here have shown already, some people find a certain satisfaction in the belief that a commoner of Elizabethan England, the Stratford Shaksper, or some other gifted commoner, was or might have been "Shake-speare." This is somehow supposed to vindicate cherished views of social democracy and egalitarianism. It may also be a source of class or social pride to suppose that "Shakespeare" is "one of our own."

Such views fail to appreciate just how much and how little has to do with class and status in Shakespeare's meanings in his plays, poetry and sonnets.

The sonnets speak of a writer who addresses nobles as one of their own class and one of very high rank. His terms toward these peers are the most intimate imaginable. Those today who suppose it to have been natural for just anyone to publicly address any noble man or woman as we see Shakespeare doing in the sonnets or the dedication of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece are indulging in a fantasy view of Elizabethan society. There was nothing egalitarian about it except death. There was nothing of what we know of as a free press. The means to purchase a press was by no means sufficient to acquire and to operate one. Presses were licensed--as were the texts they printed. A book, a pamphlet, a play or a poem could not be published and openly sold unless it had the imprimatur of the registrar of the Stationer's office.

The idea that any talented person could, merely by persistence and clever wits, breach the social barriers that separated the classes is alien to Elizabethan social reality except in extremely rare cases.

Noble men and women who committed serious enough offenses were not spared trial--by privy council--convictions, and sentence of death. Even once very high ranking and admired noblemen ended their lives by placing their necks on the executioner's block: Sir Walter Raleigh was one; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and a close friend of Edward Oxford, was another. Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton, was also tried for high treason and his life hung upon the decision of the Privy council and those commissioned to serve as jurors. Among them was Edward Oxford. Southampton was convicted but his sentence was commuted and his life spared. He spent the remainder of Elizabeth's reign imprisoned in the Tower of London, only released and his status restored when James succeeded to the throne upon the death of Elizabeth in 1603.

(continued)

>38 proximity1: ok, less pause than I thought. I'm going to reply now as I doubt I will be able to do so again until the weekend.

Thanks for that correction.

My argument may be a little teleological - in that at times I look at the effect and then seek to think about the cause of it. I think I mainly seek to think about William Shakespeare in so far as to see if I can see any reasons why he may not be the author of these plays and I can see no evidence of that. By the way I think you'd do your tone and argument no end of good by respecting him with his name.

The de facto position has through history been that William Shakespeare wrote these plays and this was not doubted for a considerable amount of time, as far as we know. Therefore I do not think it is unfair to challenge those who feel Oxford wrote these plays to show how it was not W. Shakespeare. My points are not made to demonstrate a fact but instead to show the possibility that the assumption he could not have written this is not proved.

Incidentally, and possibly in reference to a theme in a deleted post - but this can seem like incredible elitism to decry William Shakespeare as someone necessarily unable to write these plays and poems.

I think my argument (and I acknowledge your correction) is not simply that he was a genius. Whoever wrote these plays and poems I think we can say that.

Perhaps I may show some of my thinking (and I am far from an expert in this subject) - I am putting to you that he had an education. I do not think it matters how good his Latin, Greek or French were - anyone who is not a gifted linguist will tell you that there may be ways to compensate, we know he lived in London where there were undoubtedly many who may have supported him with this. Is it too early for dictionaries, perhaps? for grammars? maybe not the latter, there was teaching and is there not reference to how much Latin and Greek he had (was that Ben Jonson? yes little, but some). It is possible that he knew how to solve issues with this, without being a gifted linguist. This is possible - it is not an assertion of fact, it is a response to your doubt over this - I do not see being poor at foreign languages to preclude such writing.

He left school - if he were someone adept in these matters then perhaps that was painful. Perhaps it could have motivated him to maintain study in some way. We do not know, it is possible. His father had been an alderman (or held another town office) - he therefore was in contact with some of the best off in Stratford I'd guess. It is possible he had access to the libraries of others. He had access to conversation with others.

There are years that are not accounted for. He may have taught. He may have been involved in theatre. This I do not think you should neglect - he may have learned of drama through such work, in fact what better apprenticeship might there be? Further, in being part of a theatre company or companies he may have learned much from others experienced in theatre - and possibly far beyond theatre.

Have you ever heard of people that feel mature from a very early age? Perhaps he felt that. Again - not a fact, a possibility. in early modern times what we see as a comparatively young age was in fact old -- I forget my history, but an average age of 35 applied at one time. I'd have to check if that were the case in Shakespeare's time. Also they did not have our medical treatments nor knowledge of good diet etc - people may have begun to feel old much sooner. They may also have led a much less cossetted life than many now - a very hard paper round.

The Sonnets, by one interpretation may refer to an intimate relationship to someone of high birth. If he spent time amongst such company he may have benefitted from their patronage to access books, and from their conversation. I am not saying he needed this. I am pointing out that you limit his horizons in ways they need not have been.

I wonder sometimes if he saw himself not as an artist but as a craftsman - a way of being so rare now.

I also think that perhaps he practiced writing and as far as i know that is the best apprenticeship (along with reading) for any writer. He seems to have worked amongst experts in theatre.

I think it is elitist to assume that William Shakespeare could not have refined a talent. There is no proof. I direct you to the writings that summarise facts that suggest William Shakespeare authored the plays attributed to him that Podras pointed you to.

If it were that Oxford wrote these plays and poems I would respect that, but we do not know that. I accept some likenesses in style - but much may account for that.

We have no evidence that other playwrights doubted this matter - and I think how jealous other writers can be is well attested, never mind actors. To the contrary, they went out of their way to attribute the plays to Shakespeare.

I hope I have answered why I have written to say 'he may' or 'perhaps' for example - I am showing that the case is not proved and that it is possible Shakespeare could develop in this way. It is not meant to be a proof, but it is meant to challenge an assumption you seem to make that he could not that is not based on facts about Shakespeare but is instead based on the possibility Oxford write these texts.

Finally, you write:

"On the comparison of giftedness in music and mathematics, I think these are special cases which are not comparable to some of the other kinds of genius. Literary genius is a gift in a different sense from math and musical prodigies. "

Perhaps your are better versed on neurobiology than I - I have little wish to read about that. though I do intend one day to read a good book on the matter The master and his emissary.

However, I think you are quite wrong to separate a linguistic gift from that in maths or music. Both maths and music are languages.

William Shakespeare may have had plenty of time to live, read, think, converse, act and to write - and with people that may have liked him and that he liked and that stimulated him and whom he stimulated.

Think for a moment about Stonehenge and all the theories that have applied to it - many torn up now. And yet, for all the theory we do (EDIT - we do NOT) know the individual experience of anyone that went there, which may have been more diverse than we will ever know.

edit - I also meant to add regarding age - do we have to assume he was writing literally of himself -- I think someone else indicated this, but I can write of seventy winters and project their effect long before experiencing them, likewise then with forty.

>40 tonikat:

" However, I think you are quite wrong to separate a linguistic gift from that in maths or music. Both maths and music are languages."

I have only time for a very brief and limited reply. The rest will have to wait.

Yes, math and music are languages. But they're so symbolic that they aren't like and aren't comparable to the written and spoken languages we refer to here. More on what I mean & why another time.

In this and the other Shakespeare authorship thread, I've noted that Shakespeare's education is treated as if it is a mystery. Like much of the information about Shakespeare and his time, more is known than is generally appreciated. Anti-Shakespeareans in general disparage it as part of the campaign to discredit him, apparently without knowing anything about it, because as long as the glover's son from Stratford is in the picture, cooking up loony ideas about some other preferred candidate--there are over 80 that have been proposed so far and the numbers keep growing--is an utter waste of time.

I think that a major reason for the authorship question to have arisen in the first place was that people forgot how good Tudor grammar schools were. If one is to understand Shakespeare, it is important IMHO to know something of the kind of education he received.

After Henry VIII closed the monasteries, replacements were established to provide the essential literate population needed to undergird basic civic functions, support trade, etc. Edward VI accelerated the process by adding many more schools, as did Elizabeth I. The King's New School in Stratford was established by Edward in 1554. It's masters were paid £20 annually and provided with a house to live in. £20 was a respectable sum back then and was much more than was paid to masters in many other locations. Some of its masters were known for their high quality. John Brownswerd in particular stood out, and not just for the quality of his teaching for which he was honored. Francis Meres cites him in Palladis Tamia (1598)--where his name is spelled 'Brunswerd'--for excellence in Latin poetry.

John Bretchgirdle was vicar in Stratford in Shakespeare's day and as such, had a say in the hiring of masters. Earlier in life when he was school master himself at Witten in Cheshire, he wrote, "I will the children learn the Catechism and then the Accidence and Grammar set out by Henry VIII, or some other, if any can be better, to induce children more speedily to Latin speech; and then Institutum Christiani Hominis, that learned Erasmus made; and then Copia of the same Erasmus, Colloquia Erasmi, Ovidius Metamorphoses, Terence, Mantuan, Tully, Horace, Salust, Virgil, and such other as shall be thought convenient."

That curricula was typical for Tudor Era grammar schools and is part of why many have assessed a grammar school education in Shakespeare's day as the equivalent of a college education today.

The overall focus of a grammar school education was the trivium; an amalgam of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; with grammar coming first after basic language skills.

Erasmus' de Copia, a rhetoric text book, was famous for teaching a wide variety of ways to express ones self in writing.

Erasmus' Colloquies were valuable to further advance writing skills, but to also familiarize pupils with a wide range of topics.

Analyses of Shakespeare's writing shows the kind of logical structure taught in Tudor grammar schools. Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" speech, for one example, displays an exploration of an issue, beginning with a question (Is it to be this, or is it to be that?) followed by consideration of one side of the issue ("Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer ..."), then the other ("Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, ...") and so on.

Shakespeare frequently mined Ovid's Metamorphoses for ideas (as he did many many other sources), and the book itself is a prop in Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline.

Terence was a Roman comic dramatist with a comedic style and plotting that was very similar to Shakespeare's own, especially in his early plays. Terence is credited with creating the five act structure.

Much of a Tudor grammar school education can be characterized as taking text written by others, rewording it, and adopting it for other purposes. That is a good characterization of what Shakespeare did in a majority of his writing.

The principles of drama taught in the universities came from the 2,000 year old models in Aristotle's Poetics. Shakespeare departed greatly from those models and was criticized for doing so. It is possible that had Shakespeare gone to university, he may have been educated away from being the kind of writer he was.

There are many sources of information about Shakespeare's education. The most thorough--the gold standard--is T. W. Baldwin's William Shakespeare's Small Latine and Lesse Greek (1944). It can be read online here. Anti-Shakespearean John Churton Collins claimed that "Shakespeare" had to have gone to university because of his extensive knowledge of the classics. Baldwin's response is that 'I know of no evidence to justify the conviction of Collins that Shakespeare's "knowledge of the classics of both Greece and Rome was remarkably extensive." Remarkably extensive it may appear to us, but so far as I can find it was only that of a grammar school graduate who had an interest in the literary side of certain Latin classics.' Baldwin concludes, '... no miracles are required to account for such knowledge and techniques from the classics as he exhibits. Stratford grammar school will furnish all that he requires.'

Added note: Knowledge about Shakespeare's education is not part of the evidence cited that unequivocally shows that the glover's son from Stratford was the author of the works bearing his name.

>42 Podras.: Thanks for that. I have read a little on this and seen numerous documentaries that make this point. I'll look forward to following up with more reading and from the sources you suggest. I'd also note that there can now be a difference in awareness of past traditions of education due to difference in experience of education.

Some anti-Shakespeareans argue that Shakespeare (the glover's son) could not have been educated, given that his name doesn't appear on lists of students, neglecting to point out that such lists before about 1700 are no longer extant if they were ever made. (Universities and the Windsor grammar school are, I understand, exceptions.) One person, when confronted with that information, explained to me that that was proof that there were no schools back then.

Not all deniers are so ... rigid. Prof. David Cressy (specialty literacy in Tudor/Stuart England) wrote:

"given the period of his upbringing (early Elizabethan), his location (a small market town with a grammar school), and his parentage (urban craftsman/sub-elite), [Shakespeare] could be expected to attend the grammar school. ... Quite apart from his subsequent history and achievement, someone with his social background would normally move into the literate world and certainly surpass the educational level of his father."

>43 tonikat:

That's an excellent point about a difference in awareness, past vs. present. It applies to the authorship question in so many ways besides the difference in understanding of the term "grammar school" now vs. then. Today, it is hard to conceive of Shakespeare not being thought of as the greatest writer in the English language, but in his own time, though a popular writer, he was just another member of a disreputable profession. One of many. The idea that plays were literature was a foreign concept with Jonson being the only proponent. He was criticized for publishing his own plays in folio format. Sir Thomas Bodley of the Bodleian Library instructed that plays, along with other some other items, were never to be catalogued there.

It is amazing how time changes things.

The claim that Shakespeare's works had to have been written by an aristocrat, like many made by anti-Shakespeareans, is a 19^th century invention. The argument has multiple facets to it, but focusing on just one, the idea that his works contained knowledge about court matters and manners that only an aristocrat could have has been contradicted by people living much nearer to Shakespeare's time. John Dryden, for one, criticized Shakespeare for his lack of court knowledge. The writing team of Beaumont and Fletcher was much better at it, he wrote in 1668. In 1673, Dryden wrote: "I cannot find that any of them \the Elizabethan dramatists\ had been conversant in courts, except Ben Jonson; and his genius lay not so much that way as to make an improvement by it."

A much fuller discussion can be found in David Kathman's essay, Were Shakespeare's Plays Written by an Aristocrat?

An important point is that Shakespeare's writing betrays his common origin and Warwickshire roots far more than otherwise.

"An important point is that Shakespeare's writing betrays his common origin and Warwickshire roots far more than otherwise."

Not to an honest reader of Shakespeare, one with some feeling for his words and style it doesn't-- and most of all not for a careful and honest reader who has been informed by either Looney's or Ogburn's work. The fact is the exact opposite of that fatuous claim.

"Shakespeare's" noble characters are clearly the most finely and fully rendered--because he was one of them by his life's formation.

Numerous questions posed I've posed already remain ignored by you "two" (?) and I need not wonder why.

____________________

If they could, Stratfordians would explain how and why their Stratford man should have ever written

both

Sonnet 72

SONNET LXXII

O, lest the world should task you to recite
What merit lived in me, that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove;
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart:
O, lest your true love may seem false in this,
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.

and Sonnet 76

SONNET LXXVI

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

???

"...You in me can nothing worthy prove" !?

"...every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed" !?

What, pray, tell, does this Stratford guy have to be ashamed of? To hear you two (?) tell it, he came from the most modest of origins, grew up, struck out for London, where he is not known to have had any contacts or support, made his own way there and in the process of earning his room and board, joined a troup of actors, picked up the arts of acting, learned to write poetry--though we see little or nothing of his earliest and formative work--why is that, by the way?--and he bursts, as though fully-fledged, upon the scene, having learned also a wealth about Greek and Latin classic texts, allusions to which spring with seeming effortless ease so familiar was his knowledge. Nothing about their fluid use and inclusion seems strained or forced--unless we alter the picture given and replace this wunderkind with a realistic person.

And, then, seriously?, Shakespeare's plays and poems, their every word--as he himself declares it--do almost tell his name, and "show... their birth"! and "where they did proceed."!

We're to understand, then, that this fellow who came from such modest roots-- who wrote so beautifully about the life and trials of royalty and courtiers--that his products shout out his humble origins, is that about it? Oh, and he is mortally ashamed of something(s) he has done which have ruined his good name--things so terrible they aren't specified there in the sonnets. Why? What does the Stratford man have to do with this picture?

As I say, Stratfordians would explain all this if they could, perhaps explain why these sonnets--obviously written for and addressed and sent to one or more particular people-- are not to be taken seriously as factually based--why they're fictive entertainments. That, I guess, is one of the preposterous fall-back positions of Stratfordians (participating here-- though, historically, not even Stratfordians seriously doubted the factual basis of the sonnets' depictions. They were taken to reflect their author's own actual feelings, problems, hopes, desires, doubts and convictions. If it had been mere fictional stuff, they'd never have so captured and held so many people's hearts and minds.

Go on, please! Explain away these dilemmas of the Stratfordian view---

those of this simple, humble man who came from nothing, rose by his own genius and catch-as-catch-can education--he read and learned texts which hadn't even been translated into English in his day!--and made a name and a fortune--in real-estate in Stratford--while writing the great works we have today. And then, for some reason, he dropped it all and returned to Stratford and lived out his life there--writing no more for a decade. This, as Looney explains, is a series of miraculous metamorphoses in three unbelievable stages: first, early rural cultural deprivation; second, a miraculous (and unexplained) transformation in urban London, into a poet and playwright and, finally, third, an strange abandonment of all that by so literary a mind to return to the sleepy world of rural Stratford--to and from which no record of correspondence between his years and his dear friends in London has come down to us--not a letter, not a "post-card"! ;^) from this man whose life's work and monumental legacy was all written--though he forgot to mention any of it in his last will and testament, forgot his dearest friend, the Earl of Southampton, to whom his earliest published work is dedicated in the kind of intimate terms which, if put into affectionate gestures, would result in the arrest of the admirer for having taken outrageous liberties with the person of a noble rank. All dropped, without a word. Leaving no record at all from those years.

What honest, disinterested, mature and world-experienced person can believe such stuff?!

We're (still) waiting for a sane, credible explanation.

We're all honest readers.

>40 tonikat:

"I think I mainly seek to think about William Shakespeare in so far as to see if I can see any reasons why he may not be the author of these plays and I can see no evidence of that."

