Shakespear is Shakespear....

[RobRoy]

I should point out that I don't really think there is any evidence that Marlowe did fake his death, but everything involving Marlowe is fuzzy: you can't really take anything at face value (again, I would recommend the Nicholl book I mentioned earlier, though it's been years since I read it).

No, no concrete evidence, at least from what I’ve seen so far. But that wasn’t my point to Vic Vega. There was plenty of good reason for Marlowe to do so.

As for the body of the hanged man: I haven't found the site I came across the other day, but this one gives a similar explanation. According to this theory, Ingram Frizer (Marlowe's killer) and the other men present at Eleanor Bull's the day Marlowe died were central to the death hoax.

Apparently, the hanged man was John Penry, executed for sedition, though the charge seems forced. That hardly matters though. What’s key here is that he was of an age with Marlowe, and that there is no record of what happened to the body after the execution. It’s extremely thin gruel, more like brackish water, but there it is.

I can see why Marlovians would focus on the body, because the circumstances help to point toward a faked death. But at best it appears coincidental, and it’s not as if they were using the Arlington National Cemetery’s system for keeping track of executions and burial of bodies.

 

[TraneWreck]

I like the way the anti-Stratfordians go crazy over the inscription on the monument. From the Frontline episode I mentioned above:

[...]

It's true that Shakespeare isn't buried in the monument: his burial under the church is marked by a plaque with a doggerel curse on it. Perhaps the author of the inscription thought it was going to be placed at the site of the burial? Obviously, I don't have a definitive answer, but some kind of wacky theory involving the manuscripts of plays that Shakespeare didn't write (according to Ogburn) seems among the unlikelier scenarios.

The "read, if thou canst..." gave me a good laugh. It's amazing how people can scrutinize something with plain meaning until they so confuse themselves that they lose track of the obvious.

It's like putting your nose 1/2 inch from the Mona Lisa and staring intently until you convince yourself that it isn't a picture of a woman.

With the monument I see two possibilities (granting the wild assumption that the works are, in fact, buried there):

1) That is where the real Shakespeare is burried, making the internment of his plays odd, but not conspiratorial.

2) It's all a clever ruse to continue the deception that Stratford-Shakespeare was an imposter. In which case, why would someon bury the plays? If this is another plot by conspirators, wouldn't they make the connection obvious rather than inscrutable?

It reminds me of the 9-11 argument that Bush knocked down the towers to start a war with Iraq...but filled the planes with Saudis. Hmm, pretty stupid.

We want everyone to think this imposter from Stratford is Shakespeare...so we're going to hide the evidence, making the connection impossible to substantiate.

If all of the convincing facts were gone, I would still doubt these Shakespeare-as-imposter theories for no reason other than their standard conspiracy tactics.

 

[The Almond]

One of the arguments I've always found most convincing is that Shakespeare worked in a collaborative environment, changing and altering the texts as he saw fit. He acted as writer, business director, performer and director in numerous plays, and the result of being closely associated with the process caused significant differences in the text. It's a relatively modern invention to have a single text, which was, in fact, culled and edited from available texts. The point being that, if Shakespeare were simply being provided the lines, there would be very little impetus on his part to change or alter the plays in any way. His acting troup probably frequently ad-libbed or changed lines (possibly at his direction), and when Shakespeare thought it was good, the text changed.

I, too, have always been annoyed with the media's portrayal of the anti-Stratfordians as being the more educated position or the opinion of learned scholars. The inevitable earth-centric-universe comparisons are enough to make me retch. Then again, the position is novel. It's interesting, and perhaps fun, to consider the idea that the truth is orthogonal to all of the available evidence. And it's a common criticism of the media to report on what's novel without deference to the truth (Can socks cause anal fissures? Story at 11!).

 

[Lucian]

No, no concrete evidence, at least from what I’ve seen so far. But that wasn’t my point to Vic Vega. There was plenty of good reason for Marlowe to do so.



