tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post2406146310419333453..comments2024-03-06T06:34:42.881-05:00Comments on EconoSpeak: Truth Is The Daughter Of TimeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-90694267238822008032020-07-26T15:10:30.739-04:002020-07-26T15:10:30.739-04:00Hi Barkley. You'd be surprised how easy it was...Hi Barkley. You'd be surprised how easy it was to reply: it was a question of length, not difficulty finding arguments. I sent the first reply to rosserjb@jmu.edu. I have now resent it, after doing some further editing for clarity. Please check your spam filter. <br /><br />P.S. it is Andres, not Anders.Andreshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12494921316257669803noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-76279124723706774692020-07-26T14:33:12.718-04:002020-07-26T14:33:12.718-04:00Vaguely related:
Loch Ness Monster was a hoax
L...Vaguely related:<br /><br /><a href="https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/00000144-0a3a-d3cb-a96c-7b3fe4780000" rel="nofollow">Loch Ness Monster was a hoax</a> <br /><br /><a href="https://www.livescience.com/loch-ness-monster-dna-study.html" rel="nofollow">Loch Ness Contains No 'Monster' DNA, Say Scientists</a> <br /><br />Yet true believers are still avidly searching, hoax or not.Fred C. Dobbsnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-55048556206826239282020-07-26T12:50:45.380-04:002020-07-26T12:50:45.380-04:00Just for the record, I never received anything fro...Just for the record, I never received anything from Anders replying to my last post here, which I think is pretty hard to reply to. One has to have a pretty elaborate and over-the-top conspiracy theory to claim that Heminges, Condell, and Jonson were all putting out a folio of Shakespeare's plays 7 years after his death and 19 years after the death of de Vere, with all of them asserting the plays were by Shakespeare when presumably they all knew that they were really by de Vere. Bottom line is this makes utterly no sense and never has. There are good reasons why the vast majority of Shakespeare scholars say he really was their author.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-63616470149206492352020-07-23T03:17:56.620-04:002020-07-23T03:17:56.620-04:00Hi Barkley. Of course, writing a detailed reply to...Hi Barkley. Of course, writing a detailed reply to the last Authorship Controversy comment required more space than the HTML comment interface could handle. No big deal as only Authorship Controversy fanatics are interested at this stage. I have sent the detailed reply by e-mail.Andreshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12494921316257669803noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-66109282036659118852020-07-22T23:17:50.476-04:002020-07-22T23:17:50.476-04:00No lo contendere indeed, but I am curious how you ...No lo contendere indeed, but I am curious how you respond to my point about the First Folio, the first publication of Shakespeare's plays. I mean, just to repeat myself, why on earth would those people in 1623 be pushing some phoney theory that Shakespeare wrote the plays if it was any of the other candidates who have been proposed? Really. This looks to me to be a very hard bottom line that to overcome will probably involve some much more fantastic conspiracy theorizing, such as, oh, Heminges and Condell did not edit the First Folio and de Vere did not die in 1604 but lived to edit instead, inventing them to still cover up his authorship. That is how ridiculous one must get to put this stuff over. Really.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-64286124473204957012020-07-22T22:15:48.954-04:002020-07-22T22:15:48.954-04:00Hi Barkley. Needless to say I am not convinced on ...Hi Barkley. Needless to say I am not convinced on Shakespeare Authorship, but no lo contendere. ;-)<br /><br />A.Andreshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12494921316257669803noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-44898747886786603432020-07-22T20:06:52.856-04:002020-07-22T20:06:52.856-04:00BTW, for all of my hostility to a lot of conspirac...BTW, for all of my hostility to a lot of conspiracy theories, especially a lot of current ones, please do note, everybody, that this post itself in effect is giving credence to one, the conspiracy theory that it was people around Henry VII, and him also, who pushed the whole widely accepted view that Richard III killed the little princes in order to cover up Henry VII's guilt, with if in fact that is true this being one of those pretty successful conspiracies, one that still ultimately tends to dominate even now in most accounts.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-21876439290283389632020-07-22T20:04:13.744-04:002020-07-22T20:04:13.744-04:00Anders,