In that case you're missing in your search what many and growing numbers of others have had no trouble seeing. But, then, most of them have probably read Looney or Ogburn or both while you, I gather, have read neither of them completely. If so, how is yours "mainly" a search "seek{ing} ...to see if {you} can see any reasons why he {Shaksper of Stratford} may not be the author of these plays" ?

It occurs to me that the reason you can "see no evidence of that" might be that you haven't read all of Looney or Ogburn.

"The de facto position has through history been that William Shakespeare wrote these plays and this was not doubted for a considerable amount of time, as far as we know.

In fact, no. That everyone had always assumed "William Shakespeare" was the author of the plays is not true. It's more accurate to say that from their earliest appearance on stage, most people neither knew nor cared to wonder about who was the author of the plays. Later, among the first printed renderings of the name, it was given as "Shake-speare"--the then as now commonly used way to indicate a pseudonym. Then, within only a few years of "Shakespeare" being given as the real name of the actual author, this idea was indeed doubted and challenged.

"Therefore I do not think it is unfair to challenge those who feel Oxford wrote these plays to show how it was not W. Shakespeare."

Which Looney and Ogburn have done! The onus is now on Stratfordians to answer the case made by Looney and Ogburn rather than--as seems to be the case here--to ignore them and pretend that it is they who owe an explanation.

"My points are not made to demonstrate a fact but instead to show the possibility that the assumption he could not have written this is not proved."

Then I suppose you want to indicate for us where Looney or Ogburn have failed in their demonstration of the evidence in favor of Oxford and against Shaksper of Stratford.

Incidentally, and possibly in reference to a theme in a deleted post - but this can seem like incredible elitism to decry William Shakespeare as someone necessarily unable to write these plays and poems.

Where is the actual evidence that Shaksper of Stratford ever attended any school?--other than your circular presupposition that, since you claim he wrote "Shake-speare's" works, then he'd reasonably had to have gone to school somewhere?

If we have no evidence of his ever
having attended school, then what is "elitist" about questioning or doubting his ability to read or write?

..."- I am putting to you that he had an education."

So goes the Stratfordians' claim. But they have no independent evidence to support that claim. Again, they assume that the Stratford guy wrote "Shakespeare" and so they suppose that he must have been able to read and write but the sound evidence for this supposition doesn't exist.

>1 proximity1:

Well, conspiracy theories and sensationalism sell. Writing an argument without evidence would get my students a low fail.

>50 LesMiserables:

I've cited not only my sources --which are full of detailed evidence ---but also cited facts from those sources' evidence.

Have you read them?

Where is your still-valid counter-evidence?

These are questions. What do you have in answer to them?

>23 proximity1:

(I don’t suppose this will do much good. But as part of no. 23 was addressed to me, I wrote a reply to that part.)

Oh, I see. By "demolition" of scholarly consensus, you mean, "We have definite answers to certain questions where ordinary scholars say there is insufficient evidence to support a definite answer." Strength of conviction carries the day.

For example: To whom are the sonnets addressed? Why, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, of course! Anyone who says otherwise is deserving of verbal abuse.

But this aggressive certainty fails to acknowledge that the evidence admits more than one interpretation while definitively excluding none. You are also drumming up more controversy here than actually exists. I'm not sure whether they are a majority, but many mainstream scholars do believe that Southampton is the most likely candidate for the "Fair Youth." But it does not follow that the poet who addresses him had to be an earl in order to express fatherly love for the young noble, or for the young noble to return that love. (On this point your >39 proximity1: and later answers are nearly as obtuse as the straw-man "democracy and egalitarianism" argument you refute. After all, Southampton was only two generations removed from commoner status that was little more exalted than Shakespeare's. He may have worn his honors lightly, knowing they were conferred on his grandfather because of the dead-common farrier's son Thomas Cromwell.)

In any case, even Stratfordian supporters of the Southampton hypothesis don’t insist that it is the only possible answer to the question. We simply don’t have enough evidence to rule out any other possibility. And this is not special pleading by beleaguered Shakespeareans seeking to avoid a painful truth. It is consistent with the way that experts read sonnets by other Renaissance poets.

For example:

The Earl of Surrey's "Geraldine," to whom he wrote sonnets, may or may not have been the lady he married: a daughter of the 15th Earl of Oxford, as it happens. I don't doubt that Surrey and his friends talked endlessly on the subject of Geraldine, but their conversations leave no trace in the historical record. So the responsible course is to make no dogmatic assertions about who Geraldine was or was not.

But perhaps you would prefer to tell me that the refusal to acknowledge Geraldine's true identity is yet another sign of the academic conspiracy against the De Vere family. (Kidding! Sorry.)

Two more examples:

- Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet-writing persona, Astrophil (or -phel; his printer's spelling was as inconsistent as Shaxpere's), may have been Sidney himself or he may have been an invented persona. "Stella," the lady of his sonnets, may have been Penelope Devereux, a woman he is actually known to have admired, or she may not have been. Sidney and his friends leave us no affidavits on the subject.

- Likewise, sonneteer Michael Drayton's unnamed lady may have been based on an actual woman, or she may have been imaginary. Only the most simple-minded antiquarians insist that she must have been a person named Anne Goodere.

- Similar caveats apply to such pseudonymous sonnet-beloveds as Cynthia, Delia, Laura, and Lydia.

Shakespeare's sonnets are packed with more verisimiiltude than most of these works, and that does suggest that they are based on life experiences and addressed to living, breathing people. Nevertheless, as long as we lack evidence that definitively states whom Shakespeare had in mind as he wrote, the case for identifying anyone as the "Fair Youth" or the "Dark Lady" has to be admitted as unproven. "Most likely" is the best we can do.

All this is leading up to a question you commanded me to answer. So pay attention.

You asked why I object to "working backward" by interpreting evidence in light of a hypothesis. Sure, as you say, every researcher does this to an extent. The difference is that responsible researchers regard the hypothesis as something to be tested against evidence. Irresponsible or naive researchers filter evidence, consciously or not, admitting only those facts or assertions that support their hypothesis. That is what I meant by "working backward" from the desired conclusion.

Confirmation bias is an apparently innate tendency all human beings have; we favor evidence that supports our preconceived notions. So it takes self-awareness and rigor to counteract the effects of this bias, and often even the best scholars are not successful. But they do make the effort, and they invite their colleagues to hold them accountable through constructive criticism.

To put it another way: Responsible researchers advance a theory while admitting other possibilities. Naifs and zealots ignore all other possibilities and insist that they have found The Truth. The most obnoxious of them then insist that there is a conspiracy afoot to deny that The Truth is true.

I hope this answers your question about how researchers should "reason things out." A little humility about one's ability to discern truth does wonders.

>49 proximity1: Is this, no sorry, clearly this is the right thread for an argument.

I'm out of it I think. There are better things in life.

I may not have read Looney, however I did read quite a bit of Oxford, a very long time ago, that did not all have the flavour that can be seen as somewhat reminiscent of Shakespeare.

On your point about who could and could not publish, there are many historians in the world that have not drawn your broad cinclusion.

Looney etc. Have not shown it was not Shakespeare what they have shown is a possibility it was Oxford.

You may want to read Podrus' post on education.

I'm out of here though. Good luck to you and your debating manner.

I did not appreciate how you ignored what I said about how to refer to Shakespeare.

>52 Muscogulus:

(This shall take a while and I don't even expect to conclude this post today. The afternoon is already well advanced.)

(A) (I don’t suppose this will do much good. But as part of no. 23 was addressed to me, I wrote a reply to that part.)

(B) Oh, I see. By "demolition" of scholarly consensus, you mean, "We have definite answers to certain questions where ordinary scholars say there is insufficient evidence to support a definite answer." Strength of conviction carries the day.

(C) For example: To whom are the sonnets addressed? Why, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, of course! Anyone who says otherwise is deserving of verbal abuse.

I don't know why you choose to begin as above (A). If I was not interested in evidence and facts I never should have reached this place and point. As soon as Stratfordians can produce better evidence, chains of reasoning and argue them I'm quite prepared to adopt their case. I'm by no means an admirer of royalty or of rule by it.
I'd be delighted by straight answers and simple statements of how this Stratfordian stuff is the best possible interpretation of the evidence we have. But no one has offered that so far--no one including you.

(B) That is snide straw-man stuff. Which specific point do you have in mind ? (one example to start would do) If _only_ Stratfordian's were diffident! Insecure, yes. Diffident, not on your life! I don't see them saying "the evidence is not conclusive." They take inconclusive evidence and upon it pronounce for Shaxper--as you rightly rendered it.

Thus I come to this bizarrity from your comment at >17 Muscogulus:

"Take this thread. Instead of posing questions or presenting evidence, the OP asserts that Stratfordian orthodoxy has already been "demolished," but that Stratfordians are too intellectually timid, as a result of "indoctrination," to face the facts. We aren't told how this demolition occurred. In lieu of Ockham's razor we are confronted with Looney’s scissors and paste.

No, the OP says nothing about Stratfordians being timid--least of all intellectually timid. On the contrary they are intellectually reckless. This comment of yours convinces me that we inhabit different universes.


You're mistaken in this--

" But as part of no. 23 was addressed to me, I wrote a reply to that part.) "

All of >23 proximity1: was addressed--in the first place --to you and in the second place to all others participating here now or to come.

(more to follow as time permits)

>54 proximity1:

We do indeed inhabit different universes; however, your characterization of Stratfordians as, variously, sheeplike or wolflike, has been a feature of this thread. You've also indulged in a good deal of ad hominem attack against Stratfordians in general and your debate partners in particular. This kind of stuff doesn’t inspire much respect for your arguments.

Your habit of atomizing our arguments into incoherence is also not appreciated. For instance, you just wrote:

That is snide straw-man stuff. Which specific point do you have in mind ?

If you had paused for just one more sentence, you would seen me introduce a specific point. I even preceded it with "For example:", hoping that this would sufficiently demonstrate the continuity of the thought. But no, you chopped off that one sentence and damned me for not introducing a "specific point."

So tell me, in what way have I offended this time?

>53 tonikat:

... "Looney etc. Have not shown it was not Shakespeare what they have shown is a possibility it was Oxford."

Since you've never bothered to read them you don't know what "Looney etc." have or haven't "shown."

>55 Muscogulus:

RE:
"So tell me, in what way have I offended this time?"

Simple:
You've not taken due account of the fact that I did _ask_ for your opinion on the question :

"To whom are these sonnets addressed? We say they're addressed to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton." (Q23/B)

WHEN you wrote,

"For example: To whom are the sonnets addressed? Why, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, of course! Anyone who says otherwise is deserving of verbal abuse. "

Were you offering me your sincere opinion in reply or were you facetiously mocking my "voice" there? I honestly can't tell which.

(ETA)

You'd elaborated by writing:

" You are also drumming up more controversy here than actually exists. I'm not sure whether they are a majority, but many mainstream scholars do believe that Southampton is the most likely candidate for the "Fair Youth." But it does not follow that the poet who addresses him had to be an earl in order to express fatherly love for the young noble, or for the young noble to return that love. (On this point your >39 proximity1: : and later answers are nearly as obtuse as the straw-man "democracy and egalitarianism" argument you refute. After all, Southampton was only two generations removed from commoner status that was little more exalted than Shakespeare's.")

Indeed, since, as you wrote, " ...many mainstream scholars do believe"... what controversy am I stirring up by asking your opinion or those of others on it?

You point out that it doesn't necessarily follow that the poet who addresses him had to be an earl in order to express fatherly love for the young noble, or for the young noble to return that love."

Indeed, that's so. Thus my question: who do you say was the addresee? If your answer is Southampton, then, "why is the Stratford guy the most plausible author? " --should have been my next question.

_____
And this must be my concluding post for the day. I'll look for replies tomorrow.

Thank you.

>56 proximity1: Clearly if they had shown this there would be no debate. I have watched and listened to several documentaries on the subject. I've also read overviews of them, sections of them and some responses to them.

>58 tonikat:

"Clearly if they had shown this there would be no debate."

If only that were true! Your underestimation of the "tenacity" of Strafordians is charming.

On the principle issue: "Whose profile best fits what is demonstrated by all that we possess as the generally-accepted Shakespeare canon? " there oughtn't be any remaining debate. The debate might then focus on other peripheral questions of interest."

RE

"I have watched... listened... read...overviews... sections... and some responses."

Yet you haven't taken from all that any clear idea of the totality of the picture that they've presented or of its force. (Your comments here show that.)

>59 proximity1: QED, obviously.

I leave quite disheartened, but maybe not for the reasons you'd ascribe. I shall look again at the arguments, as my reading schedule allows and as I have started to work through all the plays. I'd suggest you give less certainty to what you see in me - or any others. That I am sure is something that the author of these works was aware of. And consider why it may be that well read, intelligent people may differ and why courtesy in respecting that may be a good thing. Just a suggestion, it may help you get where you want to be.

>60 tonikat:

""And consider why it may be that well read, intelligent people may differ...

Believe me, I wonder constantly about this and have various provisional ideas by which I try to understand it. It is a puzzle. Some of the explanation--but not all of it--is in the point Muscogulus made about the pitfalls of confirmation bias being so common. But I think there are other factors at work.

...and why courtesy in respecting that may be a good thing.

I am ready to deal courteously with anyone who engages here with the habits of an open-mind. Beyond that, I cannot and do not take any responsibility for others' reactions to or their disappointments occasioned by being faced with an unapologetic exposition of the Oxfordian case and its consequences for many people's cherished but mistaken beliefs about the author behind the works which we find published under the name of "Shakespeare." Nor do I hold myself required to treat kindly those who come to this thread and present as unchallenged facts claims and arguments which are, in my view, so thoroughly untenable and offensive to basic common sense experience (historically founded and contemporary) and logic that they are intellectually insulting. Moreover, when such people, faced with pertinent but difficult questions steadfastly ingore those questions, they have, at that point shown that they aren't entitled to further benefit of the doubt about their good-faith participation here. And I'm then under no obligation to treat them with the kind of courtesy or respect which others, by their different comportment, do deserve.

Like Stratfordians, I used to accept without question the factuality of that myth. Unlike them, when at last I came--by sheer chance--to learn that there was actually a controversy about this matter, through no thanks to the Stratfordians' openness about the existence of this controversy, I was fascinated by the details and the arguments marshalled by, for me, first, Charlton Ogburn Jr. and, later, by J. Thomas Looney rather than disappointed that my former assumptions had been exposed as mistaken and lacking in basic reasonableness.

>51 proximity1:

You call that evidence?

>62 LesMiserables:

From >51 proximity1: :
"These are questions. What do you have in answer to them?"

I cite you as an example of what I mean by those who, faced with unwelcome questions, demonstrate their bad faith by ignoring those questions.

>51 proximity1: I come back as I must point out that this is the kind of mistake in human interactions that must always be challenged. Good, peaceful human interaction depends on this being false...we need to be able to differ, but civilly, not as you say:

"Moreover, when such people, faced with pertinent but difficult questions steadfastly ingore those questions, they have, at that point shown that they aren't entitled to further benefit of the doubt about their good-faith participation here. And I'm then under no obligation to treat them with the kind of courtesy or respect which others, by their different comportment, do deserve."

>64 tonikat:

"Good, peaceful human interaction depends on this being false..."

There is a great deal of common sense in the practical approach I described. Your view is a terribly naive one whereby everyone comes together in a spirit of harmony, good will and good faith--and then advocates treating all alike as if this were actually true. That rewards and encourages people of bad faith, con men, cheats, liars and scoundrels who are interested only in the next opportunities to take advantage of the politeness they neither practice nor care for except, again, as something to take advantage of in others.

Those who would be treated with respect and politeness have only to show by their honest, good-faith treament of others that they deserve that.

It morally wrong to treat bad faith and calculating dishonesty with the patience and politeness which honest, good-faith treament of others deserves.

By the way, the real author of "Shakespeare's" works was a moralist, a world away from the commercially obsessed landlord and wool and malt merchant, William Shaksper, of Stratford. He was a paid stand-in and he knew this. It explains so much when that is understood. What thanks are owed him for playing that part were discharged long ago and are no longer incumbent on us.

Our duty is to correct the record and to help see credit given where it is due--rather than lavish unmerited patience and politeness on those who are invested in perpetuating a myth that has no further use or excuse except to a self-interested and self-serving minority.

If that does not include or describe you, then you make of yourself an unwitting aid and tool to those who it does include and describe.

> 57
Replying to the question you posed.

Thus my question: who do you say was the addresee? If your answer is Southampton, then, "why is the Stratford guy the most plausible author? "

Because his name is on the title page.

When authors use a pseudonym, they usually resort to a learned invention (like Smectymnuus), an anachronism (like Publius), a descriptive phrase (such as "Rambler" or "A Citizen of the World"), or simply a set of initials. What they don’t do is ascribe their work to another living author.



Fussing over the hyphen in the title page's "SHAKE-SPEARES" is anachronistic nonsense. In the 16th and 17th centuries "John Smith" and "John Smyth" were two ways of spelling the same name; not until the 1800s did we conceive of the idea that divergent spellings of surnames must indicate divergent identities. For me, the likeliest explanation for the hyphen (though this is sheer speculation) is to help the type match the width of the decorative woodcut without having to resort to excessive letter spacing (or kerning, as typesetters call it).

I would have left the hyphen out, but this typesetter may have preferred tight kerning in "SHAKESPEARES" followed by loose kerning in "SONNETS". There's no accounting for taste.

