The faculty at the University of Guelph’s School of English and Theatre Studies were less than pleased to learn that one of their colleagues, Professor Sky Gilbert, was supporting (with university cash no less) a conference on the controversial subject of Shakespearean authorship.
Along with York University’s Don Rubin, Gilbert used university funds (to which he was entitled as a member of the department) to help sponsor the Toronto Shakespeare Authorship Conference, which was held from Oct. 17 to 20. The conference gathered sceptics – some academic, though mostly not – from around the world to discuss the much-discredited idea that Shakespeare’s plays were, in fact, written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.
For nearly the whole Shakespearean community, there is no doubt that William of Stratford, otherwise known as William Shakespeare, is the true author of these beloved plays. For a fringe minority – so-called Oxfordians like Rubin and Gilbert – there is enough reason to doubt. The English faculties at both York University and the U of G are understandably worried that, by financially backing this dubious conference, their departments’ reputations have been publicly tarnished.
“If this makes big news and I go to a Shakespeare conference down the road, will people be looking at me, like ‘Oh, you’re from Guelph,'” Andrew Bretz, an English professor at the U of G, said to the Guelph Mercury.
“I think that it’s a real blow to the scholarly credibility of the university,” York University Shakespearean David Goldstein told the Globe and Mail.
Others tried to see a silver lining:
“If students get good information and can learn from being exposed to how academic red herrings like this get produced and disseminated… then I’m OK with it,” U of G English professor Daniel Fishlin said to the Mercury, after expressing his own concerns about these “incorrect points of view.”
The Ontarion believes that we should not give credence to the idea that William Shakespeare is anything other than the true bard. We must respect academic consensus on certain matters, and this is one of them. The Oxfordians, in this case, seem to share much in common with their contrarian cousins – climate change deniers – in their misplaced scepticism.
Yet aside from being a bit embarrassing for other faculty, this little drama raises a question perhaps more interesting than the authorship question itself: that is, why would two professional academics risk their reputations on so spurious an issue?
Gilbert explained part of his rationale for the Mercury:
“A lot of professors, unfortunately, instead of wanting to welcome new ideas, they try to defend their own research and not look at new ideas, because they’re afraid of change and they’re afraid of threats to papers that they have published.”
Gilbert has a point. Academics are protective of their research. And while this doesn’t mean they aren’t open to new ideas (as Gilbert went on to say, incorrectly), it does mean that academics are tasked with defending how well their research ‘contributes’ to the existing body of knowledge. Theories that would jeopardize these foundational bodies of knowledge are indeed threatening developments, as Gilbert said.
Yet, in modern times, these bodies of knowledge have become stronger and more comprehensive than ever. The temptation to find a fatal flaw in the design, to tackle the big topics once again, and not simply toil away in obscurity and esotericism, is greater as a consequence.
Natural contrarians and outliers like Gilbert and Rubin perhaps feel these temptations and oppressions more than most. The lure of doubt, the Other Way, and going against the grain has always been medicine for the mind tired of pedantry.
The problem is that Gilbert would have academics “welcome” new ideas by virtue of their mere existence. This is something that should not be encouraged. Ideas must duke it out, not be shepherded and made deaf to the incontrovertible evidence. While worries about demystifying the universe (or the works of Shakespeare in this case) might be emotionally appealing to some, those concerns are anathema to post-secondary education.
“Ideas must duke it out, not be shepherded and made deaf to the incontrovertible evidence.”
Thanks for covering the controversy! Let’s not be made deaf to the nuances of evidence, how so much of it depends on an observer to interpret. If you are biased towards William Shakespeare, born in Stratford, what you find will seem self-evident. Same thing holds for those who’ve come to believe that Oxford is Shakespeare.
If you refuse to allow yourself to be made deaf to the life of Edward de Vere, you may begin to see for yourself how often the plays of Shakespeare seem to mirror his affairs, always controversial, both in love and with the state. You may even begin to believe, as I do, that William Shakespeare must have been aware – as Sidney, Lyly, Greene, Nashe, Munday, Gabriel Harvey and others were – of the earl’s subversive presence in the London literary scene.
This article is an example of argument from eminence, rather than argument from evidence — a fallacy in logical thinking that is often resorted to by those in positions of power. And make no mistake about it: academia is powerful. To make matters worse, academia notoriously self-replicates, rather than self-corrects in response to evidence. Even so, there is a growing list of notables, and some from academic venues, who point out the weaknesses in the traditional story (reference the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt website). Even in the face of the fierce embargo that academia has placed on the authorship subject, increasing numbers of people are taking the time to study the historical information — and they have the personal courage to speak out on this issue. In this article and others, academics take the self righteous and self-serving position that the authorship subject is taboo because there is no question that they are right. But are they? Along with Professors Rubin and Gilbert, another distinguished academic who recognized the lack of evidence to support the traditional story that William of Stratford was the author of the Shakespeare canon is Oxford University historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. He wrote that “armies of scholars, formidable equipped” have come up empty handed after lifetimes of searching “for even a mention of his [Shakespeare’s] name.” There are no letters, no manuscripts or copies of manuscripts, no books, no evidence of education, no evidence that this person was paid to write, no notebooks, no diaries, no tributes at his death, and no miscellaneous notices of his proposed life as a writer. Some evidence of this kind exists for other writers and dramatists of the era, even though posterity has not made an equivalent effort to dredge up evidence for these lesser known writers. As Trevor-Roper noted, this man from Stratford has been the subject of the most intense historical investigation ever directed toward a single person. Could ALL of this possible documentation of the traditional story just happened to go by the way-side? Could it ALL just happened to have been lost if the story of “his” authorship were true? Is not this absence of documentation statistically impossible if the beloved traditional story were true?
“Controversial… much-discredited… fringe minority… dubious… tarnished reputation… academic consensus… academic red herrings… incorrect point of view… misplaced scepticism… embarrassing… spurious… “
These words, so generously applied to the Shakespeare Authorship Question as a whole and to the Toronto conference in particular, can also reference the milieu in which (let’s choose just one example, shall we?) Galileo labored to bring new ideas to light. Science clashing with Religion: Is there a more apt comparison? Evidence, theory, hypothesis all call into question the tenets of the 400-yr-old religion surrounding the Stratford god-among-men. The hierarchy, those embarrassed academics whose reputations have been tarnished, will not be contradicted. They are the arbiters of what constitutes incontrovertible evidence and the correct point of view. They alone are the ecclesiastical court enforcing the commandments and punishing those who transgress. To question their authority is anathema.
For shame!
To Whom it May Concern:
This editorial represents an embarrassment to the very idea of a university. It hearkens back to a day when when witches were burned for delivering babies or supplying herbal remedies for diseases.