This will be my last on this, and I shall...Anders,<br /><br />This will be my last on this, and I shall stick to Shakespeare, otherwise, too many other conspiracy theories and too many theories about them.<br /><br />So, I forgot Marlowe died early. Makes all those pushing him as an alternative look pretty silly, although de Vere has the same problem, if not quite as bad.<br /><br />I thought Marlowe and Jonson had edited the First Folio, but I was wrong on that. Went and checked on it, which simply reinforces my view Shakespeare was for real. The editors were John Heminges (several spellings out there of that name) and Henry Condell. Both were longtime members of the theater company, staying on after Shakespeare's own retirement and still at it in 1623, indeed supposedly until their respective deaths, Heminges in 1630 and Condell in 1627. Both were mentioned in Shakespeare's will to receive 26 shillings for mourning pieces. There is much more information about Heminges, who was a trustee when Shakespeare purchased the Blackfriars. He seems to have been involved in a lot of lawsuits. The folio was dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke and his son, who would succeed him as Earl. No mention of de Vere or Bacon or anybody like that. And Ben Jonson was involved. He wrote a preface that praised Shakespeare.<br /><br />So, really, why would these people have held to some made-up fake story that Shakesspeare wrote all this, some years after his death and even more years after de Vere's death, and two years after the fall of Bacon from power. I mean really, why? I cannot think of a reason. I think this is a serious bottom line that anybody pushing an alternative to Shakespeare really has to overcome.<br /><br />Stay well. rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-62187995377068565162020-07-22T17:19:21.471-04:002020-07-22T17:19:21.471-04:00Hi Barkley. There are lots of gaps and errors of c...Hi Barkley. There are lots of gaps and errors of commission in the above post on Shakespeare Authorship (e.g., Marlowe died in 1593, well before De Vere and Shaksper), but we are way beyond the point of diminishing returns for other readers, so in the unlikely case you wish to continue, we can take up by e-mail.<br /><br />The Lost Cause started out as a conspiracy to (a) rewrite the Confederate position as being based on state's rights and individual liberty from the federal government rather than the overt defense of slavery that led the rush to war (though the agreement may have been tacit or socially networked rather than through an explicit cabal); Jefferson Davis's post-war history of the Confederate government is Exhibit A in this trend; and (b) an attempt to suppress black rights, with the Forrest-led KKK cabal at the forefront. <br /><br />Over time, the Lost Cause transitioned from a conspiracy to a social movement designed to cement Jim Crow in the South. i.e. a general social trend like the Lost Cause can consist of both conspiracies and broader political movements.<br /><br />The possibilities on JFK are two-fold:<br /><br />(1) Oswald did it all by himself, and his post-Dealy plaza behavior was that of a deranged, homicidally desperate man rather than a rational man. A rational JFK assassin would either have had a getaway car at the ready near the schoolbook depository or would have turned himself in and confessed to the deed.<br /><br />(2) Given that the Warren Commission was made up of honest people (with the possible exception of Allen Dulles), a conspiracy could succeed in deactivating investigations only if it fed the right evidence to the WC, and that required insiders at the FBI, almost inconceivable without J. Edgar Hoover's knowledge. There is also no incentive for the government to cover up mafia involvement _unless_ the mafia agreed to do the deed with insider FBI support (and such support was no longer present at the time of the late 1970's HSCA report, hence the focus on the mafia that you mention). Any non-FBI involvement mafia theories are crazy since they assume that the mafia would be willing to start an all-out war with the U.S. government by assassinating a president with a much larger risk of getting caught. <br /><br />The one strong weakness of theories along the line of (2) is that they require both Oswald and possibly Ruby to be participants and unwitting scapegoats. It would have been an exceedingly elaborate ruse that could recruit Oswald for such an operation given his anti-social leftist fanatic background. And contrary to what you mention, Jack Ruby was a well-known loudmouth with only indirect mafia connections (see Wikipedia entry on Jack Ruby). It is inconceivable that he was a participant in the JFK conspiracy itself. It _is_ possible that he was approached by the mafia right after the JFK assassination and told to kill Oswald "or else we go after you and your family". It is also possible that Oswald was intended to be framed in a judicial process and that Oswald's shooting was entirely unplanned and random. <br /><br />So where I stand is that (1) is more plausible/likely, but something along the lines of (2) cannot be written off.<br /><br />Here also I think we have gone beyond the zero marginal utility point for comment thread readers, so this is my last post on JFK theories. <br /><br />I guess our point of disagreement is that I think conspiracy theories should be first greeted with initial skepticism but not outright hostility (you seem more tilted to the latter), especially if they involve high-level political conflicts that can be resolved one way or the other by palace coups. Such events, e.g. Josef Stalin's succession and possible assassination, can be seen as the Game of Thrones of modern times. <br />Andreshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12494921316257669803noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-5765598235966909472020-07-22T15:48:17.305-04:002020-07-22T15:48:17.305-04:00Anders,