N.B. I am not proposing a hypothesis here that somehow must be defended in order to vindicate the Stratfordian cause. Just rejecting any presumed need for a conspiracy theory. I hope the distinction is clear.

(borrowed from Dave Kathman)

Despite Oxfordian claims to the contrary, it was not at all unusual for proper names of real people to be hyphenated in print in Elizabethan times. The following is a very partial list of names of real people which were hyphenated on title-pages of printed works between 1570 and 1640; some of these are taken from Irvin Matus's Shakespeare, In Fact(pp. 28-30), while others are culled from my own research with the Short-Title Catalogue, the National Union Catalogue, and the OCLC database.

Charles Fitzgeoffrey's name was regularly hyphenated on the title pages of his works, published between 1596 and 1637 as by "Charles Fitz-Geffry," "Charles Fitz-Geffrey," or "Charles Fitz-Geffrie." Fitzgeoffrey's name was hyphenated much more regularly than Shakespeare's was, yet no one has suggested that he was using a pseudonym.

The name of the Protestant martyr Sir John Oldcastle, the original model for Shakespeare's Falstaff, was often hyphenated as Old-castle. When four of Phillip Henslowe's writers wrote a play about Oldcastle in response to the success of Falstaff, the printed version of the play had the title "The first part of the true and honorable historie, of Sir John Old-Castle, the good Lord Cobham."

When Anthony Munday wrote a pageant in honor of Sir Thomas Campbell's installation as Lord Mayor of London in 1609, the title of the printed version was "Camp-bell, or, The ironmonger's faire field." (This is actually taken from the running title, since the title page of the only surviving copy is missing.)

The printer of Munday's pageant, Edward Allde, was quite fond of hyphens, and in fact he often hyphenated his own name as All-de on the title pages of works he printed (e.g. Henry Fitgeffrey's Satyres (1617), Thomas Middleton's The Sun in Aries (1621), and John Bradford's Holy Meditations (1622)). note4

Another printer, Robert Waldegrave, also regularly hyphenated his own name as Walde-grave on the title pages of works he printed from 1582 on; Matus's book contains an illustration of one of these (p. 31). It is interesting to note that Waldegrave was the printer of most of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets, which initiated a major controversy in 1588-89; "Martin Marprelate" is the one example sometimes cited by Oxfordians of an undisputed Elizabethan pseudonym being hyphenated. It is true that there are a few instances of "Marprelate" being hyphenated (for example, on the title page of Rythmes against Martin Marre-prelate(1589)), but it was usually not. In all the Marprelate tracts published by Waldegrave (reprinted in facsimile by Scholar Press in 1967), I have been unable to find a single instance of the hyphenated version "Mar-prelate" (or its variations), though the name occurs repeatedly. However, the name of Waldegrave himself also occurs repeatedly in the tracts, and it is always hyphenated. If hyphenation was supposed to indicate a pseudonym, it is curious that Waldegrave repeatedly hyphenated his own name while failing to hyphenate an undisputed pseudonym in the same texts.

In fact, the pattern seems to be that a name could be hyphenated (according to the whim of the printer) if it could be seen as divided into two parts; most often one or both of these parts were English words, though in "Fitz-Geffrey" the "Fitz-" is a Norman French prefix meaning "son of." As the above examples show, whether a name was real or pseudonymous had nothing to do with the matter; real names were hyphenated just as easily as pseudonyms (perhaps even more easily). "Shakespeare" obviously fits this pattern; the name was taken to consist of "shake" + "spear," even though E. K. Chambers (EKC II: 374-5) doubts that this is its actual historical origin. Contemporary evidence that this was how people thought of the name can be found in William Camden's Remaines, first published in 1605. Camden had a long section on the origins of English names, and at one point he says that some men derived their names "from that which they commonly carried, as Palmer, that is, Pilgrime, for that they carried Palme when they returned from Hierusalem, Long-sword, Broad-speare, Fortescu, that is, Strong-shield, and in some such respect, Breake-speare, Shake-Speare, Shotbolt, Wagstaffe." Camden here not only confirms that the name was thought of as "shake" + "spear," but he hyphenates it along with several of the other names. At least one more tidbit of evidence that the family name had the "spear-shaking" interpretation long before William was born can be found in the records of Richard Shakespeare, William's paternal grandfather. Richard was called "Richard Shakstaff" in a 1533 record; some scribe apparently wrote "staff" instead of the semantically similar "spear" as part of the name.

In sum, there is no evidence to support the Oxfordian assertion that the occasional hyphenation of the name Shakespeare means that people thought of it as a pseudonym. Real names were occasionally hyphenated when they could be divided into two parts; the same is true of fictitious names. The best-known pseudonym of the time, Martin Marprelate, was only occasionally hyphenated, while names of several real people (such as Charles Fitz-geffrey and Robert Walde-grave) were hyphenated with great regularity.

http://shakespeareauthorship.com/name1.html

>65 proximity1:

To the contrary my view is highly realist. Many people would not bother to explain this to you, after your arrogant and superficial dismissal of their world view, but perhaps in the spirit of that world view I will reply. You said:

"There is a great deal of common sense in the practical approach I described. Your view is a terribly naive one whereby everyone comes together in a spirit of harmony, good will and good faith--and then advocates treating all alike as if this were actually true. That rewards and encourages people of bad faith, con men, cheats, liars and scoundrels who are interested only in the next opportunities to take advantage of the politeness they neither practice nor care for except, again, as something to take advantage of in others. "

I live by my view - and am not finding myself generally abused by such as you describe. I did not say that where I need to stand up for myself I would not, nor that wrong should be allowed. "Tread softly for you tread on my dreams."

Would you have the level and quality of human interaction circumscribed by such lowest aspects of human behaviour as you cite - surely that would mean no Michelangelo, van Gogh, Proust, Shakespeare etc etc etc.

Instead I would suggest to you that such interaction as I suggest may be tempered by its environment. But for me it is fundamental that helpful human relationships can be characterised by the theory of Carl Rogers. Some liken aspects of that to that of Buddha - his views have lasted a long time. I put this into practice on a daily basis and it reaps rewards for me and others in countless ways. Not that i am perfect at it - and yes, it can be misunderstood, or unwanted, or I may not be the right person for some.

The value of forgiveness and mercy are incalcuable. Believe me, I have learned it is best not to question these. The harsh mode you suggest of conditional love and the marginalisation and non acceptance of others is one that leads only to separation, hostility, boundaries, non transformation of the situation, lack of growth.

It may mean you measure where it is possible to feel able to explore mutuality - most of all in safe, boundaried relationships and personal relationships that have proven their safety. As this is practiced I think we become better at judging this - but I hope to be able to take such chances upon others, if not what hope is there?

If I give up on others in any way I may as well give up on myself - it would be a function of my lack of ability and humanity, and of my fear.

In the latter part of you post you start making unsubstantiated claims about Shakespeare - you do not know what he did and did not know.

Sonnet 23 tells you everything you need to know about Shakespeare.

also

I have just read The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

>66 Muscogulus:

“When authors use a pseudonym, they usually resort to a learned invention (like Smectymnuus), an anachronism (like Publius) a descriptive phrase (such as “Rambler” or “A Citizen of the World”), or simply a set of initials. What they don't do is ascribe their work to another living author.”

Under the Oxfordian hypothesis, these points are accepted as valid since, the real author, Edward Oxford, did not ascribe his work to any other author. Rather, he ascribed it to “William Shake-speare” a name for which there existed, by varied spellings, living examples but none of them (as far as we know) were authors--unless, that is, we assume so as a prior condition of the discussion.

Here, for the fun of it, is my own personal gloss on the choice of the name by Oxford. I do not contend that this is other than speculation or that I have anything resembling proof; nor do I imagine that I'm the first to have speculated in this way:

If I'm not mistaken, “Shaks-per”, “Shax-per” and their variant spellings would have usually been pronounced in De Vere's time as “shox” (or “shocks”) “pair”. This is not far from “Ox” “pair” where “Ox” is a punned allusion to Oxford, of course, and where “pair” denotes “peer,” or “equal”—not only in English but in other languages with which Oxford was fluently conversant: French (pair), Latin (pares), Italian (pari). We could playfully push the analysis and speculate that De Vere, known and accepted as a incorrigible punster, intended the full name to be understood this way:

Will- I- AM shOX's-PAIR: “I Am Oxford's peer, equal, that is, his double.

So, for me, this view brings richer meaning to numerous lines in the sonnets. If it is the punster, De Vere, behind the mask of Shox-pair, we can find new meaning in the lines,

Sonnet 76:

Why with the time do I NOT gLANCE (“speare”) ASIDE

a “glance aside”, physically, entails the shifting of one's eyes, also called in Shalkespeare's usage, “spheres”; in other words, to glance aside could be described as “shaking one's 'spheres.' ”
While here, he is alerting us that he does not "glance aside" (i.e. is not Mr. “gLANCE ASIDE”--Mr. Shake-spheres) .

Playfully, he asks his correspondent, who, obviously can be in no doubt as to his actual identity, Why do I not glance aside?”

Immediately after assuring us that he does not “glance aside”, he adds what ought to immediately strike us as bizarre
...”to new found methods and to compounds strange.
what is “Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new found methods, and to compounds strange?”
if not, indeed, “new found methods and compounds strange” !?

Because he specifically denies ever doing what we have just witnessed him doing, we ought to be alert to the idea that he is up to something here, that these words are not to be taken at face value.

Having just related NOT with GLANCE ASIDE, he continues,

“Why write I STILL ALL ONE. (i.e. I'm one, alone,) E VER THE SAME”

“And keep invention in a NOT-ED WEED”

“...that E VER y WORD doth almost tell my name.”

“Showing their birth, and where they did proceed...

>67 Crypto-Willobie:

"In sum, there is no evidence to support the Oxfordian assertion that the occasional hyphenation of the name Shakespeare means that people thought of it as a pseudonym. Real names were occasionally hyphenated when they could be divided into two parts; the same is true of fictitious names. The best-known pseudonym of the time, Martin Marprelate, was only occasionally hyphenated, while names of several real people (such as Charles Fitz-geffrey and Robert Walde-grave) were hyphenated with great regularity."

In real names, as you point out, these hyphenations typically indicate something factual about the person--at least originally:

with your examples, "Fitz" a Norman-French "fils" (French) thus, "son".

This is emphatically not the case with "Shake-speare." What real attribute are either of these supposed to bear about the person supposedly so named? Indeed, no one is in fact denying that there were then (and are perhaps are still) real people named "Shaksper," "Shakespair", "Shakespere", and all the other unhyphenated potential spelling vanants. But which of them, as far as we know, ever had hyphenated names?

You seem to go out of your way to miss the obvious point: we do not dispute that hyphenated real names existed. We dispute that this particular hyphenated name referred to an actual living person.

You have not shown either that it did refer or that, according to custom, it was likely to have referred to an actual living person since we have no examples of that name hyphenated in regular known use, do we?.

---------------

Further reading I recommend for others:

"How he spelled his name"
How did William spell his name?

by Stephanie Hopkins Hughes, from her site

https://politicworm.com/oxford-shakespeare/to-be-or-not-to-be-shakespeare/why-no...

>69 LesMiserables:

And I have just re-read A Connecticutt Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain.

So what?

>68 tonikat:

I write this not with malicious intent but matter-of-factly, as an observation: as I see things, you misunderstand Shakespeare's words and meaning, starting with who he really was--so why should it be surprising if you also misread my words and meaning?

RE: “I did not say that where I need to stand up for myself I would not, nor that wrong should be allowed.”

In that case, we are in (sort of) agreement since, even though you probably do not see it this way, that is a fair description of all that I'm trying to do here—stand up for and defend a view which I happen to share with other Oxfordians –defend it from specious claims and arguments.

You write,

“I live by my view- and am not finding myself generally abused by such as you describe.”

So much the better for you. I'm pleased that the good-faith and the trust you show in others is returned. But why shouldn't that be so--to you and to many, many others in similar circumstances?: Your views in this particular matter are the generally-accepted views, seconded by the near-totlality of academic scholarship. (Note!: that consensus is neither proof nor evidence of their being correct. In a factual matter, as is the case with the question, “Who was the person behind the name—the author of the works ascribed to--'Shakespeare' ?” it can be the case that the near totality of opinion is mistaken while a single or a few others, holding a contrary view, have it right.) Why should you expect them to incite, among most people, any controversy, any impassioned rejection? Likewise, examine your life circumstances. I do not mean to presume too much about those but, I ask, are they particularly peculiar? Are your manners of living outlandish, odd, liable to provoke others to take a hostile attitude toward you? If not, then why shouldn't people respond with the ordinary and quite predictable good natured way that you expect them to do?

In short, it may be rather naive of you, again, to suppose that, since your ethic of “treat-every-man-as-though-he-means-me-well” has so far produced good results for you, in your circumstances, therefore it's a fair and reasonable manner for everyone in any and all circumstances to adopt and follow. There, I do not agree—though once I should have automatically agreed with you. Now, in very different life circumstances, I have found that it is not a universally appropriate attitude to take—even if I generally practice and try to assume, in the first-instance, good-will, trust and a good-faith attitude toward others that you propose. In actual fact, here,of course, in the safety of this discussion forum, there is really little besides bruised feelings at risk.

Still, it is not the case, as I am today aware as never before, that everyone is generally a “basically good person.” well-meaning and worthy of trust --acceptable at face value. Most of the people with whom I am now in daily contact cannot be fairly or accurately described that way. Most are dishonest and are looking for any opportunity to take advantage of any trust shown them. Still, I can and I do make the distinction between them and many of the people I encounter “on-line.” But I don't mind telling you that, given my points of view, many of which are anything but orthodox, I encounter a good many people on-line who more resemble the kind of people I see and deal with every day “off-line.” It would not only be naively foolish to treat many of them as you've proposed, it would in some cases be dangerously naive to do so.

Still, and again, that is a different set of circumstances from the risks entailed in participation here—participation which you've twice declared you'd found too unpleasant to want to continue.

I think that anyone who wants to venture outside the relative pseudo-safety of intellectual isolation, must (and ought to) accept the risks (as here) of the rather minor danger of having feelings bruised in the course of one's beliefs being tested, challenged and contradicted by others. I think you agree with that, too.

RE:

"Would you have the level and quality of human interaction circumscribed by such lowest aspects of human behaviour as you cite - surely that would mean no Michelangelo, van Gogh, Proust, Shakespeare etc."

I don't see it that way at all. First, I think you have a mistaken view of certain of these famous authors --perhaps Proust was as much the picture of genteel civility that his prose suggests to many people. But I do not think that "Shakespeare's" writitngs, (simply because they're regarded by some as the height of polished style--though in fact they're quite variable in many respects and not always the height of polished style in fact) should be interpreted as indicating that their author was the picture of over-done civility and politeness any more than I think we can say something similar about Michelangelo or van Gogh. To suppose so strikes me a little like imagining that, since they were referred to as "gentlemen" and "gentle ladies," people so called in Elizabethan times were actually literally "gentle" towards others, even if "gentle" here only means always "basically polite."

Further to >68 tonikat:

RE:
"In the latter part of you post you start making unsubstantiated claims about Shakespeare - you do not know what he did and did not know."

You refer there either to my comments about Shakespeare as a moralist or to those sbout Shaksper being a paid stand-in and, of course, knowing this to be the case --if I've understood you.

>73 proximity1: and >74 proximity1: -- I think you have interpreted me quite incorrectly, your characterisation of what I mean is quite wrong, for example as to gentility.

I explained I had stuck around to explain in the spirit of my world view.

What is difficult, and what is more what is getting in the way of your making a good argument to others that they would want to listen to you and that you either do consciously or unconsciously is that you continually make assumptions that you know what others are thinking or meaning, when it seems to me you have not entirely understood their point. This was behind my point about your unsubstantiated claims. We get to know what others are thinking by getting to know them well - but we never know exactly what others are thinking, not at all, and that can be especially problematic with authors. You're misplacing certainty over and over again and then carrying through on that belief. It is possible you do this deliberately, I do not know.

You know nothing about the reactions I provoke in others.

I am now out of this discussion, I will not explain any further - it is sad this has hardly been about The Sonnets and their authorship at all.

Edit - to correct myself and in the spirit of civility - I say you -- I mean as you have conducted yourself on this thread. I would also add that this style undoubtedly provokes others.

>75 tonikat:

"I am now out of this discussion, ..."

Yes, you do keep telling me that. That makes three times now unless I've miscounted.

"What is difficult, and what is more what is getting in the way of your making a good argument to others that they would want to listen to you and that you either do consciously or unconsciously is that you continually make assumptions that you know what others are thinking or meaning, when it seems to me you have not entirely understood their point. This was behind my point about your unsubstantiated claims. We get to know what others are thinking by getting to know them well - but we never know exactly what others are thinking, not at all, and that can be especially problematic with authors."

Well, damnit, that's why I occasionally seek clarification by either stating what I take to be the other's intended point or simply asking about what he meant.

If I haven't understood you well, could that be partly _ your_ fault for being less than completely clear?

With certain authors- including Shakespeare, of course- we can't ask questions. We can only take what they've left us and try to make sense of it.

So, here , while we can, let's ask questions, let's seek clarification. Or you could stomp out in a huff for a fourth time!

"You know nothing about the reactions I provoke in others."

I know what you tell me about that:

"I live by my view - and am not finding myself generally abused by such as you describe."