If the anonymous writers cannot answer their own rhetorical question of why Professors Rubin and Gilbert, not to mention professors Felicia Londre (emeritus, theatre history, University of Missouri Kansas City), Jack Shuttleworth (retired chair, Air Force Academy, Department of English), Daniel Wright (Concordia University), Ren Draya (Blackburn College), Michael Delahoyde (Washington State University), William Leahy (Brunel University), Richard Waugaman (Georgetown), Geoffrey Hodgson (University of Hertfordshore), Donald Ostrowski (Harvard), Tom Regnier (University of Miami School of Law),Michael Wainwright (University of Birmingham, etc.), Charles Chaplin, Tryone Guthrie (first artistic director, Stratford Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir John Gielgud, Michael York, Leslie Howard, James Joyce, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, James Galsworthy, Marjorie Bowen, Orson Wells, Clifton Fadiman, Harry A. Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Mortimer Adler (heard of him?), Lewis Lapham, Malcolm-X, Dr. Sarah Smith (PhD, English), Richmond Crinkley (former educations director, The Folger Shakespeare Library), Louis J. Halle (Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva), Lynne Kositsky (MA, U of T.), Katherine Chiljan, Diana Price, Charles Burford, Ruth Loyd Miller, Charlton Ogburn, Bonner Cutting, Bill Boyle, Steve Steinburg, Mark Anderson, Dr. Heward Wilkinson (PhD, literature), Dr. Dr. Michael Hyde (PhD, English), Dr. Frank Davis (MD), Dr. Earl Showerman (MD), Henry Hallam, Alexander Grosart, W.H. Furness, Alexander Waugh (trust me, Prof. Bretz doesn’t want to debate *him*) Anne Rice, and many,many others, have all risked their reputations to advance greater public knowledge of the Shakespearean question, that’s because, judging by this flippant editorial, your local newsroom is as ignorant as dirt when it comes to the question at hand.
As the Stratford Ont. festival’s first Artistic Director, Tyrone Guthrie, wrote in 1962 in *The New York Times Magazine*:
There is a theory, advanced by reputable scholars, seriously and, in my opinion, plausibly, that Shakespeare merely lent his name as a cover for the literary activities of another person, perhaps the Earl of Oxford. (Cited in Hope and Holston, *The Shakespeare Controversy,* 204).
A little research might be in order, and I mean the kind of research that goes beyond asking the opinion of your Guelph English Department advisers. Judging by recent history these are so confident of the truthfulness of their own opinions that they are afraid to debate Dr. Gilbert, Dr. Rubin, or any of a number of authorship scholars, who would stand ready not only to defend their own point of view, but to expose the logical fallacies, factual lapses, and impressive history of the suppression of relevant evidence, on which the continuance of the orthodox view of the bard depends for its continued credibility.
You think that Shakespeare is not in doubt? Then why does Brunel University offer a Master’s Degree in Shakespeare authorship studies? To answer this question, try the lecture of Keir Cutler (PhD, English), delivered at the conference in question:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpc5A-14tmw&feature=c4-overview&list=UURzlWYW48RdhBZrS_ybq_UQ
Get the point now? This conference is not controversial because those who actually attended are, as your editorial condescendingly assumes, mentally defective wanabee intellectuals who milked Guelph and York out of money to conjecture about whether the moon landings were real or not, but because the presentations delivered there demolished the epistemological (look it up if you don’t know), logical, and factual bases for a view of Shakespeare that you, based on a pre-intellectual combination of argument from authority and ad hominem, want your readers to believe is sacrosanct. But since you editorialize against something an event you did not attend, about people whose research you have never read, merely because your local English professors told you it would be a good idea, it is not surprising that your editorial is so generous in its bizarre assumptions and so short on anything resembling a logical argument, using facts to derive a conclusion.
As Cutler says, if you are looking for the “DNA” evidence that something is rotten in the traditional view of the bard, you need not look beyond Cambridge University Press’s *Shakespeare Beyond Doubt,* a book assembled by representatives of the Stratford-upon-Avon tourist industry. The best arguments against the orthodox view of the bard, in other words, are the arguments made in favoring it by prominent apologists like Stanley Wells, James Shapiro, David Kathman, or Paul Edmondson, in a book that devotes three chapters to Delia Bacon but somehow manages to omit the last fifty years or more of scholarship the topic on which it makes pretense of enlightening its readers.
Google is your friend, but since you seem to be Google-challenged, here are a few links that may help you to recover from this embarrassing display of public prejudice. I dare you to spend some time reading, watching, or listening to the materials available on these sites. Consider it the homework that Profs. Fischlin, Bretz, and Goldstein said your dog should have eaten. Given sufficient attention to relevant detail, you may even realize that you owe Professors Gilbert and Rubin (among others) a public apology.
http://www.shakespearefellowship.org
http://www.theshakespeareunderground.com/
https://doubtaboutwill.org/declaration
http://www.firstfoliopictures.com/
If your University would like to host a real inquiry into this matter, including any combination of debates, panels, or courses devoted to further inquiry of relevant details, please consider me provisionally available. Since you do not yet have the benefit, like York, of a course devoted solely to examining the authorship question, your students may presently be less prepared to understand the nature of the evolving debate than are Dr. Rubin’s York students. Having studied the authorship questions as a topic of intellectual history (which is not the same thing as “studying” it as a Shakespeare scholar per se), I believe I can bring something to the table that, judging by the low level of the discourse exemplified in this editorial, may not be available locally.
Sincerely Yours,
Roger Stritmatter
MA, New School for Social Research, PhD, University of Massachusetts
Associate Professor of Humanities
Coppin State University
CV: http://shake-speares-bible.com/curriculum-vitae/
That man must be a real scholar: look at all the big words and bad grammar he used! No doubt academics are reeling after being “demolished” in such a manner (long-winded, verbose, wordy, pleonastic, discursive, rambling, drawn-out, overlong, lengthy, protracted, interminable, and silly come to mind).
Tom, thanks for fondling the pulse of academia for us.
Tom your continual barrage of sarcasm does a discredit to your intelligence. But for someone who thinks that scholarship consists of “correcting” original documents to make them say what you wish they had said, rather than what they did and do say, you certainly do get extra credit points for trying extra hard to insult those who are actually more well informed than you. You people long ago left off making real arguments and substituted the “argument from adjective” that is employed in your rather pathetic response. Keep on attacking the messenger as you are doing. I can only imagine that the more intelligent of the Guelph students are wonder if you have any answer to Kier Cutler. No, just more adjectives.
“But for someone who thinks that scholarship consists of “correcting” original documents to make them say what you wish they had said, rather than what they did and do say…”
The irony in these remarks is palpable. The entire Oxfordian “theory” depends upon “correcting” objectively straightforward documents so that they may say what the Oxfordians wish they might say, rather than what they did and actually do say. All of the direct evidence which identifies Mr. William Shakespeare, Gent., of Stratford as the author must be negated, and so it is twisted by Oxfordian contortionists to mean something other than what it says on its face. Many Oxfordians even seek to deny the evidence as to Shakespeare’s acting career as well, perhaps realizing that they must distance him from the theaters where the Shakespeare plays were performed and the acting companies that performed those plays, never mind the words of his fellows, Heminge, Condell, and Jonson, and the documentary evidence, all of which place him at the heart of the Shakespeare works.