Let me note that the first several histor...Anders,<br /><br />Let me note that the first several historical conspiracies you mention all became public knowledge almost immediately or not long after their main effect happened (some delay on Guld of Tonkin, but it came clearly eventually and even at the time there were suspicions). The Lost Cause is not really a conspiracy, more a long running movement that gradually took control. There was not some secret cabal of insiders running it.<br /><br />I have exprsssed strong doubt about the JFK theories, although if one is correct I would lean more to the mafia one. After all, Jack Ruby was a mafia operative. I personally knew a staffer at the House Committee that investigated the JFK assassination in the mid-70s, and the mafia theory was the only one they took seriously, and they took it very seriously, although in the end were unable to pin it down and prove it convincingly. But it has much more support than CIA or J. Edgar Hoover or the others, of which there are almost as many as those about who was really the author of Shakespeare's plays and poems.<br /><br />As it is, I fully accept that there are conspiracies and that many are successful. The point on that is that we do not hear about or know about the successful ones, or at most vague hints or rumors. The conspirators keep their mouths shut and nobody ever finds out.<br /><br />I will comment a bit more on the Shakespeare matter, where obviously neither you nor I are going to budge, and on de Vere in particular. I think I have noted that on the "covering up the author to protect him at court," I think there is more reason to believe that for Bacon, who stuck around after Eilzabeth died as an important court official, and who, of course was the first person proposed to be the "real Shakespeare, although not for over two centuries after they were all dead..<br /><br />Regarding de Vere, here is the strongest claim to be made for him. While none of the plays he supposedly wrote under his own name remain extant (he destroyed them to cover up his bad activities and ave his good name?), we do have 23 lyric poems he wrote. Apparently he stopped writing those after 1593, about the time Shakespeare began writing his, with some claiming the earliest Shakespeare poems somewhat resemble those of de Vere. Maybe, although somehow nobody thinks those openly de Vere poems have been worth reading or studying at all. But, hey, maybe he got a whole lot better.<br /><br />But the really big problem with the de Vere theory is simply his 1604 death. There were 12 more Shakespeare plays to come out after then, including several of the most important. Once he was dead, why on earth was there any reason to go on pretending he was not the author and that this nothing from Stratford was, and why would people like Marlowe and Jonson go along with such obviously silly nonsense? There is simply not reasonable explanation for this, none. And that is probably it from me on this topic.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-1388174555166394822020-07-22T13:54:50.801-04:002020-07-22T13:54:50.801-04:00Hi Barkley. I won't belabor Shakespeare author...Hi Barkley. I won't belabor Shakespeare authorship any more, given that we are not going to change our minds by trading comments as opposed to doing deep research. However, your hostility towards conspiracy theory gullibility is puzzling, given that there have been lots of proven conspiracies in history, including:<br /><br />--Assassination of Julius Caesar.<br />--Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (though the conspiracy circle was very narrow, less than half a dozen people).<br />--Gunpowder plot in Renaissance England.<br />--The Lost Cause, which started out as a deliberate attempt to sweep under the rug the defense-of-slavery rationale of Southern secessionism.<br />--The entrance of the U.S. into the Viet Nam conflict via the Gulf of Tonkin "incident".<br />--Russian history is chock full of conspiracies, including the assassinations of Peter III, Paul I, and Alexander II, the Decembrists, the October Revolution, the removal of Khruschev, the August 1991 coup, etc.<br /><br />You get the picture; wherever there are power conflicts, there will be conspiracies. I do agree with you that the number of bad conspiracy theories is legion, but there are a small number of conspiracy theories that are plausible/possible (though maybe unlikely, depending on the case) but unproven. These include:<br /><br />--Will Shaksper as front man for the real author of the plays/sonnets.<br />--Henry VII or the Duke of Buckingham as the true murderers of Edward IV's children.<br />--Possible assassination of Joseph Stalin.