I mention the following author and text as a priority interest for this thread's topic:

Claes Schaar

Elizabethan Sonnet Themes and the Dating of Shakespeare's Sonnets

In addition, I post the following link for a useful bibliography on Shakespeare's Sonnets:

https://politicworm.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/hughes-sonnets-bibliography.pdf

I hear through politicworm that the works of John Webster were written by Mary Sidney?

>78 Crypto-Willobie:

Then you can be sure that, if it's the view of S.H. Hughes, there is interesting analysis and thinking behind it--thus, worthy of the most serious consideration. You and I would be lucky to have so much insight.

79> I initially thought 78> was a joke but yours as far surpasseth it as great'st doth least.

>79 proximity1: >80 TheHumbleOne: I don't think it's Stephanie Hughes' own fantasy but just something she reported on from another fan fiction writer. But after all, Webster was merely the son of a coach-maker and would have attended the excellent Merchant Taylor's School (no record though!) instead of Uni.

>78 Crypto-Willobie: & >81 Crypto-Willobie:

" I don't think it's Stephanie Hughes' own fantasy but just something she reported on from another fan fiction writer. "

And you just didn't think to include that in the first place, did you?

(Updated for those interested)

Stephanie Hughes has an article at her website entitled

"No Spring Till Now : The Countess of Pembroke and the John Webster Canon"

( 38 pages; Illustrated)

A link to her paper :

https://politicworm.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/hughes-no-spring-till-now1.pdf

RE : Sonnet 107
Just a brief comment:

I suspect that the word "endur'ede" was a copyist or a compositor's error.

Elizabeth's "Enduring an eclipse" as a metaphor for her own death didn't make any more sense in 1603 than it does today. I suspect that the intended word was "incur'ed" (or "encur'ed)-- and that a check of S' s texts would show similar usages of it.

"The mortall Moone hath her eclipse encur'ed,
And the sad Augurs mock their owne presage ..."

-----

An update on this:

Stephanie Hopkins Hughes replied to this comment posted at her blog and offered this cogent explanation for "endured":

"If the eclipse was about the fact that she survived her 63rd year in 1596, supposed to be a year of mortal danger, then endured makes sense.."

In light of that, I stand corrected.

>82 proximity1:
What's your point? I said I heard it THROUGH politicworm.

You argue like a lawyer (not a compliment). You're interested in Scoring Points for your pre-determined position, manipulating 'evidence' instead of finding truth by letting the chips fall where they may. Everything in the Oxfordian universe consists of imaginary scenarios and "this-really-means-that" arguments. Life's too short.

>84 Crypto-Willobie: :
"What's your point? I said I heard it THROUGH politicworm."

Right! That's you wrote. You could have been clear but for mysterious reasons you chose to leave a distinct false impression.

And THAT'S "my point":

keeping _you_ semi-honest. It's more than a part-time job but I have time. By the way-- if you don't like being kept semi-honest then remember: your participation here is voluntary .

"...finding truth by letting the chips fall where they may."

I am only too happy to do that. Hence, this thread--to which you come for the express purpose of manipulating 'evidence' since everything in the Stratfordians' universe consists of imaginary scenarios and "this-really-means-that" arguments.

Questions:

Concerning Sonnet LXXII, What does this Stratford guy have to be ashamed of?

And, concerning sonnets I through XVII, at only a dozen years the senior of Henry Wriothesley, a noble man, how does William Shaksper, the hick kid from Stratford dare address him (in published writings! ) as though he's a father speaking to a child?

>85 proximity1:

Right! That's you wrote. You could have been clear but for mysterious reasons you chose to leave a distinct false impression.

I didn't choose to do any such thing. You listen with a bad will. You choose to twist whatever anyone says. All that stuff you say about us really applies to you. I guess we've come to the schoolyard point -- did not, did too, did not, did too. You're never going to convince me and I'm never going to convince you, so this conversation is a waste of time. At least I have the comfort of knowing that your idea that a tide of anti-Shakespearean "truth" will soon triumph is nothing more than a grandiose illusion, a wack-job pipe-dream.

30

>86 Crypto-Willobie: :

..."You're never going to convince me..."

Obviously! But I knew that going in. It is not and never was any part of my purpose or objective here. If, with your unrivaled library (leaving aside private libraries' contents) on Shakespeare, you still can't see what's right under your nose, then certainly nothing I could add could move you.

Now, I, on the other hand, could be persuaded--if only there were the evidence and the common sense to go with it that produced a better-more compelling- case than that for Oxford.

RE:

" At least I have the comfort of knowing that your idea that a tide of anti-Shakespearean "truth" will soon triumph is nothing more than a grandiose illusion, a wack-job pipe-dream."

LOL! Yes, "at least" you have that. Confidence and serenity-- exactly the picture you present. As to that, l leave every reader to judge for himself and herself.

No. I could be persuaded. When I first heard of the idea (in its Marlovian form), as a teen, I was excited and intrigued. But the evidence for Shakespere the player from Stratford is context-appropriate and more than adequate, whereas the so-called 'evidence' for Oxford (or anyone else) is imaginary. I've read Looney, Ogburn and Anderson, and many blogs, posts etc., and there's no there there. It's not because I'm 'not open-minded', it's because I don't agree. My assessment is rational, yours is tainted by your true-believer obsession.

>88 Crypto-Willobie: :
"No. I could be persuaded." ...

Nothing I've seen from you supports that claim.

You don't tell us how, don't tell us what it might be that could persuade you. "Context"? The myriad details which "fit" Oxford to the role of author contrast with the absence of such for your man.

"But the evidence for Shakespere the player from Stratford is context-appropriate and more than adequate, whereas the so-called 'evidence' for Oxford (or anyone else) is imaginary. I've read Looney, Ogburn and Anderson, and many blogs, posts etc., and there's no there there. It's not because I'm 'not open-minded', it's because I don't agree."

If yours were the better case, you could do things--answer questions and resolve apparent inconsistency--that others, Oxfordians, for example, could not and cannot. But I don't see you doing that. Instead, the converse is the case: you can't answer or resolve inconsistencies while Oxfordians can.

Typically, you ignore-most recently- the questions I put to you again just above. If Shaksper's circumstances are such a fitting context, you shouldn't be stumped at why this hick kid wrote Sonnet 72.

"My assessment is rational,..."

It's just that you can't show us reasons. Your whole case is, "trust us, we have the experts on our side."

..."yours is tainted by your true-believer obsession."

I will admit to having been entirely uninterested in the picture of Shake-speare offered by Stratfordians. Unaware that there were competing candidates, I simply ignored both Shake-speare and his work because the back-story struck me as absurd. In a sense, then, I was a true disbeliever. But when I learned that there were alternative theories as to S' s identity, I became interested enough to read of them. Like you.

Again, if you've read Looney and Ogburn and you remain unmoved, there is nothing I could add to persuade you and I wouldn't care to waste my time here trying.

You said yourself, above,

"At least I have the comfort of knowing that your idea that a tide of anti-Shakespearean "truth" will soon triumph is nothing more than a grandiose illusion, a wack-job pipe-dream."

the Stratford view represents "comfort" for you as does your (claimed) confidence in the inevitable futility of the Oxfordian case.

Part of that is true, in my opinion.

Currently I'm reading an essay by John Rollett, "Secrets of the Dedication"-- that is, an attempt to explain the long-standing puzzles of the dedication to the Sonnets by their publisher, Thomas Thorpe.

See this link to the text in The Oxfordian newsletter (this number from 1999).

http://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/Oxfordian1999_Rollett_...

>90 proximity1:

The text of that PDF is corrupt, at least as it appears in my browser. But from what I could see, the article is yet another effort to make much of aberrant spelling and capitalization, as if these were not the Elizabethan norm.

I am bored by appeals to arguments that can only be appreciated as expressed in some particular author's words — e.g., everyone must read Looney or Ogburn, in full, to appreciate "how the Stratfordian case is demolished as the Oxfordian case is built point by point, brick by brick. Those who have not read one of these texts won't have a full and clear conception of the force of one case and the weakness of the other."

In other words, the argument has no force when separated from the style and tone of these authors. To paraphrase one of Nietzsche's aphorisms: The Oxfordian case is presented festively, on the carriage of derision, mostly because it cannot walk.

For anyone who has been lurking on this interminable thread, I recommend the Wikipedia article Shakespeare authorship question for some historical perspective. The article lays out the case against Shakespeare, the case for him, and (what I especially appreciate), a history of the authorship question followed by a list of nominees for "real author" of the works of Shakespeare.

I find myself in sympathy with some of the Victorian-era skeptics, who were reacting to an uncritical veneration of Shakespeare as "the immortal Bard" and "sweet singer of Avon," informed by precious little historical criticism of his work. Though even ca. 1850, I believe, there was a consensus that some Shakespeare plays were co-authored with John Fletcher, and that the Hecate doggerel in Macbeth was the work of some third-rate hack who was neither Shakespeare nor Fletcher. (The Oxfordian version of this strain of criticism seems to be the "Oxford Syndicate" theory, in which De Vere co-wrote the plays along with other literati, including Mary Sidney.)

Even more annoying, devotees of the cult of Bardolatry (as G. B. Shaw christened it) maintained an awkward silence about the fact that some of the Bard's dramatic writing is inconsistent, even (*shudder*) bad. Shakespeare was, for the cultists, a divinely chosen vehicle for the conveyance of pure genius through the medium of our dear English tongue, proving (were any proof needed) that God is an Englishman. And anyone who doubts all this is a philistine, at best.

So no wonder some restless minds began to doubt that Shakespeare truly deserved all this adulation. And some questioned the veracity of the literary superhero's origin story. I might have done the same, had I been condemned to live in the latter 1800s.

Things have changed. Historical research in general has become more professional, less subjective. it is supposed to be guided by primary sources rather than sensibility. In literary studies, Bardolatry has been replaced with a more sophisticated understanding of how these plays and poems actually came to be, how they were sometimes garbled by copyists and printers on the way, and the social and political context in which they appeared.

(One of the more tangible fruits of all this research is the Shakespeare's Globe complex in Southwark, London, which contains both an open-air "wooden O" playhouse and an indoor space inspired by the 17th-century Blackfriars theatres.)

What has failed to turn up is any hard evidence that someone besides William Shakespeare wrote (or co-wrote) these works. So the skepticism that was understandable in the age of Bardolatry has become far less justifiable. With no substantial evidence to rest on, the Oxfordian case has to be argued with a lot of hair-splitting and banging of fists upon tables.

91> Even more annoying, devotees of the cult of Bardolatry (as G. B. Shaw christened it) maintained an awkward silence about the fact that some of the Bard's dramatic writing is inconsistent, even (*shudder*) bad.

I remember making that suggestion some years ago in the relative safety of a Stratford winter school discussion on the previous night's production - only for some youngster to directly quote me in the full plenary. Not that people disagreed as such - it is after all fairly undeniable - but it did feel a mite weird.

>91 Muscogulus: & >92 TheHumbleOne: ( who cites and replies to the following) _et al_

"Even more annoying, devotees of the cult of Bardolatry (as G. B. Shaw christened it) maintained an awkward silence about the fact that some of the Bard's dramatic writing is inconsistent, even (*shudder*) bad."

That's not typical of Oxfordians. On the contrary, Looney and Ogburn each discuss the fact that Oxford developed and matured as a lyric poet and dramatist and that his best work shows this and came later, and vice versa. But one would know that if one had read either of them. See also, on this topic, M.M. Mahood's Shakespeare's Wordplay .

______
Updated:

And this example, by Stephanie Hopkins Hughes, from her article, "Shakespeare the Genius"

...Shakespeare was a writer who grew immensely over a fairly short period of time (though not so impossibly short as the Stratford bio would have it), one who was not afraid to experiment and fail. We have only to compare works like Hamlet or King Lear with an early (never revised) play like Titus Andronicus. Yet even Titus was an immense leap forward from the period just preceding, one C.S. Lewis aptly terms “the drab era.”

(This excerpt and the full text are copyright © Stephanie Hopkins Hughes. www.politicworm.com)

Link: https://politicworm.com/oxford-shakespeare/why-shakespeare-matters/shakespeare-t...

>93 proximity1:

You might want to consider attaching that comment to the original author of my quote. It wouldn't make it less snide or more accurate but at least it would be aimed in the "right" direction.

>94 TheHumbleOne:

Done. (As I'd originally had it --but I thought I'd mistaken the attribution and so I changed it--in error.)

More RE >91 Muscogulus: _et al_ :

Looney's & Ogburn Jr.'s works are simply the clearest and most complete statements of the evidence for Oxford and against Shaksper--thus the frequency of citations. Some people have arrived at Looney's and Ogburn Jr.'s conclusions by other much more circuitous routes. In part this may be due to numerous scholars who, with no design of making a case for Oxford, never the less present facts which give an astute reader direct support for Oxford's role as the most reasonable candidate. Ironically, these same scholars typically don't recognize their contributions-or at least don't openly avow them. We can guess why they might have preferred to pass without comment a conviction for Oxford as author.

I, too, found a visually very inferior version of Rollett's article. But I also found a quite good one with facsimiles of pages from original 16th C. editions of texts he cites for examples.

I recommend your trying this link:

http://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/

Or search on these terms:

John M. Rollett

The Oxfordian volume ii 1999

"Secrets of the Dedication to Shakespeare's Sonnets" .

/uploads/Oxfordian1999_Rollett_Dedication.pdf

His arguments are far superior to anything I've seen from Stratfordians here or elsewhere. To summarize, they show how and why the original first edition's paragraph layout and the word order is peculiar--compared to other dedications published by T. Thorpe (examples given) and how these facts invite speculation about the possible reasons why that is.

He explains the significance of the use of the full-stops; the unique spelling of "onlie" rather than the then-usual "onelie" and why this is necessary.

Finally, he reveals a cryptogram which gives us these letter strings "HENRY", "WR" "IOTH" and "ESLEY" and comments on the likelihood of their chance occurrance. And a second 6-2-4 (indicated by the paragraphs' layout: i.e. six lines, two lines, four lines) word-order cryptogram which, by taking the sixth word, followed by the second word after it, followed by the fourth word after that, yields:

"THESE SONNETS ALL BY EVER" (I.e. E_VER)

Anywhere else I'd challenge my opponents to explain away such astounding "coincidences" but experience here shows that such a challenge should be ignored.

More RE >91 Muscogulus: _et al_ :

"Shakespeare was, for the cultists, a divinely chosen vehicle for the conveyance of pure genius through the medium of our dear English tongue, proving (were any proof needed) that God is an Englishman. And anyone who doubts all this is a philistine, at best."

You didn't mention that some people are "Young Earth Creationists" and some of them, or still others, believe that the New York World Trade Center Twin Towers were really the objects of planted explosives-- the airliners having been deliberately flown into the towers being, apparently, just a coincidence; or that there are some who insist that the 1969 lunar landing was faked. Why didn't you mention these, too? For, like the examples above which you do mention, these also have nothing necessarily to do with Oxfordians' typical beliefs.

I have never heard any Oxfordian suggest that Shakespreare--whoever he was--was "a divinely chosen vehicle for the conveyance of pure genius through the medium of our dear English tongue" or that this "proves (were any proof needed) that God is an Englishman" or that "anyone who doubts all this is a philistine, at best." Of couse all that is absurd. And of course you didin't post any of it to in any way suggest that Oxfordians' views are similarly ridiculous. It may merely seem that way to some suspiciously-minded readers.

TonyH, I gather, is a poet. I gather that because his library and reading suggests that this may be the case. If so, then perhaps part of the reason that a very Shaksper-like Shakes-peare is so appealing to him is that it would seem to suggest--following the reasoning which is contrary to your absurd parody example above--that such genius could and should be expected to come to anyone, whether or not schooled as Oxford was by the finest tutors and with ready access to a nearly unrivaled library as a resource. In other words, it presents a very hopeful example for anyone of less-than-noble origins.

But the fact is that Oxford, as Shake-speare, in no way "proves" anything about a special reserve of genius for the nobility or any otherwise determined privileged elite, nor do Oxfordians typically think so. Some Oxfordians may be devoted "royalists" but I'm certainly not an example of one of them. On the contrary, I'm a confirmed small-d democrat and small-r republican. ( I'd prefer to see the British monarchy disolved--nicely, politely, peacefully.) There are and have been poetic geniuses--arguably, that is--before and since Oxford who never had his social standing or his education. Some of them were singer-sonwriters with roots in either the middle-class or something well "below" it by conventional reckoning.

I have read some who argue that great genius shall always become apparent, that it is never thwarted by unfavorable circumstances since it is always more than equal to overcoming them. I believe that while that is often true, it is not necessarily always true. Alas. But Oxfordians don't typically think or argue or suggest that high-class birth or its privileges are either necessary or sufficient in the making of literary genius. And divine appointment is of course also typically out of the question.

Oxford came to be their candidate for the most practical of reasons: the fact-set of his biography "fits" better than any other person known to us--whatever his origins.

More RE >91 Muscogulus: _et al_

While I admire "Shakes-peare" for his genius, I admire him more for what he did with that genius. He could have employed it in many other and very different ways.

At her website, www.politicworm.com, Stephanie Hughes has an essay entitled "Why Shakespeare Matters." In she advances a thesis which I share and which I had come to believe about Shakespeare before I'd ever heard of her. Here is her way of exprssing the ideas I share with her and those like her:

(excerpt from "Why Shakespeare Matters," by Stephanie Hopkins Hughes, from her webiste www.politicworm.com, @ this page:

https://politicworm.com/oxford-shakespeare/why-shakespeare-matters/

(This excerpt and the full text are copyright © Stephanie Hopkins Hughes.)

