I wonder how folks would get around Marlowe's death date of 1593...

For some Marlovians, it's an article of faith that Marlowe didn't didn't really die in that knife fight, that Walsingham or Raleigh or some other heavy hitter(s) engineered a fraudulent inquest.

i may give it a go.

9000 good reasons are enough for anyone.

In response to dismissive and uninformed comments re Shakespeare
 

Mr. Whitworth saw fit to dismiss the authorship issue with a few quips and me along with it. I would recommend a more informed approach. For example, his remark that Jonson mattered regarding "Shakespeare", not Emerson. True, and be certain to read "On Poet-Ape" for his view of the Shakspere figure whom you identify as "Shakespeare". They were two different individuals, one a low-life knave and the other a pseudonymous Renaissance man. There is a hell of a difference.

In response to the view that the play is the thing, could I remind the author of it that the sentence quoted in part was "The play's the thing to catch the conscience of the king." A play does not exist in a vacuum and knowing the context, the author, the conditions and pressures of the times, all contribute to understanding and appreciation. Where this may fit the present topic is that believing a fable, in essence a lie, undercuts a true appreciation of the artistic work one reads or views.

There is little point in discussing the matter further if the truth of history and literature is of no importance. I would wish it otherwise for your sake and that of our trusting children. We should reward their trust with responsibly seeking that truth.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" ... the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

The cadence, the relevance of the enjambment, the sheer "playability" of the perfect exit line is what "William" wrote and, and William missed.

There are different kinds of truth and the tub where history and literature swim round and round lke a pair of goldfishes reflects the face of the honest peerer-in with more accuracy than the truth of either.

This may be the stuffiest paragraph I have ever read on Eratosphere.

No one dismissed the "truth of history and literature." And if they did, here on an intelligent, yet fairly innocuous Internet forum, I'm quite certain that truth, history, and literature will get over it, as will our trusting children (after they eat their broccoli, of course).

And so long as they are not accidentally drowned in a tub of goldfishes...

Based on Mr. Ray's post, I'm starting to think John Whitworth has a lot more power than we give him credit for.

Poetry is always a bigger tent than anyone imagines. I went to a poetry gathering at our church the other night. One lady, after telling a somewhat contemptuous but partly inspiring story about an oral performance of the Odyssey she'd seen, proceeded to read her favorite sections from Spoon River Anthology as quickly as if she were skimming a newspaper story. She seemed completely deaf to the weight and pacing of words. Yet she'd come there to share her favorite poems. The author Mary likes so much on Mary Sidney brings impressive, exhaustive erudition to bear on the authorship question without a word on the characteristic handling of language in the many, many facets that make up the writer's complex and inimitable fingerprint. Poets don't own poetry, and it is a little shocking to see how much it can mean to people who see it from such a different perspective. To some extent the poet's perspective can be demonstrated, laboriously, but to some extent it's untransmittable intuition.

PS. Hi Ann. I was at a funeral the other day. We were singing a very nice hymn, so I looked down at the bottom of the page to see who wrote it. Your pal, Jan Struther!

Speaking of fingerprints, did you know that there is no hard evidence of William Shakespeare's handwriting, except for a couple of barely legible and inconsistent signatures on legal documents?

Apart from any opinion on the question at hand (which I have little invested in), I think, overall, the rather blithely superficial treatment and condescending dismissal of Mr Ray's comments can't be denied. This thread sounds more like a snotty cocktail party than a poetry site.

Nemo

In what way are we snotty, Nemo? We have listened to Mr Ray's views. We have dismissed them.

As the Bard says, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

I am not the first to note that the magnum opus on the Shakespeare-was-somebody-else thesis was written by a man named Looney.

RHE

Perhaps supercilious is the word, John. And your dismissal seems to be based, as always, on lazily imperious whim.
Nothing I say will change that. So I will say nothing else.