On the other hand, the Oxfordians’ “positive evidence” for their Lord depends almost entirely upon subjective interpretations of literary works, which, again, are found [no surprise] to mean exactly what the Oxfordians would wish them to say, even if that may not be what the works actually say. These speculative interpretations of literary works do not qualify as evidence, but they are treated by Oxfordians as if they are, in fact, evidence.
Errr . . . sorry.
Did the ‘more intelligent Guelph students’ just railroad you out of town??
Insulting other people’s intelligence comes so naturally to you you have no idea when you are doing it. Do you?
Tom[insert comma] your continual barrage of sarcasm does a discredit to your intelligence. But[insert comma] for someone who thinks that scholarship consists of “correcting” original documents to make them say what you wish they had said, rather than what they did and do say, you certainly do get extra credit [points – eliminate word] for trying extra hard to insult those who are actually [more well – replace word, “better”] informed than you. You people [who do you mean, you people?] long ago left off making real arguments and substituted the “argument from adjective” that is employed in your rather pathetic response. Keep on attacking the messenger as you are doing. I can only imagine that the more intelligent of the Guelph students are wonder[add “ing”] if you have any answer to Kier Cutler. No, just more adjectives[sentence fragment].
I see some funny little anti- Stratfordians
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Toronto
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very fright’ning me
(Galileo) Galileo (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo figaro
Magnifico …
Sky Gilbert presented a paper at this conference which offers an excellent and original scholarly analysis of euphuistic discourse in Shakespeare with Lyly’s influence as well as the classical and medieval rhetorical and grammatical origins and aims of said poetic. Open-minded scholars of all stripes would have appreciated his insights. If the editorialist had done any research, her or she would have found that all or most of the presenters involved in the have appropriate scholarly credentials or have become independent scholars through long study, research and writing on their various topics. The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship practices an openness to new ideas based on careful research. We believe that most people can think and should think for themselves,which is the real goal of scholarship, not the defense of the same ideas over and over. Yes, Canadian students, you should think for yourselves and seek truth, not whatever it is some dogmatic professors tell you.
Prof. Stritmatter’s comment is one of the most articulate and comprehensive reviews of the authorship controversy I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
I most whole-heartedly agree. That’s why it’s such a fringe cult.
Prof. Stritmatter’s comment is one of the most articulate and comprehensive reviews of the authorship controversy I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
Did you read it? He calls the authors of the article ‘as ignorant as dirt’. It’s almost as offensive, though not as funny, as calling himself an academic.
Is it even possible to be Oxfordian of the Year and an academic at the same time?
Mr. Reedy, you obviously think that casting aspersions is a form of argument, and to, I suppose it is. Keep up the great work. For those who are wondering about the answer to you really stupid rhetorical question, here is my cv: http://shake-speares-bible.com/curriculum-vitae/
The list of publications is out of date but at least this may satisfy anyone dumb enough to be taken in by your serial insults that I am, like many of those named in my original posting, an academic, and also that my qualifications will stand up, any day of the week, against the Guelph Professoriate who, like you, will throw stones from their glass houses but will NOT DEBATE. Sorry, this is just cowardice. Why are you defending cowardice?
What does your CV look like? O, I forgot, you dropped out of your PhD program and have published a grand total of one “academic paper,” a paper now totally demolished on its merits by myself and Lynne K. in our book: http://www.shakespearesbible.com
Mr. Reedy, you obviously think that casting aspersions is a form of argument, and to[I’m not entirely sure what you mean to use here, but I suppose you mean to use the form “too,” as in, “as well”], I suppose it is. Keep up the great work. For those who are wondering about the answer to you[add “r”] really stupid[you really like big words, so I would have at least used “incredibly”] rhetorical question, here is my cv[capitalize]: http://shake-speares-bible.com/curriculum-vitae/
The list of publications is out of date[insert comma] but at least this may satisfy anyone dumb enough to be taken in by your serial insults that I am, like many of those named in my original posting, an academic, and also that my qualifications will stand up, any day of the week, against the Guelph Professoriate who, like you, will throw stones from their glass houses but will NOT DEBATE. Sorry, this is just cowardice. Why are you defending cowardice?[this was a very well written paragraph with excellent grammar]
What does your CV look like? O[add h, we actually don’t use this form of “O” much anymore, unlike the much debated Shakespeare], I forgot, you dropped out of your PhD program and have published a grand total of one “academic paper,”[I would personally change this to an em dash, but that’s just me] a paper now totally demolished [on its merits – unnecessary, eliminate] by myself and Lynne K.[please spell out the last name to receive full name dropping benefits] in our book: http://www.shakespearesbible.com
May I congratulate you on a principled stand on this issue and encourage you to ignore the adverse criticism and hatemail that will ensue from anti-Stratfordians in general and Oxfordians in particular.
You are entirely correct in your assessment of their case.
Oxfordians (for that is who they all are) are conducting an exercise in misdirection in their pleading on behalf of free enquiry and rational discussion. They claim that authorship studies are resisted by a purblind and hidebound academia, heavily invested in traditional orthodoxy, permanently closed to new thinking.
The idea that Emeritus Professors of English and History would combine with Cambridge University Press to tell lies intended protect tourism in Stratford, expressed above by Roger Stritmatter, is a small example of the extent of their capacity for self-deception.
Acute irony can be found in the fact that it is they who are now mired in their own orthodoxy and totally resistant to new ideas in the arena in which they claim precedence.
Computerised stylometry may have got off to a bad start but as computers have become exponentially faster and cheaper, stylometry is not only redeeming itself but, allied to traditional metrical analysis, it can be applied to the whole database of drama from the period. This is beginning to contribute a picture of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Genome which is turning up all sorts of new possibilities in the very authorship field that Oxfordians are claiming is ignored by mainstream academics.
It is merely their ideas which are being ignored. And for very good reasons.
New research is slowly revealing a picture of the extent of collaborative authorship. New ideas now abound in precisely that area of study that Oxfordians claim ‘orthodox’ academics are inactive and unwilling to engage.
Oxfordians won’t touch any of the new research with a barge pole because the authorial DNA of their candidate is entirely absent in the new database. His signature is that of a writer with a poor understanding of verse, incapable of producing any kind of fluidity in iambic pentameter, a writer who relies on monosyllables to create rhythm and who stuffs repetition into his lines the way a plasterer fills holes in a ceiling to make them the right metrical length. Furthermore, Oxford is a writer who is selfishly obsessed with his own affairs, a misogynist who obsesses over other people’s deservedly poor opinion of him. Similarities to the author of the canon? There are NO similarities whatsoever when looking at the work.