..."Many cultural streams converged to create the English language, and many groups and individuals over a long period of time contributed, and continue to contribute, to its evolution, but there was one point in the late sixteenth century when the streams of Latin, of Italian and French, of courtly discourse and street argot, of Old and Middle English, of classical Greek, and, some think, even of Hebrew, converged in the mind and pen of a single individual, to emerge as a new language, shorn of its antiquated awkwardness and ambiguities, its various sounds and rhythms woven together and blended, adopting what was best from each, a bigger, better, more powerful, more expressive language, one that was good for thinking and for expressing ideas, that provided a rich palate of choices with the potential for many shades of meaning, that offered more than one word for things so that thoughts could be crafted into something beautiful and graceful to the ear as well as clear and precise to the mind. This mind and pen belonged to the genius we call Shakespeare.

Out of his thoughts, his personal passions, and his need to express himself, Shakespeare created, or published for the first time, thousands of words that were new to the language, many of which, most perhaps, that have become part of our everyday usage. More than words alone, he created hundreds of phrases and turns of speech that we still take for granted, that we use ourselves, and read or hear every day. Thus are preserved in our minds and the minds of all who read English, truths and bits of wisdom, some he derived from ancient sources, some from the hearth, the pub, or the stable, as he translated them into the English of his time, or, more precisely, English as he wished to hear it."

(emphasis as in the original)

Interestingly enough, she mentions that in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations only citations of the Bible are presented with the same treatment as that given to Shakespeare's citations. I mention that because there is another who I credit with a comparable importance in having made the English language so powerfully versatile and expressive: William Tyndale.

One of the most important keys to understanding both the work of Shake-speare as well as the mind and personality behind the work and why, in each, the most compelling reasons point us to the person of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is to be found in putting together a number of facts, of pieces of circumstancial evidence.

First, there is Edward's family name, “de Vere,” a name which, in
the Latin-based intellectual world of the time, resonated both figuratively and
literally with the English translation of its root: "truth."

It is not mere speculation to suppose that Edward was powerfully aware of his name as
the cognate of "Vero," and of "Verius," since his own motto was "Nihil Vero Verius"--"Nothing Truer than Truth" (Ogburn, Jr., 1983).

Truth resounds as a key element of the conflicts which drive the themes and the action of
the plays and is a key to the meanings of so much throughout his poems and plays and
in understanding his life's key moments and how these came to inform and influence his literary work.

Next, we take these factors and place them within the psycho-social context of Elizabethan court society the world in which Edward lived by noticing certain facts exposed by, perhaps among others, M. M. Mahood in her
book, Shakespeare's Wordplay, where, in chapter VIII, at pages 169-170, she writes,

{ Chapter VIII : A World of Words
1 }

( @ p. 169)

"The Elizabethan attitude toward language is assumed rather than
stated, and is therefore much easier to feel than to define. Like Plato, the Elizabethans believed in the truth of names, but whereas, according to Socrates
in the _Cratylus_, these right names had been given by “the
legislators”, to sixteenth-century ways of thinking, the right names of things had been given by God and found out by Adam. In a play on the Creation acted at Florence in the seventeenth century, Adam takes a very long time to name the property trees, stars, and the like.

It is (p. 170) tedious for the modern reader, but clearly it was exciting for the contemporary spectators when they heard Adam guess all the names right. Even
after the seventeenth century as a whole had decided that names were arbitrary and conventional,the Cabbalists went on hunting for the natural language of
Adam; and this notion of natural language was alive and meaningful for Coleridge, who enjoyed the anti-materialist, anti-rationalist undercurrents of late seventeenth-century thought.

Names, then, seemed true to most people in the sixteenth century because they thought of them as at most the images of things and at least the shadows of things, and where there was a shadow there
must be a body to cast it. This view of language has died hard. The argument of sixteenth-century astronomers that no new star could be discovered because
there would be no name to call it by, seems less fantastically remote from our ways of thinking when we recall that, in the present century, there were doctors who refused to accept Freud's clinical proof that men could have hysteria on the
grounds that the word was derived from and could therefore only apply to women.

The Elizabethan faith in the rightness of words is perhaps best seen in the way their preachers handle their texts. A simple piece of poetic parallelism is developed into two topics on the assumption that where there are
two words there are two things. If a word has several meanings they are shown, through the serious punning which so exasperated a later generation, to bear a
kind of transcendental relationship to one another. Name puns were serious for the Elizabethans on the same principle. The bearer of a name was everything the name implied; a notion not unknown among modern parents.

Given this belief in the truth of names, a belief in the power of words through sympathetic magic followed. Where there was a name there was a thing; therefore
names could conjure up things. There was, moreover, religious sanction for this traditional belief in the efficacy of words. The verbal authority given to the apostles by the Incarnate Word lived on in the Church's power to bind or loose.

'For curs wol slee right as assoilyng savith'

says Chaucer, and I think we are wrong to read our modern verbal scepticism into his words."

________________

"For curs wol slee right as assoillyng savith,"... *

"For excommunication will slay just as forgiveness saves,"...

* From the general prologue to The Canterbury Tales (at line 661)

(Harvard Univ. On-line interlinear Chaucer text's gloss on this phrase.)

Link: https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/gp-par.htm

>95 proximity1:

Fair enough (removes tanks from Proximity's lawn)

>93 proximity1: >96 proximity1: >97 proximity1: >98 proximity1: >99 proximity1:

You must think I have nothing better to do than imbibe all this orthographical vomit, including the pages you link to. Whereas you made it clear that you hadn't even paid attention to the post you were replying to. You disgorged hundreds of words to refute a claim that I never made, for instance.

So I hope you'll excuse me for not wasting more time on Oxfordian arguments at the moment. I've decided to follow up the much more diverting case that "SHAKE-SPEARE" was actually an Arab immigrant to England, originally known as SHAYKH ZUBAYR.

It seems that his works are teeming with textual clues to his true identity.

>101 Muscogulus: _et al_

"You must think I have nothing better to do than imbibe all this ..."

Far from it. On the contrary, I take it for granted that _you_ set your priorities, manage your time and determine whether, when and how to comment.

The "beauty" of this medium is that it allows this. It's here, "ready when you are" (as well as when you're not).

Then, too, there's the fact that this is an open, public, discussion. Everything I post here is intended for the consideration of all interested readers, present and future. Thus, this post can serve not only as information on these points for you but for any others as well.

Not being a Stratfordian, I rely on others who are-- to present their views, exposing as they are bound to do the weaknesses and inconsistencies and errors of their views. All of that, too, is also for the general readers' consideration.

_____________

RE: Your SHAYKH ZUBAYR,

I am skeptical. T. Thorpe (or some other) apparently did not go to amazing lengths to contrive a dedication in which his (Zubayr's) name is discovered contained in a cryptogram. In addition, since I know nothing else about him than your mention, I must wonder, as I do in the case of the mythical young illiterate country clod from Stratford:

Why should SHAYKH ZUBAYR be supposed to have written sonnets 1 through 17, and sonnets 72 and 76? And why shouldn't he have written and published under his own name? What did he have to be mortally ashamed about?

Oxfordians have clear and reasonable answers to all these questions while Stratfordians have to ignore or evade them.

Was he fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian and French as well as English and, I suppose, his native Arabic dialect? If so, then, it being the 16th C., I have to suspect that he was either some kind of nobleman or he was educated as though he was.

>102 proximity1:

My sarcasm went astray, so I'd better clarify. "Shaykh Zubayr" is the invention of a Lebanese humorist who jokingly proposed that this was the "true origin" of the name Shakespeare. He was only having a bit of fun. But human folly being what it is, the theory has been taken up in earnest by some, including the late Col. Qadhafi of Libya. One Iraqi scholar, Ṣafā’ Khulūṣī, felt it necessary to write The Arabness of Shakespeare (عروبة شكسبير), a detailed refutation of the Shaykh Zubayr theory. (I get this from the blog Shakespeare in the Arab World.)

And yes, Zubayrians have found numerous "hidden clues" in Shakespeare's texts to his true identity as an Arab. That might inspire a little humility about our ability to deduce biographical facts by reading between the lines of the sonnets.

ETA: The blog appears to have been wrong. According to Worldcat, Ibrahim Hamada (إبراهيم حمادة) is the actual author of The Arabness of Shakespeare: new studies in drama and criticism (عروبة شكسبير : دراسات أخرى في الدراما والنقد).

>103 Muscogulus:

It was understood to have been facetious--though I did not guess the angle with the Lebanese comedian. That's funny! And so are you.

But you're also much too smart to think that this offers us anything of a valid analogy. You know it does not. Humor aside, it has _zero_ probative value.

There is nothing surprising, of course, about the fact that many nations would like to be able to claim "Shake-speare" as their native son. (How ironic! Burghley was so concerned.)

When I mention my interest in Shakespeare to Italians, some tell me he was Italian: viz, Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza.

By the way: I do not subscribe to the "Prince Tudor theory". Just so that's clear. Some Oxfordians do and it's embarrassing.

"That might inspire a little humility about our ability to deduce biographical facts by reading between the lines of the sonnets."

Now that, coming from a confirmed Stratfordian, is funny.

Orthodox (Strafordian) Shakespeare scholars remind me of "Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau" for their "skills" in detection. If we had to depend on these sleuths, we'd still be trying to figure out who shot Lee Harvey Oswald.

SONNETS I - XVII

The "procreation" sonnets--
_______________

To begin, a group of seventeen sonnets, the first seventeen—and all them on a single theme. They are written, and apparently addressed, to a young nobleman, Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, who, it happens, is himself only about seventeen years old at the time.

In these first seventeen sonnets we find a very straightforward appeal being urged by the sonneteer to his addressee: marry and procreate.

So we have every good reason to suppose that the author has some powerful interest in this matter. What, then, is the motivation for the young fellow from Stratford, only in his mid-twenties by the reckoning of many scholars (who have dated the sonnets as being written from the late 1580s to the beginning of the 1590s) and supposedly not that very long since arrived in London?

Why this particular focus—even assuming the highly improbable notion that these two people could have ever formed so close a relationship as to produce this sort of intimacy—rather than some other? Why is that a young man who is himself only about nine years senior to his addresseee is so very focused on that seventeen year-old nobleman's prospects for marriage and fatherhood?

Wouldn't a pair of young men such as these have been much more likely to have been sharing their interest in the quest for enchanting and seducing attractive, young, eligible women of London instead? That is what most close friends, as young men of 17 and 26, would be doing in our time.

Why should Elizabethan England, admittedly very different from today in innumerable other ways, have been so different in this particular respect from our times? Today, young people of the social class of a young nobleman such as Henry Wriothesley still go carrousing, still play at amorous games of mutual flirting and seduction with the objects of their amorous interests and still get into mischief doing these things.

Here, we find the only-slightly-older one urging his younger friend to skip all that and go right to marriage and to fatherhood. Again, why?

Then, notice this strange thing in Sonnet III

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remembered not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee

It's of course the bold-face text that is the object of my point for the moment.

It certainly seems to suggest that the author here is speaking of something from his personal experiences of this youth's mother's younger days

Henry Wriothesley's mother, Mary Wriothesley, Countess of Southampton, was born 22 July 1552 and died October/November 1607 (Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wriothesley,_Countess_of_Southampton). Are we to suppose that the author of the sonnets remembered those youthful days of Mary Wriothesley? The sonnet clearly suggests as much. How do we square such a memory with the picture given us of the young man from Stratford, making his way as a young unknown in London, circa late 1580s?

This sonnet is telling us that its author was someone who was able to look back on his own memories of the young Earl's mother--in "the lovely April her time." It tells also that in the present in which it is written, that time is past. It tells us that this author lived through that past and that now, he looks upon this young man and sees what he recalls of the young man's lovely mother as a young woman.

(more to follow)

Sonnet IV

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tomb'd with thee,
Which, used, lives th' executor to be.

Here we find Shakespeare addressing his correspondent--the young Earl of Southanùmpton--

as... "beauteous niggard" ...

as "Profitless usurer"...


Could you address a member of the nobility in such terms today? How about doing so in 1580 - 1590?

---

Sonnets V & VI


Sonnet V

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap cheque'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where:
Then, were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Sonnet VI

Then let not winter's ragged hand deface
In thee thy summer, ere thou be distill'd:
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty's treasure, ere it be self-kill'd.
That use is not forbidden usury,
Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
That's for thyself to breed another thee,
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;
Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,
If ten of thine ten times refigured thee:
Then what could death do, if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
Be not self-will'd, for thou art much too fair
To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

OF COURSE -- IN SUCH TERMS DOES THE ORDINARY 27-YEAR-OLD ADDRESS HIS NOBLE FRIEND OF SEVENTEEN. with a message that warns again and again, Beware Time's Scythe!

It's time to consider a different source of motivation for these sonnets--as it is no wonder that some have done just that.

As author, Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford, at once clears away the oddities otherwise facing us here.

At the time these sonnets are thought to have been written, William Cecil, Lord Burghley--who is both Edward's father-in-law and one Elizabeth's (i.e. the reigning Queen) closest (and most powerful) advisors--is at work trying to convince the young Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, to marry Elizabeth de Vere--Edward's eldest daughter, Burghley's grand-daughter--and Edward is just as much in favor of the match.

He'd be close to the age of Wriothesley's parents. He'd have been acquainted with the young Earl's mother and father, remembered them in their youth.
The young Earl of Southampton, like Edward, lost his father when just a boy. Wriothesley, like Edward, was raised as a ward of the royal Court in the household of William Cecil. Edward, at this time, has no son of his own, is a widower.

>105 proximity1:

You ask the same question three times, but I'll answer it once.

Q: Why is that a young man who is himself only about nine years senior to his addresseee is so very focused on that seventeen year-old nobleman's prospects for marriage and fatherhood?

A: He loves him. You object that a love relationship (not necessarily a sexual one; it's our modern bias to conflate intimacy with sexuality) is "highly improbable," though elsewhere you conceded that it is not so very strange. And it need not be commonplace in order for it to have occurred between these two.

Next question.

Q: Wouldn't a pair of young men such as these have been much more likely to have been sharing their interest in the quest for enchanting and seducing attractive, young, eligible women of London instead? That is what most close friends, as young men of 17 and 26, would be doing in our time.

A: Obviously this is not "our time" that we are talking about. As for the seduction angle, Shakespeare is having a bit of fun along those lines with the poem. The motifs you allude to — "Die single and thine image dies with thee", and so on — are the kind of thing often used in seduction poetry from men to women. So the association with sexuality and eroticism is present; it just isn’t spelled out in an obvious way.

Your complaint seems to be that Shakespeare doesn’t compose sonnets in exactly the same way that every other sonneteer of the period did. But his originality has a lot to do with why we still read his stuff much more avidly than we read the sonnets his contemporaries churned out in such numbers.

>106 proximity1:

Q: In Sonnet IV the poet addresses the Fair Youth (presumably the Earl of Southampton) as "beauteous niggard" and "profitless usurer." "Could you address a member of the nobility in such terms today? How about doing so in 1580 - 1590?"

A: Of course. The terms are exquisitely flattering in the context of the sonnet. Only when these epithets are ripped from their context can they be regarded as presumptous pr potentially insulting.

>107 proximity1:

About sonnets V and VI: OF COURSE -- IN SUCH TERMS DOES THE ORDINARY 27-YEAR-OLD ADDRESS HIS NOBLE FRIEND OF SEVENTEEN. with a message that warns again and again, Beware Time's Scythe!

There's no question here, just a shouted comment. You insist, once again without evidence, that the 27-year-old Shakespeare is "ORDINARY." It is imperative that you believe that, yet the proof consists only of an assumption that a person of an "ordinary" background must be "ordinary" in every way, at least in the 16th century. There can be no exceptions to this assumption; otherwise Shakespeare becomes plausible. And we cannot have that.

As for Time's Scythe: In the 16th century no one reached their 20s without having seen more than one corpse and been present at at least one deathbed. You were far more likely to have already survived some of your peers. Learned and pious men kept a skull on the writing table to remind them of their mortality, and this was not considered morbid.

Compared to the general fashion in Elizabethan England for melancholy reflections, these two sonnets are scintillating in their treatment of mortality. The first uses a metaphor of changing seasons; the second, an increase in wealth through usury.

>108 proximity1:

As author, Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford, at once clears away the oddities otherwise facing us here.

There are no "oddities" here, unless you find it odd for a non-noble poet to have an intimate friendship with someone of a higher station and to produce original verse that is also in tune with the times. As I’ve said before, these things only seem impossible to people with a static olden-days notion of English society in the decades around 1600.

So how many of the 154 sonnets dost thou intend to walk upon in these hobnailed boots of thine?

>109 Muscogulus:

"You object that a love relationship (not necessarily a sexual one { Note: agreed that it's not sexual for whatever that's worth }; it's our modern bias to conflate intimacy with sexuality) is "highly improbable," though elsewhere you conceded that it is not so very strange." (emphasis added)

No. I object simply that • there is no evidence that these specific individuals ever met, nor is there any reasonable likelihood that they could have ever met.

"And it need not be commonplace in order for it to have occurred between these two."

( True but irrelevant since we have no reasonable grounds to suppose that they did ever meet. It's an unfounded assumption on your part.)

"A: Obviously this is not "our time" that we are talking about."

Why suppose that, in this one specific characteristic of youthful male characteristics, the common impulses of youths their ages today did not equally hold then? What is it that you know about young men of their age in the 16th C. which makes them so unlike--in that respect--youth of our times? Is there something I've missed?