Nemo

And don't forget our local hero Ignatius Donnelly, state senator, lieutenant governor, three-time U.S. Congressman, and author of The Great Cryptogram, advocating Bacon's authorship. There's nothing wrong with throwing rocks at elite icons, and it's to be expected elites will throw rocks at popular icons. Maybe there is an inconsistency between the wide berth poets claim for eccentricity and crankiness and the guild feeling that wafts around Father William, but that doesn't make the case any easier to accept on the merits. Contemporaries over decades thought he wrote his own plays. In the artificial world of law, if Herbert, Oxford, or Bacon perpetrated a fraud, their successors couldn't come along 300-400 years later and claim they were lying when they said Shakespeare did it.

William,

This is not said to attack your opinion in any way, and may instead be an example of my own frivolousness. But in the first place, I myself don't really much care who wrote Shakespeare: that the poetry and plays were written is enough for me -- the biographical information is very interesting, but I see it as icing on the cake. Secondly, I'd be a little saddened if the scholars settled, definitively, on one person: the dispute is entertaining, and I'd be sorry if it stopped. Besides, I kind of enjoy considering Shakespeare as different possible people -- it's like turning a jewel and viewing how different facets play with the light.

However long the battle rages in the ivory tower, though, we still have all that lovely work by the author, authors, or authoress; the man, the woman, the myth, the man moth. . .

Best,

Ed

Except that he doesn't seem like different possible people. He doesn't sound anything like Herbert, Bacon, or Marlowe. Though the fact that the ivory tower has decided in favor of Shakespeare may not be the strongest point in his favor.

The Alleged Author!
 

Our greatest writer? This person? From such a mediocre and undistinguished background? Something is amiss. Let the facts speak for themselves:

* born in an obscure village
* the sixth of seven children
* a sickly child who apparently stayed mostly indoors until age 9
* raised in a backwater river town
* grew up in poverty and near destitution
* fewer than six years of formal education in a country school
* apprenticed at age 11 to an older brother as a typesetter in a small print shop
* at age 18 left home to try his luck in a larger city, moving from job to job
* worked for several years as a boatman
* enlisted in a military unit and deserted after two weeks
* moved again to escape the war
* failed at various enterprises, including mining
* went to work for local newspapers
* started writing articles and sketches, but suspiciously under such odd names as “Josh” or “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass” before settling on a consistent pen name

Obviously, a foul conspiracy is afoot. Who really wrote all of those novels and stories and sketches? Who is the real genius and author of these incomparable works? Who is the person William Dean Howells referred to as “the Lincoln of our Literature?” Certainly not the pathetic character whose early circumstances and life are outlined above. Let us pursue the truth, wherever it may lead. Let us ask the crucial question: Who really wrote the works ascribed to Mark Twain?

Richard

Seriously though, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

Didn't Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, praise Shakespeare? Apparently, he was known as a master even in his own time.

I highly doubt the plays were the work of a commitee or company of writers. It is obvious to me that the majority of material attributed to Shakespeare was the work of a single hand, the work of someone with undoubtedly the finest ear of anyone writing in English.

To appreciate this superb ear outside the plays, one only has to read Venus and Adonis, one of his long narrative poems. He is far and away superior to any other author in English, from his time forward.

Marlowe, Herbert, and many others, were exceptionally fine poets, but they do not match Shakespeare. Not even Milton matched him, though he came admirably close, as did Keats in his Hyperion fragments.

There were other masters who came admirably close: Browning, Tennyson, and even Wallace Stevens, in his amazing The Comedian as the Letter C, which contains whole blocks of lines nearly on par with Shakespeare.

The opening of Richard III is, in my view, a perfect encapsulation of Shakespeare's unrivaled mastery:

I disagree. Gentle John doesn't have an imperious whim but an imperious Will. He Will not consider another Will, but Bill Will. Bill, an attorney, and therefore conversant with facts and evidence, says: "The author Mary likes so much on Mary Sidney brings impressive, exhaustive erudition to bear on the authorship question..." That author is Robin WILLiams, of course. Do you hear that, John? Bill read the book and says: "impressive, exhaustive erudition." Robin Williams writes, “there is no documented evidence that [Will] Shakespeare was a writer.” Why don't you read the book, John?