Oxford’s claims of authorship have been eliminated by The Shakespeare Clinic, a team of statisticians who have put years of work into improving stylometry and offered £1,000 to anyone who can knock a hole in their methods. Yes, I did say ‘eliminated’. Each new step forward leaves him further behind.
In the teeth of large quantities of counter evidence, the almost complete consensus on Will’s authorship of his own work among serious students and the embarrassing fact that Oxford died before a third of the work was written, you may decide that seeking to deprive Shakespeare of credit for his work on the eve of his 450th birthday is not only wrong-headed but contemptible.
You may want to try and ensure that your university does not provide any more academic endorsement to the Oxfordian Fallacy.
I hope so.
Because the answer is ‘Yes’.
Claiming Oxfordianism can contribute to our knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre is like claiming that astrology can aid in our understanding of quasars.
And yes, this kind of sponsorship does reflect badly on the academic establishments who offer it. And you would do well to take steps to prevent any further instances occurring.
If you succeed, you will earn the thanks of Shakespeare lovers everywhere.
Mr. Leadbetter, please respond not to my posting, but to the critique given in the link which I provided, to Dr. Kier Cutler’s critique of the book in question. I was summarizing a case that Cutler makes in excruciating detail in his video. You have no response to it, do you? Because it shows that, in fact, Cambridge University Press did lend its good name to a book that is edited (you seem to have missed this point) by two employees of the Stratford Birth Trust, which is in fact funded by the Stratford tourist industry.
The book fails, as I already mentioned, even cite anything of significance from the last fifty years of scholarship on the question you think you are debating. The names Ogburn, Price, Roe, Waugaman, Showerman, and many others don’t even appear in the book’s index. This was a poorly conceived, hastily executed, piece of pseudo-scholarly trash which will in time prove – like the present editorial – a gross embarrassment to all involved.
Details supporting this generalization are found in Dr. Cutler’s excellent video, which incidentally also gives the lie to your high sounding but utterly hypocritical characterization of the debate. You seem to think that defending people whose primary arguments are ad hominem and ab authoritatem makes you look scholarly. It doesn’t. It just makes you look foolishly dogmatic.
Until you have apologised for your unwarranted and highly offensive abuse of the hosts of this column, I’d say your presence here was an affront to even the normally low standards expected from Oxfordians.
You last paragraph shows a truly breathtaking lack of self-awareness. I doubt you’ll be getting your sponsorship for your Mad Hatter’s Tea Party next year.
You can find individuals irked and pecked by the authorship issue at any surrogate institution receiving checks from the Royal Shakespeare Company. The RSC has outspent any other institution in fighting against any rogue with the temerity to ask questions about the Stratford man’s mediocre and inadequate background.
The authorship issue has grown rapidly since the 1980s, with exciting textual research and discoveries about the best candidate Edward de Vere from a vast cross-section of professionals. I believe you may find it one of the most exciting and contentious topics you ever dreamed of covering.
The editorial states: “Ideas must duke it out, not be shepherded and made deaf to the incontrovertible evidence.”
For controversial ideas to “duke it out” they must be heard and counter evidence presented. It is true that some ideas are more controversial than others…but academic censorship combined with ad hominems are not the right way to deal with them.
The idea that authorial pseudonyms were widely used in the Early Modern Era is NOT, in itself, controversial. It is 100% well accepted by the academic community worldwide. Read about the Martin Mar-prelate episode if you need any reassurance about that.
The only controversy here is whether or not Shakespeare (or Shake-speare as it was often printed) was such a pseudonym…as opposed to a variant spelling of the surname of a part-time actor, London theater investor and grain merchant from Stratford-upon-Avon.
Will Shakspere of Stratford a) had a similar name to that which appeared on the title pages of the long poems and the quartos, b) was in the right place at the right time (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the 1590s and the King’s Men in the 1600s) and c) the posthumous 1623 First Folio seems to make an iron-clad prima facie case that HE was the author of 37 immortal plays.
No need to argue for a pseudonym there. Case closed…right?
Except it isn’t.
Past ultra-notable literary skeptics of the Stratford attribution include Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, John Greenleaf Whittier, Mark Twain and Helen Keller.
Past and present theatrical skeptics of the Stratford attribution include: Orson Welles, Charlie Chapin, Leslie Howard, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Derek Jacobi, Michael York, Mark Rylance (Past Artistic Director at the new Globe Theater) and Jeremy Irons.
Among those who have expressed either some doubt, or at least “wonderment” about the Stratford attribution are: Prof. Crane Brinton (Harvard), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Tyronne Guthrie, Thomas Hardy, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Prof. Sidney Hook (S.Y.U.), James Russell Lowell, Prof. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Oxford University).
If English professors Bretz and Goldstein are ashamed to be numbered in that company, that is their affair…but they should not deny students the right to hear why the above names thought that “Shake-speare” might be a pseudonym for another author entirely.
P.S. Add to the above lists these persons who have also rejected the Stratford attribution:
Sigmund Freud, Hamilton Basso (novelist, reviewed 5 Stratfordian biographies in The New Yorker 4/18/50), Prof. Louis P. Benezet (Dartmouth), Richard Bentley (President, Chicago Bar Association, and Editor of The American Bar Association Journal), Tom Bethell (syndicated columnist), John Bright (Lord Rector of University of Glasgow), John Buchan (novelist, historian & Chancellor of Edinburgh University), Otto von Bismarck (Statesman), Charles Champlin (Arts Editor of The Los Angeles Times), Benjamin Disraeli (Statesman and Prime Minister), Senator Paul Douglas (also a Chicago University Professor), Daphne DuMaurier, Cyrus Durgin (drama critic, The Boston Globe), Prof. William Y. Elliott (Harvard), Clifton Fadiman, Prof. Bronson Feldman (Temple University), Daniel Frohman (famed producer of plays & theater historian), W.H. Furness (literary scholar and father of the editor of the Variorum), John Galsworthy, Charles DeGaulle, Prof. Louis J. Halle (Ecole de Hautes Etudes), James Joyce, Kevin Kelly (drama critic, The Boston Globe), David Lloyd Kreeger, Lewis Lapham (Editor, Harper’s), Prof. Abel LeFranc (College de France; one of 40 members of Academie des Inscription et Belles Lettres), Prof. W. Barton Leach (Harvard Law), Clare Booth Luce, Lord Palmerston, Maxwell Perkins (eminent literary editor), Prof. William Lyons Phelps (Yale), Canon Gerald H. Rendall (Litt D.), Dr. Peter Sammartino (Founder & First President, Farleigh Dickinson University), Lincoln Schuster (of Simon & Schuster), Muriel Spark, Day Thorpe (Literary editor, Washington Star), Philip Weld (Publisher, International N.Y. Herald Tribune), Dr. Daniel Wright (Chair, Department of English, Concordia University) and FOUR recent US Supreme Court Justices (Stevens, Blackmum, O’Conner and Scalia).
I found the students at York U disagree with this editorial. They jumped all over the insulting remarks of Stratfordians. They seek knowledge.
You can find individuals irked and pecked by the authorship issue at any surrogate institution receiving checks from the Royal Shakespeare Company. The RSC has outspent all other institutions in fighting against rogues with the temerity to ask questions about the Stratford man’s mediocre and inadequate background.
The authorship issue has grown rapidly since the 1980s, with advanced textual research and discoveries about the best candidate Edward de Vere from a vast cross-section of professionals. I believe you may find it one of the most exciting and contentious topics you ever dreamed of covering.
Mr Koch
The Royal Shakespeare Company does not run a special covert operations unit dedicated to eliminating people like yourself who talk the most preposterous tripe. Sadly, all its funds are reserved solely for the purpose of performing plays.
Jack Cutting quite rightly argues that it is a fallacy in logical thinking to argue from eminence rather than evidence. That is precisely what his comrades Roger Stritmatter and John Lavendoski are attempting to do in their tedious and yawn-inducing lists of deniers, doubters and those who apparently expressed ‘wonderment’ at Shakespeare’s authorship.
Unfortunately, mere straws are being grasped in a number of instances. Let’s look, for example, at Lavendoski’s mention of Thomas Hardy who impresses me slightly more than Hugh Trevor-Roper or the Editor of Harper’s.
In his 1916 poem ’To Shakespeare’, Hardy wrote that the playwright left no ‘intimate word or personal trace’ outside his ‘artistry’. However, here’s what Hardy said about the authorship question in a letter in 1926: ‘The testimonies of Heminges, Condell and Jonson and many other of his contemporaries are weighty enough to set aside all doubts on the point.’
I note with interest that these lists contain what a cutting edge academic like Dr Stritmatter might well term ‘structured absences’.
One such absence is Colonel Muammer Gaddafi who claimed that amongst the Arab community in Stratford in Avon lived one Sheikh Zbir who wrote a play called ‘Abdullah’ which was unfortunately mispronounced as ‘Othello’.
A more telling omission is the prominent Oxfordian Joseph Sobran whose views on the ‘Jewish Question’ are easily discovered through a friendship with Google.
Alasdair,
1) Regarding Hardy: Yes, that is why Hardy is classed only “Among those who have expressed either some doubt, or at least “wonderment” about the Stratford attribution”.
I think it is fair to say that (after some thought on the matter) Hardy accepted the First Folio testimonies by Heminges, Condell and Jonson as the strong prima facie evidence for Shakspere of Stratford which they appear to be. This, to my eyes, was a reasonable position at the time, as the Heminges and Condell letters were seemingly strong support for a Stratfordian POV.
I would go so far as to say that they were the very STRONGEST piece of evidence that the Great Author and the Stratford Actor were one and the same.
Eighty+ years later, however, the majority of modern scholars have now accepted that Ben Jonson was the one who wrote the letters which appear over Heminges’ and Condell’s names…and question whether or not even a single word of those letters to the reader sprung from their pens.
How Hardy have reacted to that news, one cannot say…
2) As for arguing from eminence: Not a bit of it. I do not claim here that this list of people were correct in their beliefs. People must decide that for themselves after their own research into the topic.
I do claim that such a list is an indication that the topic ITSELF, however, is a matter worthy of investigation by intelligent persons. These are not cranks or lunatics. These are accomplished human beings whose judgment may or not be flawed on this question but whose very INTEREST in the topic commands a modicum of respect…or at least SHOULD command respect among those who are more than just reactionary zealots for their own preferred POV.
I, for one, deeply respect the right of Schoenbaum, Bate, Greenblatt, Dickson, Shapiro, et al to express their (sometimes conflicting) ideas on Shakespeare. I think their POVs are not unreasonable when viewed as a byproduct of generations of past scholarship (especially 20th century scholarship). Eric Sams, however, a Stratfordian to the core, did not always think they knew what they were talking about. Honigmann also had some deep problems with mainstream orthodox thought. I read all those writers…and especially enjoyed Ron Rosenbaum’s thoughts on the healthy debate which exists among English Lit Professors regarding Shakespeare.
Such open debate about Shakespeare is a good thing, IMO.
3) As for this being yawn-inducing to you. I apologize for even waking you to begin with, Sir.
Please go back to sleep and forgive me for disturbing your slumber with these trifles.
While Heminge and Condell may not have written out the prefatory materials in the First Folio which appear over their names, it is readily apparent that the content of the ‘Epistle To The Great Variety Of Readers’ contains what the two actors wanted to say about their fellow, William Shakespeare, and is not at all what Jonson would have said had he been writing for himself. In fact, the piece that Jonson composed for the actors praises one of Shakespeare’s traits which Heminge and Condell found to be a virtue, but which Jonson found to be a detrimental aspect in Shakespeare’s writing.
From the ‘Epistle’:
“His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers.”
Jonson, in the posthumously published ‘Timber’, shows exactly what he thought of this particular praise of Shakespeare’s writing:
“De Shakespeare nostrat[i]. — I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, ” Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted.”
What made it into the ‘Epistle’ was what the actors Heminge and Condell wanted to say about Shakespeare and his writing, not what Jonson would have said. It also appears that Jonson and the players had “often” argued about this issue, and, according to ‘Timber’, they found his answer to their praise to be malevolent speech. And yet it is the praise that makes it into the First Folio without any of Jonson’s contrary sentiments. So, although it is most probable that Jonson did the actual writing of the prefatory materials to the First Folio for the actors, the evidence shows that it was the actors who exercised control over the content of what was written for them to endorse as their own. Ultimate control over what made it into the Folio appears to rest with Heminge and Condell, not with Jonson.
DH,
You wrote: “While Heminges and Condell may not have written out the prefatory materials in the First Folio which appear over their names, it is readily apparent that the content of the ‘Epistle To The Great Variety Of Readers’ contains what the two actors wanted to say about their fellow, William Shakespeare, and is not at all what Jonson would have said had he been writing for himself….So, although it is most probable that Jonson did the actual writing of the prefatory materials to the First Folio for the actors, the evidence shows that it was the actors who exercised control over the content of what was written for them to endorse as their own. Ultimate control over what made it into the Folio appears to rest with Heminge and Condell, not with Jonson.”
I want to make sure I have this correct.
1) You freely admit that Jonson composed both the Heminges & Condell letters…and also the later Nostrat which purported to speak for “the actors”, (but was written, once again, by Ben Jonson),
2) You are arguing that it is all “OK” because, nearly 400 years later, it is “readily apparent” to YOU that it all accurately reflects H & C’s POV despite Jonson having written all the documents in question,
You then go on to claim:
3) That H&C were in “ultimate control” over the FF contents…despite their not even being in penmanship control of the two letters supposedly “written” by them…or the Nostrat.
OK, I think that says just about all that needs to be said here. Thanks for clearing this up, and letting all the students out there know to just take your word for all this and to not even BOTHER investigating why Jonson was writing for H&C. No mystery there at all…
P.S. Do you have anything…anything at all authentically written by Heminges or Condell with regards to plays and poems attributed (prima facie) to Shakspere of Stratford by the FF? One letter, one note…anything that didn’t come THROUGH Ben Jonson?
P.P.S. Are you just as sure that Thomas Hardy would have found this all “readily apparent” based just on your opinion? Is it not possible that he might have wondered WHY Jonson was writing for the purported ‘editors” H&C? I mean, if they really WERE the editors, they must have had excellent writing skills…right?
You are confused and don’t have it at all correct..
1. I freely admit that Jonson may have written the prefatory material for Heminge and Condell in the First Folio. Nowhere, however, did I ever come close to stating that Jonson’s ‘Timber’ “purported to speak ‘for the actors’.” I have no idea where you got such a notion from what I actually wrote.
What I did say was that Jonson’s ‘Timber’ reported quite specifically about a disagreement that he had with Shakespeare’s fellows, and that they had “often” discussed this matter. The players saw Shakespeare’s free-flowing faculty [so that he rarely crossed out a line] as a virtue. Jonson saw it as a vice. So, even though Jonson may very well have written the prefatory materials to the FF, the evidence of the Folio and ‘Timber’, when considered together, shows that the content of the Epistle is what the actors Heminge and Condell felt about Shakespeare’s writing, not what Jonson thought about it. That qualifies as evidence that Shakespeare’s fellows exercised ultimate control over what made it into the prefatory materials that appeared over their names. It seems a highly likely scenario that the actors requested that Jonson write the material for them, being that he was a learned author and they were mere actors, but that they told him what they wanted it to say about Shakespeare. This may even have been one of the times that they disagreed with Jonson’s malevolent speech.
2. I am not arguing that it is all “OK” because, nearly 400 years later, it is “readily apparent” to ME that “it all accurately reflects H & C’s POV despite Jonson having written” the prefatory evidence which appeared over their names. I am arguing that the Epistle and ‘Timber’, when read together, constitute evidence that even though Jonson may very well have composed the Epistle, it contains the sentiments of Heminge and Condell. This is a factual matter. If you can dispute that it does so, please show how I am wrong — but I’d appreciate it if you would refrain from indulging in the construction of straw men to argue against.
3) My argument is that evidence from ‘Timber’ shows that H&C “exercised control over the content of what was written for them to endorse as their own”…”despite their not even being in penmanship control of the two letters supposedly “written” by them.” If you’d like to engage in a discussion of the actual evidence, and what I have actually claimed, I’ll be more than happy to do so. Otherwise, not so much.
OK, I think that says just about all that needs to be said here. I appreciate the opportunity to clear up your confusion, and to let all the students out there see the difference between someone trying to score points and someone involved serious consideration of the actual evidence. I don’t expect anyone to just take my word for all this and to not even BOTHER investigating why Jonson was writing for H&C. In fact, I’d much rather that people investigate and consider all of the evidence and come to their own conclusions without any biased motivation [such as failing to engage with the textual evidence out of some preconceived notion that there is some mystery there].
P.S. — Nothing that may have been penned by H&C has survived, to my knowledge, but, of course, that has nothing to do with my argument that there is evidence that what Jonson wrote to go over their signatures was what they wished to say about Shakespeare.
P.P.S. — I don’t have an opinion as to what Hardy may have thought had he been exposed to my argument, or what he may have wondered. Such speculation is ultimately worthless in this debate. Finally, I have never stated that H&C were the “editors” of the First Folio. My argument is that they exercised control over what appeared in their prefatory remarks to the Folio, which argument would impinge on the Jonson as the secret, shadowy force behind the mystery in the First Folio. In my opinion, there is evidence, in Jonson’s own hand, which shows that the players had an active role in the production of the Folio.
Further evidence that the players, Heminge and Condell, exercised some control over what made it into the First Folio, is found in the following:
From a record in the Stationer’s Company Court of Assistants Record dated 3 May 1619:
“Upon a letter from the right honorable the Lord Chamberlain: It is thought fit and so entered that no plays that his Majesty’s players do play shall be printed WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF SOME OF THEM.” (Matus, 113)[emphasis supplied]
The order came from the Lord Chamberlain but the players were the ones that had to give their consent.
That particular letter has been lost, but we have a later letter dated from 1637 from the Lord Chamberlain’s brother, Philip which tells us what William Herbert had written. “Whereas complaint was heretofore presented to my dear brother & predecessor by his Majesty’s servants the Players, that some of the Company of Printers and Stationers had procured, published & printed diverse of their books of comedies, tragedies, chronicle histories, and the like, which they had (for the special service of his Majesty & for their own use) bought and provided at very dear & high rates. By means whereof not only they themselves had much prejudice, but the books much corruption to the injury and disgrace of the authors. And thereupon the Masters & Wardens of the Company of Printers & Stationers were advised by my brother to take notice thereof & to take order for the stay of any further impression of the plays or interludes of his Majesty’s Servants without their consents.” (Matus, pg 114)
So, according to the Herbert brothers themselves [the dedicatees of the FF], it appears that the “comedies, tragedies, chronicle histories, and the like” were the property of the actors and were in their possession, and, following the order from the Chamberlain, it would require the consent of the actors for the plays to be published. This evidence certainly tends to show that it was Shakespeare’s fellow actors who controlled the plays?
Several people have quoted the Editorial’s telling remark: “Ideas must duke it out, not be shepherded and made deaf to the incontrovertible evidence.”
Some have responded in terms of academic freedom. And I indeed think that academic censorship is against the spirit of the academy. But – and I avowedly write as an Oxfordian – we must indeed accept that there are theories out there which will receive comparatively short shrift in scientific and historical argument. Thus, I would not advocate censoring dialogue with advocates of Intelligent Design theory, but there are good reasons why the scientific community, the Roman Catholic Church, and the mainstream Protestant Churches, have all broadly accepted the Darwinian theory of the mechanism of natural selection, even whilst the Churches propound a view of theism which seeks to be compatible with that. So we need to accept that there really are fringe theories out there. When all the censorship and ad hominem rhetoric is set aside, are there are criteria by which it can be rendered fairly clear that reasoned doubt about the Stratfordian Shakespeare Authorship attribution is now a legitimate minority theory, not a fringe theory, which has legitimate mainstream presence?
So, I invite thoughtful Stratfordians reading all this to consider the following – I’ll confine myself to four major ones but there are more. My fifth and final point is a little polemical:
1 The fact of the sheer scale of the change in literary assumptions, in virtue of the supreme greatness of Shakespeare, recognised century upon century, makes this an almost unprecedented challenge to change belief in respect of this. The shift in theory involved in the Copernican Heliocentric understanding, and in the discovery of the mechanism of Evolution by Natural Selection, are perhaps comparably large paradigm shifts. It is almost on a scale of core religious belief, perhaps the nearest thing to it in what is in many respects a secular epoch, and it makes it understandable that people on all sides of the argument sometimes yield to tactics and stances which are irrational and sheerly passionate.
2 With this recognition goes that of the sheer Longevity of the problem. The earliest clear modern recognition of a Shakespeare Authorship Identity problem (it was not unrecognised in Elizabethan and Jacobean times) I know of – discovered by Peter Dickson – came in the introduction to a pamphlet edited by John Payne Collier in 1838 (p. 6 of the introduction):
https://ia700409.us.archive.org/15/items/traditionaryanec00dowdrich/traditionaryanec00dowdrich.pdf
This is nearly two hundred years and counting, and it has by no means gone away. This is to say the least unusual. The problem of the identity or non-identity of Homer was laid to rest in about 70 years. Modern Biblical Textual Criticism was accepted within about a hundred years of its inception. Copernican theory took at most 150 years, in a theocentric epoch. Darwin took at most 70 years. Wegener’s theory of Continental Drift took 50 years. It took 50 years for the Higgs theory to be confirmed. Quantum theory and Relativity theory only took about 30 years. And so on – a Historical-Scientific problem on this scale taking so long to solve, with a complexity – the proliferation of alternative candidates, for instance – which is almost Ptolemaic, is almost unprecedented, and itself requires explanation.
3 Whilst we Authorship Sceptics can become a bit overloud about this, the fact is that many supremely major intellects, geniuses in many cases, from a whole variety of disciplines relevant to Shakespeare, including politics and law, have been unconvinced by the Stratford theory. For any one of them, taken alone, ad hominem challenge to their motives and credentials might be mounted – whether they are FW Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Supreme Court Justices Stevens and Scalia, Sir John Gielgud, Joan Robinson, Hugh Trevor Roper, or Sir George Greenwood, probably Kenneth Branagh, and so on and on. But ALL of them together? Is there not at least a prima facie presumption, together with the Longevity of the problem, that there MAY BE a problem?
4 As the Authorship Problem has become more and more foreground, the quality of Stratfordian Shakespeare Studies has deteriorated. Is this merely a coincidence? Harold Bloom in Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human is perhaps the last great Stratfordian critic whose writing is comparable to such great Stratfordian Shakespeareans as Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, AC Bradley, John Berryman, Ted Hughes, Wilson Knight, LC Knights, FR Leavis, and others. The quality of writing, appeal to evidence, and thought in, for instance, James Shapiro’s Contested Will, and in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, marks a severe deterioration by comparison with such touchstones and giants. The 2000s have seen a stream of semi-popular speculative pseudo-biographies of William of Stratford, including the film Shakespeare in Love, which is actually, as pure fiction, on the cover of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt; if it was legitimate to excoriate Anonymous for its free license with historical data, how much more so for all of these, which purport to be so factual, apart from Shakespeare in Love, which, nevertheless, reflected the desperate need (as an Oxfordian, I of course would say driven by the massive cross-connections of life and literature Oxfordian biography, unlike Stratfordian, gives us) to give the Stratford man a live identity. Another feature here is the backtracking from realisations previous generations of Stratfordians could recognise, take for granted, and leave unsolved, such as the connection of Polonius and Lord Burghley, or between Hamlet the play and Beowulf, because they open the way to Oxfordian correlations.
5 It would be useless to argue about the circumstantial basis of the Oxfordian case here. That, as they say, would be ‘begging the question’. Oxfordians may consider it as a major driver of the evolution of the problem, but no doubt the jury is still out on that. But that the Stratfordian case rests massively upon circular and e question-begging arguments is increasingly recognised by the younger generation – and here is the final clue that it is entering the mainstream – so that, consequently, works which purport to directly address the case for doubt are coming into being and being written. Even their titles are echoes and puns driven by the sceptics – Contested Will and, clearly a response to ‘Declaration of Reasonablr Doubt’ (doubtaboutwill.org), Shakespeare Beyond Doubt. Is there not here a contradiction, that a title, which declares in its wording the notion of ‘Beyond Doubt’, is itself a formulation catalysed by the expression of Reasonable Doubt?
I’m delighted Dr Wilkinson acknowledges Coleridge as ‘a great Stratfordian Shakespearean’. Pleonastically speaking though, either one of those adjectives beginning with S would have served.
But hang on a sec. Scroll up and we find John Lavendoski putting Coleridge amongst the doubters!
Come on chaps, get your act together. People might think you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Dear Alistair! There is something about your posts I enjoy, something genial about them I like. I am pleased we agree about the greatness of Coleridge. Of course a genuinely open stance about literary research might allow of the possibility of some disagreements amongst friends, – and I’ll come back to why Coleridge might evoke that (and John did put him amongst those who had expressed ‘some wonderment’! close reading dear heart, close reading!), – and not require the kind of party line a title like ‘Shakespeare Beyond Doubt’io seems to require.
There is no book title ‘Dickens Beyond Doubt’ because there is no question of doubt, unless to a philosophical sceptic, about the correlation between Dickens the man and the works of Charles Dickens, since the scale of the evidence which is ‘in’ is way beyond the level of the circumstantial and testimonial we require for certainty of identity. That is what ‘Beyond Doubt’ MEANS, in this context. It is revealing, Alisdair, that you believe it a pleonasm to refer to Stratfordian AND Shakespearean. If that were so the possession of a named identity would be a tautology. Anthropologically, it is far from being that. Not only do Popes and Royals take on new names on accession, but writers in particular acquire pseudonyms and pen names, spies take on new names in other countries, for many people nicknames become their actual names, and people actually do change their names. It is not a tautology to say that Dickens was ‘Dickens’, indeed Bertrand Russell used ‘Scott is the Author of ‘Waverley’ as his paradigm of a REFERENTIAL identity statement in the formulations which launched modern logical analysis in 1906 (‘On denoting’). It remains a meaningful statement even when the evidence is in, and the evidence certainly is not in for the Stratford man. To try to turn it into a tautology is indeed the conjuring trick ‘Shakespeare Beyond Doubt’ is trying to foist upon us. But it is a conjuring trick which rests upon the circular and tautological suppression of that evidential enquiry, and this is a petard upon which Stratfordians will, in due course, be hoist.
Now to Coleridge! The genius who gave us back the mind of Shakespeare; as we moderns understand it, all the great modern critics write in his wake. The supreme mind Shapiro should have, but did not, attack, instead of Malone as the bete noire who invented the ‘mind of the author’ notion regarding Shakespeare. The man who wrote [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm#link2HCH0015]:
‘What then shall we say? even this; that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself.’
A formulation which, for anyone who is not an adherent of the ‘tautology’ model of ‘Stratford = Shakespeare’, is one of the great death knell statements in the discussion of the authorship, since, without tsunamis of speculative addition and qualification, it is impossible to ‘fill out’ the Stratford man’s biography to fulfil those Coleridgean requirements.
Coleridge also has intriguing things to say about ‘Courtier Poets’:
“Shakespeare’s characters might be reduced to a few, that is to say to a few classes of characters. If you took his gentlemen, for instance; the character of Biron was seen again in Mercutio, in Benedick, and a variety of others. They were men who combined the politeness of the Courtier with the faculties of intellect; the powers of combination which only belong to an intellectual mind. The wonder was how he should thus disguise himself, and have such miraculous powers of conveying the Poet, without even raising in ourselves the consciousness of him.
In the address of Mercutio to Romeo regarding the Fairy Queen Mab….there would be noticed all the fancy of the poet, but the language in which was contained possessed such a facility that one would say, almost, that it was impossible for it to be thought, unless it were thought as naturally and without effect as Mercutio represented it. This was the great art by which Shakespeare combined the Poet and the gentleman, throughout borrowing from his own most amiable character that which could only combine them, a perfect simplicity of mind, a delight in what was excellent for its own sake, without reference to himself as causing it….”
Can you wonder that Oxfordians have felt Coleridge was within a hair’s breadth of opening out the Authorship Question?
Personally, because of the evolution of consciousness, I do not think that question could become a live scientific-historical question till the 1830s (I put a link to Collier’s advertisement of 1838 where it appears to be first formulated in my previous post).
http://hewardwilkinson.co.uk/coleridge-and-implications-authorial-self-awareness-shakespeare
But if you can prove to me otherwise, we Oxfordians would be exceedingly grateful.
The repudiation of the Coleridgean sense of the Mind of the Author is dictated by the necessity to have an author who is a cipher, and a mere vehicle, or channelling medium, for the miracle of genius unaided by experience, and whose powers are not, for instance, rooted intractably in the kind of background of personal experience and depth of personal trauma and faultlines, which Dickens manifests in what he does creatively with the Marshalsea Prison in ‘Little Dorrit’.
It would of course be far too bold for me to suggest that ‘Monarchy itself’ plays that kind of role for the Author of Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and the History Plays. We cannot possibly entertain the imagination that the plays might be
‘the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.’
Or to require that we
‘suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.’
This would be to bring into view the intentionality of the character as that of the author, and to imply that Hamlet himself might be that dark and strange ‘Courtier Poet’, whereas surely we all know Shakespeare was just a team writer the Elizabethan equivalent of a Soap Opera Hack, regarding whom it is meaningless to ask whether anything they write bears any relation to personal experience and remembance.
Fie on it!! an academic exercise surely, nothing personal here forsooth!
‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.’
Hey ho!
Alasdair,
Are you STILL awake ?? To bed, good Sirrah !!!
You might notice that Coleridge is NOT actually listed with the outright skeptics in my listing…just with the small list of those persons who expressed “some doubt or wonderment” as to how the Stratford man (supposedly) did it.
Are you familiar with Coleridge’s comment to the effect (and I paraphrase) that: ‘Shakespeare must have remained a child, some sort of changeling. Had he been a real flesh and blood man, he would have been a monster’?
Wonderment indeed…
P.S. Go ahead…only a hundred or so other names to trifle with…
Dear Ontarians,
The comments section of your article will now turn into a sprawling and ugly stream of sophistry and self-justification.
I have two recommendations.
1. Waste none of your time reading any of it. Many of the famous academics of former times they cite so airily would have set the dogs on them. You are students and have far better things to do and far better arguments to engage with. Better still, close the comments section.
2. Print out the long comment from Stritmatter and see that it gets onto your Vice Chancellor’s desk accompanied by the shortest note you can devise explaining that the author is the “Top Oxfordian of 2013”. Say that you believe that sponsoring this kind of pseudo-academic masquerade is damaging the reputation of the university. (S)He will agree, especially if you can point out how Oxfordians use the sponsorship to claim endorsement of their silly ideas.
That should be all that is necessary to avoid a return to the same issue next year, though you could attach a conference programme, if you can find one. That would also be a big help.
If this is true, it is, sir, largely a result of the degrading of real intellectual conversation that seems to follow you wherever land on the internet. May I also therefore take the occasion to suggest, since you have gone so far out of your way to single out my remarks on this blog as somehow typical of what you so generously term the “silly ideas” of Oxfordians, that the editors in question also supply Guelph administrators with the following
1) Shakespeare Beyond Doubt
2) Shakespeare Beyond Doubt?
3) a dvd of the recently released documentary, *Last Will. & Testament*;
4) A copy of Kier Cutler’s documentary.
With these resources in hand any reasonably intelligent university administration would realize that the course of action that best reflects the long term principles of the University (any university) is to encourage full participation and debate in what has more than once begin called the “greatest detective story in all of literature.”
Even Mr. Leadbetter, who first calls people names and then calls for the closing of the discussion (since neither he nor Mr. Reedy find themselves able to control it), deserves the opportunity, short of his sometimes slanderous and plagiaristic tendencies, to have his say. His regular habit of name calling does an efficient job of calling attention to what is wrong with Shakespearean orthodoxy.
So.
Borrow Doc Waugaman’s copy of ‘Psychology for Dummies’ and look up “projection”.
And apologise.
It’s what He would have wanted.
If this is true, it is, sir, largely a result of the degrading of real intellectual conversation that seems to follow you wherever [insert – you] land on the internet. May I also therefore take the occasion to suggest, since you have gone so far out of your way to single out my remarks on this blog as somehow typical of what you so generously term the “silly ideas” of Oxfordians, that the editors in question also supply Guelph administrators with the following[insert – colon]
1) Shakespeare Beyond Doubt
2) Shakespeare Beyond Doubt?
3) [a – capitalize] [dvd – capitalize] of the recently released documentary, *Last Will[. – eliminate period] & Testament*[; – eliminate semi-colon]
4) A copy of Kier Cutler’s documentary[. – eliminate period]
With these resources in hand[insert comma] any reasonably intelligent university administration would realize that the course of action that best reflects the long term principles of the [U – make lowercase]niversity (any university) is to encourage full participation and debate in what has more than once [begin – replace, been] [also, I would rearrange to “…has been called on more than one occasion the…”]called the “greatest detective story in all of literature.”
Even Mr. Leadbetter, who first calls people names and then calls for the closing of the discussion (since neither he nor Mr. Reedy find themselves able to control it), deserves the opportunity, short of his sometimes slanderous and plagiaristic tendencies, to have his say. His regular habit of name calling does an efficient job of calling attention to what is wrong with Shakespearean orthodoxy.[on a less editorial note, I would mention that it is somewhat hypocritical to call people names – i.e. “Google-challenged” and “pre-intellectual” – and then criticize others for name calling.]