POETICKS

28 November 2009

I’ve always found Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography a fascinating book. I’ve even read it all the way through twice, writing notes on its pages as I did so, and I’ve reread many pages of it since.  In my own book on the authorship controversy, I mentioned it a number of times, devoting 16 pages to its bizarre method of evaluating evidence in an appendix to the first edition of my book.  Needless to say, I also argued in many threads here and elsewhere on the Internet about it.  Not being a Crowley, I did find a few of its arguments reasonable though far from persuasive.  But I found the bulk of them foolish at best, and more often than not incredibly flawed.  Since I’m the sort who enjoys dismantling wacks’ theories and believes it advances the cause of truth to do so, I spent a fair amount of time getting together a critique of it.

But, as happens with too many of my projects, I got side-tracked, and never got anything of consequence concerning it done other than the appendix.  I’ve a yearning to give it another try, though, thanks to the wack who recently claimed that there was no paper trial for Shakespeare, one of Price’s central delusions.  Ergo, I’m beginning this thread as a sort of notebook for reactions against or in defense of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography.  I plan to dump ll my thoughts about the book into it, a little at a time, two or three times a week.  I hope others will join me.

1.  Price becomes an Anti-Stratfordian.

In her introduction, Price “was surprised to find nothing in Schoenbaum’s William
Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life “to prove that Shakespeare had written any
plays.  Prior to that she claims, as so many wacks do, that she had always taken it for
granted that Will wrote the plays attributed to him–until she investigated the matter.  This
may be the truth, but I’ve heard that her father was an Oxfordian.  What establishes Price
on her very first page as a probable propagandist, however, is that she claims not to have
found anything in Schoenbaum’s book that PROVED rather than established beyond
reasonable doubt that Shakespeare was a playwright.  The latter is all that historical data
can ever do, but Price wants her readers thinking something is wrong with the case for
Shakespeare if it can’t be proven that he was a playwright.

In the paragraph she writes immediately after the one in which she tells about
Shoenbaum’s book, Price begins lying.  “Fact after fact stopped me in my tracks,” she
says.  “No biography could account for Shakespeare’s education.  His own children grew
up functionally illiterate.  Shakespeare retired to an illiterate household at the height of his
presumed literary powers.  He wrote nothing during the last several years of his life.  He
left behind dozens of biographical records, but unlike those surviving for other writers of
the day, not one of them suggests literary activity.”

Okay, when I accuse Price of “lying,” I may be exaggerating.  She is doing two things: (1)
asserting something as a truth that is not a truth or (2) asserting something out of
historical context as a truth with no simple explanation that has a simple explanation when
considered in its historical context.  Call either of these some form of not-lying if you
must, but to me they are lying.  When she tells us “no biography could account for
Shakespeare’s education,” she doesn’t tell us that she is merely telling us that no records
exist for his formal education–NOR for anyone who went to his hometown grammar
school, nor for many others.  As a propagandist, she doesn’t want the reader to know the
historical context of her statement because she wants him to fall for what is an implicit lie:
that Shakespeare had no formal education.  She is wrong, to boot: I’m sure most, or all, of
the Shakespeare biographies she read DID account for his education by informing the
reader that there was a free grammar school a few hundred feet from his house where his
father, a prosperous businessman would probably have sent him.  The bottom line here is
that we don’t know for sure whether Shakespeare was formally educated or not because of
lack of data.  Hence, it is a lie to say or suggest either that he did or did not; one can only
say that it is likely that he did (since his funerary monument said he could write, and he
had a documented acting career which strong suggests he could read scripts.

I suspect Price was not “stopped in her tracks” when she found out all the attendance
records of the grammar school Shakespeare probably attended during his time and for
many years before and after that have disappeared.  Time devours records.  So, another
probable lie.

Very close to a definite lie is her assertion that “his children grew up functionally
illiterate.”  We have two signatures from one of them, Susanna, who married a physician
and was considered unusually wise (at least according to her tombstone).  One record
suggests to some that she was shown her husband’s handwriting but failed to recognize it
as his, which Price considers evidence of illiteracy.  But it is not.  Furthermore, the
likelihood is that she did no more than glance at the handwriting, if she looked at it, at all.
(She was shown a book said to be her husband’s because the man showing it to her
recognized its handwriting as her husband’s; she denied the book was by him; that says
nothing about her literacy.)  One can certainly reasonably claim that it’s possible Susanna
was functionally illiterate, but we lack sufficient data to assert, as Price does, that she
definitely was.  To do that is to lie.

DItto Price’s assertion that Shakespeare’s household was illiterate. His father signed with a
mark but so did many literate men of the time, the mark being like a set of initials for
them.  We know he kept his town’s financial records for several years, which suggests but
does not prove literacy.  I think we have no real evidence one way or the other about his
wife’s literacy.  We do know, however, that Thomas Greene was a member of
Shakespeare’s household for a year or more, and he, a lawyer, was definitely literate.
Shakespeare’s brother Gilbert was able to write his name and may have lived with
Shakespeare’ family and his parents.  So, again, to say Shakespeare’s household was
illiterate when its highly possible but not certain it was not is, for me, propagandistically
lying.

Although Price asserts that Shakespeare “wrote nothing during the last several years of his
life,” we have little idea what he did during those years.  We can’t even be sure he did
retire to Stratford, although it’s fairly certain that he retired from the stage.  Most scholars
believe he wrote Henry VIII in 1612, four years or less before he died.  He may have
contributed to other plays and/or revised earlier plays.  He may also have left behind
unfinished plays.  So, another lie or near-lie, this assertion that Shakespeare wrote nothing
during his latter years–because no one can say with any confidence that it is true or not.
But even if true, so what?  Sheridan, a major English playwright, ended his playriting
career at the age of 29.  Rimbaud gave up poetry in his early twenties.  Rossini retired
from music (except for a few short pieces) long before he died.

Price’s biggest lie in this passage, the one that is to be the lead lie of her book, is the last
one in it, where she claims Shakespeare left behind not a single record “that suggests
literary activity.”  He left behind books with his name on their title pages as their author,
but that fails to suggest literary activity to Price.  There are a good many other records
from Shakespeare’s lifetime that suggest to the sane that he was a writer, but I’ll hold off
bringing them up until we get to the heart of Price’s book, which is a brilliantly clever
attempt to discount as evidence of a literary career all evidence for it that Shakespeare has,
validate all evidence that can be said to indicate a literary career missing from the records
of Shakespeare’s life as the only evidence that genuinely counts as evidence for a literary
life.

****

My contributions to this thread will be first-draft level, scattered, uneven, often badly
expressed, sometimes wrong, etc.  This is to be a notebook  Responses of others welcome
although I may not have time to reply to them.

28Nov09

29 November 2009

I’m now to the main paragraph on the second page of Price’s introduction.  How did the
country boy Shakespeare, “learn to write plays from an aristocratic perspective?” she
wonders.  This, too, is a form of lie.  It is not a given that the plays were written “from an
aristocratic perspective.”  As we shall see further on in her paragraph, her actual question
is, “Where did Shakespeare learn about subjects that it would seem aristocrats of the time
would be familiar with but not country bumpkins like he?”–as she would have phrased it
had she been a scholar rather than a propagandist.

To buttress her implied argument, that Shakespeare’s cultural background makes it
unlikely he wrote any plays or poems, she would then, if a scholar, have mentioned some
of these subjects AND given facts supporting her contention that Elizabethan aristocrats
would be much more familiar with them than bumpkins.  She doesn’t here (nor in the rest
of her book as I recall).  All she does to support her baloney is quite Whitman, who
thought the plays written “for the divertisment only of the elite of the castle, and from its
point of view,” but Whitman was no historian, and his subjective view is just his subjective
(effusively democratic, philosophically unsophisticated) view, with no particular weight.

Price DOES go on about the knowledge of falconry the plays of Shakespeare reveal,
quoting a line from Romeo and Juliet, indicating that the plays’ author knew that falconers
released their birds, then got them to return to them, which doesn’t strike me as very
arcane knowledge.  But he also knew a specialized name for a male peregrine.  Wow.  “It
is unlikely,” Price writes, “that the dramatist thumbed through manuals on falconry just to
create metaphors” (such as the one in what Price quotes from Romeo and Juliet).  She
thinks–no, STATES–that those lines and others making use of what she considers to be
aristocratic knowledge, “came from someone to whom the terminology was second
nature, pulled out of the mental stockpile accumulated from the writer’s own experience.”

The least a scholar making such an assertion would do is cite reputable authorities in
where creative writers’ facts come from to support her opinion presented as a fact.  But
you have to be rather extremely ignorant of how novelists and playwrights work to believe
they don’t have random clusters of specialized words in their memory banks.  Indeed,
writers like words, unsurprisingly enough, and tend to accumulate many more, from many
more varied worlds, than non-writers–the best to a greater degree than the inferiors.

FLAG: I’ve just made an assertion as unsupported as Price’s.  I will do that often–because
I am treating this thread as a basket of thoughts.  In my final critique I will provide some
support, I hope, for all my assertions.  In this case allude to Stephen Crane, non-soldier
writing about the war between the states as though he had fought in it, and all kinds of
other writers, such as Sinclair Lewis, whose “Arrowsmith” is apparently full of
information only doctors would likely know because he had a doctor helping him with it
(and who is to say Shakespeare didn’t have all kinds of help, if he’d needed it?)   I will also
discuss one modus operandi of the creative narrative writer–the expert use of small
knowledge to suggest full knowledge of a subject.

Note well, to return to Price’s statement that certain specialized knowledge in the plays
“came from someone to whom the terminology was second nature, pulled out of the
mental stockpile accumulated from the writer’s own experience” the propagandistic way
she presents opinions as fact.  No one can possibly know where any given detail in a
writer’s output came from.  In the case of falconry, scholars–real scholars–have found
that commoners of Shakespeare’s time sometimes had their own falcons and participated
in it.  (An assertion that I have backed with citations and quotations when arguing this
here at HLAS, as the archives will show anyone with enough time to kill to do a search on
them.  I will provide all needed support in my final draft.)  I might add that even if
commoners never engaged in falconry on their own, many participated as servants of
aristocrats in the sport.  (And servants sometimes talk to other commoners and pass on
information about the aristocratic life to them.)

Note, too, her ridiculous suggestion that the bumpkin, had he written the plays of
Shakespeare, would have “thumbed through manuals on falconry just to create
metaphors.”  I’m sure Shakespeare, like all writers, used reference books at times, but I
doubt he ever found himself in need of a metaphor, so pulled out a manual on falconry to
find one.  What much more likely happened is that he remembered some stray fact he’d
picked up, as we all pick up stray facts, and used it–in the Romeo and Juliet case, the
specialized name of the male peregrine.  I’m sure he already knew, as just about anyone of
the time would, that falcons are used to hunt birds, which they attack, and bring back to
their owners.

