About
I expect soon to put some stuff about me here. I may make it a storage area for all the bios of myself I’ve made over the years. To make a start, I’ll merely say that I’m an Aged Codger (closing in on 69 as I write this) who began a secondary (and unprolific) career as a Serious Poet at the age of eighteen mostly emulating Keats. My first publication came in 1966 when I had a collection of visual haiku inspired by E. E. Cummings and the Peter Pauper series of Japanese haiku in English printed. poemns. I actually sold forty or fifty copies. It was over five years later that I got any poetry published again–conventional haiku by Dragonfly, a leading haiku magazine at the time, and Bonsai, a more advanced haiku magazine just starting out that only lasted two or three issues. No other publications until I was around forty and began getting visual poems and critical essays published–both first in Score, as I recall. My first important vispo contact was Karl Kempton, but I soon was corresponding with numerous others, in particular, Crag Hill of Score. I met a number of these people at one of mIEKAL aND’s Swampfests, mIEKAL then as now being a Key Illuminary in Our Field.
By this time, I had begun The Runaway Spoon Press, publishing just about all kinds of poetry but specializing in visual poetry. 1987. 22 years later the press close to comatose, and has been for probably ten years or more.
I was close to fifty when John Martone published my first little collection of mathemaku although I’d composed two mathematical poems twenty or so years before that.
My career as an extremely uncertified theoretical psychologist began the year after poemns when–inspired by an article in the New York Times Magazine, of all things, I sketched out what I considered a complete psychology. I’ve since adding a great deal to it, but only two or three central Main Ideas to the four to six I started with. I’ve published excerpts of my theory on the Internet, and published three or four chapters of it in the two editions of Shakespeare and the Rigidniks I self-published a few years ago. Just about no one has taken it seriously.
At various stages of my life, I concentrated on plays–very conventional ones, except for the ideas expressed by some of their characters. I now have ten or so full-length plays done and a handful of one-acts. I only consider four or five finished, though. I think I would most like to have succeeded as a playwright. Indeed, I pushed my poetry more to get a name I thought I could use to get people interested in my plays than anything else. No such luck.
I have ideas for a bunch of books, and a 200,000-word sci-fi novel that’s half final draft, half final-revision-in-progress. Discouragement over the way my writing career has gone, and over the uselessness of publishing this has prevented me from going on with the revision.
I should say that I’ve lived all my life under the “poverty line” and am now a Welfare Recipient in serious credit card debt but owning a fully-paid-for albeit decrepit house in Port Charlotte, Florida, a little south of Sarasota and north of Fort Myers on the west coast.
I have a cat named Shirley.
There. Much more aboutness than I thought I’d write.
(Gad, according to my spell-checker, I did the above errorlessly! Something is seriously wrong.)
This all sounds like a personal war for you where you see anti-Stratfordians as the enemy and you as the Defender of the Faith. I wonder what it is about Shakspere of Stratford that you identify with. Is it his humble origins and his (alleged) rise to genius? Perhaps this is what you aspire to as well. It’s your own dream that you are defending. It’s difficult to fairly weigh evidence once one is personally involved, that is, if one has a stake in the result of the investigation.
Hi, Robert.
I’m relatively new to blogging at this site so wasn’t aware of the two or three dozen comments it has drawn in the six months or so that I’ve had it, yours among them. According to where I’m reading your post, you were responding to something of mine in the “About” section of my blog–probably my response to Diana Price’s book. Anyway, I do see myself somewhat as the defender of the “faith” that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. Emotionally, I do strongly identify with his relatively humble background. Mainly, I identify with his having managed to become a great writer without a great deal of formal education. Self-reliance is an important ideal for me. He was also like me in coming from the middle class and in having been born outside a major city–and in having a bald head!
