Great post Stratford and worthy of your name
I am with Ben Jonson camp and with his ascerbic wit, if anyone was to have debunked Shakespeare, he would have done!
I am with Ben Jonson camp and with his ascerbic wit, if anyone was to have debunked Shakespeare, he would have done!
stratford wrote:
Greetings HG,
Being a de Vere proponent you are probably already familiar with the following resource, but for the many who possibly may not be familiar with it I offer it to the book club as a whole anyway. In an attempt at an even-handed, balanced, and fair approach to the authorship question, the October 1991 “The Atlantic” had as its cover story, “Looking for Shakespeare: Two partisans explain and debate the authorship question.” Pages 43-86 include a one-page introduction followed by “The Case for Oxford” by Tom Bethell, “The Case for Shakespeare” by Irvin Matus, “Reply” by Bethell, “Reply” by Matus, and “The Ghost’s Vocabulary: How the computer listens for Shakespeare’s ‘voiceprint’” by Edward Dolnick. I re-read all of it several evenings ago.
I would also like to share two extended quotations from “Shakespeare’s Lives” (S. Schoenbaum, 1991) with you and the rest of the book club. At the time of publication, Samuel Schoenbaum was considered “the outstanding living authority on Shakespeare’s biography.”
His [Looney’s] subjective ruminations do little to strengthen an hypothesis which has certain inherent limitations. The attestation of Puttenham and Meres to Oxford’s playwriting activities cuts two ways. Meres after all lists Shakespeare separately in ”Palladis Tamia” and names twelve plays, as well as “Venus and Adonis,” “The Rape of Lucrece,” and the Sonnets: clearly he did not believe that the Earl wrote “The Comedy of Errors,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and the rest. And if people knew that Oxford graced the stage with plays, why had he need of employing Shakespeare as a mask? The only motive that Looney can suggest is self-effacement. ‘We may, if we wish’, he adds, ‘question the sufficiency or reasonableness of the motive. That, however, is his business, not ours.’ But of course the man who sets out to convince the public of the validity of an eccentric theory “must” (italicized) make the motivation his business. These considerations, however, pale into triviality alongside the principal drawback of the entire argument: Oxford, born in 1550, died in 1604. Thus he was forty-three when he offered the first heir of his invention to Southampton, and was buried before “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “Timon of Athens,” “Coriolanus,” “Pericles,” “Cymbeline,” “Winter’s Tale,” “The Tempest,” and “Henry VIII” appeared on the stage. (p. 433)
With the Black Muslim candidate [King James] our own survey comes to an end. Perhaps at this pause in the narrative the writer may be permitted to drop for a moment the historian’s mask of impersonality and give vent to private emotion. This section has been the cruellest endeavour I have ever confronted. The sheer volume of heretical publication appals. In the 1840s Joseph S. Galland, a professor of Romance Languages at Northwestern University, compiled a typescript bibliography, “Digesta Anti-Shakespeareana,” that fills six large volumes and describes 4,509 items. A number of these are enormous, and many more have of course appeared since. The voluminousness of output is matched only by the intrinsic insubstantiality of most of it: two characteristics which together produce an overpowering effect….
A great many of the schismatics are (as we have seen) distinguished in fields other than literary scholarship, and their ignorance of fact and method is as dismaying as their non-specialist love of Shakespeare’s plays is touching. One feels oppressed, moreover, by the presence of an irresistible passion in these men and women: the inexorable compulsion that usurps thought, courts ridicule, even (at times) unseats reason. Vanity presses have published some of these anti-Stratfordian diatribes at their authors’ expense; others have been sponsored by well-esteemed commercial houses which would refuse, as a poor business risk, the scholar’s sober monograph. It would be a nice question to determine which phenomenon has the more depressing implications.
If the well one day should run dry, it might be argued, we would be deprived of the harmless mirth occasionally provoked by heretical extravagance; but it would be an exaggeration to suggest that the gaiety of nations would be thereby eclipsed. …The continuous flow of publication, and the publicity given sensational theories by newspapers throughout the Western world, have understandably induced in laymen—even educated laymen—lingering doubts about the reality of Shakespeare and the true authorship of the canon. Away from the academy…the professor of English (once his identity has been guessed by fellow-holiday-makers) will be asked, as certainly as day follows night, ‘Did Shakespeare really write those plays?’ He will do well to nod assent and avoid explanation, for nothing he says will erase suspicions fostered for over a century by amateurs who have yielded to the dark power of the anti-Stratfordian obsession. One thought perhaps offers a crumb of redeeming comfort: the energy absorbed by the mania might otherwise have gone into politics. (pp. 449-51)
And, lastly, a quotation from the 1979 “Encyclopaedia Britannica”: In spite of recorded allusions to Shakespeare as the author of many plays in the canon, made by about 50 men during his lifetime, it is arguable that his greatness was not as clearly recognized in his own day as one might expect. But on the other hand, the difficulties are not so great as many disbelievers have held, and their proposals have all too often raised larger problems than they have resolved. Shakespeare’s contemporaries, after all, wrote of him unequivocally as the author of the plays. Ben Jonson, who knew him well, contributed verses to the First Folio of 1623, where (as elsewhere) he criticizes and praises Shakespeare as the author. John Heminge and Henry Condell, fellow actors and theatre owners with Shakespeare, signed the dedication and a foreword to the First Folio and described their methods as editors. In his own day, therefore, he was accepted as the author of the plays. Throughout his lifetime, and for long after, no person is known to have questioned his authorship. In an age that loved gossip and mystery as much as any, it seems hardly conceivable that Jonson and Shakespeare’s theatrical associates shared the secret of a gigantic literary hoax without a single leak or that they could have been imposed upon without suspicion. Unsupported assertions that the author of the plays was a man of great learning and that Shakespeare of Stratford was an illiterate rustic no longer carry weight, and only when a believer in Bacon or Oxford or Marlowe produces sound evidence will scholars pay close attention to it and to him. (p. 630e) John Russell Brown/Terence John Bew Spencer
I hope you will not be overly critical of the age of my source material, coming as it does from 1979 and 1991. When Choisya had written in one of her posts, “I think Ogburn Jr’s thesis was successfully debunked in this Harvard Magazine article of 1975,” your response was, “Ohmygoodness, Choisya, a great deal has happened since 1975!!!!” And, although the Ogburn book that you mention more than once in your posts was published in 1984 according to one source, to flesh out the record more fully I think it should be noted that the Twain essay you reference was apparently published in 1909, and you mention the Looney book as published in 1920. Hasn’t even a great deal more Shakespearean scholarship happened since 1909 and 1920?
In any event, I think all lovers of Shakespeare would be unanimous in agreeing that we are lucky indeed to even have this wonderful body of work available to us today for our reading and viewing pleasure. The identity of the author is not a necessity for enjoying the beauty of the language, the timelessness of the themes, and the wonderful stories peopled with so many memorable characters. On the other hand, knowing the identity of the author can obviously add additional layers of richness to already excessively rich material. I have always been in the traditionalist camp, and I consider William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon to be the legitimate author of those plays today bearing his name. And I will continue thinking the same until some definitive, incontrovertible, and generally accepted evidence to the contrary is brought to light. Until that point your proselytizing efforts will have no effect on me whatsoever. But you are obviously free to continue on in your beliefs even though they fly in the face of mainstream academia. Remember, Juliet does not say “That which we call a Will/By any other name would sound as neet,” but “That which we call a rose/By any other word would smell as sweet.”
HG_Author wrote:
De Vere Society
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email: malim@btinternet.com (R.C.W. Malim, Esq.)
This is the leading organization in the United Kingdom promoting Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the true Shakespeare. They hold several meetings a year, and sponsor lectures and other events throughout the year. Please contact Richard Malim, Society Secretary, for further information: Richard Malim, Brookman's Old Farm, Iwerne Minster, BLANDFORD, Dorset, DT11 8NG, UK; email: malim@btinternet.com or phone +44(0)1747-811020. You can contact the Editor of the Devere Society Newsletter: Kevin Gilvary, Esq., 6 Rosedale Close, Titchfield, Fareham PO14 4EL, (h) 01329 842 689; email: kevgilvary@aol.com
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