You invoke anachronisms as excuses when they're convenient and ignore anachronisms when, as problems, they aren't convenient.

"As for the seduction angle, Shakespeare is having a bit of fun along those lines with the poem. The motifs you allude to — "Die single and thine image dies with thee", and so on — are the kind of thing often used in seduction poetry from men to women. So the association with sexuality and eroticism is present; it just isn’t spelled out in an obvious way."

What "seduction" is implied there? The sonnets are imploring Wriothesley to _marry_ and _procreate_ --but not with the author.

"Your complaint seems to be that Shakespeare doesn’t compose sonnets in exactly the same way that every other sonneteer of the period did."

It's nothing of the sort. You should have understood that I admire the author's work. How can you be in this discussion and miss that! ?

"But his originality has a lot to do with why we still read his stuff much more avidly than we read the sonnets his contemporaries churned out in such numbers."

Of course. None of which has anything to do with your Stratford man.

>106 proximity1: proximity1:

Q: In Sonnet IV the poet addresses the Fair Youth (presumably the Earl of Southampton) as "beauteous niggard" and "profitless usurer." "Could you address a member of the nobility in such terms today? How about doing so in 1580 - 1590?"

"A: Of course. The terms are exquisitely flattering in the context of the sonnet. Only when these epithets are ripped from their context can they be regarded as presumptous potentially insulting."

A commoner --"context" or no "context" could not dare address such terms to a noble. The idea is ridiculous. Where is _any_ other even remotely similar example? I challenge you to produce one that went unpunished.

>107 proximity1: proximity1:

"About sonnets V and VI: OF COURSE -- IN SUCH TERMS DOES THE ORDINARY 27-YEAR-OLD ADDRESS HIS NOBLE FRIEND OF SEVENTEEN. with a message that warns again and again, Beware Time's Scythe!

"There's no question here, just a shouted comment. You insist, once again without evidence, that the 27-year-old Shakespeare is "ORDINARY." It is imperative that you believe that, yet the proof consists only of an assumption that a person of an "ordinary" background must be "ordinary" in every way, at least in the 16th century."

Absent any evidence to the contrary, yes. And not merely in the the 16th C. Where, again, are comparable examples?

"There can be no exceptions to this assumption; otherwise Shakespeare becomes plausible. And we cannot have that."

This, rather, states your dilemma. You must make an a priori assumption: that the names "Shake-speare" and "Shakespeare" refer to your Stratford man and could not refer to anyone else--since, otherwise, your Stratford man is seen to be implausible --and _you_ can't have that.

But you lack evidence that the names do in fact refer to your man. There is zero unsuspicious evidence that it does. And the suspicious evidence is so meagre as to be farcical.

"As for Time's Scythe: In the 16th century no one reached their 20s without having seen more than one corpse and been present at at least one deathbed. You were far more likely to have already survived some of your peers. Learned and pious men kept a skull on the writing table to remind them of their mortality, and this was not considered morbid."

Yes, but why does your fellow "love" Southampton in the first place? What's the motive of the affection? You have no conceivable motive other than a basic animal impulse for this young man's uncommon handsome face. So why aren't there others similarly smitten?

Were there other commoner "groupies" obsessed with Wriothesley's becoming a father? I've never heard of them.

"Compared to the general fashion in Elizabethan England for melancholy reflections, these two sonnets are scintillating in their treatment of mortality. The first uses a metaphor of changing seasons; the second, an increase in wealth through usury."

Bizarre! Of course they're wonderful. But we need not strain to make _that_ point. But what on earth is the connection between them and your stick-figure Stratford man? No one is denying that the person behind the name was a literary genius. They're slack-jawed at the idea that it is the Stratford man who is that genius. Again, yours is a baseless assumption. Without it, you have a name on a page and a "?" for the actual person it relates to.

"There are no "oddities" here, ...

Nonsense. Of course there are!

...unless you find it odd for a non-noble poet to have an intimate friendship with someone of a higher station ...

Of course I do. _Many_ people find it not only "odd" but absurdly preposterous.

...and to produce original verse that is also in tune with the times."

His verse is so far from being "in tune with the times" as to be, on the contrary, epoch-making. If there was one thing the actual author was _not_ it's "in tune with his times."

"The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

His very words. You don't hear this man. If you did, you'd be shocked to argue as you are doing here.

"As I’ve said before, these things only seem impossible to people with a static olden-days notion of English society in the decades around 1600 ."

Nonsense. There is no such thing. The notions of society then have run the gamut and gone "full-circle" more than once in the intervening centuries.

"So how many of the 154 sonnets dost thou intend to"... Treat ?

All that offer rich material for demonstrating the facts about who is and who is not the best candidate according to the best reasoning of the best evidence.

Thank you for asking that.

For next consideration:

SONNET XX

A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling,
Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

>47 proximity1:

In >46 Podras.:, I reported observations by John Dryden, a near contemporary of Shakespeare's, that few Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, Shakespeare not excepted, knew much about court manners. I concluded with the assertion, "An important point is that Shakespeare's writing betrays his common origin and Warwickshire roots far more than otherwise." In response, you wrote in part, "The fact is the exact opposite of that fatuous claim."

Thank you for asking for justification of my assertion, though the request seems peculiarly worded coming from someone who is open minded.

Here are a few observations drawn from Shakespeare's works:

Christopher Sly in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew makes mention of Warwickshire locations including the villages "Greet", "Burton Heath", and "Wincot", all of which were close to Stratford. Joan Lambert, an aunt of Shakespeare, lived in Burton Heath, and Shakespeare's mother was born in Wincot. A Hacket family, also mentioned by Sly, lived in Wincot. Sly also mentions a Stephen Sly who was a real servant of William Combe of Welcombe, yet another town near Stratford.

The names of three of the characters in Henry V are Fluellen, Bardolf, and Court. The same names appeared on the 1592 list of recusants that included Shakespeare's father's name.

Imogene in Cymbeline disguises herself as a boy whose master, she says, is "Richard du Champ" (IV.2). That name is French for "Richard Field". Field was a fellow Stratfordian who had moved to London and become a printer and publisher. It was he that published the first works of Shakespeare's that appeared in print, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

In The Merry Wives of Windsor, a comparison is made between the shape of a character's beard and the shape of a glover's knife (I.4). Shakespeare's father was a glover. Another glover's term, "cheveril", the kid skin used in making high quality gloves, appears in Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Henry VIII.

In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet's father personally involves himself with kitchen staff preparing for Juliet's marriage with Paris (IV.2 and IV.4), this in a household which must consist of hundreds of people including a whole hierarchy of servants, not counting the twenty additional cooks that are to be hired for the wedding. It is behavior that is much more likely to be found in a relatively modest household such as that of a Warwickshire gentleman than that of an aristocratic family such as Juliet's.

Shakespeare uses Warwickshire colloquialisms. Examples from Henry IV, Part 1 are "God save the mark" (I.3--God keep evil away, an expression of indignation), "a micher" (II.5--truant), and "dowlas" (III.3--dirty linen). Others are "unwrappered" (unfatigued or fresh--The Two Nobel Kinsmen, V.6), "ballow" (cudgel--Folio King Lear, IV.6), "batlet" (paddle for beating laundry--As You Like It, II.4), "gallow" (terrify--King Lear, III.2), "honey-stalks" (clover--Titus Andronicus, IV.4), "mobbled" (muffled--Hamlet, II.2), "pash" (smash--Troilus and Cressida, II.3), "potch" (poke or thrust--Coriolanus, I.11), and "tarre" (provoke--King John, IV.1, Troilus and Cressida, I.3, and Hamlet, II.2).

These are examples that came readily to hand and are only a subset of the greater number that I've run across but not bothered to take special note of over the years. A book could be written documenting all of the Shakespeare/Warwickshire connections in his works. None of this "proves" anything, but the occurrence of such things in his writing needs no explanation when the author is Shakespeare, the glover's son from Stratford in Warwickshire. If the author is proposed to be an aristocrat with no notable background in Warwickshire, then they require at least an attempt at justification. Unqualified denial won't do it.

For additional interesting facts, see Were Shakespeare's Plays Written by an Aristocrat?

>49 proximity1:

I'm ignoring the wildly distorted picture painted about Shakespeare and scholars' views and focusing only on ...

"Later, among the first printed renderings of the name, it was given as "Shake-speare"--the then as now commonly used way to indicate a pseudonym. Then, within only a few years of "Shakespeare" being given as the real name of the actual author, this idea was indeed doubted and challenged."

The claim that the use of a hyphen in names was a signal of the use of a pseudonym in Shakespeare's day is utterly false. From The Spelling and Pronunciation of Shakespeare's Name:

"Another common claim made by Oxfordians is that hyphenation was used in Elizabethan times to indicate a pseudonym; since Shakespeare's name was sometimes hyphenated, this is taken as evidence that people recognized it as a nom-de-plume. They fail to mention, however, that such an idea is completely unknown outside of Oxfordian (and earlier, Baconian) literature."

More important is why deniers cooked up that loony claim in the first place. They premise that it was necessary for the mythical "real" author of Shakespeare's works to remain anonymous. How to do this? Use a pseudonym, and then by means of the hyphen, tell everyone that it is a pseudonym. That is sure to keep everyone from thinking the author is someone else and becoming curious about who it is. Right!

The anti-Shakespearean rationale for secrecy in the first place is based on the idea that there was a stigma attached to the notion of an aristocrat publishing anything, plays especially. In Oxford's case, his identity had been blown in Francis Meers' Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598) in which it was said that he was among the best at comedy (his name is probably listed first because of his rank, not because of his talent). See Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical "Stigma of Print" for information about the real situation. By the time that James I was in power, himself the published author of multiple works, it should have been clear to anyone with doubts that being published wasn't a problem for anyone, as long as censorship lines weren't crossed.

By any standard, the idea that hyphens represent anything other than a printer's tool is a total bust.

>113 Podras.:

Excellent post.

>113 Podras.:

RE this,

..."More important is why deniers cooked up that loony claim in the first place. They premise that it was necessary for the mythical "real" author of Shakespeare's works to remain anonymous. How to do this? Use a pseudonym, and then by means of the hyphen, tell everyone that it is a pseudonym. That is sure to keep everyone from thinking the author is someone else and becoming curious about who it is. Right!"...

"The anti-Shakespearean rationale for secrecy in the first place is based on the idea that there was a stigma attached to the notion of an aristocrat publishing anything, plays especially. In Oxford's case, his identity had been blown in Francis Meers' Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598) in which it was said that he was among the best at comedy (his name is probably listed first because of his rank, not because of his talent)."

"They premise that it was necessary for the mythical 'real'
author of Shakespeare's works to remain anonymous."

Why do you write, "mythical 'real' author of Shakespeare's works".... ?

You do accept that there was a real author, don't you? Then what use is there in qualifying this as mythical? Or in putting "real" between quotation marks?

Your comment tries to portray the account given by Oxfordians as mysteriously peculiar:

"More important is why deniers cooked up that loony claim in the first place. They premise that it was necessary for the mythical "real" author of Shakespeare's works to remain anonymous."...

But there's nothing mysterious going on in that. Nobility of high rank could not violate the social taboos which their society regarded as essential to their status apart from commoners. Their claims--both implied and expressed--to be of a class apart from commoners could not be maintained unless those taboos were respected and, when seriously violated, the violations' perpetrators punished as examples.

Since, stripped of their fine clothes, their refined speech habits and their polished manners, it would be impossible to distinguish a member of the nobility from any commoner, it was essential that codes of dress, speech and manners be taught, inculcated and maintained. Had that not been done--and continued today--the distinctions by which the arbitrary class structure was marked out should have become more blurred and sooner so than they in fact came to be with the rise of the wealthy (working) merchant class. It wasnt merely published writing under their own names which the nobility could not engage in. Anything which was identifyingly typical of a commoner's lifestyle was barred to the nobility. Oxford, as a keen and iconoclastic observer of his own noble society, to which he belonged by birth, unlike his father-in-law, Lord Burghley, chafed under numerous of the taboos. That explains his frequent use of the motif of the noble character fleeing to some natural ldyll, far from the constraints of court life.

Yes. There was a taboo against publishing one's own writings under one's own name. So ranking nobility published their writings under assumed names. This was not unusual, it was the common way to publish without falling afoul of the taboo. Oxford was certainly not the only one who has done this.

Nothing about the mention of Edward Oxford by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury constituted "blowing" Oxford's "identity" since at no time throughout his life was Oxford generally known to common society as a published writer of anything. Commoners attending a public playhouse performance typically neither knew nor cared to know the name of the play's author. Only the rarest among them could have the entré to behind-the-scenes which they'd require in order to find out who wrote the play on the theatre's billboard. Very often, an average stage actor in an acting company couldn't have told a member of the audience the name--real or assumed--of the playwright. The scripts commonly bore no author's name and a player wouldn't have had either the rank or the nerve to insist upon being informed by anyone who could have known.

"By any standard, the idea that hyphens represent anything other than a printer's tool is a total bust."

"Shag-Bag, or Shake-Bag--A poor sneaking fellow; a man of no spirit: a term borrowed from the cock-pit."

See:
http://www.regencyassemblypress.com/Regency_Lexicon.html

"By the time that James I was in power, himself the published author of multiple works, it should have been clear to anyone with doubts that being published wasn't a problem for anyone, as long as censorship lines weren't crossed."

Putting it that way makes it seem like it was child's play to recognize and stay clear of those "lines." It was anything but that. There was nothing like our conceptions of free speech or press in 16th C. England. Nobles in public could not be touched by a commoner lest they be liable to prosecution for assault. Nor did a commoner dare to walk up to and address a lord or lady in public--assuming their way was clear and open to do so.

To cite just one example:

Footnote 32: "Northampton's touchiness resulted in Star Chamber hearings for three of the major writers of the period: Jonson for Sejanus, Chapman for The Tragedy of Byron and Wither for his satire, Abuses, Stript and Whipt for which he was condemned to prison by a Star Chamber dominated by
Northampton." (Source: Brennan, Michael: Literary Patronage in English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family , (London, Routledge, 1988) Cited in Hughes:
"No Spring Till Now: The Countess of Pembroke and the John Webster Canon"

(See : https://politicworm.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/hughes-no-spring-till-now1.pdf )

>112 Podras.:

..."If the author is proposed to be an aristocrat with no notable background in Warwickshire, then they require at least an attempt at justification."

For details of Oxford's rustic tutelage by Sir Thomas Smith,
See original scholarship by Stephanie Hopkins Hughes at her site, www.politicworm.com

E.g. 1)

https://politicworm.com/oxford-shakespeare/the-big-six-candidates/oxford-and-the...

2)

https://politicworm.com/oxford/oxfords-life-in-a-nutshell-birth-to-forty/life-at...

>116 proximity1:

Thank you for the links to Hughes' site. I found them to be ... interesting. At the core of Hughes' case is this from the first link:

'... Science knows that where hard facts are not available, conjecture, which it dignifies with the term hypothesis, is not only acceptable, it is a necessity, for without it physics would never have arrived at Probability, Relativity, or a thousand other stepping-stones to our present understanding of the universe.

Thus by acquiring enough “proxy data” to project the most likely nature of the missing content, we can create bridges of conjecture solid enough to connect those areas where established facts provide secure footage, and thus, finally, to a narrative that makes sense.'

It is valuable for a couple of reasons. First, it makes it clear that Hughes has no clue about how science works. By extension, that includes historical research, a subset of science. The second in the context of the post is that writing fiction and calling it history is acceptable to Hughes.

She does seem to value "hard facts", but my experience with anti-Shakespeareans is that only those that seem to support their case, often when distorted, are acceptable; e.g. cherry picking. Hard facts that contradict denier dogma are attacked. Goofy claims about their having been demolished are made. I've yet to see an example of a demolished hard fact or an argument that successfully demolishes one. The extant historical record remains intact in spite of its critics.

This link to Historical Method might be illuminating. Real historians have standards.

>117 Podras.:

"I've yet to see an example of a demolished hard fact or an argument that successfully demolishes one."

Yes, well, we understand how and why that should be the case with you. Like a tone-deaf choir-master who couldn't recognize a melody when one was played to him, you refuse to see what's right in front of your nose.

Orthodox Stratfordian "scholars" would be lucky to have an iota of Hughes' literary insight. But they don't.

So far, I'm still waiting to see a substantive response from you which addresses one of my points on its merits with something other than old and refuted nonsense.

>112 Podras.:

"I reported observations (>46 Podras.:) by John Dryden ...."

Yes, that's true, you did.

( from Wikipedia's (mobile version) page on Dryden:

" (Samuel) Johnson also noted, however, that 'He ( i.e. Dryden) is, therefore, with all his variety of excellence, not often pathetic; and had so little sensibility of the power of effusions purely natural, that he did not esteem them in others. Simplicity gave him no pleasure.' Readers in the first half of the 18th century did not mind this too much, but later generations considered Dryden's absence of sensibility a fault."

Note that, though Samuel Johnson is my favorite example of a person I regard as an over-rated and pompous literary twit, he at least had an interesting view on Dryden, a fifth-rate plodding hack of a poet who I suspect was immensely envious of Shakespeare's genius.

That you cite Dryden as an authoritative judge of Shakespeare's work speaks volumes about you.

>119 proximity1:
That you resort to insulting Dryden, Dr. Johnson and Podras as part of your "argument" speaks volumes about you.