Sure, Price is only giving her side in a short introduction, so she’s not required to support
her bullshit, or mention any arguments against it at this point in the proceedings.  As we
shall see, she rarely supports or introduces arguments against her (except when she
mistakes them for strawmen she can skewer) anywhere else in her book.

That’s it for the second meaningful installment in this thread.  Interesting that no anti-
Stratfordian has jumped in to contest my findings.

30 November 2009

Continuing to try to persuade us by assertion that Shakespeare did not
have the necessary background to have written the plays attributed to
him, Price finds it “hard to believe that he developed those resources
(the resources of language the halfwitted bardolator, Harold Bloom,
claims Shakespeare had to a greater degree than any other writer) on
the strength of an incomplete grammar school education.”  She is not
lying here, merely expressing in incredibly dubious opinion.  We don’t
know how complete or incomplete his grammar school education was, if
he had one, but that formal education has much to do with a person’s
language resources is rather absurd.  I’d love to know what kind of
epistemology would lead to that conclusion.  Something, perhaps, like
this: the subject sits passively in Good School taking in language
from a teacher and books provided by a teacher?  Few would accept my
epistemology, but surely it is superior to that: it is that the
subject is born with a superior brain, over-all, and a superior
linguiceptual awareness (i.e. language center in the brain).  His
superior brain compels him to learn as much as he can; his superior
linguiceptual awareness makes language particularly enjoyable for him
to learn about and use, so he tends to specialize in it by reading a
lot (after finding some way to learn to read–and write) and
discussing things with others, and writing, etc.

Many “uneducated” writers seem to have done this: Dickens, Shaw,
Mencken, Hardy, Twain, to name just a few.

At this point in her nonsense, Price comes to her Great Discovery:
“Far from following the fragmentary literary trails in (Shakespeare’s)
personal life,” she says, “the orthodox biography fails to find ANY
(italics) personal literary fragments.  The documents that literary
biographies are based on–academic records, letters, manuscripts,
diaries, and remnants of the person library–simply do not exist for
Shakespeare.”  Her first statement would be a lie if not for the fact
that she defines “personal literary fragments,” as we shall see, as
“literary evidence of a person’s being a writer that Shakespeare did
not have.”

Shakespeare, according to Price, was no writer, but “a sharp
businessman who would certainly have been willing to turn a profit by
brokering plays or taking credit for their authorship.”  But there is
no tenable evidence that he brokered any plays or ever took credit for
the authorship of plays he did not write.  There IS evidence that he
was a businessman, but much less than there is that he was an actor
and a playwright.

1 December 2009

Entry No. 4.  Today I have a coinage to introduce the world to:
“propagandanalogy.”  That’s an analogy used by a propagandist to try
to persuade the gullible that some X should be accepted because it is
the same as or very similar to some Y that has always been acceptable
when in fact that Y is significantly or intiretly different from the
X.  The propagandist, of course, is silent about any differences
between the two.  Price comes close to using one on the third page of
her introduction when she says some courtier may have used “William
Shakespeare” as a pen-name.  This may seem far-fetched, she tells us,
but tries to get the reader to accept it with the information that pen-
names haven’t been that uncommon: Eric Blair and Marian Evans, for
instance, used them.  Most authorship wacks mention Samual Clemens,
too.  So, an analogy equating some ourtier’s use of a pen-name to that
of several known authors doing the same.  What’s wrong?  What’s wrong
is that this hypothetical courtier of Price’s did not use a pen-name,
he used a front man.  That is, this courtier used the name of a man
alive at the time.

Price to a degree escapes lying via propagandanalogy by also bringing
in people like Dalton Trumbo who, during the McCarthy years, got
around the Hollywood blacklist of leftwing writers by writing under an
assumed name.  She doesn’t say so, but in some cases such writers used
fronts, like her hypothetical courtier.  When I was relatively new to
the authorship question, I didn’t know that–or knew it but never
remembered it when arguing for Shakespeare.  For a year or two I
argued that no one in literary history had used a front the way anti-
Stratfordians said their True Auther, usually Oxford, did.  Peter
Farey corrected me.  If I were the propagandist that Price is, I would
not have included this paragraph here.

Price tries weakly to provide a motivation for her True Author’s
wanting to conceal his identity.  It’s that an aristocrat would sully
his family name unsalvagably if he had a profession of any kind, like
writing for the public stage, as the True Author, for some unspecified
reason, needed to do.  Hence, the front.  I will return to this
subject later, when it comes up again in Price’s book.  Here, I will
just say that I can’t understand any noble’s giving a damn about being
known to write for the public stage–or having a book of poems
published–although it was okay for a noble to be known as the author
of plays for the court, or privately-circulated poems.

Nonetheless, Price hypothesizes that a courtier was the True Author
(but in the whole of her book never is able to name him).  She further
advances the theory “that the man from Stratford exploited the
SIMILARITY (my caps) between his name and the published pen name.”
This is a standard dodge of the authorship wacks, this lie that
William Shakespeare of Stratford was not known as “William
Shakespeare.”  Many documents indicate that he was.  True, other
documents have his name spelled differently, and his signatures have
it spelled differently, but minimal research of the times shows that
almost everyone’s name had more than one spelling, and many had a half
dozen or more.  There are cases in which one man spelled his own name
two different ways on a single document, in fact.

Clearly, Price is trying to insinuate that her True Author was using a
pen-name, not a front.  Even if that were true, it helps her only
slightly since there is as little precedent for a person’s using a pen-
name that is accidentally the name of a contemporary as there is for
his using a front man.

With that, I’m through with Price’s introduction.

I not, by the way, that no one has said anything against anything I’ve
argued although Richard Kennedy has deplored my bad manners.

2 December 2009

Gosh, here we are already to Entry #5 of my analysis of Diana Price’s book.  Whee.

In Chapter One Price starts out with the standard malarky about the absence of links from
Shakespeare of Stratford to the literary works attributed to him.  She tells us that “readers
(of biographies of him) are often surprised to discover that there are no manuscripts or
surving letters in his hand,” a characteristic bit of pure propaganda since it is only ignorant
readers who are surprised–since almost no manuscripts of ANY plays or letters of
Shakespeare’s time survive.  Worse, it’s quite possible that a manuscript of part of a play in
Shakespeare’s hand DOES survive.  I’m referring to the manscript of “Sir Thomas More,”
which many scholars believe Shakespeare contributed to.  Hence, it is again a half-lie to
claim that no manuscripts of any manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand (and some handwriting
experts believe it is in the hand of the man from Stratford).  Again, the point is that we do
not know for sure whether any such manuscripts exist; hence, it is philosophically
irresponsible to state as a fact that none do.

Price’s practice of cherry-picking from orthodox scholars when she thinks it will help her
case begins here with a quotation from Gerald Eades Bentley which simply points out that
the absence of “letters to or from or about Shakespeare . . . except for a few referring to
business transactions’ and of “diaries or accounts of his friends,” it is unsurprising that his
biographers have made up fanciful details about him to fill out their portrait.  But many
orthodox scholars of Shakespeare have referred to this “problem.”  None of them, I think,
would agree with Price’s absurd opinion (or near-lie) that “no reliable records exist” to
support the fact that (1) Shakespeare attended his local grammar school (the records show
that it existed and that his father was–at least at one time–an important, prosperous,
ambitious citizen of the town who tried to get and finally succeeded in getting a coat of
arms, so very likely to have sent his sons to school); (2) Shakespeare had a personal
relation ship with the Earl of Southampton (his dedication to “Venus and Adonis”
indicates he almost surely did); (3) was a drinking buddy of Benn Jonson’s (Jonson’s
testimony strong indicates this was so, and we know Shakespeare acted in at least two of
Jonson’s plays, which Shakespeare’s company put on, and common sense strong suggests
it was almost certain, even if Shakespeare was only an actor, that the two knew each
other–as anecdotal evidence, which IS evidence, says was the case); (4) made money
from writing plays (as we will find out from Price later, we have no record of payment to
him for writing plays, but we do know he was a shareholder in his company of actors and
became wealthy; other evidence conclusively indicates the was a palywright, so how could
he not have been paid directly or indirectly for writing plays?)

Price can rightly say, most of the time, that no explicit record connects Shakespeare to
schooling, the friendship of other writers, and the like, but she rarely does that; instead,
she propagandistically (lyingly) states that NO records do this although many implicitly do.

She tells us that Shakespeare left behind records of business activities, his family life–even
his having been an actor (which is something many anti-Stratfordians resist doing since it
makes it much harder to believe he could not have written plays).  But, pushing her main
theme, she reitierates that his “contemporaneous records reveal noting of his alleged
literary activity.”  Not the “nothing.”  Note, yet again, the idea that names on title-pages
are not records.  “As we shall see,” she continues, “he has been credited with literary
activity solely on the basis of posthumous evidence.”  Not so, but even if so, so what?

Price is here actually admitting that even her propagandistic skills aren’t sufficient to
overturn the posthumous evidence for Shakespeare, so she lays the groundwork for
ignoring it as irrelevant, with an innuendo about how rare if ever it is that a person is
known as a writer because of posthumous evidence only.  I’m not well-versed in the lives
of pre-1600 writers, but I suspect that this is the case with a fair number of them.  I AM
well-versed in the life of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, and therefore
know that it is not true of him.

3 December 2009

Price next has a passage with the title, “Shakespeare Who?”  She starts it off with a
propagandanlogy between a researcher who has only some scripts and reviews to
reconstruct the life of someone named William Shakespeare and a modern Shakespeare
biographer.  Both need videotapes to be able to confirm who Shakespeare was, according
to Price.  The problem is that we have a great deal more than “some scripts and reviews”
to help us.  We even have a picture of our Shakespeare!

But Price is pushing the lie that “No one has yet found any personal records left by
(Shakespeare) or by anybody else during his lifetime that would link him to the occupation
of writing.”  She tells us about Shakespeare’s contemporaries like John Weever and
Francis Meres who praised him in print but claims “The reviews do not prove that Weever
or Meres personally recognized the man from Stratford as the author.”  Again, the use of
the word “prove,” so I can’t deny she’s right.  But I can say that the evidence in the case of
Meres strongly suggests that he indeed personally recognized the man from Stratford as an
author.  The evidence is without question strong enough to make Price’s claim that no one
has found personal records for Shakespeare as an author an egregious near-lie (and I need
a word for what it is).  We can’t know that no one has found such personal evidence.
Therefore, she can’t properly claim that no one has.  Much of the evidence may well be
personal.  Some, I feel, is beyond question personal.  More of that when Price becomes
more detailed.