Mary, if I read every book that everybody with a cause told me to read because it will change my life - or at least my thinking on their particular point - I'd have no time to breath. Frequently, you have to go with what you've got, use common sense and general knowledge, and trust that all those other very learned people have it right. I do that with global warming to some extent (I've read more there on my on my own than of Mary Sidney), and by God, I do it with Shakespeare and Mary Sidney and all the other theories and pretenders. I'm not being blithely superficial - just trusting my own sense. (John, of course, is blithely superficial. He is, after all, a Tory. But even John is sometimes right. And this is one of those times.)

I can't have that, Michael. I may be blithely superficial but that is in spite of, not because of, being a Tory. Are you suggesting Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott are superficial? Of course you are not. It is Tom Paine who is superficial. And Thomas Jefferson, or whoever it was responsible for that monument to superficiality, the American Constitution. As if you could write all that stuff down. Brits are deep. We bite our lips and stay silent. All except me, that is.

And I am right about Shakespeare because I feel it to be so.

As the great Peter de Vries had it - Deep down, I'm shallow.

If you’re thinking of Thomas Jefferson’s authorship, John, you’re not thinking of the Constitution, but rather of the Declaration of Independence. Every year on the Fourth of July, some British commentator can be counted on to point out that the Declaration, properly considered, was an expression of British Enlightenment thinking. Well, of course it was. Jefferson was British. All white Virginian slave owners in the 1700s were British.

James Madison is frequently credited as “the Father of the Constitution,” but that document was more a product of committee collaboration than of individual authorship. (Although other hands dabbled in Jefferson’s Declaration, it’s reasonable to see him as the primary author. You can’t really finger one primary author of the Constitution, although Madison definitely gets credit for the Bill of Rights, without which the Constitution would have been far more imperfect.) The Constitution was certainly a pact with the devil, in the sense that it blueprinted a democratic republic by compromising with the monumental evil of the slave system. But it was not shallow or superficial. To design a democracy with built-in safeguards against the tyranny of the mob is a deep undertaking.

Shakespeare-didn't-really-write-Shakespeare arguments -- now, those are shallow.

I bow to your superior knowledge, Chris. As you might suppose, Chris, I'm no great fan of enlightenment thinking. Too much Shaw, that child of the enlightenment, at an early age. The only enlightenment philosopher I really like is Hume for his book-burning tendencies.

I still think that a written constitution is a great step backwards. You have to live it, not read it.

Well, I’ll take a written constitution over its historic alternative, which is usually tyranny or monarchy. So, John, am I to assume that you’d rather be ruled by the whims of some king or queen or prince? What’s next in your reasoned argument? The divine right of kings? You probably would have opposed the Magna Carta.

Without written constitutional law, people have no rights. Your statement, "You have to live it, not read it," is a ridiculous non sequitur. How can people live a life entailing certain freedoms and rights if those freedoms and rights are not stipulated in the governmental structure? You sometimes say the dopiest things.

Richard

Our way is better. The British way is better. We have managed for a thousand years without a written constitution. And in general we are freer than you have historically been.

How many Americans have read and understood their constitution and amendments (twenty-seven? thirty-three?) right through? I get from the internet that there are 4,500 words in the Constitution. How many more words are in the amendments? Are all these words immediately intelligible to an ordinary person? I assume it is taught in schools but lots of things are taught in schools. What exactly has a slave owning man of the eighteenth century got to say to an American black woman today?

John,
I'll tell you what the eighteenth century man would tell a black woman today-- we were wrong, we were wrong to try to get 13 colonies to agree to the bigger picture without foregoing slavery, however, we corrected that problem in the Civil War which cost the country half a million men and bad blood for many years after the war was over.

Furthermore, the Crown had no specific problem with the Colonies and slavery during the Seven-Years-War with the French. The Crown relished using rubes like us to do their dirty work until that little disaster was done. We were allies loyal to the King, however crazy he might have been.

I would rather have the freedom wrought by blood and the Constitution than be referred to as a subject.

Respectfully,
Charlie.

Perhaps the British way is better for the British and the American way for the Americans, neither of which is without flaws nor without greatness.

As the subject of the thread has written:

Let's all cry peace, freedom, and liberty!

I am a foe to tyrants, and my country's friend.

Who is here so vile that will not love his country?

Well, actually, Charlie, we are not referred to as subjects, though I wouldn't mind that at all.

My original point is that few people are convinced of anything by reading a book about it unless they are already half convinced. Nor does reasoned argument do the trick. Have you not ever thought, 'His argument is better but he's still wrong. I can't put it as well as he can but I know I'm right.'

I know it's off topic, but, John, would you mind saying what you mean that the British are "freer" than the Americans?

Freer do say and do what we think. The tolerance of eccentricity. This is becoming less the case than it was when I was young when black Americans had to sit at the back of the bus and all that and teachers on American campuses were forbidden to discuss the Vietnam war, but I think it is still true. But perhaps it is not. I deprecate not being able to say certain words if I choose to, I must say. Does the Constitution allow you to say them? And I would like to be able to smoke in a public house. Can you do that?

Freer is not always better.

Americans, however, are freer to bear arms and it shows in the frequency of gun-crimes in the US.


You can't do that here either. It isn't being "freer" for the person who is unduly, against his will, subjected to such a harmful substance. I don't want the freedom to be subjected to harmful substances against my will. To be free from being such is a much better, and healthier, freedom.

Of the many statements of yours I’ve read over a long period of time, John, there’s only one that I totally agree with—an observation you’ve made repeatedly about yourself: you are shallow.

It’s comical how you take any half-baked notion that comes out of your head as truth or reality. In your last post you wrote: “teachers on American campuses were forbidden to discuss the Vietnam war.” Where in the hell did you come up with that! It may be some such oddball case can be dredged out of the records of the time, but the fact is the Vietnam War was widely and hotly debated in American schools, both high schools and universities. In fact, many college professors across the country were leaders and organizers of campus war protests. I was there. I lived it and saw it. And the national debate about that war increasingly became the dominant focus of the media.

There’s no end to the ill-informed, crazy crap you generate in these political and historical discussions. My only suggestion is that you start wearing a pointy cap with bells.

Richard

Richard beat me to it on the Vietnam war. John, you've got to stop reading that Murdoch crap. Or at least stop repeating it.

John, you may have managed for 1000 years without a constitution, but don't forget that a few hundred of those years featured serfs and monarchs. And let's also not forget that it was the wonderful "freedom" the colonies enjoyed as part of Britain that caused them to rebel and write the Constitution in the first place.

Leaving aside the pros and cons of written versus unwritten constitutions, the US actually had no real choice but to write it down. It's not all freedom and stuff, but nuts and bolts. They had to decide on things like having three branches of government, two houses of the legislature, etc. They couldn't simply opt for waiting 1000 years for these things to evolve. And even when it comes to the freedom stuff, since they were forming a new government and had to write down what they were forming, it would have been foolhardy of them not to at least try to articulate some of the guiding principles.

Michael and Richard, it was my wife, who worked on a campus (UCLA) in California in 1967, who told me. I am sure you would not be so intrepid and ill bred as to call her a liar. And I read the Daily Telegraph, not a Murdoch rag but quite another.

Kevin, I could smoke in my pub for smokers and you could not smoke in yours for non-smokers. Then we would all be happy, wouldn't we?

People have become very intolerant I find.

No, John, I do not question your wife’s veracity. I even mentioned in my post that most likely an example of what you claim could be dredged up. It’s a big country and all sorts of things happen and have happened, including on college campuses. But, as you so often do, you make an isolated pronouncement and serve it up as an unqualified universal truth. And your statement “teachers on American campuses were forbidden to discuss the Vietnam war” is just such an inaccurate and gross generalization. Your wife’s experience was not the norm during the late 1960s on college campuses across this country. Quite the contrary.

Richard

John, I happened to be teaching in the English Department at UCLA in 1967 and we spoke against the war daily, suffered gas attacks, and the roaring of helicopters above our classrooms as acts of intimidation. I watched a cop break a colleague's arm and other colleagues beaten and arrested during peaceful demonstrations. We had frequent "Teach-ins" about the war. Where was your wife hiding?

Oh, never mind.