<br />--Assassination of JFK. I am hostile to almost all of the conspiracy theories except those that posit J. Edgar Hoover and his small inner circle feeding pre-selected evidence to the Warren Commission, while a group of outsiders who fanatically hated JFK (e.g. Cuban exiles) carried out the actual murder. It is of course just as likely if not more so that Oswald did the murder on his own; his post-Dealy Plaza behavior was highly irrational even if he did want JFK dead.<br /><br />My point is that it is one thing to be hostile to conspiracy theory gullibility, but that should not make one automatically hostile to all conspiracy theories. All that one needs to do is ask if the theory in question is consistent with the rest of the historical and biographical context.<br /><br />What highly irritates me, more than conspiracy theory gullibility, is the knee-jerk rejection of theories as "loonie conspiracy theories" especially when the theory in question concerns conflicts in the upper levels of government where there is the most incentive to create conspiracies.<br />Andreshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12494921316257669803noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-87374777244246465002020-07-20T18:33:43.311-04:002020-07-20T18:33:43.311-04:00Alternative link, for those who would avoid Resear...Alternative link, for those who would avoid ResearchGate:<br /><br />https://www.scientificexploration.org/docs/22/jse_22_4_sturrock_2.pdf<br /><br />For Scientific Explorers only: https://www.scientificexploration.org/journal-libraryFred C. Dobbsnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-64060934431180836892020-07-20T18:08:46.110-04:002020-07-20T18:08:46.110-04:00Shakespeare: The Authorship Question, A Bayesian A...<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255669549_Shakespeare_The_Authorship_Question_A_Bayesian_Approach" rel="nofollow">Shakespeare: The Authorship Question, A Bayesian Approach</a><br /><br />Journal of Scientific Exploration 22(4) · Peter A. Sturrock · December 2008Fred C. Dobbsnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-65459165301810639172020-07-20T15:34:28.787-04:002020-07-20T15:34:28.787-04:00Oh, now Fred drags in somebody playing Bayesian st...Oh, now Fred drags in somebody playing Bayesian statistical games with this. here is more from me.<br /><br />Many of the arguments, starting in the 19th century when the first candidate was Bacon, have boiled down to somehow this guy from Shakespeare could not have had the brains or knowledge to do it, with somehow his handwriting on some signatures supposed to show this. Really? I have known a lot of very smart people whose handwriting is all be illegible. That is a ridiculous argument.<br /><br />Regarding de Vere, the man openly wrote various plays and poems. Does anybody read any of those? No. They are utterly obscure, not worth the time of day. But, aha! a bunch of plays and poems he wrote secretly, they are wonderful and brilliant and widely played and read and studied.<br /><br />Heck, at least with Marlowe as a possibility or Ben Jonson, you have people who wrote well enough to have their work remembered somewhat, although as has been noted Marlowe's background connections in court were not all that obviously superior to those of the man from Stratford, who was all agree, at least smart and capable enough to become part owner for quite some years of a quite successful theater company in London. And why would Marlowe, who like de Vere openly wrote his own stuff go around writing a bunch of it under a fake name and continue to maintain this up to his death, especially when both he and Jonson are recorded as saying Shakespeare wrote his own plays and poems?<br /><br />Frankly, if one want so push this conspiracy theory that whoever it was they were trying to keep it a secret because they in a high position at court, the original candidate, the seriously brilliant Francis Bacon looks more plausible as he never had any plays to his credit (I think maybe some poems) and he was definitely in high position, especially after James I came in. But then he was deposed for corruption in 161, dying in 1626, but in 1623 the first Folio was published, with everybody saying it was all by Shakespeare.<br /><br />Here is a really serious bottom line problem with all this arguing about how this guy from Stratford could not have had all this knowledge. Whowever wrote the plays and poems was a genius, an extremely smart and brilliant person, at a world historical level of brilliance, up with people like Leonardo and Einstein, super duper smart, even able to pass that test that Trump is challenging Biden to take, :-) (couldn't resist that one). Anyway, people who are super brilliant are very good at learning, even from the flimsiest of sources. From what I have read there was a primary school in Stratford where pupils even learned Latin. So it is highly likely the man from Stratford was literate, and in London there were libraries, and there were plenty of people around who hung out in court and went to Italy. It would not be all that hard for the man from Stratford to pick all kinds of knowledge in London, especially if he was indeed a super genius, which he appears to have been.<br /><br />We are back to the origin of this being a bunch of snobby Victorians who decided that only upper class people could be smart and well-educated, but that is simply a pile of nonsense.<br /><br />I also remind that while this is an appeal to authority, the overwhelming majority of scholars who have studied this and so so today reject all these alternative theories. They think William Shakespeare who wrote the plays and poems was indeed the man from Stratford everybody said he was at the time and not long after he died and indeed until all this nonsense picked up in the mid-19th century.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-77433052003543112972020-07-20T12:53:42.018-04:002020-07-20T12:53:42.018-04:00It always bemuses me that erudite people