Price goes on with boilerplate about scholars’ acceptance of all mentions of a writer named
William Shakespeare as reference to the Stratford man even though they have, in her view,
no hard evidence to back them up . . . from his lifetime.  But, Diana, you don’t need hard
evidence from his lifetime if you have the personal testimony from people who knew him,
and other documentary evidence from after he died.  If Ben Jonson says his friend Will
Shakespeare wrote plays, it doesn’t matter whether he says it while Will is alive or after
he’s dead; it’s still strong evidence that his friend Will wrote plays, especially as no
evidence against it exists.

Price also says that Shakespeare biographers “produce no evidence to show that
(Shakespeare) was capable of writing literature,” which is another flat out lie, although I’m
sure she meant to say, “no evidence FROM HIS LIFETIME.”  From after his lifetime
there is the monument, which I will be continually bringing up, which says that what wrote
leaves living art behind, and that he had the art of Virgil, which seems fairly good evidence
he was capable of writing literature.  From his lifetime, too, there is “Sir Thomas More,”
which may be partly his work, and which therefore makes it improper for her to claim
flatly that no evidence that ce could write literature esixts from his lifetime.

Price finishes this small section of her book with crap about how the clever skeptic who
studies the matter will find “a startling number conflicts between the known life of the man
from Stratford and the literary evidence for William Shakespeare.  As we shall see, Price,
like just about all anti-Stratfordians, finds loaning money and owning houses in conflict
with being a poet.

4 December 2009

No entry.

5 December 2009

Price spends a page or so telling us why pinning
down the identity of an author is valuable.  Her two reasons:
(1) it can add to one’s enjoyment and, I assume, understanding
of a  literary work if one can add a referential layer out of the
author’s life to it; and (2) it allows one to add the pleasure
of being with the author or outside his works as well as in them.

She goes on to say that the importance of doing what she thinks
she is–i.e., overturning the orthodox position on who wrote the
works of Shakespeare–it will change curricula, critical studies, etc.
So let’s give her (3), getting history right is important and can
have significant consequences (which I am fanatically in favor of).

The most important, for me, would be for the study of creativity,
which Price doesn’t mention, nor would I expect her to, because
that may be her area of greatest ignorance.  Basically, she and
all authorship wacks are arguing about the creative process–that it’s
something one is somehow disciplined into attaining the ability
to carry out instead of something an innately gifted person
automatically learns to carry out.

Epistemology is another subject accurate biographies of artists
is important to.  Again, no mention of it by Price.  But it’s near-
central to the authorship question, too.  The wacks don’t understand the
possibility of self-learning, or learning through osmosis.  Again,
they believe learning can only occur via authority figures (which, yes,
makes them to a degree sympathetic, whether they know it or not, to
totalitarianism.  Big brother knows best.)

Relatedly, there’s sociology, the wacks being staunchly for conformity
(except, as in their case, when a non-conformity is in the service of
a defense of a higher conformity).  Stratfordians, for the most part,
can accept a person like Shakespeare, who comes out of nowhere, relatively
unindoctrinated, a product of nature rather than of Society, a person
who failed to go up the chain of command, follow the rules every
conformist knows must be followed if one if to get anywhere in life.

Of course, knowing who some character in a play was modeled on
can muddy its universality, too–even cheapen it–one might see the
twerp, Oxford, pontificating as Hamlet rather than the universal
seeker of truth Hamlet would be better taken as.  Unhelpful
resonances as well as, or instead of, helpful ones may be added.
But if a significant historical background is available, I’m all for
revealing it, and I definitely greatly enjoy reading about writers
whose works I’ve enjoyed.

Price only mentions making sure the right person gets credit for
a given oeuvre in passing, but that seems to me as important
a reason for determining who an author is as anything.  A writer
wants to know that posterity will give him proper credit, even if
he isn’t there to appreciate it.

6 December 2009

Next up for Price is propaganda about critics of authorship wacks who,
according to Price, “Typoically . . . make no distinction between” those
wacks who do solid research like George Greenwood and super-wacks,
like the cryptographers who find all kinds of messages in the plays in
the most crazily illegitimate ways.  She is eager not to start us off with
evidence and arguments for her position but to show us that not all
those denying Shakespeare are super-wacks.  True enough, both that
some, if few, anti-Stratfordians do sound if idiotically misused research,
and are often perfectly logical, however absurd in their choice of premises,
and that those writing against them often pay too little attention to these
better wacks.  In fact, when I first got into the authorship game, I wrote
several times deploring the fact that scholars tended too often to refuse
to dignify the theories of the wacks with replies and/or to simply call
them lunatics.

Not that the anti-Stratfordians haven’t responded to their critics
every bit as poorly.  Just about none yet have responded pertinently
in any detail to the solid pro-Stratfordian books that have been published,
beginning with Milward. W. Martin.  Ogburn, the king of the Ozfordians,
gave the latter just one mention in his long long book, for instance, and
it was feeble.

Price goes on with the usual roll call of benighted non-scholars like
Whitman and Charlie Chapman who either expressed doubts about
Shakespeare’s authorship like the former, or couldn’t believe it.  Price
claims that doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare’s work
began “almost as soon as it appeared.”  I will return to this idiotic
claim when we reach Price’s twelfth chapter where, she says, she’ll
support it.  (It will be with large amounts of wishlexia, which is what
I call the misreading of a text to get it to mean what one wants it to
rather than what it clearly does mean.)

Price concludes this section of her book with a summary of the
various wacks advancing various candidates for the title of
True Author, none yet fully successful in her view.  She won’t be
advancing a candidate, though: it is enough to show that merely
that Will Shakespeare could not have been The True Author.  Right.
Over a hundred and fifty years of fanatical attempts to find a
different True Author, none of whom has been found suffciently
plausible for Price to accept as that True Author, coupled with forty
books from his lifetime stating on their title-pages that he was their
author, and a good deal of other evidence of that, but no matter–
it won’t be a waste of time to investigate yet again whether or not
he deserves to be considered an author.

Nothing will stop a True Wack.

7 December 2009

In her next section, Price continues trying to convince the reader that the authorship
question is valid, mentioning more names of non-scholars she claims are or were anti-
Stratfordians, though some of them, like Whitman, seem to have been skeptical about
Shakespeare’s credentials rather than certain he lacked them.  The fact that the controversy
is interesting enough for television to have done programs on it seems, for Price, to
indicate its value.  But television has John Edwards, too, and all kinds of other nonsense.

One point of hers seems valid: that the academics has ignored the question, leaving it up to
non-academics to argue on one side or the other of it.  Even now, I think, no True Scholar
has written a book against the anti-Stratfordians, although Jonathan Bate is said to be
doing one, and James Shapiro.  Few, if any writers considered bona fide scholars by the
Establishment have weighed in against Shakespeare, either, though recently some who are
accepted scholars in subjects other than literature, or Elizabethan literature, have done so.
However, who is for Shakespeare, who against, and who has written about the
controversy is irrelevant.  What counts is whether it is saner to investigate who wrote the
works of Shakespeare than to investigate whether Queen Elizabeth was from Mars or not,
and it is not.  Nonetheless, Price will start her investigation in the next chapter, sincerely
believing she will contribute to the Truth on the matter.  Rather than merely contributing a
case history of deranged propagandism.

Note to the little girls out there dismayed at the way I insult St. Diana, I will defend myself
in one small way by reminding the reader that I consider this thread a bunch of notes that
will be revised.  I intentionally insult my opponent every time I get a chance.  My main
reason for that is to try out insults.  My final draft will have many fewer–but they will be
my best!

8 December 2009

Price heads her second chapter with the following:

“We know more about the life of Shakespearre, both in terms of facts and of rational
conclusions that they suggest, than of any other Elizabethan dramatist. . . . Documents
relating to Shakespeare’s activities, inlcuding letters to him and material relating to his
family, are extant in quantity in the Shakespeare Centre records office at Stratford upon
Avon.  Few could reasonably remain skeptical if they examined these.”

–Gareth Evans and Barbara Lloyd Evans
Companion to Shakespeare

I can’t really fault Price for beginning her attempt to overturn the Stratfordian case by
quoting a passage about that case from her opponents.  But a more responsible, a more
honest, truth-seeker would find a much better passage to quote.  And, as we shall see, she
uses her passage as a straw horse, blasting at it as though it represented the best of
Stratfordian reasoning, using it entirely to suggest Stratfordians are failing to say much
and are even incompetent.

When I first read the passage, I scribbled, “selectively pores through scholarly records for
(1) data she can wrench out of context to support her cause and (2) as in this case, find
minute errors to highlight.”  I actually thought she’d caught the Evanses in such an error
when she criticized them for assuring their readers that among the documents
Shakespearean scholars had to work with were “many ‘extant’ letters to him.

Here the minute error uncovered is about the letters the Evnases mention.  Price is wrong
in her claim that they said such letters were extant IN QUANTITY–they only said that
documents including such letters were, which is true.  Price is right that only one letter to
or from him exists (it’s to him), but there are records that mention the existence of at least
one other letter (and what it was about), so scholars do have letters to work with.

Continuing to push her main theme that we actually don’t have much documentation for
Shakespeare, she quotes two more authorities, one saying Shakespeare’ life “is unusually
well documented for a commoner’s of his period,” the other that data concerning his life is
“scanty.  Here, she wants to seem even-handed.  Hence the first quotation,  She can’t
immediately claim there’s hardly any documentary evidence for Shakespeare, as she’d like
to, and comes close to doing in the remainder of her book, so she brings in the second
quote to get halfway there by demonstrating that shcolars disagree on how much evidence
we have.

The two quotations do not contradict each other, or the gist of what the Evanses say,
however.  We have lots of documentary evidence for Shakespeare considering how long
ago he lived, but that evidence is also scantly compared to what we’d have if he’d been
born in 1764 rather than 1565.

Finally, of course, the amount of evidence is unimportant.  What counts is its strength.

For the rest of this section of Price’s chapter, she blabs on about how much conjecture
biographies of Shakespeare include.  She thinks any biography of the man could be
reduced to a few pages if it were based solely on the facts we have about him.  So what?
Biographers are not required to stick to the explicit facts, nor to facts directly about their
subject.  It is valid to make intelligent inference from his work, and discuss his times and
where he lived, relating them to his life.  Moreover, most biographies candidly admit to
speculation.  They can’t be definitive about Shakespeare’s life, so only try to do the best
they can with what they have.  And what they have is more than enough to establish beyon
reasonable doubt the the man from Stratford wrote the works attributed to him.