Apparently, the hanged man was John Penry, executed for sedition, though the charge seems forced. That hardly matters though. What’s key here is that he was of an age with Marlowe, and that there is no record of what happened to the body after the execution. It’s extremely thin gruel, more like brackish water, but there it is.

I can see why Marlovians would focus on the body, because the circumstances help to point toward a faked death. But at best it appears coincidental, and it’s not as if they were using the Arlington National Cemetery’s system for keeping track of executions and burial of bodies.

What I want to know is, did they stab the corpse above the right eye?

 

[JerryGarcia]

Contested Will : Who Wrote Shakespeare is a read some of you might enjoy.

It's a history of the "authorship controversy" and makes for a great read.


Check your public library!~

 

[Floyt]

For beneficial uses of the Shakespeare debate, see Kipling in "The Propagation of Knowledge":

[...]McTurk relented and promised to approach King next ‘English’ on the authenticity of Shakespeare’s plays.

The time and tone chosen were admirable. While King was warming himself by a preliminary canter round the Form’s literary deficiencies, Turkey coughed in a style which suggested a reminder to a slack employee that it was time to stop chattering and get to work. As King began to bristle, Turkey inquired: ‘I’d be glad to know, sir, if it’s true that Shakespeare did not write his own plays at all?’

‘Good God!’ said King most distinctly. Turkey coughed again piously. ‘They all say so in Ireland, sir.’

‘Ireland—Ireland—Ireland!’ King overran Ireland with one blast of flame that should have been written in letters of brass for instruction to-day. At the end, Turkey coughed once more, and the cough said: ‘It is Shakespeare, and not my country, that you are hired to interpret to me.’ He put it directly, too: ‘An’ is it true at all about the alleged plays, sir?’

‘It is not,’ Mr. King whispered, and began to explain, on lines that might, perhaps, have been too freely expressed for the parents of those young (though it gave their offspring delight), but with a passion, force, and wealth of imagery which would have crowned his discourse at any university. By the time he drew towards his peroration the Form was almost openly applauding.

[...]

[W]hen the essays were read, Mr. King confined himself wholly to Turkey’s pitiful, puerile, jejune, exploded, unbaked, half-bottomed thesis. He touched, too, on the ‘lie in the soul,’ which was, fundamentally, vulgarity—the negation of Reverence and the Decencies. He broke forth into an impassioned defence of ‘mere atheism,’ which he said was often no more than mental flatulence—transitory and curable by knowledge of life—in no way comparable, for essential enormity, with the debasing pagan abominations to which Turkey had delivered himself. He ended with a shocking story about one Jowett, who seemed to have held some post of authority where King came from, and who had told an atheistical undergraduate that if he could not believe in a Personal God by five that afternoon he would be expelled—as, with tears of rage in his eyes, King regretted that he could not expel McTurk. And Turkey blew his nose in the middle of it.

So I hope the old public school spirit will keep you lot from Baconizing all over the place. The Empire was not built on mental flatulence

 

[headscratcher4]

Contested Will : Who Wrote Shakespeare is a read some of you might enjoy.

It's a history of the "authorship controversy" and makes for a great read.


Check your public library!~

That's what I'm reading...facinating look at the whole alleged controversy. The author also wrote another A year in the Life of William Shakespeare, also very good.

As to Contested Will, I particularly like the Oxfordians (originating with a guy named Looney of all people) who went to seances to speak to Shakespeare, Oxford and Bacon to get the full scoop from beyond the grave and than published a book of these extra-life conversations. Really strange stuff.

 

[RobRoy]

What I want to know is, did they stab the corpse above the right eye?

Happened when he was dropped en route. Unfortunate, but gave them a better story than Marlowe was accidentally strangled to death by Frizer out of self-defense.

 

[Lucian]

Of course, there's always this.

From the link:

It is true that Shakespeare acted in the company that performed the plays after 1594, and that the same name appeared on the long poems, on the 15 plays published in Quarto after 1598, on the First Folio, and in documents of the acting company. But no evidence demonstrates that he actually wrote the plays.

<snip>

But aside from that, what evidence is there that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?

Well, of course there's Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592), in which poet, playwright and University Wit Robert Greene warned three colleagues (including, almost certainly, Marlowe) that they would be forsaken by "those Puppits . . . that speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours" because "there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide,* supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie" (quoted in The Norton Shakespeare, pp. 3321-2).

Somehow anti-Stratfordians argue that this doesn't refer to Shakespeare. Two playwrights mentioned in the pamphlet (probably Marlowe and Shakespeare) were vexed, causing the printer, Henry Chettle, to offer an apology to one of them:

About three moneths since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sungry Booke sellers hands, among other his Groatsworth of wit, in which a letter written to divers play-makers, is offensively by one of two of them taken; and because on the dead they cannot be avenged, they wilffully forge in their conceites a living Author: and after tossing it to and fro, no remedy, but it must light on me. . . . With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be [Marlowe]: The other [Shakespeare], whome at that time I did not so much sapere, as since I wish I had, for that as I have moderated the heate of living writers, and might have usde my owne discretion (especially in such a case) the Author beeing dead, that I did not, I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because my selfe have seene his demeanor no lesse civill than he exelent in the qualitie he professes: Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writting that aprooves his Art. (Norton Shakespeare, pp. 3322-3)

*3 Henry VI 1.4.138: "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide!"

 

[paulmarkj]

I'd like to add some of the evidence for Shakespeare writing Shakespeare:

1) Shakespeare was educated at grammar school until he was about 13/14

Anti-Statfordians say there is no evidence for this but there is: Shakespeare's father was an Alderman, his father built the local grammar school, aldermen got a free laces at the grammar school - circumstantial, but clear that Shakespeare would have gone to grammar school

2) University educated people of the time (and later) mocked Shakespeare for his lack of education, ie: because he didn't go to university.

3) Shakespeare's plays demonstrate his lack of education in different ways: weak geography and weak knowledge of the classics. There are various versions of the classic stories, but Shakespeare always uses the version taught from the standard (only) grammar-school text book of the time. Thus evidencing that his education stopped at about 13/14.

So we have people mocking Shakespeare and his plays because he didn't go to university and because they had mistakes on them and yet also saying the plays must have been written by a university educated man.

4) Shakespeare's Greek classical education was worse than his Latin - schools taught Latin early on, but Shakespeare would only have got 1 year of Greek.

5) Shakespeare uses many colloquialisms from London and Stratford: he used over 60 words for birds alone, many from his home town - a would another author know so many colloquialisms?

(Other contributors to this thread have question how much Shakespeare would have mixed with the upper classes, but equally, how would another author learn so many colloquialisms without spreading a great deal of time time in Stratford.).

6) Shakespeare understood theatre - no one doubted he was an actor and worked in the theatre. There is much evidence to show that the author understood how acting worked. I am no expert in this area, but have been told that his exit and entrances and timings thereof show the hand of an expert in theatre.

7) Shakespeare references science, wars, history, etc. Studies have shown that his knowledge came from the standard histories of the time, and, interestingly, one study shows that his information usually comes from the first quarter of the standard books. Ie: the knowledge is shallow and it looks like Shakespeare read quickly but not deeply!

I could go on, but these facts are usually ignored by anti-Stratfordians.

The trouble is that most evidence is circumstantial, but this doesn't prove Shakespeare didn't write the plays. In any case, anti-Stratfordians' evidence is often less than circumstantial!

 

[Helen]

I've never really understood the need some seem to feel for Shakespeare not to have been Shakespeare. It seems an unlikely conspiracy, since it must in that case surely have been a conspiracy - many people must have known that he wasn't, mustn't they? If, indeed, he wasn't.