>52 Muscogulus:

With regard to the possible subjects poets used in their sonnets, I find your post to be one of the most valuable that I've seen. I was generally aware that the fair youth, dark lady, and rival in Shakespeare's sonnets, though conceivably based on real people, may merely have been invented foils to display his poetic talents, modeled on the practices of other Tutor poets. However, this is the first time that I've seen other poets identified that may have been doing that. I very much appreciate having that and look forward to more reading in the future. Thank you.

>69 LesMiserables:

The Merchant of Venice is one of my favorites among Shakespeare's plays. I once saw it on stage with Hal Holbrook as Shylock; a brilliant performance. The if you prick us speech (III.1) is extraordinarily powerful. Also great is Portia's lecture to Shylock about the quality of mercy (IV.1). It is too bad that having spoken so movingly about mercy to Shylock, she subsequently shows him none.

There is one part of the play that I think may have made a special impression on Elizabethan audiences. It is when Shylock is stripped of his religion (IV.1). At the time that Merchant was written, roughly 1596, Elizabeth was aging and had no heir. The identity of an inevitable successor was so sensitive a subject that the very discussion of it was outlawed. Regardless, concern about it must have been prominent on people's minds. A concomitant concern would be what would happen regarding the state religion when she was replaced. Within living memory, mandated religious conversions had caused considerable disruption. Bloody Mary well earned her epithet, but she wasn't the only monarch executing people for religious reasons. Religious tensions were rising again, and the Catholic Church's fatwah against Elizabeth's life didn't help.

When audiences first saw Shylock's prized religion stripped away, I can't help but think that many may have wondered if a similar fate was in store for them; possibly again. There but for the grace of God go I.

>122 Podras.:

Interesting point Podras. We differ in our assessment of Portia: I believe she offered him everything possible and he deserved his dues.

Lots of other stuff to discuss in your post, but I'm half asleep so....

>120 Crypto-Willobie:

It's not "part of my argument," It's part of my self-defence from warrantless defamation and the deliberate distortion of facts.

I don't know how I could insult either Samuel Johnson or John Dryden as both are dead.

Now back to the programme....

Returning to Sonnet XX
To resume- - see >111 proximity1: for the verses-- or here below ;^)

What's going on in this sonnet?

It's addressed just as are the first seventeen to the "fair youth," Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton,

"A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; ..."

who, at the time, was a stunningly handsome young fellow with features that, the verses tell us, straddled the feminine/masculine "border" --figuratively speaking.

Typical of Oxford/Shake-speare, there are puns and allusions.

"A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling,
Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth."


"And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,"

"By adding one thing to my purpose nothing."

"But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure."

This is rife with multiple meanings.

"For a woman wert thou first created." ...

This is not--or not _only_-- "you were first made/intended/destined for the admiration and the satisfaction of of women, " but, rather, "Nature's first design was that you be a woman.

But that original plan went awry when Nature fell a-doting and instead "added one thing" --and by this one thing's addition "defeated" the author because this one additional thing is "to my purpose nothing" (*)--useless to him.

So, at one level of interpretation we might restate the verse prosaically as,

You--gorgeous youth-- were first destined to be a beautiful woman. But destiny's design was defeated--and my heart's desire with it-- because Nature, unable to resist, equipped you as a man--for women's pleasure, "pricked you out"-- endowing you with that device which is "to my purpose nothing"-- i.e. I, too, have "one of those" and thus, this addition is superflous to my needs. Would that thou hadst remained, according to Nature's first plan, a woman. But since you didn't, my loss is woman-kind's gain, and still my affectionate heart is yours to rule.

* "Nothing," it must be added, also could mean in Shakespeare's puns and allusions a specifically female part of human anatomy ("Much Ado About Nothing": Much Ado About 'N "O" Thing")

So, not as a primary message but, rather, and all the more incisive for that, secondarily, "by the way" his interests aren't those of one seeking a homosexual partner for the satisfaction of physically sexual desires.

And so much, then, for the speculation--or, in some, the conviction-- that Shakespeare was "gay." It shouldn't, of course matter to us at this point whether or not Shakespeare was "gay" --only that we do justice to what the evidence suggests--and, still better, what his own words tell us on this point.

>91 Muscogulus: "With no substantial evidence to rest on, the Oxfordian case has to be argued with a lot of hair-splitting and banging of fists upon tables." ... Not to mention never-ending distortions, sneers, and cheap shots at scholars, real ones, and anyone else who doesn't find anti-Shakespearean nonsense compelling.

In support of a small part of your excellent post, a lot is known about Collaboration in the Time of Shakespeare. I wouldn't call Thomas Middleton, responsible for the Hecate additions to Macbeth, a third rate hack, but I agree that he wasn't in Shakespeare's class. Shakespeare is also believed with a high degree of probability to have punched up plays attributed to others. The most notable example is Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. This article describes some recent work in that area.

The collaboration subject is part of the large body of evidence that Shakespeare was an active professional member of London's theatrical community and not an improvident, secretive aristocratic pretender huddled in fear of discovery in an ivory tower.

"An Oxfordian Response" by Stephanie Hopkins Hughes

(On the topic of Shakespeare's work as a collaborative effort)

http://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/Oxfordian2009_Hopkins_...

(The following citation is, as are all citations of Stephanie Hopkins Hughes' work excerpted here, the copyright of their author in whom all rights are reserved.)

"Not so long ago there was talk about a "group theory," that the works of Shakespeare were written by a number of writers who all published under his name, or perhaps a sort of committee effort, in which a play got passed around so it could be improved by each in turn. This notion seems to have been quashed, hopefully for good. This may be the way some mediocre works get written. Certainly no great work of art was ever made by committee."

>127 proximity1:
Has she ever seen a movie?

>128 TheHumbleOne:

You know? I'll just bet she _has_!

Her point is none the less true of cinema art.

Do you know any great film directors? Well, ask one--or read in their memoirs--about these supposed "committees" to which they turned at every crucial moment of creative decision. Expect to be laughed off.

You people really lack all sense of creative life and work, _don't_ you!?
I guess you'd have to in order to believe in such a fairy-tale as the Statford man as literary genius. More over, your detection skills and evidentiary-chain reasoning skills are nil.

Old fashioned French critics and their followers may well believe in auteur theory - but that is their problem. So may naïve hero worshippers - I wish them well with that.

But anybody who seriously believes the great Hollywood films weren't largely the product of a collaborative process is ever so slightly deluded - and yes, that includes Kane et al.

>126 Podras.:

Oxford huddled. Depend on it! His towers were made of stone, but he huddled--though not, of course, in fear.

..."Some say the Earl of Oxford is dead...." --Roland White in a letter to Robert Sidney.

(Cited, Hughes, supra)

126, 128 & 130:

You're straining to make a poor point : deliberately (?) confounding the subtleties of any solitary artist's "collaboration" with the ideas of joint-authorship, work-by-committee, etc.

Making a film is qualitatively different from writing a poem, a sonnet, a play or a short story or novel. In a film, directors have to work with other artists-- actors, cameramen, sound and lighting artists, to produce the desired results. But it's the director who determines what these desired results ought to look like before they're produced; and it's the director who determines whether the desired results have been achieved.

A writer draws on his life's experiences, his reading, all his learning by whatever source it may have come to him--though, strangely, Sratfordians are apparently ready to forget this when it's convenient: supposing that a rustic commoner with zero entré to the life within the court of Elizabeth, nevertheless gave us, in his work, what constitutes, for many ever since, practically the totality of any ideas of what such life is actually like-- in a real sense, these comprise the collaborative elements of even the most solitary of writers.

Nowhere in any of that is there room for the sort of collaboration which is done by a group, a committee, wherein the direction and motive force of the written work is derived from multiple "cooks" all revising the recipe even as the pot hangs over the fire.

Editors there are--or sometimes were; and their work can help improve a text--or harm it as has often happened. But an artist of any significance cannot and will not surrender more than a tiny fraction of his creative prerogatives once he's beyond the earlist stages if his intellectual development.

And a "Shakespeare" who's past his own formative years--and he had them-- won't suffer any such hindrance of his artistic drive.

I accept as natural that Edward Oxford was influenced by many people--both those in his entourage and those authors, living and dead, whose work he read and admired. These were in a true sense his "collaborators." But they had no preemptive authority over his decisions as a creative artist.

Other writers, both then as well as before and since, have presented, between them, the full gamut of intellectual dependence and independence. But they don't primarily concern us here--except as a comparative distraction.

---

By the way, à propos these issues,
-- for the playwright whose work concerns us here-- though a clumsy stage production or actors of deplorable talent can mar the experience of the audience in attendance, those faults do nothing to lessen the quality of the play as it exists on the page--for the discerning reader with the eyes to see and the ears to hear. For the undiscerning reader there is no help. Only a life in orthodox academic Shakespeare scholarship.

There you go - I used to spend far too much of my time moaning about deficiencies which had undermined my theatrical experiences. However I came to prefer the attitude of my late friend, Frank Benson (no not that Frank Benson), who always said that he had never seen a Shakespeare production from which he didn't gain something which deepened and enriched his experience. He looked for that enrichment and found it. Those of us who search for faults will doubtless be successful in that quest - and much good may it do us.

More generally a play is a play - it is not a dramatic poem.

Meanwhile though - back at the cinematic coalface - you seem to imagine a world in which every director is a dictator, merrily tearing pages from the script when behind schedule, having every actor undertake untold retakes and sitting in the cutting room making every decision up until the final cut. This simply doesn't relate to the real world - any more than the author of a play can dictate every aspect of that play either on a real stage or, for that matter, the play you are fondly imagining can be set within the aspic of your imagine as you study it on the printed page.

>127 proximity1: >132 proximity1:

Planned collaboration (as distinct from 'committee' work) was a common practice in the 16th and 17th century theatre. Some of the most highly regarded Eliz/Jac plays are by collaborating authors, including...
- Eastward Ho by Chapman, Jonson and Marston
- The Maid's Tragedy and Philaster by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
- The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley
- The Honest Whore and The Roaring Girl by Middleton and Thomas Dekker
- The Witch of Edmonton by Dekker, Rowley and John Ford

Marlowe collaborated. Webster collaborated. John Fletcher, who was regarded by contemporaries as greater than Shakespeare (and wiser in the ways of courts and gentlemen) collaborated, mostly with Beaumont or Philip Massinger, on about three dozen of his 50-some plays.

Your inflexible assertions to the contrary about "great art" don't make it so...

I am also mildly curious as to the status of lieder, opera and common or garden song when it comes to this off-hand dismissal of joint work. But only mildly - don't feel compelled to answer.

>134 TheHumbleOne:

..."you seem to imagine a world in which every director is a dictator, merrily tearing pages from the script when behind schedule, having every actor undertake untold retakes and sitting in the cutting room making every decision up until the final cut. This simply doesn't relate to the real world - any more than the author of a play can dictate every aspect of that play either on a real stage..."

If I gave that impression, it was certainly unintended; allow me me to correct it. While I think there are certainly some directors such as you described, I've never intended to suggest that they're all like that. There are, as in other artistic fields, all kinds of film directors--from the tyrannical to the convivial.

>135 Crypto-Willobie:

It's time to avow that I have recently read and found utterly compelling the evidenced reasoning from Stephanie Hopkins Hughes' article on Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, as the actual author behind the name John Webster --who, for a fee, lent the Countess the use of his name.

They became acquainted as Webster's family were prosperous coach makers--a trade which served, of course, the nobility and the wealthy merchant class.

Hopkins herself does not claim this as an indisputable fact. Rather, she considers it the most plausible in view of the evidence she masterfully marshals to demonstrate this case.

I feel confident that she is correct. Mary Sidney did, I believe, write the work attributed to John Webster.

There are undoubtedly other such cases. Nobles wrote. They had the education, the opportunities, the needs and the time and resources to do so. That this fact has not been long-acknowledged is due to whom and to what?

It is mainly due, I believe, to orthodox Shakespearean scholars' needs to eschew that line of reasoning in order to protect their preposterous theories about Shaksper of Stratford on Avon.

RE:

"Marlowe collaborated. ... John Fletcher, ... collaborated, mostly with Beaumont or Philip Massinger,....

They may indeed have. None of this has to mean that the author of "Shakespeare" did, too.

"Your inflexible assertions to the contrary about "great art" don't make it so..."

Right. No more than Dryden's opinion about the poverty of Elizabethan playwrights' representations of court life makes that claim "so" as to Shakespeare's work.

When one mistakes "the mask" for the person behind it, the way is opened to all kinds of outlandish misinterpretations of the meanings of the evidence and the author's intentions in his writings: "Shakespeare was homosexual," "he wrote plays to support himself," "he was in tune with his times," "he didn't really care what became of his writings after his death" and so on.

>138 proximity1:

ROFL !!!

When the comments about collaboration among Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, including Shakespeare, were posted, distractions were immediately brought up. The idea of committees being playwrights, a straw man if there ever was one, was panned as if it was relevant to the quality of Shakespeare's works in collaboration with others. It isn't. Nor is the unrelated anti-Shakespearean fiction of Hughes.

The collaboration evidence is a subset of the much more significant fact that Shakespeare, the writer, was a working professional and insider in London's theatrical community--a concept that is anathema to anti-Shakespearean dogma. This is shown in many ways.

Shakespeare was a collaborator. See Collaboration in the Time of Shakespeare, recent evidence about Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and >135 Crypto-Willobie:.

Early published versions of some of Shakespeare's plays sometimes use actors names in place of character names in speech prefixes. Will Kemp portrayed Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and at least twice, his name was used instead of Dogberry's. There are several other instances of this in the plays.

There are numerous instances in which the physical description of characters matches those of actors known to play in Shakespeare's company.

Shakespeare's writing style for comedic parts changed when Will Kemp, known for his improvisations (criticized in Hamlet), was replaced by Robert Armin who also had a very different acting style.

The five act structure became a standard part of Shakespeare's plays written after The King's Men began performing in Blackfriars in 1609. This was needed to allow time between acts to trim candles.

The addition of the Blackfriars venue allowed more sophisticated music and special effects, both reflected in stage directions in the plays.

All of this is ample evidence that the ivory tower playwright imagined by anti-Shakespeareans is not just impractical, it is virtually impossible. This is especially true of the changes that occurred in the plays many years after a certain Earl passed away.

"Early published versions of some of Shakespeare's plays sometimes use actors names in place of character names in speech prefixes. Will Kemp portrayed Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and at least twice, his name was used instead of Dogberry's. There are several other instances of this in the plays."

"There are numerous instances in which the physical description of characters matches those of actors known to play in Shakespeare's company."

If you refer to the so-called "bad quartos" then please indicate that. If you mean well-worn manuscripts
of plays, please indicate that. I
can't tell what you mean by "early published versions." But, to the extent that such sloppy stuff appeared and persisted, it's compelling evidence that the real author was not involved. Why not? Where was your man? Did he simply not give
give a damn?

There is no evidence that the Stratford man ever _had_ an acting company.

"All of this is ample evidence that the ivory tower playwright imagined by anti-Shakespeareans is not just impractical, it is virtually impossible."

No, it isn't. Even less is it supportive of your views. Oxfordians do not claim that Oxford led an "Ivory tower" existence. That's straw-man bullshit peddled here by _you_.

--------------
EDITED TO ADD : THIS SPECIAL NOTE TO THE GENERAL READER HERE:

I advise you to be on your guard against any representations by "podras" in this thread which concern Edward Oxford or the views of Oxfordians. Such representations are in loaded language, calculated to distort the facts and produce a false impression.

>141 proximity1:
In fact, none of the argumentative fantasies offered by prolixity1 are worth spit. There is plenty of context-appropriate evidence that Shakespeare the player from Stratford wrote (or in a few cases co-wrote) several dozen plays for the acting company he worked with, as well as two popular narrative poems and a series of sonnets. There is NO EVIDENCE (according to the usual definition of that word) that Oxenford had anything to do with the Folio plays and the Shakespeare poems. Nada. Zilch. It's nothing but a series of speculative scenarios and purposely misinterpreted 'evidence', conjured up to lead to a foreordained conclusion, and supported by nothing but assertion and a debating style worthy of a Republican presidential contender.

Furthermore, almost every complaint about logic, perceptiveness, taste, credibility (etc) that p1 and his cabinmates makes about Shakespeare's supporters really applies to themselves. They don't listen to reason because they don't want to -- their minds are made up. What an enormous waste of time all this crap is.

>142 Crypto-Willobie:

I'll soon resume consideration of the sonnets following a reply or two to these interruprions just above.

RE:

"In fact, none of the argumentative fantasies offered by prolixity1 are worth spit."

That's a judgement I am happy to leave up to the readers who happen to come to this thread. May they decide for themselves what merit my posts here have.

"There is plenty of context-appropriate evidence that Shakespeare the player from Stratford wrote (or in a few cases co-wrote) several dozen plays for the acting company he worked with, as well as two popular narrative poems and a series of sonnets."

All of this evidence alluded to here bears the marks of having been trumped up, created after the fact rather than having found its place in the normal course of contemporaneous events as they unfolded. Wherever there are documentary indications, they look on the page as though they've been squeezed in on a document which did not originally bear those indications. All this is detailed in J. Thomas Looney's and Charlton Ogburn Jr's main work on Edward Oxford as Shakespeare. If the documentary evidence in favour of Shaskper of Stratford weren't both meagre and obviously suspicious un its authenticity, the case for Oxford could never have survived, let alone flourished and captured larger numbers of adherents with each new generation.


"There is NO EVIDENCE (according to the usual definition of that word) that Oxenford had anything to do with the Folio plays and the
Shakespeare poems. Nada. Zilch."

Other than, that is, his being their most obvious author--leagues ahead of any other candidate. Everything about De Vere's life squares with the messages and the themes and the events of the plays and, as we'll see below, upon resuming, of the sonnets.

De Vere had died before the publication of the First Folio. it is obvious that he couldn't have personally supervised its preparation or check and approved its final form. That, too, argues in Oxford's favour since it explains why the Folio contained errors and problems which, had the real author been alive and aware, should never have survived his review.

"It's nothing but a series of speculative scenarios and purposely misinterpreted 'evidence', conjured up to lead to a foreordained conclusion,"...

Let any fair-minded person read the Oxfordian case's portrayal in full and judge that claim for himself or herself.

Sonnet XXXVII

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in thy parts do crowned sit,
I make my love engrafted to this store:
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised,
Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give
That I in thy abundance am sufficed
And by a part of all thy glory live.
Look, what is best, that best I wish in thee:
This wish I have; then ten times happy me!

Let's recall that that Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, was born October 6th in 1573. Stratfordian scholarship holds, based on a baptismal entry, that William Shakespeare had been born In April of 1564, nine years and a scant six months earlier.

Thus, in this sonnet we have an author likening his perspective on the object of his most devoted affection to that of a decrepit father delighting in his active child--not his infant child but a child now of an age capable of demonstrating some matured abilities.

He needs these vicarious satisfactions because, "made lame by fortune's dearest spite,"... he has suffered in ways which he characterizes by the imagery of being left as one "lame, poor, ... (and) despised."

This condition, moreover, is not deserved; it's the fruit of fortune's spite--he has been unlucky and is now comparatively hobbled, poorer and in disrepute.

Now try and imagine that Shaksper of Stratford had written and sent this to Wriothesley, the Earl about whose love for him Shakespeare had described (In bold italics below) only eight sonnets previously this way (already in the melancholy state in which he wrote (above) XXXVII -------note the following plain italics ) :

Sonnet XXIX

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

This is man who, from the depths of his own despair at being badly wronged by fickle fortune, finds and takes his only comfort from the recollection of Wriothesley's love for him--or else for whom if not for him?

Restated, the author writes an appreciation to Wriothesley telling him that, through these bleak times, it's Wriothesley's love alone that has sustained him. This is a powerful statement indeed. Not only is Wriothesley the lord of Shakespeare's love, Wriothesley, in turn, loves Shakespeare with such an effect that Shakespeare would scorn to trade his state in "such wealth" with that of "kings."

Unless that is just a load of infatuation-inspired hyperbole, it represents to us this picture: a man who knows of his own devotion to his dearest friend, who knows of the devotion to him from his dearest friend and knows so well the realities of a sovereign's life circumstances that, even if he could trade the former for the latter, he would scorn to do so.

Just how we fit William of Stratford into this picture and at the same time keep our common sense and our knowledge of life and of human nature I confess I do not understand--unless, that is, William is a stand-in as a name only, a mask for another who, unlike William of Stratford, saw his reputation fall, rather than rise, saw his gross wealth seriously diminished through remarkably bad luck rather than mount from next-to-nothing to make of him one of the most prosperous merchants of Stratford, and who had the closest acquaintance with noble life, allowing him to judge its value as inferior to the value if a single peer's affection rather than a young man who came from the humblest of social origins and on all likelihood, never encountered a nobleman until the occasion arose to serve as mask for one with in return, the chance to do what all we really know about him suggests he most cared for: not to write, not to read or study and not to live a life in direct association with theatre but, rather, the opportunity to pocket some money by keeping his mouth shut and doing nothing at all.

>144 proximity1:
"All of this evidence alluded to here bears the marks of having been trumped up, created after the fact rather than having found its place in the normal course of contemporaneous events as they unfolded."

No, it doesn't. Only when you twist it and reinterpret it for your own ends.

"Other than, that is, his being their most obvious author--leagues ahead of any other candidate. Everything about De Vere's life squares with the messages and the themes and the events of the plays"

That's not evidence, it's fan-fiction.

>145 Crypto-Willobie:

The evidence is detailed in the texts which those who are reading this thread will have seen cited --and drawn upon by me in my posts.

The evidence, in short, which you claim to have read and which is lost on you.

Philosophical question: If an anti-Shakespearean is in the midst of a dense forest of evidence contradicting his/her beloved dogma but refuses to look, does that make the evidence go away?

It may be useful to link to The Shakespeare Authorship Page again for the benefit of those who choose to look. A subset of that extremely useful and fact laden site, How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts is especially good for those wishing to see some of the most important facts unequivocally establishing Shakespeare, the glover's son from Stratford as the author of the works bearing his name.

As an added note, I very recently stumbled on yet another useful fact connecting Shakespeare of Stratford with Shakespeare of London, a connection that some anti-Shakespeareans insist doesn't exist. One of the two law suits Shakespeare filed to recover funds owed to him was against John Addenbrooke. The case was settled on June 7, 1609 in Shakespeare's favor. In the Stratford court's papers documenting the settlement, Shakespeare is described thusly: "generosus, nuper in curia domini Jacobi, nunc Regis Anglie." The Latin translates into English as: "gentleman, recently in the court of the Lord James, now King of England.” Recall that in 1604, Shakespeare, a member of The King's Men, had been among those made liveried servants of the king.

>147 Podras.:

The claims of the repeatedly-referred-to "Shakespeare Authorship page" are without foundation or without relevance--or, sometimes without either of these.

The many references to a person named Shakespeare lack any credible connection as evidence that this Shakespeare was the author whose work is our topic here. You may dredge up every public record that you can find mentioning a "Shakespeare"--however it might be spelled--but none of that has been found to refer to anyone who can be reasonably thought to be our topic's author.

The above shall remain the reply to your next useless appeal to the Shakespeare Authorship page.

>148 proximity1:
"The many references to a person named Shakespeare lack any credible connection as evidence that this Shakespeare was the author whose work is our topic here"

Why? because you insist it is so? nothing means anything unless it squares with your 'opinion'?

But the authorial identity of Shakespeare the player from Stratford existed and was constructed the same way as any author's. If you deconstruct that because the alternative scenario 'seems' right to you, then no one can safely be held to have written anything that's been attributed to them. One might as well pretend that Oxford wrote the works of Greene and Golding and Lyly, or that Mary Sidney wrote Webster or... Oh wait! you do!

The whole Oxfordian project is laughable.

("The many references to a person named Shakespeare lack any credible connection as evidence that this Shakespeare was the author whose work is our topic here.")

>149 Crypto-Willobie:

Why? because you insist it is so? nothing means anything unless it squares with your 'opinion'?

Certainly _not_ merely "because I say so."

No. But, rather, because, in fact, there is a lack of any credible connection as evidence that this Shakespeare was the author whose work is our topic here.

"But the authorial identity of Shakespeare the player from Stratford existed and was constructed the same way as any author's."

False.

"If you deconstruct that because the alternative scenario 'seems' right to you, then no one can safely be held to have written anything that's been attributed to them."

False.

"One might as well pretend that Oxford wrote the works of Greene and Golding and Lyly, or that Mary Sidney wrote Webster ...."

If the best, most reasonable interpretation of the totality of the best evidence points to that view, then, yes, of course: not only "one could pretend that," one ought to pretend that.

I thought you'd said this forum was a waster of time. Is it now your objective to persist commenting in order to prove that to be true?

>148 proximity1:

For clarification, The Shakespeare Authorship Page reports a host of historical facts in addition to analysis. Everything it "claims" is solidly based on those facts. Those facts exist. They aren't going anywhere. Deny them all you want, but they remain uncaring, unfazed.

That Shakespeare's name, spelling variations notwithstanding, appears on the title page of many of the quartos, the octavo, and the First Folio of his works as the author is a fact.

That Francis Meres' Pallidis Tamia (1598) names Shakespeare for writing excellence in a number of areas, including sonnets and about a dozen of his plays by name is a fact.

That Meres' Pallidis Tamia names both "Edward, Earle of Oxforde" and Shakespeare as a separate individuals in the same paragraph is a fact.

That about 1601, a student play at Cambridge, The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, has characters named Kemp and Burbage who compare Shakespeare's writing favorably against other playwrights, including Ben Jonson, is a fact.

That on May 19, 1603, Shakespeare and others listed by name were licensed as The King's Men is a fact.

That Sir George Home, Master of the Great Wardrobe, issued four yards of red cloth each to Shakespeare and other members of The King's Men to be made into livery, showing they ware servants to the king, is a fact.

That on June 7, 1609, Shakespeare is identified as "gentleman, recently in the court of the Lord James, now King of England" in Stratford court documents is a fact.

That Leonard Digges' eulogy to Shakespeare in the First Folio refers to Shakespeare's Stratford monument is a fact.

That John Ward, Vicar in Stratford, wrote in notes discovered after his death in 1681 "... in his elder days \Shakespeare\ lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year" is a fact.

That these are but a tiny handful of the facts about Shakespeare and the authorship flapdoodle reported in The Shakespeare Authorship Page is a fact.

That I'm not doing this in an attempt to convince a worshiper at the alter of Looney and Ogburn of anything at all is a fact. It is for the benefit of others who have valid questions about authorship and have the curiosity and willingness to look at the facts.

That none of these facts is ever going to go away because of denials of their existence or validity, attacks on scholars, and sneers at anyone who disagrees with you, not to mention huffs and puffs in general, is a fact.

>151 Podras.:
Objection!, Your honor: "Asked and answered."

RE : " ... It is for the benefit of others who have valid questions about authorship and have the curiosity and willingness to look at the facts."

For their "benefit," huh?

Well, let these other readrs--who are most welcome here-- ask themselves why you've left ignored so many pregnant questions here. Let these others ask themselves how, under the Stratfordian view, they could adequately respond to the questions you and Crypto-Willobie and others here have ignored.

I am quite confident that every honest reader of this thread shall see right through you and the aburdities you present as "evidence." Let them read it! I am delighted that as many as possible resort to your links and read them--and then ask themselves if what they've read makes sense to them.

Then, let the most open-minded among them turn to Looney's and to Ogburn's texts or, indeed, go straight to Stephanie Hopkins Hughes' site,
www.politicworm.com and find there the whole picture of the Oxfordian case--without the deliberate distortions in your posts.

>150 proximity1:

"lack of any credible connection"

Credible to you, that is. But then your judgment is impaired by your addiction to fan-fiction conspiracy theories.

"If the best, most reasonable interpretation of the totality of the best evidence points to that view"

But it's "best" and "most reasonable" only to your impaired judgment. Using your fact-free "this really means that" approach you can arrive at any conclusion you desire.

Why do I bother? I usually don't. And I don't really expect you to listen to reason, anymore than I expect that of truthers, birthers, JFKers, moonlanding doubters, alien probers, Illuminatists and other true-believer descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. But it is a bit irritating to find one of my LT groups invaded by the crabgrass of smug delusion.

..., anymore than I expect that of truthers, birthers, JFKers, moonlanding doubters, alien probers, Illuminatists and other true-believer descendants of Jesus and Marty Magdalene."

Then take heart! because, with the exception of Marty Magdalene, with whom I am not acquainted, I'm on "your side" in each of those cases

Alas, the wacko conspiracies you deplore actually have _ more_ going for them than your views about the Stratford Shaksper as the author of "Shakespeare's" works.

RE:

"But it is a bit irritating to find one of my LT groups invaded by the crabgrass of smug delusion."

One of _your_ LT groups, huh? I feel your "pain", "pal."

Here, in

Sonnet XLVII

the author tells us, among other things, that he owns a painting of his beloved--

hardly surprising: Oxford had framed portraits and the wall-space in which to hang them. Shaksper had two beds, the second-best of which he left to his wife. To whom did he leave his portrait of Wriothesley? We are left to wonder.

Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took,
And each doth good turns now unto the other:
When that mine eye is famish'd for a look,
Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother,
With my love's picture then my eye doth feast
And to the painted banquet bids my heart;
Another time mine eye is my heart's guest
And in his thoughts of love doth share a part:
So, either by thy picture or my love,
Thyself away art resent still with me;
For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move,
And I am still with them and they with thee;
Or, if they sleep, thy picture in my sight
Awakes my heart to heart's and eye's delight.

"...better than high birth to me,...

Sonnet XCI

Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their bodies' force,
Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill,
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
But these particulars are not my measure;
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be;
And having thee, of all men's pride I boast:
Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
All this away and me most wretched make.

"But these particulars are not my measure;
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be;
And having thee, of all men's pride I boast:..."

Restated--

I have high birth, wealth, proud garments; hawks and horses I have . But better than all these which I possess is that of which I most boast--"thy love is better than" all these to me.

Note to the future reader:
Believe these, my verses, for they speak as true as is my own name true.

Sonnet XVII

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say 'This poet lies:
Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'
So should my papers yellow'd with their age
Be scorn'd like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice; in it and in my rhyme.

Either there's no real person as recipient of these sonnets--as, rather incredibly, some have tried to seriously contend--or there really is one, just as this sonnet's verses indicate and, as here, we find the author speculating on the how future readers shall read and interpret these verses.

How nearly prescient these lines! :

"The age to come would say 'This poet lies:
Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'
So should my papers yellow'd with their age
Be scorn'd like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage ....

Here, from centuries ago, he tells the reader that in this much he is to be taken at his word--these lines are not a joke, their inspiration is not a fiction.

How he'd tear his hair to have thought that, 400 years on, most readers cannot even get his own identity right--let alone reason rightly on the merits of his addressee! Burghley himself could not have belived things should have lasted so long--or have needed to.

Sonnet LXVI

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded* honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

(* Note: the M.I.T. site's Shakespeare texts have this sonnet with "guilded" while the original
1609 Quarto has the word "gilded"--which makes a better and more reasonable point. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_66#/media/File:Sonnet_66_1609.jpg )


Every one of these laments rings true coming from Edward Oxford's life as we know it.

By contrast, what, in the life of William Shaksper, was the occasion (or were the occasions) for his becoming weary with "beholding desert a beggar born"?

Why should he particularly lament "needy nothing trimmed in jollity"? After all, he was needy himself at some point and rather than begrudge the undeserving trimmed in jollity he could congratulate himself on his own trimmings in jollity--how much he actually deserved that is another matter. But, having the trimmings with really little to show for them, he's ill placed to begrudge others' undeserved trinkets.

Purest faith unhappily forsworn. I don't really have much of any idea about the Stratford Shaksper's "purest faiths." His purest devotion--that is, that we can actually document--seems to have centered on the pursuit of turning one shilling into two, two into three, three into four, and so on. Through good times and bad--which, exactly were Shaksper's "worst times"?--he continued to accumulate money. Malt, barley, wool and houses.
Of course his life was not entirely Idyllic. No one's life is. But here, our real author is referring to disgust at the common sight of others unhappily forswearing their purest faiths.

For each, it's not just a strain to make sense of country-commoner-comes-to-London-and-makes-good having been moved to write this sonnet, it's passing bizarre.

When reading the following we can easily imagine these faults and failings as part of the spectacle that made up court life--because these things are still common features of life in the heights of privilege and power :

● And gilded* honour shamefully misplaced,

● And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

● And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,

● And strength by limping sway disabled,

● And art made tongue-tied by authority,

● And folly doctor-like controlling skill,

● And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,

● And captive good attending captain ill ...

but, unless we mine the plays for suggestions and take these to relate to real-life events of Shaksper of Stratford, where do we find anything else in Shaksper's life to make consistent sense of this world-weary litany drawn from the realm of power and privileges run amok?

I invite the open-minded reader here to pose that question and try to imagine valid responses.

In your circle, reader, do you know of anyone of similarly humble origins as those of Shaksper? Do these laments ring true coming from his or her mouth?

Sonnet LXVII

Ah! wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?
Why should false painting imitate his cheek
And steal dead seeing of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Why should he live, now Nature bankrupt is,
Beggar'd of blood to blush through lively veins?
For she hath no exchequer now but his,
And, proud of many, lives upon his gains.
O, him she stores, to show what wealth she had
In days long since, before these last so bad.

A fascinating sonnet, this one. Because it appears at first so unusual in tone, manner of address and because the meanings are not obvious or readily easy to parse, it presents both interesting challenges and opportunities in seeing behind it to its rightful author.

(more later)

I'm currently reading Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife in which chapter 15 analyzes several of the sonnets. (Not discussed is 145 in which Shakespeare (probably) puns on Ann's maiden name, nor does she cover 134, 135, 136, or 143 in which Shakespeare puns on his own name. (136 ends with "... my name is Will".))

Greer makes a strong argument that 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 117, and portions of several others were written about and possibly to his wife, Ann (Anne) Shakespeare née Hathaway. (Greer argues that Ann may have been able to read if not write--there is evidence that a lot of men and women of the time could--but if she couldn't, then anything written to her could be read for her by others.)

Greer is well aware of alternate views about the Sonnets, but though she believes in hers, she isn't so rigid as to insist that none of the others have merit. This places her at odds with some anti-Shakespeareans who have strait-jacketed ideas about creative imagination; i.e. the conceit that only an aristocrat could have written the sonnets.

The issue isn't so much about which view is the correct one--as if that could ever be known--but whether, absent confirming evidence (e.g. historical facts), anything at all can be deduced about the author with certainty. It takes a pretty narrow-minded view of reality to think that it can. In the case of the authorship question, deniers find what they want to find and filter out anything else. In the words of an earlier post, "any argument that attempts to claim certainty about the author from the contents of the sonnets is blowing smoke."

For continued discussion on this thread's topics, please refer to the Edward de Vere and the Shakespeare Authorship Mystery group