9 December 2009

It’s time now for Price to introduce her first witness for the prosecution, and it’s none
other than Mark Twain.  Twain stole the idea from Greenwood that “any experienced
practitioner can tell a pro from a layman by the use, or misuse, of technical terms,” as
Price puts it.  She then mentions the many critics who have observed that Shakespeare
used legal terminology the way a lawyer of his time would have.  She neglects to mention
that many others have found him to have used legal terminology the way non-lawyers of
his time did, and no more knowledgeably than most of the playwrights of his time did.

Price turns much more propagandistically absurd next, when she brings up Twain’s having
been “struck by another inexplicable phenomenon: Shakespeare’s neighbors in Stratford-
upon-Avon were oblivious to the supposedly famous poet in their midst.”  According to
Price, “not one of (Shakespeare’s) neighbors, relatives, or even second-generation
descendants every suggested that he or she recognized Shakespeare as a writer.”

I am still looking for a word to call this kind of lie or semi-lie, this stating as factual
something for which there is insufficient data to state was or was not a fact.  She has no
way of knowing Shakespeare’s neighbors were oblivious of his (supposed) fame as a poet.
We have almost no letters or diaries or the like from any commoners of the time, nor have
we recordings of their conversations.  How can she know what they said about him?  And
why would they erect a monument to him as a poet only seven years after his death if none
of them ever thought he was that when he was alive?  If she were philosophical
responsible, she would have said simply that of the very few records concerning Stratford
townspeople, none refer to Shakespeare as a poet.

Even if none really did. it would not be inexplicable.  Plays were considered by many to be
immoral.  Actors were hardly better than pimps in many people’s minds.  No reason
Shakespeare might not have kept what he did in London from most of his fellow
townspeople–or that they would not have spoken of it much had they known of it.  Not
that I believe they didn’t often mention what he was.

Price tells us that no “legends” of his career surfaced until around 1661 when John Ward
wrote in few words about him in his diary.  Another . . . “slie?”  The truth is that we have
no records of his career that predate that time.  This does not mean that such records had
not surfaced, then been lost.  It also does not mean that oral “legends” about his career
weren’t in circulation.  Some certainly were, for one visitor to Stratford in 1631 or so
reports a conversation he’d had about Shakespeare with the deacon (I believe) of the
church where Shakespeare’s monument is.  In the conversation, the deacon relayed an
anecdote or two about the poet.

Price is now ready to tell us the facts about the man she misnames “Shakspere.”  Needless
to say, she leaves out all the facts that identify him as a playwright or poet, such as his
name on various title-pages.  They are part of the historical record nonetheless.

11 December 2009

Price next inserts an essay she’d gotten into a “scholarly” Oxfordian publiscation on the
many men named some variant of “William Shakespeare” when the Stratford William
Shakespeare was alive.  Her reasonging in this section seems more goofy than
propagandistic.  Her premise is that scholars arbitrarily attach the man from Stratford to
anyone of the time with the same name (or variant of the same name) when it suits their
purposes.  As those she doesn’t detach him from anyone of the time with the same name
(or a variant of the same name) when it suits hers.

She is right that much of the time biographers attach their man to someone of the same or
similar name as though he WERE that man instead of as though he was probably that man.
But they generally do so with much more evidence for it than Price attributes to them
here.  And some accept some men as WS, and not others that others accept.  In other
words, Shakespeare scholars as a whole, are reasonably untainted.

Price’s only example of scholars making WS a man he wasn’t has to do with a record from
1613 of a payment to a “Mr. SHakspeare” for the earl of Rutlan’ds equestrian logo for a
tournament.  Using standard propagndistic innuendo, she says that WS “is supposed to
have come out of retirement to write the slogan or motto.  Richard Burbage, the actor and
artist, is supposed to have painted the design.  WS was in London at the time of the
tournament, buying and mortgaging the Balckfriars gatehouse, she for some reason tells
us.  I wonder if she really intended this to show he would have been too busy to compose
the text for the impresa.  Seems good corraborating evidence to me.

The impresa read, “Paid To Mr. Shakspeare in gold, about my Lord’s impresa, (44
shillings); to Richard Burbage for painting and making it, in gold (44 shillings).

To her credit, Price doesn’t claim WS was not involved with the impresa, only that there’s
no more reason to claim he was than there is to claim he was not involved in some loan
(the 1592 Clayton loan) she wants him to have been involved in (and, I’m pretty sure,
others scholars do, as well), because it allows her to state that WS’s “first explicit recorded
activity in London is money-lending.”   She gives those favoring WS as impresa author the
connection to Burbage (as she hardly could fail to do) but tells us at length of Mrs. C. C.
Stopes’s having found a John Shakespeare who was the royal bit-maker and recorded as
having made decorations for tournaments.  She neglects to inform her readers that E. K.
Chambers found that John Shakespeare doesn’t start appearing in the records until 1617.
Nor does she inform her readers that playwrights often were involved in such jobs, Jonson
having written an epigram to some noble complaining that he had not yet been paid for “a
gulling imprese for you at tilt.”

Rob Ziegler, who supplied me with 90% of my ammunition against Price when this was
debated at HLAS, argues forcefully also that John Shakespeare is never recorded as
partners with Burbage, and that it made perfect sense for the job of making it to be divided
between someone designing it and writing a text for it, and someone artistically putting it
together–a poet like Shakespeare and an painter like Burbage.  It seems very close to
beyond reason certain that WS was the “Mr. Shakspeare” referred to in the impresa
record.  Obviously, Price can’t accept that because it would mean that he had a literary
trail, however slight and mundane this literary achievement may seem to us today
(although it would have probably been taken as an honor to be asked to design and
provide a text for such a thing back then, and 44 shillings wasn’t chicknfeed–though I’m
not sure what it would translate into nowadays.  Anyone know?)

Price finishes this section, and the chapter it’s in, by reminding us that “The problem of
identification is further complicated by the fact that many contemporaneous refernces to
‘Shakespeare’ refer only to the written works, not to the man who wrote them.”:  But that
can’t be true, can it?  If I ask someone if he’s read Stout, I mean the works of the writer
Rex Stout, so am referring to both certain works and the person who wrote them.  But her
point is surely that she won’t accept the name when it’s attached to a literary work because
it COULD be referring to some man other than WS of Stratford, a different WS or
someone of a different name who was using the name.  But we know from his monument
that WS of Stratford was a writer, as no other WS or non-WS using his name was,
according to the evidence, so we have to accept references to works by any WS as his.

12 December 2009

Now we’re to a chapter on the theatrical evidence scholars have found relate to WS of
Stratford.  Price begins propagandistically, needless to say, telling us of a few famous
actors of Shakespeare’s time we know a little about as actors.  Then she finds a scholar (of
sorts) who suggest Shakes was a busy actor.  Therefore, according to Price, WS “ought to
have a few theatrical clippings.” She will show he had very few.

Of course, she neglects to tell us that we can’t expect to have many records of
Shakespeare’s acting career because early in his acting career there are very few
records for any actor, and later in his acting career he acted for his own troupe exclusively
(or almost exclusively–we don’t know of his acting then for any other group), and we
have very few records of his acting troupe, perhaps partly because their theatre burned
down, taking with it, presumably, many or all of the records.

She neglects, too, to tell us how many actors there were in his time, and how much we
know about each of them.  I suspect we don’t even have the names of half of them.  She
tries to make the very few we know relatively a lot about represent all the actors of the
time.

She begins with Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, realizing that she must persuade her readers
that it doesn’t, in 1592, state that Shakespeare by then was an actor and “upstart”
playwright.  She adds Chettle’s apology for what material in the Groatsworth considered
scurrilous by some that he as editor allowed to be printed.  She claims that traditional
“biographers magically transform Shake-scene (WS, as the Groatsworth refers to him)
from being the *subject* of the open letter (in The Groatsworth, which is what we’re
mainly concerned with) into one of its three *addressess, and therefore into one of ‘those
gentlemen’ who spends his with ‘making plays.’”  Of course, the biographers don’t use
magic but common sense to show that only Shakespeare could have been one of the two
playwrights adressed by Chettle, the other being Marlowe.  I explain it all in two essays,
one on Greenes Groatsworth, the other on Chettle’s apology, that were long on the
Internet but gut deleted by Geocities, when it decided to shut down part of its operation.
The same essays are in an appendix of the first edition of my book on the authorship
controversy, Shakespeare and the Rigidniks.  One of these days, I’ll post them on the
Internet somewhere.

Price goes on to (naturally) accept some scholars’ thesis that Chettle was the True Author
of the Groatsworth.  Not that it matters whether it was Chettle or Greene who referred to
Shakespeare as a playwright.  Price claims to believe that those reluctant to accept Chettle
as the author of the Groatsworth do so because they like Chettle and don’t want to think
of him as duplicitous.  She doesn’t give the arguments based on evidence that can be made
against the revisionists’ thesis.  I believe that Greene wrote the Groatsworth, but don’t feel
a definitive case has been made for that, or for Chettle’s authorship.

13 December 2009

Today just URLS for three of my Shakespeare Authorship-Related
essays.  All three were appendixes in the first edition of Shakespeare
and the Rigidniks.  I updated one.  The other two, the ones on Greene
and Chettle, are old and may need updating.  The one on Greene needs
iltalics added, the other two more work.  I prepared them offline,
which was stupid, for when I put them online, I lost all their
formatting.  I had to put them online because Yahoos deleted the
versions of them I previously had online when it ended its Geocities
operation.

http://poeticks.com/essay-on-greenes-groatsworth-of-wit/

http://poeticks.com/chettle%E2%80%99s-testimony-regarding-shakespeare/

http://poeticks.com/personal-literary-evidence-for-shakespeare/

14 December 2009

In the introduction to the essay at

http://poeticks.com/personal-literary-evidence-for-shakespeare

I show in detail how a scholar would deal with the authorship evidence
compared with the way Price deals with it.  I challenge any anti-
Stratfordian to refute my contention that my way of handling the
“personal” evidence is not at least ten times more scholarly than
hers.

I’ve reached page 31 of her book, by the way.  That puts me about a
tenth of the way through it.  On page 31 Price makes a big deal about
Shakespeare’s having been recorded as one of three payees of some
money received by his acting company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men in
1595.  She empasizes not that it shows him to be os some importance to
this company but that it is the ONLY record of a transaction
concerning his company that he was involved in.  Kempe and Burbage
were also recorded as recxeiving the 1595 payment and, according to
Price, they “both show up elsewhere as payees.”  I charge that Price
is propagandistically implying that Kempe and Burbage “show up
elsewhere as payees,” more than once or twice.  I suspect Kempe did
not, and Burbage very poosible did not.  If not, I believe Price would
have told us how many times they did show up and where.  Such
withholding of information a scholar would provide even if it didn’t
help his side of an argument is characteristic of Price.