continue ...It always bemuses me that erudite people<br />continue to argue the Shakespeare Authorship<br />Matter. Especially since it was settled some <br />years ago by a Stanford physicist. Sort of.<br /><br /><a href="https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/march/physicist-shakespeare-plays-031813.html" rel="nofollow">Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?</a><br /><br />Stanford astrophysicist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_A._Sturrock" rel="nofollow">Peter Sturrock</a>'s new book takes a statistical <br />approach to the Shakespeare authorship question ...<br /><br />Sturrock, 88, is a professor emeritus of applied physics and an eminent astrophysicist. While writing his 2009 memoir, 'A Tale of Two Sciences', he revisited his early pastime of writing poetry.<br /><br />"The only poem I could remember was a parody of that famous sonnet, 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' My parody began, inevitably, 'Shall I compare thee to a winter's night?' and it went on from there."<br /><br />This led him to re-read all 154 of the Bard's sonnets, which he felt were autobiographical.<br /><br />"But once you start asking what the sonnets are all about, you are automatically led to the question: Who was the author anyway?"<br /><br />The authorship question, he reasoned, could be addressed by a scientific approach. Years before, while studying pulsars, Sturrock devised a new method to process information using statistics. His method was based on a statistical concept known as Bayes' theorem, which states that probabilities change depending on the information you have. ...Fred C. Dobbsnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-12887684410090578822020-07-20T09:41:58.448-04:002020-07-20T09:41:58.448-04:00Anders,
Actually I am going to slam this stu...Anders,<br /><br /> Actually I am going to slam this stuff a lot harder. It is because I am currently disgusted by the mass gullibility out there for conspiracy theories, and this is what that is, fancier and more sophisticated than many of them as it is. But, I do not buy into the JFK assassination theories, and I view it (or one or another versions of it) as having much more credibility than any of these Shakespeare ones.<br /> Indeed one sign is that at least with the JFK ones they appeared soon after the assassination. These Shakespeare theories did not appear until the 1800s, over 200 hundred years after Shakespeare died. If in fact one of the 80 other candidates was it, why did nobody say much sooner after his death, especially an original source?<br /> Indeed, you even accept that some of his known friends, some of whom have been proposed to be him, say when he was alive he was the author. Why would they have been covering up for de Vere or Bacon or whomever. More to the point, why would they continue to do so at the time of the first Folio well after the main parties were all dead and continue to keep the secret to their graves This makes utterly no sense.<br /> On de Vere, the guy died in 1604. He was publicly known as a poet and playwright on his own. The argument is that some of his work was being covered up to politically protect him. But maybe only a couple of plays would hold such danger. Would all those comedies? No, it is simply ridiculous. Anyway, he died a year after Elizabeth I. Why continue to keep his authorship secret? And a bunch of plays came later, with The Tempest in particular showing knowledge of America that it would be unlikely de Vere would have had, if not impossible. But to defend him you have to come up with completely bizarre arguments that make utterly no sense, not a shred of it. And he was not even proposed as an alternative until the 1920s. This is total crackpottery, to be frank, sorry to be so blunt.<br /> A final note is that the first person to talk about Shakespeare as author of the plays was in 1598, the less well known Campbell I think, who complained about him. This guy was a rival playwright who was criticizing him. And then we have the likes of Jonson and Marlowe saying he wrote them.<br /> I close by noting that for any of these alternatives to be true you have to have a large number of people keeping this secret for their entire lives. It is a saw about conspiracy theories that the more people you need to have in on it and keeping it secret over a longer time, the less likely it is to be true. And this one involves a lot of famous people keeping it secret long after there was any reason to. Why in 1623 would they still be keeping it secret about a guy who died 19 years before? Sorry, no dice, not in the remotest.