However, all that’s irrelevant. I’d love to find that Oscar Wilde did not write The Importance of Being Earnest because I’m not homosexual, or that Einstein’s theory is poppycock, because I’m not Jewish. Nonetheless, I go with the facts. The facts in the Shakespeare authorship controversy are entirely on the side of my Will. So much so that my real major interest in the question is in determining why apparently sane people believe Oxford or Marlowe or Bacon or someone else wrote the works of Shakespeare. I believe that they are psitchotics, or “psituational psychotics”–sane in most of their lives but insane when it comes to the authorship question. I have a complex neurophysiological theory to explain how their brain works and how it forces them psitchotically to refuse to accept self–reliance and imagination, neither of which they are capable of, as sufficient means to make a man a genius, so write books like Diana Price’s . . . or send Internet messages to those who are sane about Shakespeare suggesting that belief in him is a “faith” grounded on a dream the believer is defending as you have done.
No hard feelings, though. Everyone is defending an outlook on life. Some do it with solid evidence, some with fantasy. Which is more likely right takes a while to sort out, depending as it does on a consensus of knowledgeable persons–like the one that has remained on Shakespeare’s side for the 150 years or so that
anyone has seriously expressed doubt as to his having written the works attributed to him.
–Bob G.
Most of us defend with facts, it’s how the facts are interpreted that is the issue. Often people leave out facts that contradict their argument. I’m wondering which books on the authorship question you have read (I suspect only Shapiro’s “Contested Will”), in order to justify categorizing all anti-Stratforians as “psitchotics”. For example, what do you know about Bacon, his life, his aims, his connections with drama, his proximity to certain source documents for certain Shakespeare plays? If the answer is “not much” then I’m afraid your sweeping psychological diagnosis has no basis in fact. By the way, the Groatsworth IS a charge of plagiarism against Shakspere (Aesop’s crow is connected to plagiarism). Sorry.
Robert, I suggest you go to humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare. It’s a Shakespeare authorship discussion group. I often post there. I don’t want to carry on an authorship discussion about it here, but might there. As to what you say above:
1. the facts that I interpret are things like a monument, a picture of an author in a book, countless names of an author on title-pages, documents written by eye-witnesses–that sort of thing. Your side mainly interprets these facts as forgeries, willful frauds, mistakes, irony, etc. The other “facts” your side comes up with do nothing explicitly to establish anyone other than Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to Shakespeare. That Bacon may have read some work believed to be a source of some Shakespearean play is meaningless, for example. Too many other writers could have read it, or heard enough about it to use it; other it may not be a necessary source. It does not objectively explicitly establish Bacon as the author of any Shakespeare play. On the other hand, the fact that the First Folio states explicitly that the author of the works the book contains was dead at a time when Bacon was still alive objectively, explicitly establishes (although it does not prove) that Bacon did not write those works.
2. If you really wondered what books I’ve read about the authorship question, you ought to have done a little research. Indeed, if you only know about me because you stumbled on this blog, you prove that you yourself must not know much about the subject. I’ve published a book on the authorship question and been active on the Internet for twenty years or so debating it. I was even a member of an Oxfordian society for five or ten years debating Oxfordians. I haven’t read all the books on the subject, but many of them–more I suspect than you have. But guess what: it doesn’t matter what books I’ve read; what matters are my arguments. Shakespeare and the Rigidniks is the name of my book. I believe it’s available on the Internet. That’s where you’ll find my arguments.
3. I don’t classify all anti-Stratfordians as psitchotics, only those who have actually studied the issue and thus can not be excused as simply ignorant. I give the reasons for my classification in my book.
4. Many scholars argue that Greene’s Groatsworth accuses the upstart Crow of plagiary. However, there are sound arguments against that. The use of the term, “Crow,” is far from conclusive as evidence that Greene considered the Crow a plagiarist since it was standard to call all actors crows–because they made a living from the use of others’ feathers, not because they were plagiarists. Finally, it is near-certain that the Crow was not merely being accused of plagiarism. Read my essay on Greenes Groatsworth for more details. It’s here at my blog.