This payment was made when the Lord Chamberlain’s Company was just
getting organized, so I suspect it was before its business manager was
decided on, so early business matters were left to its leading
shareholders, its two principal actors and its playwright.  In any
case, because of all the corroborating evidence, I’m sure it indicates
quite strongly that Shakespeare was one of his company’s most
important members, which ad to be because of his acting and/or writing
since we have no evidence of his doing anything else for the company,
and evidence beyond reasonable doubt that he acted for the company.
Also that he wrote for it, but since that’s what we are out to show
beyond reasonable doubt, I can’t use it here.

Price could not leave out the record of payment that Shakespeare’s
name is on; it’s too well-known.  So she lawyers it, trying to make it
inconsequential with no interest in determining the truth of the
matter, only in preventing a piece of evidence from helping to
convince her of being wrong about who wrote Shakespeare.  I believe,
by the way, that she sincerely believes Shakespeare did not.  It
doesn’t seem likely that she could be pushing her views just to make a
little money lecturing to wacks and ignoramuses, and get some kind of
reputation among the same crew.  I think very few are pretending to be
anti-Sttratfordians because they see doing that will help them in some
way.

Next up, an absence in the records that Price believes important.  I
hope to attend to it tomorrow, but I also hope to get going on some
other, more important projects of mine, so may be in and out of this
thread rather erratically for a while.

15 December 2009

Price’s next bit of propaganda is so stupid I almost want to ignore it.  She bases on this
passage from Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life:
“Shakespeare moved into New Place before the year was our or, at the latest, early in the
new year.  We know because, in a survery of corn and malt made on 4 February 1598, he
is list as a resident.”  Since the survey of corn and malt shows Shakespeare, as well as
most of the other home-owners of Stratford, to have more corn and/or malt than the law
of the time against hoarding allowed.

She then gives details about how busy acting companies were, and how hard it would be
for Shakespeare to commute between his Stratford home and London

16 December 2009

In her book, Price is very thoroughly and meticulously trying to make everything
concerned with WS ambiguous.  She also is trying to disconnect him as much as possible
from London.  Hence the section I discussed (very incompletely) yesterday, and her next
section, which I’m going to discuss even more incompletely today.  This latter is about
where he lived in London.  I have trouble caring.  That Shakespeare almost certainly lived
in or near the theatre district where other evidence suggest he worked as an actor is mildly
helpful circumstantial evidence that he was the playwright the sane view him as, but there
is much better, direct evidence of that.

Price brings everything up, though, whether out of duty or to confuse her opponents with
the quantity of her attacks on Shakespeare I can’t say.

Important to her argument (which I don’t entirely follow) are extremely minor possible
conflicts between the tax records biographrers have used to trace WS in London and
where they believe he lived.  I feel they’re easy to explain, if actually there, by bureaucratic
error.  I’ll return to this.   I bother writing about it today merely to make sure not to
accidently skip it.

17 December 2009

Price tries her skill at sowing confusion on the Manningham record and a few other
records of Shakespeare as an actor.  The Manningham record is the diary entry in which
John Manningham relates an anecdote about Shakespeare beating Richard Burbage to an
assignation.  Manningham referred to WS as “Shakespeare,” then, as a footnote, wrote the
reminder that Shakespeare’s first name was William, that having an importance for the
punchline of the anecdote (Shakespeare being William the Conqueror and there “before”
Richard.)to Burbage.

Quick, what was Liberace’s first name?  Houdini’s should be easier.  (Note: I put down the
first names of all my nieces and nephews and their children in my address book because I
forget them all the time, even those among them I see fairly often.)  I ask. because Price
wants us to believe that WS was not well-known to Manningham, who was a theatre-
enthusiast.  If not, why an anecdote about him?

Incredibly, Price tries to bolster her argument that Manningham was not familiar with
Shakespeare by citing a diary entry of his six weeks after the entry with the anecdote in
which Manningham describes a performance of Twelfth Night–WITHOUT
MENTIONING SHAKESPEARE.  According to our Sharp Mind, ” . . . either he did not
know that ‘Shakespeare’ wrote Twelfth Night, or he was unaware that the ‘Shakespeare’ in
his anecdote was also the playwright.”  I think even an Oxfordian ought to be able to see
the weakness of this reasoning.

Price tries to clinch her case by mentioning other diary entries of Manningham’s in which
he mention Jonson, Spenser and Marston—”all specifically as poets.”  These wacks eem
to feel that anyone writing anything at all about Shakespeare should refer to him as
“William Shakespeare, the actor and play-maker born in Stratford-upon-Avon.”  But one
could argue that his not calling him a poet is an indication that he and his being a poet
were too well-known to indicate with more than his last name.  Liberace, the Pianist?”
“Houdini, the magician?”

Just to muddy the waters a little more, Price tells us that the Manningham diary entry was
“examined” (Price’s term) by the notorious forger, John Payne Collier.  But she drops this
after a line or two, no doubt because scholars have shown the record to be clearly
legitimate.  Note, incidentally, that Price doesn’t say Collier discovered the Manningham
diary, only that he “examined” it.  This suggests to me that he did not discover it, so
almost certainly did not forge any part of it, but that Price wants to, as I said, muddy the
waters.  (Note: if anyone knows the full story of Collier’s involvement with the diary, I’d
appreciate learning about it; if not, I’ll try to find out more, myself.  There’s a book on
Collier that’s pretty detailed–and defneds him against the charge of forgery; I’ve read it
and was not convinced he was not the forger he was shown to be in his lifetime, but found
the book seemingly accurate on his involvement on what he did as a Shakespeare scholar.)

Price dutifully lists the other instances of Shakespere the actor’s showing up in the records
with no comment until she gets to the First Folio’s putting him at the head of those who
acted in the Shakespearean plays.  She says the First Folio cast list is “the *only* evidence
that can be used to support the claim by one scholar that (WS) frequently perform in his
own plays”  Laughably, she then reminds us that the record is POSTHUMOUS.  Aha!
Since we have no contemporaneous evidence that he performed in any of his plays (by
which she means EXPLICIT evidence), biographers have to rely on anecdotal evidence.
However weak anecdotal evidence may be, it is still evidence (and there’s not even
anecdotal evidence that Shakespeare did not write the wors ascribed to him).

There’s also all the circumstantial evidence that he was an actor.  Unlike that if he were an
actor he would not have frequently acted in his own plays, since they were his troupe’s
most frequently performed plays.  A good many people MUST have acted in those plays,
but we have very little record of any given actor’s having been in any of them.

Price claims Shakespeare was one of the least-referred to actors of the time, but that
ignores the many actors with have no record of, and (I’m pretty sure) is based on the
records of other companies than Shakespeares, with fuller records of who acted in what
than Shakespeare’s company left us.

18 December 2009

Price devotes all of her fourth chapter to Greenes Groatsworth of Wit.  One line from it,
“Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with out feathers, that with
his *Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide*, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a
blank verse as the best of you,: and being an absolute *Johannes fac totum”, is in his own
conceit the only Shake-scene in a country,” is enough to close the authorship question all
by itself, if its words are allowed to mean what they say, so, of course, she must somehow
knock it out of the picture.  I was going to skip this chapter on the grounds that my essay
on the Groatsworth takes care of it, as it does, but I want to focus on a few of Price’s
more egregious aruments, in case I didn’t bother with them in my essay, or didn’t pund
them as hard as I could have.

When Price can’t find a scholar to agree with her that some passage in some way
indicating that Shakespeare was an author, she finds some scholar to call it amnbiguous.
There are always dimwittedly relativistic scholars to be found in any large area of literary
studies.  Here she uses D. Allen Carroll, the editor of the standard edition of the
Groatsworth.  He’s not dimwittedly relativistic, by any means, but he’s super-academic is
refusing to accept conclusions without near-incontestable evidence for them, and–like
most academics–he likes the idea of new light to shed on the subject, such as the idea that
Greene didn’t compose Greenes Groatsworth of Wit.  Price quotes this from him (about
the “tigers heart” line): “Something ambiguous hoavers at the cenbter of its expression just
at the point wherewe might hope, in this first certain allusion to Shakespeare in London,
for a clue to his early practice as a dramatist . . .  It was the sapling (according) to W. W.
Greg in 1942, from which ‘sprang a whole jungle of critical and biographical error.”

I doubt that any of the errors Greg was referring to had to do with who wrote the play the
line quotes (except for one change of wording–”woman’s” to “player’s”). but Price quickly
tells us that the passage doesn’t tell us anything about the authorship of that line.  Now,
Diana isn’t lying: the passage doesn’t.  But the First Folio does, for it includes 3 Henry VI,
where the line is, and attributes it to William Shakespeare.  There is no evidence
contradicting this attribution.

“Furthermore,” our propagandist informs us, “the play (3 Henry VI) was first published in
1595 in a corrupt and anonymous version, so, in 1592 (when the Groatsworth was
published), general readers would have had no reason to associate the ‘tiger’s heart’ line
with anyone named Shakespeare.”  So what?  Greene would have, as would the
addressees of the letter his line is in.  Moreover, he soon identifies whose line it belongs
to: Shake-scene, an obvious pun on Shakespeare.

Now she is to her main bit of obfuscation, the idea that most biographers have failed to
consider the “tiger’s heart” line in context with the Groatsworth as a whole.  But they
needn’t.  The letter the line appears in is clearly separate from everything else in the
Groatsworth.  And the line itself is clearly separate–as aside about a particular fellow
Greene didn’t like and seems to have been extremely jealous of–from everything else in
the fairly short letter it is a part of.

Muriel C. Bradbrook is the schlar Price cherry-picks from to begin with, Bradbrook
commenting that the Groatsworth is thematically unified, something few could argue with.
But Price wants narrative unity, and has now way of getting it.  Nonetheless, she tries, by
telling us that the Roberto in the main narrative in The Groatsworth is Greene, as Greene
says himself, and that “the gentleman-player” robert has dealings with “shares several
characteristics with “Shake-scene.”  Both are actors who pad their parts (Price here
assuming as fact something about Shake-scene she hasn’t even tried yet to show was true,
and most definitely is not), both are braggarts, both hire needy playwrights (pseudo-fact
number two; the Shake-scene line has nothing whatever to do with hiring actors).  Price,
naturally, finds a few scholars she claims accept the gentleman player in the main narrative
of The Groatsworth as a caricature of Shakespeare.