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-88710392626238322262020-07-20T08:10:59.825-04:002020-07-20T08:10:59.825-04:00Well, you are not going to be convince, and, sorry...Well, you are not going to be convince, and, sorry, I am not about to be convinced, Anders, not by what you have put forward. Sorry. So, guess we shall all have to agree to disagree, unless you want to be disagreeable about the whole thing, which you brought up in the first place. This thread was originally about the ongoing debates over Richard III, not over the true identity of William Shakespeare.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-82063417613196833422020-07-18T14:40:19.240-04:002020-07-18T14:40:19.240-04:00Ok, I'm happy if we could conclude by agreeing...Ok, I'm happy if we could conclude by agreeing to disagree, but apparently that's not the outlook of the last two comments. Counterargument:<br /><br />That some of Will Shaksper of Stratford's peers and contemporaries name him as the author of the plays and sonnets would be conclusive _if_ there was any other surviving documentation that he did write them. But there is none. Again: no Shaksper correspondence, no handwritten manuscripts/foul papers, no handwriting samples other than a half a dozen varying signatures with different spellings and most tellingly of all, no mention of plays or literary property in any of the surviving legal documents (including a will) that refer to Shaksper. If the documentation was deliberately destroyed, why would Shaksper have done this? It is perfectly possible that he became disillusioned with his past as an actor/writer and destroyed its documentation as an act of rejection. Or that he felt the plays/sonnets might be a political liability for his family now that the less tolerant Stuart king James I was on the throne instead of Elizabeth, but the following alternative is also possible. <br /><br />Shaksper was an actor and part owner of The Lord Chamberlain's Men, the theater company whose main patron was Henry Carey, Queen Elizabeth's chamberlain and first cousin (possibly half brother). Carey was thus a prominent member of the court and would have had connections with all of its prominent members including the Earl of Oxford since he was also High Steward of Oxford in later years. <br /><br />It is thus perfectly possible that with Carey as a go-between, Shaksper agreed to act as the front man for the true author of the plays, who would be a member of Elizabeth's court and would thus have access to the private libraries needed to come up with the extended vocabulary in the plays of "Shakespeare". And since the content of the plays was politically charged plus the individuals described in the sonnets were also members of the court, the author of the plays would have wanted anonymity. <br /><br />There is also the issue that Will Shaksper of Stratford's life has so little documentation in any sense: no correspondence, no evidence that he went to school, no documentation of his whereabouts for significant portions of his life, and no evidence of his having access to the literature needed to build up the writing skills needed for the plays and sonnets.<br /><br />Ok, that's my last word on this, though Barkley and Peter T may well insert further disagreements. In addition to Truth, Controversy is also the daughter of time.Andreshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12494921316257669803noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-77374461156947918162020-07-17T00:58:08.946-04:002020-07-17T00:58:08.946-04:00On Shakespeare - his contemporaries accepted that ...On Shakespeare - his contemporaries accepted that he wrote the plays, several other playwrights at the time mention him as a playwright, the court accepted him as the author, the Chancellor's office accepted him (they licensed all plays, and the stamped copy of the script was a legal document kept by the player company), his friends published his plays shortly after his death. Evidence that anyone else wrote the plays - essentially zero. He is fairly well documented for a middle-class Elizabethan.Peter Thttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13289172253358199028noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-4726864443783695902020-07-16T14:52:10.450-04:002020-07-16T14:52:10.450-04:00I did check, and not only have 80 different people...I did check, and not only have 80 different people been proposed as alternatives to Shakespeare, but the vast majority of historians accept that he wrote the works his name is on. There are something like 70 hard pieces of evidence about his life from his day, and many of his contemporaries at the time made comments about him authoring plays and sonnets from as early as 1598 on.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-63137734592570400492020-07-16T09:50:42.816-04:002020-07-16T09:50:42.816-04:00 There is simply no contemporary evidence that Wil... There is simply no contemporary evidence that Will Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays and sonnets...<br /><br />[ Good grief, but do go play in the sand.<br /><br />Better though, try to learn from the plays and sonnets. ]Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-82649952957459319782020-07-15T20:08:10.879-04:002020-07-15T20:08:10.879-04:00Hi Barkley. Agreed on Richard III and the princes....Hi Barkley. Agreed on Richard III and the princes. <br /><br />As to the Authorship Controversy, it is perfectly possible to be an Oxfordian or other anti-Stratfordian without being a pro-nobility snob, and I find the Stratfordian charge of snobbery highly irritating. No serious Anti-Stratfordian denies that Will Shaksper of Stratford _could_ have written the works of Shakespeare provided that he (a) had access to an initial education that would have taught him to read and write, and (b) had access to either a single library or a number of small libraries extensive enough for him to have developed one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer; after all, Christopher Marlowe was not a nobleman and yet became an accomplished playwright. The anti-Stratfordian case is built upon the simple fact that documentation for Will Shaksper's (a) and (b) is 100% missing: there is none. And of course, there is the evidence limitation: no existing evidence is conclusive enough to prove either case in a Court of Law; one can only state which candidate has the most circumstantial evidence in his favor.Andreshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12494921316257669803noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-5541058859913278662020-07-15T19:50:25.534-04:002020-07-15T19:50:25.534-04:00Anders,
My understanding is that the princes were...Anders,<br /><br />My understanding is that the princes were seen as late as 1484, but indeed the lack of anybody reporting seeing them after that is the strongest argument for it being either Buckingham or Tyrrel on the orders of Richard. But there remains this curious matter of Henry VII not mentioning this matter in his Bill against Richard after his death, and Henry certainly has much more reason to want them dead than did Richard.<br /><br />I am not going to get into the Shakespeare debate. The literature on it is far vaster than what you cite here. I shall make only one observation on it, that a lot of it depends on an assumption that this mere nothing from Stratford who was not an aristocrat could know so much about court matters as well as so many other intellectual and historical matters. This strikes me as coming from classic British classist snobbery.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-82094790370691436322020-07-15T17:28:46.705-04:002020-07-15T17:28:46.705-04:00Hi Barkley. We are on opposite sides of this: I th...Hi Barkley. We are on opposite sides of this: I think it more likely that the young princes were killed by either Richard III or Richard's right-hand man the Duke of Buckingham (with or without Richard's orders) than that they were killed by Henry VII: there is no documentation of anyone seeing them after 1483, one year into Richard's reign. See Sharon Kay Penman's novel _The Sunne in Splendor_ for a good if imperfect argument that the princes were killed by Buckingham acting behind Richard's back. It is also possible that Buckingham acted on Richard's orders, or that Richard killed the princes after Buckingham rebelled. <br /><br />On the other hand I think it is much more likely that Shakespeare's plays were written either by Edward De Vere or by someone who know De Vere intimately. There is simply no contemporary evidence that Will Shaksper of Stratford wrote the plays and sonnets: no handwritten manuscripts, no correspondence by Shaksper, no mention of plays or other literary property in his legal documents, and not even samples of Will Shaksper's handwriting other than a half dozen signatures on legal documents, which spell his name in different ways. For research on the Oxfordian case, see (if you haven't already):<br /><br />Bertram Fields (2005). Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare. <br /><br />Mark Anderson (2005). Shakespeare by Another Name: A Biography of Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, The Man Who Was Shakespeare.Andreshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12494921316257669803noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4900303239154048192.post-9814177236507075792020-07-15T16:11:10.075-04:002020-07-15T16:11:10.075-04:00Anders,
For what it is worth, while I am open to ...Anders,<br /><br />For what it is worth, while I am open to the arguments of Tey and others that Richard III may have been innocent in the matter of the little princes (we never will know for sure), I am a total skeptic on the now ten million theories regarding who wrote Shakespeare's works, being fairly certain it was the man himself, although I cannot prove that. I shall grant that if it was not him, DeVere has more credibility than some of the other many alternatives who have been proposed.rosserjb@jmu.eduhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09300046915843554101noreply@blogger.com