A main problem with it, aside from the fact that all they share is the acting profession, is
that Greene denounces Shake-scene, but is befriended by the gentle-man actor.  The latter
is an important figure in the theatre world, Shake-scene an upstart.  The latter once wrote
plays but now doesn’t while Shake-scene is only beginning to write plays.

To support her argument Price, she tells us, will now connect the ‘tiger’s heart’ line to
other lines in the letter.   When this is done, Shake-scene “turns out to an untrustworthy
actor who is also a money-lender and. like the ‘gentleman-player,’ a paymaster of
playwrights.

At this point she introduces one of her strangest, uh, findings, the idea that satirists like
Jonson alternate between the singular and the plural “to blur satiric material.”  She has to
say this to allow sentences about actors in general to refer to a specific actor.

Interestingly, Price never quotes a sane paraphrase of the “tiger’s heart” line by me or
anyone else.  For mine, see my essay.

She goes on to cherry-pick theparagraph the t-h line is in for “evidence” that it describes
WS as a money-lender.  Because Greene (or, and I’ll just say this once, the writer
pretending to be Greene or, in effect, being Greene) refers to actors in general, whom he is
carrying on against in the paragraph, as “anticks,” she goes to Brabbrook for a definition
of “anticks” as the lowest kind of actor, with a capacity for betrayal, aomng other traits.
I’m not sure the point of this.  We already know Greene doesn’t like actors.

She uses the characterization of Shake-scene as a Crow, to bring in Horace’s crow, which
was a plagiarist.  The Crow in Greene is obviously not a plagiarist but an actor dependent
on feathers provided by others (Greene having spoken of the puppets and anticks in his
diatribe as speaking “from our mouths” and “garnisht in our colors,” not as stealing words
from him and the playwrights his letter addresses and claiming them as their own.  He
simply repeats the comparison when speaking of the Crow–who is beautified in our
feathers.  She finds other instances of crows in the literature of the time that she uses to
try to make out Greene’s Crow as shifty and double-dealing.  I’m not sure why.  The t-h
line indicates that Greene thought him a betrayer and untrustworthy.

Much better for confusing a gullible reader away from the clear meaning of a word is her
connecting “supposes” to “pretending,” following a wack (Jonathan Dixon) I quote in my
essay, where I show that the word seldom used to mean “pretend,” and extremely unlikely
to have been used that way in Greene.  I asked then for a example of any Elizabethan
writer using it that way, and a few wacks brought up a translation of an Italian play with
“Supposes” or the like in its title that I’ll have to spend some time finding out about.  As I
recall, the word “suppose” may have been intended to mean “pretend,” but needn’t have,
and was semi-forced by the title of the Italian play.  It was a farce, I believe, with
pretended identities, yes, but also many confused supposititions.

Price does a wishlexic take on the passage, first going close to a lie by telling us Greene
said he’d been deserted by actors (“by one in particular”–supposedly Shake-scene, but the
text doesn’t say that, only paints him as being a betrayer like the other actors.

She says Shake-scene “fancies himself able to extemporize lines in blank verse that are as
good as any of yours.”  Sorry, no, Diana.  Greene would not rise out of his deathbed to
denounce some minor actor for extemporizes lines and expect his friends to beware of
him.  What kind of threat would such an actor be.  The threat was that he was writing
PLAYS in competition with them, so they’d eventually desert kreal playwrights.

Price has Shake-scen acting a plagiarist, too.  There is a small chance that this is true but
Greene’s main problem with Shake-scene is that he’s a literary rival.

Then Price lies, using her plurals and singulars are the same to make Greene inveighing
against Shake-scen only instead of the actors in general he began the paragraph inveighing
against.  This allows him to make the charge of usurer more able to stick.  She wants us to
think Greene characterized all actors and Shak-scen inparticular as usurers, but he didn’t,
he only slandered them as having the cruelty of usurers.

More ridiculous misinterpretation by Price (which terms Chettle the passage’s author as
though that were a fact) is followed by a ludicrous attempt to make Shake-scen the Ant in
the Grasshopper/Ant fable the follows Greene’s letter in The Groatswroth.  But the fable is
clearly free-standing with nothing in common with the rest of the book but its theme.  Nor
is there anything in it or eslewhere in the book, like an introduction, to link it to any other
part of the book.

Price faults biographers for leaving the references to usury in the pivotal passage out, but
has no cause to.  They had nothing to do with Shake-scene, who is mention in one line,
then dropped.

Price’s last three pages have to do with a text written after the Groatsworth that Price
considers related to it.  I’m not up to discussing it doay.  Perhaps tomorrow.

19 December 2009

Price makes much of the silly idea that using the singular and the plural interchangeably
*in a work* is a trick satirists use to keep the identity of the specific subject of their satire
overt.  This allows her to claim that what Greeene (or Chettle) said about actors in general
only or principally applied to Shakespeare.

She continues relying on this sham in the rest of her chapter on the Groatsworth ehen she
quotes gobs of Vertues Common-wealth, by Henry Crosse (or someone using that name).
Crosse incontestably plagiarizes Greenes Groatsworth–BUT directs his malice against
actors in general, as does Greene, never against any specific actor.  Price assumes he is
targeting our boy WIllie, naturally.  True, he repeats Greene’s “bombast(ing) out a blank
verse,” but I don’t believe Greene was the only one who used that phrase, and Crosse
applies it to actors in general.  And at that time, uses the singular: “He that can but
bombast out a blank verse, and make both the ends jump together in a rhyme, is forthwith
a poet laureate, challinging the garland of bays, and in one slavering discousre or other,
hand out the badge of his folly.”  This, however, is not singling out a particular actor, but
referring to those several actors from the actors in general whom Crosse in his preceding
sentence had called “Anticks, and Puppets,” that are capable of writing poetry.  In other
words, Crosse doesn’t say, as Greene did, that one of them is a bombaster, he speaks of
“he that can.”  The “he” is a general “he.”

Hence, in his very next sentence, Crosse writes, “Oh how weak and shallow much of their
poetry is, for having no sooner laid the subject and ground of their matter, and in the
Exordium moved attention, but over a verse or two run upon rocks and shelves, carrying
their readers into a maze, now up, then down, one verse shorter than another by a foot,
like an unskillful Pilot, never comes night the inded harbot,” etc.  Price takes this to be
directed at Shakespeare, showing he commanded “no respect whatsoever, was hardly the
subject of any professional envy . . . an incompetent hack and broker.”  Ah, but a WRITER,
Diana.  If you want Crosse to be speaking of Shakespeare here, you must acknowledge
that he is thinking of him as a writer, something the whole point of your book is to deny.

Crosse goes on to say that these (plural) writers are “either like Chirrillus, writing verse
not worth the reading, or Battillus, arrogating to themselves, the well deserving labors of
other ingenious spirits.”  Price latches vigorously onto “Battillus,” for the rest of the book
considering Shakespeare that–a plagiarist.  I wonder who the other Battilluses Crosse was
referring to.  At least some of the historical Battillus’s material was his own, by the way.

Amusingly, Price reveals that Greene referred to Battillus’s plagiary of Virgil in one of his
pamphlets.  What that has to do with anything, who knows.

Whoopee: Price finds a scholar stupid enough to say that Crosse’s pamphlet contained
“hits at Shakespeare”–Alexander B. Grosart.  She can always find some support from
some academic.

Price wants WS unlikable, and barely able to write, so uses one cantankerous man’s bad
opinion in one sentence of a rival as the basis of a smear campaign calculated to make it
seem to readers with no critical sense whatever that everyone thought Shakespeare an
untalented, unscrupulous creep.  But, hey, thanks to the amazing conspirators hiding . . .
The Truth, all these people only let us know about it in the most circuituitous ways
imaginable.  (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they murdered Greene for being so obvious
about who he was writing about!)

20 December 2009

Price heads her next chapter with a quotation from something by William W. E. Slights
that claims any resemblance between a living person and a person in one of Jonson’s plays
was probably intentional.  Why this quotation?  Because Price is going to continue semi-
psychotically interpreting anything any writer of Shakesspeare’s time wrote that was
negative about some person as being about Shakespeare, as she did with Crosse.

She begins her chapter in another precinct of of Wackdom, thought, the precinct where
the hyphen sometimes used by his contemporaires between the two words making up his
last name indicates that the name is a pseudonym.  In her discussion of the hyphen Price
again shows herself to be a propagandist.  But she also shows herself to be an imbecile
more directly than she generally does.  Shes pitches four possible explanations for the use
of the hyphen: (1) it was used randomly, punctuation, spelling, etc., still being arbitrary
back then;  (She propaganduates the fact that WS “never once chose to hphenate his own
name.” I guess she hopes her readers will forget that we only have five or six of his
signatures and/or wants them unconsciously to think of his name on records as having
been put there by him rather than by lawyers of publishers or others.)  In any case, the
radon hyphen may have been repeated from one edition of a book to another along with a
title-page reused to save mony and time.  She presents a reasonable argument aginst this
happening frequently, by citing instances where a title-page was not copied, or not copied
in whole, from one edition to the next.  She seems to assume that that means none were.

(2.) “the compositors deliberately inserted the hyphen to prevent the long tails present in
the K and S italic type fonts from bumping into each other and breaking.”  But, she tells
us, roman type fonts didn’t have long tails and were used with most editions of the plays,
and the compositors had other means of taking care of the problem.

(3) the name “inexplicably attracted hyphen-mongers,” or (4) “‘Shake-speare’ was
regarded as a made-up name.”

So, two weak and trivial attempts by the orthodox to explain the hyphens described only,
I’m sure, to make those scholars look bad  (straw men), and two moronic explanations.
(3) is moronic because there’s nothing inexplicable about using a hyphen in a word
consisting of two common words to separate those two words.  (4) is moronic because
there is no evidence that a hyphen was taken to indicate a made-up name.  The fact that
many made-up names used one is irrelevant as such names always consisted of two words.
See my Of Manywhere-at-Once for other arguments against that hypothesis, including
names not psuedonyms from the time that used a hyphen.

One also wonder, as one does over and over when reading the authorship wacks, why the
use of  a front the wacks believe in was concealed and revealed at the same time by the
same people.  “We’ll give him a false name so people won’t know who he is but make the
false name so obviously false that they will known it’s a false name.”

“But, but, Sir Genius-Hoaxster, won’t that tend to defeat our intent?”

“How?  We want no one and everybody to know of our hoax.”

One further note: that WS and his troupe liked “Shake-speare” because it gave the name a
bit of extra flair in a business where flair counted.

21 December 2009

Price next subjects a poem by John Davies of Hereford to her wishlexia, bending it to
make her readers believe Davies was not referring to WS as a dramatist.  Ordinarily, she
could just dismiss the poem as not explicitly personal inasmuch as Davies nowhere calls
himself a friend of WS, but the poem is clearly about a person and his associates Davies
knew pretty well, so she has to deconstruct it in some way.

I wrote an extended essay about Shakespeare and Davies, focusing on Price’s
interpretation of this poem.  She, by the way, neglects in her book (as far as I’ve been able
to find) two other high relevant poems about Shakespeare that Davies.  I assume even she
realize her wishlexia wouldn’t work with them, or saw that they contradicted her reading
of the one Davies poem she discusses.  My essay, by the way, is stored at the Shakespeare
Fellowship site, which I want to commend for keeping it there, although no one is ever
referred to it.  Here’s the essay:

——————————————————————————–

On Three Shakespeare-Related Poems By John Davies

We have three poems called epigrams, by John Davies of Hereford, that people debating
who wrote the works of Shakespeare cannot avoid discussing. The most important of
them is the following, which was published in 1610:

To Our English Terence, Mr Will. Shake-speare

Some say (good Will), which I, in sport, do sing,
Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport,
Thou hadst been a companion for a King;
And been a King among the meaner sort.
Some others rail; but, rail as they think fit,
Thou hast no railing, but, a reigning Wit:
And honesty thou sowst, which they do reap;
So, to increase their stock which they do keep.

Needless to say, the views of Gulielmus-Affirmers and Rejectors about the meaning of this
poem are decidedly incompatible. What is perhaps their worst clash begins even before the
body of the poem. It concerns just what Davies meant by “Terence.”

Oxfordian Charlton Ogburn has trouble with this because Terence wrote comedies, and
Shakespeare was a great tragedian. Well, the probability, as Irvin Matus theorizes, is that
Davies was merely complimenting Shakespeare for his gift for verbal clarity and elegance,
Terence having been most esteemed by the
Elizabethans for such a gift. According to Matus, Terence “was in the curriculum of
Westminster School, one of the great schools of the day, ‘for the better learning (of) the
pure Roman style.’” Almost every contemporary writer commenting on Shakespeare’s style
praised its mellifluousness or the like. And most of what Shakespeare wrote was clear,
particularly when contrasted to the style it replaced, Lyly’s euphuism, which was very
ornate and affected-seeming.

Carrying on for Ogburn, Diana Price suggests that Davies described Shakespeare as a
Terence because Terence was a front man for aristocrats, as none other than famed
literary historian Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) held. He thought that only aristocrats
could have been refined enough to write elegantly.  Terence was an African slave.
(However, as John W. Kennedy said about this at HLAS when a Gulielmus-Rejector
repeated Montaigne’s opinion, “In Roman times, being a slave had virtually no bearing on
literacy. Teachers were slaves.”) The English scholar, Roger Ascham (1515-1568) is also
brought up in support of the Terence-as-Front view, for his posthumous The Scholemaster
(1570) asserts without evidence that Terence’s name was on some works he did not write.

Price argues her case further by pointing out the hyphen Davies used in Shakespeare’s
name, which “Anti-Stratfordians theorize . . . signifies a pseudonym, and in this instance
the sobriquet, ‘our English Terence,’
reinforces this theory.” That’s because Terence in his time was “accused of taking credit
for the plays of aristocratic authors Scipio and Laelius.” Fascinating lapse of logic this:
“Shake-speare” equals “Terence,” according to Davies; “Terence” equals his front-man,
Shaksper and “Shake-speare” equals Oxford, according to Price. Which leads to Shaksper
equals Oxford.

There are many reasons to believe Davies considered Terence a genuine author, not
anyone’s front, in his title. Where in the poem does Davies suggest that Terence was, as
Terence may have been, indebted to Scipio and Laelius, or that Shakespeare was any kind
of front? Since we see no references to any of these
stories about Terence, the only reasonable conclusion is that Davies was speaking of
Shakespeare as “our Terence” because Shakespeare was one of the great writers of
English comedies just as Terence was one of the great writers of Latin comedies.

Terry Ross has more to say in response to Price’s take on Terence. He states that except
for a few explicit reference to Laelius or Scipio, Terence, in Shakespeare’s time, was
always referred to as a genuine author.  “His name was not proverbial for a ‘front.’” Ross
draws attention to the front matter to the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida which
describes that play as deserving of serious discussion “as the best comedy in Terence or
Plautus.” Clearly, whoever wrote this was calling Terence a superior writer of comedy,
like Plautus, as well as using the Roman to compliment Shakespeare as a writer.

Another allusion to Terence occurs in a poem of 1614 that brings up Shakespeare by
Thomas Freeman:

….Who loves chaste life, there’s Lucrece for a teacher;
Who list read lust, there’s Venus and Adonis,
True model of a most lascivious lecher.
Besides, in plays thy wit winds like Meander,
Whence needy new composers borrow more
Than Terence doth from Plautus or Meander….

Freeman is clearly saying “new composers” borrow more from Shakespeare than Terence
did from Plautus or Meander. In other words, Terence, for Freeman, is indeed a borrower,
but still a playwright, and Shakespeare not a borrower, but one borrowed from.

There’s also Meres, who lists “the best poets for comedy … among the Latines” as
“Plautus, Terence, Naevius, Sext. Turpilius, Licinus Imbrex, and Virgilius Romanus”;
Shakespeare is listed as one of “the best for Comedy among us.” Meres as clearly as
Freeman speaks of Terence as a genuine (superior) playwright. Ross, drawing on Don
Cameron Allen’s Francis Meres’s Treatise “Poetrie”: A Critical Edition, adds that “Textor,
an important Meres source for his list of the best Latin poets, does not even mention the
Scipio/Laelius rumors in his capsule bio of the playwright, although Textor does mention
Terence’s having been a slave and his having been born in Africa.

In his First Folio eulogy to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson compares him to “tart Aristophanes,
/ Neat Terence, witty Plautus ….” all of whom he plainly considered playwrights of note.

Add to these George Puttenham (1529-1590), who said, “There were also Poets that
wrote onely for the stage, I means playes and interludes, to recreate the people with
matters of disporte, and to that intent did set forth in shewes & pageants, accompanied
with speach the common  behauiours and maner of life of priuate persons, and such as
were the meaner sort of men, and they were called Comicall Poets, of whom among the
Greekes Menander and Aristophanes
were most excellent, with the Latines Terence and Plautus.”

All this is not enough to satisfy the Guliemus-Rejectors. They claim that any educated
person of Shakespeare’s time who read the Davies poem would be aware of Ascham’s or
Montaigne’s opinion of Terence, and would have as likely thought of him as a front as they
would have thought him a genuine (important) playwright. Ross points out, however, that
even in the few cases when some Elizabethan writer discusses the Scipio/Laelius rumors,
they do not consider him essentially as a front. “Sidney in his Apology said, ‘Laelius, called
the Romane Socrates [was] himselfe a Poet; so as part of Heautontimoroumenon in
Terence,
was supposed to bee made by him’ — note the qualifying ‘was supposed’ and the limited
scope of Laelius’s possible contribution to Terence’s work. Sidney’s other references to
Terence speak of him as the author of the works attributed to him.”

Ascham does say that “some Comedies” with Terence’s name on them were written “by
worthy Scipio, and wise Laelius, and namely Heauton: and Adelphi.” But he leaves four of
Terence’s comedies to him. Elsewhere in Ascham’s The Scholemaster, Terence shows up
as a genuine writer of the works credited
to him, never as a front of some sort. As for Montaigne, he explicitly states that he
thought Scipio and Laelius wrote the comedies of Terence in one of his essays, but
whenever he elsewhere refers to those comedies, he treats them as by Terence. That is, he
writes of Terence not as a front but as an author.

The long and the short of it is that there is little reason to suspect from the title alone that
Davies is not complimenting Shakespeare as a fine dramatist. There is strong support for
this in the body of the poem. Davies, with no hint whatever of irony, says there that
Shakespeare was an actor who could have been a
companion of the king had he not been an actor. He also says Shakespeare has a “reigning
wit” and sows honesty. Nowhere does he say anything against his poem’s subject. It would
therefore be ridiculously against sane poetic decorum for his title to disparage him.

But, argue some Gulielmus-Rejectors, what about the two poems in Davies’s book after
his poem to Shakespeare that are, respectively, to “No-body” and to “Some-body.”
Shouldn’t they make one suspicious?  Not me. Evidently, Davies wanted to flatter two
friends who were shy, so what? Actually, the sequence of
poems the poem and the ones to “No-body” and “Some-body” are part of supports the
proposition that Davies was complimenting Shakespeare. Here on the titles of the poems
in it, in order:

155. To my worthily-disposed friend, Mr. Sam. Daniell.

156. To my well-accomplishÆd friend Mr. Ben Johnson.

157. To my much esteemed Mr. Inego Jones, our English Zeuxis and Vitruvius.

158. To my worthy kinde friend Mr. Isacke Simonds.

159. To our English Terence Mr. Will: Shake-speare.

160. To his most constant, though most unknowne friend; No-body.

161. To my neere-deere wel-knowne friend; Some-body.

162. To my much-regarded and approved good friend Thomas Marbery, Esq.

163. To my right deere friend approved for such, John Panton Esquire
[followed by others to his dear pupil, his beloved friend, etc.]

According to Pat Dooley, Diana Price’s husband, we’re supposed to notice how different
from the others Davies’s poem to Shakespeare is. “When Davies is personally acquainted
with someone it is very obvious. It would appear that he does not have such a relationship
with Shakespeare. We then have the odd choice
of playwright. Terence was believed to be a front for aristocratic playwrights and other
Elizabethan writers said as much.”

Right. So let’s go through the list again, this time with their titles as Dooley would take
them to be (and shortened):

155. To my friend Daniell, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

156. To my friend Johnson, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

157. To my friend Jones, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

158. To my friend Simonds, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

159. To my non-friend, Shake-speare, derision and scorn.

160. To my friend No-body, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

161. To my friend Some-body, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

162. To my friend Marbery, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

163. To my friend Panton, compliments (with, perhaps, some teasing).

Hmmmm.

I’ve already given the gist of my interpretation of the poem, itself, but will now present my
detailed reading.  I find no concealed meanings in it. Davies, for me, Davies considers
Shakespeare a superior dramatist, as Terence was. He reports that Shakespeare had played
some “Kingly parts in sport.” To “play a part” is, of
course, what actors do. He did this “in sport,” as Davies writes his poem “in sport,” which
surely indicates that he played the “Kingly parts” as an artist—that is, his playing the parts
in sport emphasizes his actions as those of an actor. Strongly supporting this is another of
Davies’s epigrams. It is to the actor Robert Armin who acted in Shakespeare’s company,
and is believed to have played the fools in Shakespeare’s plays after 1599. In it Davies
says of Armin that he “in sport . . . wisely play(s) the fool.” Elsewhere in that poem Davies
makes it unambiguous that he considers Armin an actor.

According to Davies, some persons said that if “good Will” had not been an actor, he
could have been a companion to a King. This seems a simple compliment like telling a
lawyer that if he hadn’t gone into law, he might have become a baseball star. As “a
companion for a King,” he would have been a king himself for
lower types. That stands by iteself, but I suspect Davies is here suggesting that “the
meaner sort,” or persons Davies looks down on, do not now think much of Will but
would, being status-conscious boobs, if he were a king’s companion.

Some make fun of the notion, railing at it, but Shakespeare is above trivial insults. In the
words of the clumsy couplet with which Davies ends his poem, he describes Will as
sowing honesty, which then also meant “honour.” This, those who railed reaped, to
increase their own stock of honour/honesty. To me it
looks like “which they do keep” is in the poem to finish off the line and provide a rhyme
for “reap.” I’d read the final line to mean, simply, “thus they increase the stock of honesty
they have on hand.”

Gulielmus-Rejectors don’t consider the poem so straight-forward. Ogburn accepts that
Davies was testifying that Shakespeare, the writer, acted (an important admission most
Gulielmus-Rejectors would be uncomfortable with). He goes further, though, and finds
evidence that Davies also testified that Shakespeare was a nobleman. How? Why, only a
noble could be “a companion for a king,” the word, “companion” deriving from the Latin
word, “comes,” which (approximately) means “count.” What can one say against such
strained reasoning?

Diana Price paraphrases this poem as follows:

“To our own Battillus (by which she means a front although copious research has shown
that the Romans considered the actual Battillus simply a poor poet who stole from other
poets, not a front), Master Will: Shake-speare

“Scuttlebutt has it, my good man Will (which I, just for fun, put in verse), that had you not
behaved arrogantly, as though you were the king of the troupe, you would still be a
member of the King’s Men, and a king among those lowly actors and shareholders. Some
of the King’s Men criticize you, as they believe you crossed them. But you don’t get
abusive. You keep your condescending sense of humor. And you have inspired the King’s
Men to value honesty, because now they take more care to hold on to their “Stock” of
playbooks (“which they do keep”). They do not want them sold out from under them by
someone dishonest like you. So now they will guard their assets (“increase their stock”),
and it will be more
difficult for you to get your hands on them, since you are no longer a partner in the
operation.

I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide who has a better grip on the poem, Price or I.

Price, incidentally, also finds a few Shakespearean scholars unable to follow the poem to
support her characterization of it as “cryptic.” But it is quite straight-forward for such a
poem from such a time. I won’t say I’ve got it exactly, but I do think I’ve gotten it as close
as one can get any such poem from that far back. I am certain I’ve shown that the poem is
not cryptic (although anyone can force mystery into it, or any poem, if sufficiently driven
to by a need to ambiguate it–and find some Shakespearean scholar to agree with one).

Regardless of how she interprets the poem, Price is sure it presents no “contemporaneous
personal literary evidence” (a term she refuses explicitly to define) for him. I do not
concur. It is true that Davies does not explicitly say anywhere in the poem that he
personally knew Shakespeare. In support of this, she notes that he used the editiorial “our”
in referring to him. On top of that, he starts his poem not by telling us his opinion of
Shakespeare but what “some” said about him.

Yet, John Chamberlain write in a letter of Spenser, “our principal poet,” as having died
without indicating that he had personally known him, and his testimony satisfies Price as
personal evidence that Spenser was a writer. The reasoning seems to be that if one testifies
that an alleged writer is a person in some way other than as a writer, it makes the
testimony personal. Chamberlain does mention a few details about a person named
Spenser beside the fact that he died, but I claim Davies tells us at least as much that is
personal about Shakespeare–as well as suggests he knew him personally.

Before I turn to what Davies said in his “English Terence” poem to indicate that, I feel it
would be useful to examine two poems by Davies that were published before it that most
Shakespearean scholars, if not most Gulielmus-Rejectors, agree are about William
Shakespeare the author. The first is from his Microcosmos (1603):

Players, I love yee, and your Qualitie,
As ye are Men, that pass time not abus’d:
And some I love for painting, poesie W.S. R.B.
And say fell fortune cannot be excus’d,
That hath for better uses you refused:
Wit, Courage, good shape, good partes and all goode,
As long as all these goods are no worse us’d,
And though the stage doth staine pure gentle bloode
Yet generous yee are in minde and moode.

This has two marginal notes besides the one with the initials: “Simonides saith, that
painting is a dumb Poesy, & Poesy a speaking painting” and “Roscius was said for his
excellency in his quality, to be only worthy to come on the stage, and for his honesty to be
more worthy then to come thereon (‘then’ being almost certainly a form of ‘than’).”

These lines seem clearly to speak of the “Players” Richard Burbage (R.B.) and William
Shakespeare (W.S), as—respectively—a painter and a poet, Thomas Middleton having
written that Burbage was “excellent both player and painter” and Venus and Adonis and
The Rape of Lucrece, among other documents, confirming
that someone with the initials, W.S., was a poet. Note that Davies speaks of personal traits
of R.B. and W.S.: they are “generous . . . in mind and mood.” How would he know that if
he weren’t personally acquainted with these men? Okay, someone could have told him, but
is it really likely that he would have written the two poems quoted so far, and a third,
about an actor he seems to know a lot about, and describes as a poet, like himself, without
ever making his personal acquaintance? Even granting that he did not know Burbage or
Shakespeare, surely he bestows as much personhood on them by describing them each as
actors who were gifted in a second art, and possessing the personal trait of generosity, as
Chamberlain bestows on Spenser when he described his place and time of death, his
vocation as a poet and he came “lately out of Ireland.”

Davies’s other poem to Shakespeare–or to W.S.–is the following, from his The Civil
Warres of Death and Fortune (1605):

Some followed her by acting all mens parts Stage Players
These on a Stage she rais’d (in scorne) to fall:
And made them Mirrors, by their acting Arts,
Wherin men saw their faults, though ne’r so small:
Yet soome she guerdond not, to their desarts; W.S. R.B.
But, othersome, were but ill-actioned all:
Who while they acted ill, ill staid behinde,
(By custome of their maners) in their minde.

Again, the poet indicates a knowledge of W.S. and R.B. as men by referring to how the
two acted off the stage; that is, he claims that when they acted the roles of evil characters
(“acted ill”), their minds remained uncontaminated “By custome of their maners,” or due
to the propriety of their real-life manners. He is also aware that the two have not be
rewarded to the extent he thinks they should have been, which indicate that, at the very
least, he thinks of them as real persons who can be slighted, just as he thinks of them as
real persons who have a vocation as stage players.

Davies’s later-published poem combines with these in granting Shakespeare personhood
(and indicating that her probably knew him personally). Here it is, again:

To Our English Terence, Mr Will. Shake-speare

Some say (good Will), which I, in sport, do sing,
Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport,
Thou hadst been a companion for a King;
And been a King among the meaner sort.
Some others rail; but, rail as they think fit,
Thou hast no railing, but, a reigning Wit:
And honesty thou sowst, which they do reap;
So, to increase their stock which they do keep.

Yes, Davies addresses Shakespeare as “our,” not “my,” “English Terence.” The reason for
that should be obvious to anyone: to claim another is a great writer in the eyes of everyone
is a somewhat larger compliment that to claim he is a great writer in one’s own eyes,
alone, and Davies wanted to compliment Shakespeare. And why should he intrude himself
into this single great compliment by saying, “My Friend, The English Terence, Mr. Will:
Shake-speare?” I’ve already discussed the reference to Terence and why that is certainly a
compliment. Moreover, the poem’s centering a group on nine poems, all the others of
which are to friends of Davies’s, strongly suggests that this one was to a friend of his, too.

We aren’t finished with the title of the poem, though, for–look: it makes “Shake-speare” a
gentleman! Do pseudonyms get coats of arms, or do actual persons?

It is also true that Davies starts the main text of his poem with a reference to what certain
others say about Shakespeare. But this is not “impersonal,” just a report as to what the
person, Shakespeare, is having said about him. Moreover, Davies indicates they say about
him, which makes it his own view, too. That is, he is directly reporting that he believes
that if Shakespeare had not been an actor (with a mention of some of the kinds of roles he
played), he’d be a big man in some court. Poetic hyperbole, but not hugely, since
commoners could and did sometimes rise to positions of political power in those times. So
both “some” and
Davies are testifying that Shakespeare was an actor who might have been “more,” two
data that seem to establish him as a genuine person the way Chamberlain established
Spenser as one.

Stronger evidence is in those three lines, too: Davies use of the intimate second person
singular–”thou. This is not something he did in the other poems in this set, but does twice
more in this poem. Surely, it is relevant that he also addressed Shakespeare as “good
Will,” using a nickname–in other words, addressing him as a familiar acquaintance who
was a good person. Later, Davies reveals his knowledge that Shakespeare does not rail,
and has honesty, or honor, which he sows. He could be speaking here only of his writing,
but taken in context with everything else we know he said about Shakespeare, that seems
less possible than that he was speaking of him as a person.

(An interesting side-point is that Shakespeare is presented as alive through Davies’s use of
the present tense in describing him in this poem. As if the fact that this “Shake-speare” was
an actor, and not a companion of kings or the equivalent, weren’t enough to distinguish
him from Oxford, this suggests
Shakespeare was alive in 1610 or 1611, when the poem was published. That’s six or seven
years after Oxford died. The poem, of course, was written before 1610, but had to have
been written after 1603, when Shakespeare began acting “King’s roles”–as a member of
the King’s Men.)

I can’t claim that the three epigrams by Davies that I’ve discussed are certain personal
evidence for Shakespeare, but they surely seem as strong personal evidence for him as
Chamberlain’s for Spenser, or the law books John Marston’s father left him in his will tha
Price counts as evidence that he was an author. The
evidence of Meres, and of Heywood when he wrote of personal knowledge that
Shakespeare, long after Oxford was dead, was upset that his name was falsely attached to
some of Heywood’s poems, which I consider equally personal (and contemporaneous), are
corroboration. Assuming we ignore posthumous evidence, the way Price does. It is not
likely that Diana Price will ever agree to that, however.

——————————————————————————–

That takes care of Price, Davies and Shakespeare.  My essay, I hope, too, serves as a
good example of responsible scholarship, particularly compared with that of Price in her
Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography.