Archive for the ‘Shakespeare Authorship Question’ Category
Entry 1742 — A New Page & More Crowley
Wednesday, March 4th, 2015
Here’s the link to what will become but is not yet The Runaway Spoon Press Homepage. You can also get to it toward the bottom of the entries to the right under “Pages.” I hope eventually to have a table of contents from which you can click to any of the authors of works my press has published and read about their Runaway Spoon Press books and see samples of the work in them. (Thanks to Karl Kempton for the good suggestion to create it.)
* * *
And here I am, finishing my latest “discussion” with Paul Crowley (which, who knows why, I failed to post yesterday although it was ready to post):
PART TWO of Bob Contra Paul
> > Why do almost all those that have encountered it, consider it
> > insane?
>
> They ‘know’ that the poems were written by an
> illiterate, who had illiterate parents and illiterate
> children.
Why does almost everyone with any knowledge of Shakespeare who has encountered this assertion of yours consider it insane?
> > Oh, and why have you presented no valid argument against
> > MY interpretation of Sonnet 18 as a comparison between a
> > summer’s day and the poem’s addressee, which ends with the
> > idea that the poem has made the addressee immortal?
>
> Because it’s not disputable. That’s how it was
> meant to read — especially for people incapable
> of seeing any more.
>
Not so. My interpretation of the sonnet is that it is a comparison of a summer’s day to the sonnet’s addressee, etc,, AND NOTHING ELSE. My arguments for the “nothing else” include my subjective opinion that your subjective interpretations of various locution and passages in the sonnet are invalid; that there are no other poems in the English language that do what you say this one does (except, for you, others of Shakespeare’s poems; that your interpretation requires the sonnet’s author to be someone a huge amount of direct evidence says was not its author; that it is my subjective view, which I share with many others, including poets and critics of note, that the sonnet is a superior example of lyric poetry as we interpret it, and would be debased by the kind of sub-text you find conceal in it, but severely disturbing its tone and breaking its unity and tangling its readers up in childishly stupid word-games.
(Note: Paul believes puns and other word-games, once solved, reveal the poem to be addressed to Queen Elizabeth and concern Queen Mary of Scots, and other nobles, during 1566, when its author, the Earl of Oxford, was 16!)
> > Why is it invalid for me to simply assert that all your attempts
> > to invalidate my interpretation are too inept to count as
> > arguments?
>
> Because I have never made any such attempts.
Good. Now I can say my interpretation completely explicates the poem because no one has proven it wrong, or even produced an argument against it.
>
> > Paul, you have no idea at all of how science, history, literary
> > criticism, the human mind and people work. You can’t just
> > gather facts and apparent facts and force them into a theory
> > you like, then assert that it is unarguably true because you
> > alone say it is.
>
> Every new statement in science, history, literary
> studies, etc., starts out that way. It’s up to the likes
> of you to point out where it goes wrong — if you can.
I can’t recall any new statement in science that started out with its author claiming it was true because he alone said it was. Nor do I know one that was wholly rejected by EVERYONE knowing of it, as your has so far been–unless you can produce someone will to say he accepts your interpretation as valid, or even more valid than any other.
> > What you really have to do is first write a detailed exposition
> > as to you methodology and why it is valid.
>
> I have, and there is nothing special. Read the
> words and phrases and check them against
> the events in (and during) the life of the poet
> which could have prompted them.
That’s not “nothing special.” What all competent explicators of poems do is read the text and figure out what they mean, checking a dictionary if necessary, and being on the look-out for figures of speech and literary allusions. If that doesn’t produce a plausible, unified of what the poem is saying, then one might study the poet’s life to see if there’s anything in it that the poem might relate to. However, we need know absolutely nothing about the author of Sonnet 18 fully to gain full normal appreciation of it as a poem–although appreciating it as a part of literary history or as an example of the human creative process or as an item out of the life of a known once-living human being or the like ius possible, too.
Your method is close to worthless, and has been classified as such by critics for close to a century as worthless.
> > You should also discuss how others determine authorship and
> > tell us why their methods, most of them greatly different from
> > yours, are flawed.
>
> There is — broadly — no difference. Everyone
> who studies the Sonnets asks ‘How do they
> relate to the life of the poet?’
No, they don’t. Most just read them. Many literary scholars, however, have a NON-LITERARY interest in them because they want to find out about their author. Your question, for them, comes after the question of what the sonnets are about and their evaluation as being so good that one wants to findout who their author was, if unknown, and anything else about they can.
> Strats come up with absurd crap such as that the line ‘from
> hate away she threw’ puns on ‘Hathaway’. And that’s the sole thing they can get to ‘match’
Actually, it makes a better match than anything you’ve come up with for Oxford. But Stratfordians, as you seem unwilling to reveal, have found a much better match, the passage, “My name is Will.”
> from the 154 Sonnets! There could hardly be
> better proof that they have the wrong guy. Marlites don’t do any better, and likewise for
> Baconians and the rest. Sabrina does not
> try, AFAIR.
I think Sabrina does in her second book, which is mainaly about Sackville. But DOZENS of people have found all kinds of things in the sonnets that they think reveal the personwho wrote them, and that includes a lot who think Shakespeare wrote them. Rowse comes to mind.
Here’s Wikipedia on Rowse and the sonnets:
Rowse’s “discoveries” about Shakespeare’s sonnets amount to the following:
The Fair Youth was the 19-year-old Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, extremely handsome and bisexual.
The sonnets were written 1592–1594/5.
The “rival poet” was the famously homosexual Christopher Marlowe.
The “Dark Lady” was Emilia Lanier. His use of the diaries of Simon Forman, which contained material about her, influenced other scholars.
Christopher Marlowe’s death is recorded in the sonnets.
Shakespeare was a heterosexual man, who was faced with an unusual situation when the handsome, young, bisexual Earl of Southampton fell in love with him.
Rowse was dismissive of those who rejected his views, but he did not make such assertions without supplying reasons. In the case of Shakespeare, he emphasized heterosexual inclinations by noting that Shakespeare had managed to get an older woman pregnant by the time he was 18, and was consequently obliged to marry her. Moreover, he had saddled himself with three children by the time he was 21. In the sonnets, Shakespeare’s explicit erotic interest lies with the Dark Lady; he obsesses about her. Shakespeare was still married and therefore carrying on an extramarital affair.
Frankly, I thought Rowse was a jerk. Imagine my chagrin when I found out just now that I also believe “Shakespeare was a heterosexual man, who was faced with an unusual situation when the handsome, young, bisexual Earl of Southampton fell in love with him.” I also lean toward the ascription of Southampton as the fair youth. Sabrina gives a good argument for that: there is a line in one of the sonnets about how the author has NAMED the fair youth in his writings, and the only person Shakespeare ever named was Southampton, in his dedications to his narrative poems.
> The Oxfordian PT merchants are just as bad —
> generally ‘reading’ each Sonnet and asserting
> that it matches some crazy scheme that (for no
> good reason) they have decided is appropriate. Whittemore decides (for no reason in particular)
> that the poet wrote one Sonnet a week while his
> son (Wriothesley) was in prison, starting at #1
> and ending at #154. He ‘matches’ them week
> by week. Alan Tarica (another PT nut) decides
> (for no particular reason) that the Sonnets were
> written in reverse order. So he starts with #154
> and works backwards to #1. https://sites.google.com/site/eternitypromised/
>
> These schemes (and all others) require that you
> ignore the words of the Sonnet, merely claiming
> that each one says what you vaguely think it
> vaguely ought to say.
So you assert, Paul, but your opponents are as convinced that they are right as you are that you’re right.
> >> So all you have to do is show that (a) Sonnet 18
> >> could _just_as_well_ have been written for the
> >> Battle of Hastings, or the Siege of Troy — or any
> >> historical episode that you care to select OR
> >> (b) finding some other sonnet or poem that could
> >> _just_as_well_ fit the events at the court of Mary
> >> Queen of Scots around February and March 1566.
> >
> > It exactly fits both the battle of Hastings, and the Australians
> > conquering of Atlantis in 9,456 B.C. because “so long” is
> > used twice in it, and salami was the chief food of both the
> > Australians and the Chinese who fought in the Battle of
> > Hastings.
>
> Yeah. yeah. Deep criticism.
You can’t refute it.
> >> IF my reading is false, either of those courses would
> >> be easy. Look at some really bad readings of the
> >> Sonnets — such as from Hank Whittemore or from
> >> Jim F. in this newsgrouip or from any Strat perfesser.
> >> Anyone could readily take one of their ‘interpretations’
> >> of a particular poem and show that it is so shallow
> >> that it could apply to almost any text or any occasion
> >> OR (b) when they do get into some kind of detail,
> >> showing that it bears little relation to either the
> >> words of the text or the facts of history, or both.
> >
> > Your confidence in your interpretation is entirely subjective.
>
> No. Part of it comes from the purely rhetorical
> nature of the ‘objections’ that I get from you and
> others.
Sure. Nothing we say is of any substance, How do you know? Because you have examined what we’ve said and found it to have no substance. That doesn’t work in real scholarly pursuits, Paul.
> > To assert it is right will not make it right for anyone but you.
>
> It’s your total inability to present sensible arguments
> against it that is so convincing.
Ah, “my TOTAL inability.” Odd that I’ve never met anyone who was totally unable to present ANY sensible arguments against my views. How can you believe your argument to be so exquisitely perfect that no one can present a sensible argument against it. But a sane person would know, for instance, that the fact that in more than one sonnet their author calls his addressee “a boy” is a sensible argument that the addressee is a boy. An assertion that the author is joking, if accepted, would defeat the argument, but NOT make it not sensible. To get the assertion accepted, though, evidence for it would be useful, and you have none. Only your recognition that your delusional system would fall apart if if were false.
> >>> Showing it impossible would be impossible.
> >>
I suspect that I took the word, “impossible,” from you.”
> >> Your rigidnikry again. In effect, ‘highly unlikely’ in
> >> this context means ‘impossible’. For example,
> >> there is no reasonable likelihood that Mamillius
> >> (in Winter’s Tale) represents Raleigh (which is
> >> what you or someone said was Richard Malim’s
> >> claim) — for the reasons I gave yesterday.
> >> Mamillius was royal and immediate heir to the
> >> throne. Raleigh was a low-born cad — in the view
> >> of every courtier of Elizabeth, especially in that
> >> of the 17th Earl of Oxford.
Here again you put one of your main flaws as a thinker on view, Paul: you fail to recognize how various people are. It is quite likely that Raleigh, who made quite a name for himself, and was an important member of an intellectual group Marlowe and Spenser were part of, so he must have had SOME friends. He may even at times been Oxford’s friend. He was Elizabeth’s at times. And Oxford could have only pretended to like him during a time when Raleigh’s star was ascending. Friendships can change from day-to-day. You weren’t there.
Note: he has a much higher reputation today than Oxford among non-Oxfordians. In fact, your denigration of him is ridiculous.
> [..] (Paul’s snip)
> > First of all, Paul, you are arguing that a fictional character
> > represents someone else. You have to show why the
> > character is not entirely fictional. You don’t.
>
> Of course I do. Hamlet’s mini-play “The Mousetrap”
> was supposedly fictional. But we all know — as King
> Claudius also sees — that it wasn’t Many in that court
> could have shown it wasn’t ‘entirely fictional’ by
> pointing out the parallels between King Claudius and
> the actions depicted in the mini-play/. They were too
> many and too close to have been there by chance.
Very direct parallels but the only direct evidence we have that the play was supposed to be about a real event is that Hamlet tells us it is. Who tells us Hamlet is really about Oxford? As for the parallels, there are many parallels between Hamlet and the life-stories of other besides Oxford, including King James, and there are many differences between Hamlet and each of them, which you ignore.
There is also NO document indicating that anyone took any of Shakespeare’s plays to be about the real court of the time.
Aside from that, the convincing parallels are between Hamlet and its source.
> Likewise for Sonnet 18, or for Viola being Raleigh,
> or for Elizabeth being ‘the Phoenix’ and Oxford ‘her
> Turtle’ or for the numerous other parallels. You
> dodge every challenge to deny them — resorting to
> rhetoric and other crap ‘arguments’.
You have no direct evidence of any of that. I can’t remember my arguments against Raleigh as a girl, but I’ve repeated a few of my Sonnet 18 arguments, and they are not “rhetoric” or crap arguments, unless I agree to let you be sole judge of the matter, which makes the debate irrelevant. You need just publish your findings, and in a preface tell the reader that you’ve examined everything you’ve said in your book and found it to be correct, so they have no reason to doubt any of it. Just to make sure they accept your findings, add that no one has ever refuted any of them or even present a sensible argument against them.
I believe it was Copernicus’s failure to do this that kept his ideas from being universally accepted for so long. It makes science and related disciplines So much easier.
> >>> Why should we have more works in his name?
> >>
> >> Good authors are not common. When someone
> >> demonstrates good writing skills, we’d expect to
> >> see them employed.
> >
> > You’re missing my point: I’m assuming that if Sackville was the
> > True Author, we’d only have work from him in his front’s name,
> > not from him, as because the case, you claim, for Oxford.
>
> In practice, the most difficult part of any anti-
> Stratfordian case is to demonstrate the WHY
> and the HOW such ‘an extensive’ cover-up was
> mounted. Many Oxfordians fail in the respect
> (as a result of adopting far too many Stratfordian
> assumptions) and, in desperation, they fall back
> on PT crapology. Most non-Oxfordians don’t even
> bother to try — since they know they have no case.
> For example, Sabrina dodges every question
> about HOW and WHY. With the monarch and her
> successor providing the backing, it’s very easy to
> see how it worked. Without the monarch, and
> her successor, it’s near-impossible. But Marlites,
> Baconians, Sabrina and PT theorists rarely allow
> for the interests of the monarchy and its presence
> in the cover-up.
Don’t you realize that you asked why we have no late works from Sackville as we should have if he were a great author, and I told you why–we did, but they were in his front’s name. You couldn’t let yourself admit that you had lost that argument, so jumped into a different argument against Sackville.
Sabrina’s answer makes sense to me: it is that Sackville did not want to his authorship known. So it didn’t become known. The court had nothing to do with it.
We have no strong reason not to accept that Sackville was simply odd. You simply can’t understand that anyone might behave differently from the single way you think he would. But how about a great author who suddenly becomes so bored with what he’s been doing, or becomes depressed due to an endocrinological problem related to old age, and stops thinking his life’s work has any value. Did you know that Groucho Marx as an old man once view one of the greatest of the Marx Brothers films and said he could figure out why anyone thought it was funny?
Anyway, the beauty of Sackville’s not caring about posterity is that it greatly simplifies the Great Hoax. Just a few people knew The Truth while Sackville was alive, and within a decade or two of his death no one any longer did. And there would have been no need to leave fatuously silly “clues” for posterity. Just about everything could be taken as above board.
> If Sabrina provides no indication of the HOW
> and the WHY, then there is no point in bothering
> with her theory. It’s not got off the ground.
Her WHY is the standard “stigma of print” for noble authors. She argues it better than other anti-Stratfordians have, it seems to me. You should buy her book and study it. I’d be surprised if there were nothing in it you could use.
Her HOW is far more elegant than yours: Sackville simply wanted to write plays for the public theatre and did so anonymously until he met Shakespeare, a second-rate playwright who had priated a play of Sackville’s and rewritten it as his. Sackville saw how well he could conceal his identity if he let the Stratford hack continue taking credit for his plays. Sabrina allows just a few others to be in on the secret, including Jonson.
I think it would be very difficult for you to find anything wrong with it except the flaws I find as a Stratfordian in it which you could not accept because they work as well against Oxford as against Sackville. For instance, the stigma of print. You can’t refute it for Sackville without refuting it for Oxford. And the absence of direct evidence works the same way against all anti-Stratfordian candidates, so can’t be used. Etc.
I do know you think Oxford had to conceal himself because of how damaging his plays would be taken to be if known to be by a noble, expecially one as high up as Oxford. I don’t think Sabrina uses this argument for her man, but she could.
Whew, I got through your whole post.
.
Entry 1741 — Arguing Against a Crank, Again
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015
Today I felt too tired (although I’d had a decent night’s sleep, for me–over six hours), to do anything after just a little over an hour of tennis (doubles, which isn’t that demanding), and–earlier–my set of exercises which now take me about a half-hour, and a run of about a mile and two-thirds, very slowly. After lunch, though, I came into my computer room to at least post something here. As a warm-up, I got involved in the SAQ (Shakespeare Authorship Question), which is probably my most insane hobby, especially when it involved my Primary Opponent, Paul Crowley, as it often does, and did this time.
As I was bouncing along giving as good as I got (I think) I began wondering what I was getting out of my interaction with Paul. Hey, I thought, I spend so much time getting nowhere with Paul in order to find out why I spend so much time getting nowhere with Paul.
I’m sort of serious here. One thing I’m trying to do is work out a definitive analysis of crankery–and, it looks like–of counter-crankery, which is close to as insane. Another thought: that by studying a crank theory one gets a better idea of what I’d call a validiplex or sane understanding of some significant field, or significant portion of a field.
It’s a genuine sport for me, too–a chance to exercise my brain, with very little of importance in the balance. Finally, when I’m in a day that’s clearly going nowhere, I can shove what I’ve said to Paul into a blog entry like this one, hoping others may find it amusing, and at times interesting (because I sez profundities all the time, even to Paul!)
My ado out of the way, here’s the latest episode of the Bob ‘n’ Paul show:
On Monday, March 2, 2015 at 8:21:04 AM UTC-5, Paul Crowley wrote:
> >> That’s just not the way they were thinking. They
> >> (entirely justifiably) believed that as soon as anyone
> >> looked properly at Stratford and it environs, and at
> >> the nature of the Stratman, and his background,
> >> those investigators would forget any possibility that
> >> he could have written a poem, let alone any of the
> >> great works.
> >
BOB:They were extremely mistaken, which suggests they were not
> > very intelligent, after all.
>
PAUL: It’s very easy to underestimate stupidity, and
> very hard to predict the future. Also they did not
> grasp the extent to which ignorant uneducated
> low-class people (editor’s note: Paul does not
> consider himself any kind of snob) delighted in the idea that a
> great writer could emerge from their own ranks.
BOB: Many educated and even upper-class people went along with it. Aside from that, there are many ways of arranging things so as to pretty much insure that the Truth would be revealed in much less time that it has taken–for instance.
You simply assume that a perfect hoax was easy except for making sure Oxford got proper credit within a reasonable time, which was impossible, and impossible even for the geniuses carrying out the hoax to realize. Because you say so. You have no direct documentary evidence of such a hoax whatsoever.
> >> My statement that “Sonnet 18 was written in
> >> London in (or close to) April 1566″ is a very simple
> >> factual one. IF it was false (and if the supporting
> >> arguments were erroneous) then it would be very
> >> easy to demonstrate the falsity.
BOB: It is false for probably at least a hundred reasons, but impossible for you to accept any of these reasons as even arguments. For instance, Shakespeare’s name, not Oxford’s, is on Sonnet 18, but that’s not an argument against your theory because the name was a lie–according to you, although there’s no direct evidence that you are right. Oxford, who you say wrote Sonnet 18, was only 16 at the time, although the sonnet can be shown to have been (1) far superior to any poem Oxford was known to have written; (2) far superior to any poem known to have been written by a 16-year-old; and (3) equal to the best of the works of its author when he was surely a much older man, as well as far better than other works of its author when he was surely older.
There is also the literary history of the period concerning how the poets of the time influenced each other, which would have to be scrapped if Oxford wrote Sonnet 18 in 1566. This literary history is subjective, but based on a huge number of facts about the times, and about the way creative poets work. You merely assert that those who have contributed to this history are incompetents.
It occurs to me to ask you why they are incompetents–besides the fact that they refuse to accept Oxford as Shakespeare. Granted, from your point of view, that is an insane mistake, although there is no direct evidence that ought to make a competent scholar accept that Oxford was Shakespeare. But what else? Did they get the English victory over Spain right? Were they right about Francis Drake? Were they right that Spenser wrote the Faery Queene? Possibly not. It seems to me, as a dabble in your thinking, that you consider them COMPETENT wherever their reasoning matches yours. So you probably consider their thinking about Jonson correct, except regarding Jonson’s Shakespeare-related writings.
My problem is that the more I think about your scenario, the more incredibly complex it becomes–without leaving any direct evidence that things were as you say. Take Lyly, for example–credited with important novels and plays influencing Shakespeare, but for you a front man for Oxford–or was he just a mediocre writer that Oxford helped? Greene was fictitious, although many other writers wrote about him. Marlowe probably fictitious. The whole literary history of the times was, according to your scenario, much less like the experts in the period say it was than the Christian fundamentalists idea of biology is like Darwin’s.
You really should carefully write up your history of England from 1530 or so until 1630. Why won’t you? You shouldn’t want someone like me to give my version of it. And you have no followers who would do it for you. The HLAS archives might be lost–and even if not, the material there by you would be hard to organize.
PAUL explains his method of determining what a poem means:
> >> The question is something like “Does this piece of
> >> this jigsaw fit this gap?” — when it’s a complicated
> >> shape, with many patterns on the piece in question
> >> and in that part of the picture of the jigsaw. You can
> >> disprove the matching by (a) showing that such a
> >> piece could readily go elsewhere, OR
> >> (b) showing that there were many other pieces that
> >> would fit the gap as well.
> >
BOB: If this is so, why do no other attribution scholars use your
> > procedure in determining authorship?
>
PAUL: There is nothing exceptional in what I do. If you
> come across an unsigned letter, you identify
> who wrote it by linking some person to the acts
> and circumstances mentioned.
BOB: Shakespeare’s works were signed.
>
PAUL: Whereas most ‘attribution scholars’ are looking at
> works they see as completely non-autobiographical
BOB: How can you keep saying that, Paul? What you MUST say as a sane literary investigator is that “most ‘attribution scholars’ are looking at works they see as NOT SUFFICIENTLY autobiographical TO BE MUCH HELP IN IDENTIFYING THEIR AUTHOR.” Actually, however, attribution scholars are making no effort to identify the author of Shakespeare’s works. You’re speaking of what might be called ‘attribution-defenders.’ As one of them, I say that (1) the hard evidence for Shakespeare, a man known to have lived at the right time in the right place to have written the Shakespearean Oeuvre, is sufficient for him to be taken as their author insomuch as there is no direct evidence against him, so we need not bother trying to relate his life to his works; (2) we know too little about his life to relate it in any kind of detail to his works; (3) his works, except the sonnets, are clearly not based on their author’s life–e.g., he didn’t become bewitched in an Athenian forest by a faery named Puck.
PAUL: and they are trying to pick up clues from style and
> word-usage. They would be only a small part
> of my interest.
BOB: It’s the only part that is in any way scientific, and–however flawed now–will almost surely settle the matter eventually. (Paul elsewhere had claimed that literary history is just as scientific as anything else, including physics. Hence, if his theory was wrong, I should be able easily to scientifically dismantle it, which–needless to say–I can’t.)
BOB: Why do no historians use your methods in determining what
> > happened at various points in history?
>
PAUL: Of course they do. They study the documents of the
> day, and glean what they can about the interests
> and motivations of the people involved. So they
> often change their minds on people like Richard III,
> or Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Moore.
BOB: Do they decide certain prominent figures were fictitious, or as good as fictitious the way you believe Shakespeare (the owner of New Place, according to the deed to that property), was? How much of what they say can they claim is objectively true the way in chemistry its true that a base plus an acid will yield (in normal conditions) a salt and water?
>
> > BOB: Why does no one agree that your interpretation of the sonnets is correct?
>
>PAUL: Like you, they have not put in the work.
BOB: How is that a good dodge considering that you can re-use it indefinitely? (I am sure, by the way, that I’ve put more work into Sonnet 18 than you have. I am also sure that many who have written complete books on the sonnets, which you have not, have done at least as much work on them as you. They just don’t realize that all who have preceded them in their field have been incredibly wrong about who, when and where the sonnets were written and what they really mean–have, in short, taken them to be poems like all poems except for their details, and not the new kind of literature you think Oxford invented, the mixture of confession/personal philosophy/autobiography/journalism/gossip/who-knows-what disguised as world class lyrical poetry and verse plays.
HERE I decided to stop, although possibly more than halfway through Paul’s post.
.
Entry 1736 — The Eurekaplex
Thursday, February 26th, 2015
The following is from an essay-in-progress I took out of the review I’ve been working on for centuries of Sabrina Feldman’s The Apocryphal William Shakespeare:
Thoughts on How an Intelligent Person like Sabrina Feldman Became an Authorship Skeptic
When, thirty or forty years ago, I first became actively involved in the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ), I had read and thought about it enough to have been convinced that anyone who thought Shakespeare was not responsible for the works attributed for so many years by so many intelligent people who had studied him, his works, and his time were flat-out insane.
But I soon also perceived that many of them seemed otherwise mentally normal, and even more or less as intelligent as I took myself to be (when trying to be objective enough about that to ignore how vastly superior in intellect to anyone else ever born the megalomaniac in me told me I was almost as often as my sometimes endocrinologically-crippled Poorest Self told me I was an irrelevant imbecile . . . and therefore possibly only more intelligent than 99.99% of the world’s population). How could this be? How, for instance, could Charlton Ogburn, Jr., even now considered among the SAQ immortals by anti-Stratfordians, as Shakespeare-doubters are formally known?
Ogburn, Wikipedia informs us, graduated from Harvard in 1932 and wrote and worked in publishing. During World War II he joined military intelligence, leaving with the rank of captain. He returned to the US to begin a career with the State Department.
After the success of his story “Merrill’s Marauders”, a Harper’s Magazine cover story in 1957, Harper & Bros. offered an advance for a book and he quit the government to write full-time in 1957 and had a distinguished career as a journalist and novelist. How could anyone term him insane?
Or similarly describe Sabrina Feldman, an anti-Stratfordian whose career, so far, is similarly distinguished, for she attended college and grad school at Cal Berkeley, getting a Ph. D. in experimental physics. Far from one-dimensional, she took a Shakespeare class taught by Stephen Booth, world-class Shakespeare scholar, while an undergraduate, and got the only A+ in the class! She now manages the Planetary Science Instrument Development Office at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory—while doing her duties as a happily married mother of two. Furthermore, among her most eminent friends is: Me (in spite of how opposed to her theory she knows me to be). In short, gifted but more or less normal in every respect, and unarguably knowing enough about Shakespeare and his times for her thoughts about the SAQ to merit attention, although ultimately proving to be wrong. However wrong her theory might be, however, it was clearly even more difficult to call her insane because of it than it was to call Ogburn that.
By the time I ran into Sabrina, though, I had stopped calling Ogburn and others opposing my man insane. I continued to think their SAQ views insane, though, so coined the word “psitchotic” to describe them—they were “psituationally psychotic”—or only crazy about one subject (or, not about so many things to need drugs, electrotherapy, confinement to a nuthouse or the like).
At first, because of Ogburn and many of the anti-Stratfordians I had exchanges with on the Internet (mainly at a site created for unmonitored discussion of the SAQ, HLAS (humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare), I thought that all the formidable anti-Stratfordians were what I termed rigidniks.”
Back in my middle twenties, I had begun my own life as a theorist without credentials, going a bit loonier quantitatively than Ogburn and the others turning out theories about who really wrote the works of Shakespeare with a theory intended to explain the whole human psychology, giving the book I then wrote about it and self-published, An Attempt at a Total Psychology. It included a fairly wide-ranging theory of temperaments that posited the existence of various temperament-types of which the most important—in the present version of the theory—are the “rigidnik,” “milyoop” and “freewender.” I could write a full book about each of these, I believe, but for now will sum them up as being rough equivalents of (in order) David Reisman’s “inner-directed,” “other-directed” and “autonomous” personality-types.
While Ogburn was definitely a full-scale rigidnik, and many I argued with at HLAS seemed as rigidnikal as he, or even more so, I also began running into authorship skeptics that seemed much more flexible and tolerant than they, most of them Marlovians (those choosing Christopher Marlowe as their True Author) but at least one who was an Oxfordian. An easy way to tell them from the rigidniks is that they much more willingly admitted that our side had a case.
Frankly, I wasn’t sure what to do with my outliers, so I merely changed my claim that all serious anti-Stratfordians were rigidniks to the claim that most of them were. Some who were not were easy to categorize: they were milyoops, a trademark characteristic of whom was suggestibility. Because of that, they became rigid anti-Stratfordians because too weak of character to resist the influence of some rigidnikal anti-Stratfordian.
But what about the anti-Stratfordians who seemed to me to have enough strength of character to have their reason overthrown by someone else and were also intelligent enough not to seem likely to fall for, or invent, a highly irrational theory of anything themselves, like several Marlovians I’d met, and then, only a few years ago, Sabrina Feldman?
TO BE CONTINUED
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Entry 1697 — SAQ Wack-Classification, Cont.
Monday, January 19th, 2015
As I was saying:
The fallaciplex a rigidnik crank is victimized by is a rigidniplex. Almost all of a rigidnik’s knowleplexes in his magniscipience (where he is involved with questions outside the everyday like the SAQ) are rigidniplexes due to his innately excessively high basal cerebral energy (while in or mostly in his magniscipience and defective accommodance (i.e., ability to lower the level of his cerebral energy, which is the basis of creativity, among other things). Nonetheless, some of his rigidniplexes are valid: Newton’s understanding of physics may have been rigidnikal, for instance. (I have this suspicion that all the best theoretical mathematicians and physicists are rigidniks.) The SAQ one is not, as I will later demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt.
That is a memory-complex that comes to over-ride any new information contradicting the understanding it generates. Call it a fixation, or a permanent outlook. The result is extreme inner-directedness based not on the interaction of continuing data but on what data was around at the birth of the rigidniplex.
Hence, if Shakespeare becomes important in his life, he must form a Shakespeare rigidniplex. For reasons I’ll soon get into, this will become a delusional system based on some kind of insane conspiracy theory that someone other than Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to Will.
Soundbite definition of a rigidniplex: a mental structure that results in an understanding of some relatively large subject (that is much more often invalid than valid) that one possessing it can’t change his mind about.
The second kind of authorship wack, the milyoop, is a kind of pseudo-rigidnik. His fallaciplex is named after him, too: the milyooplex. It is the opposite of a rigidniplex, for milyoops suffer from a too low level of basal cerebral energy. This causes them to form knowleplexes they are too weak of mind to defend.
The sanest kind of wack is the eurekan. Usually he is the third type of the three my theory of temperaments hypothesizes, the freewender, but he can also be a strong milyoop or weak rigidnik (in real life, just about everyone is a mixture of the three types). He will have a healthy mentality, perhaps even a superior mentality, but been done in by a Eureka moment. A Eurekan moment can occur in almost any intelligent, creative person’s life. What happens is he meets an apparent problem without the background knowledge properly to deal with it, then finds a brilliant solution—which is incomplete but which excites him too much for him to notice that.
His cerebral energy is not naturally too high, but can be driven high by the pleasure of suddenly finding an apparent solution to a difficult problem. In the case of the eurekan, his burst of energy will allow him to build a fairly strong knowleplex, or understanding of the problem he believes he has solved. Moreover, if society considers the subject his solution deals with, and Shakespeare is one of the largest cultural subjects there is for most people in the West with any culture at all, he will be filled with energizing anticipation of fame and fortune.
From then on, he will work on it, each time with the energy of a rigidnik because of the pleasure his brilliant solution is giving him. As a result, he will make the knowleplex he began with into an artificial rigidniplex every bit as immune to reason as a natural rigidniplex.
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Entry 1696 — Some New Coinages
Sunday, January 18th, 2015
I’m hoping to do Important Work elsewhere today, so this entry will be short (unless I get inspired). Currently one of the essays I’m working on concerns the kinds of people who become Shakespeare cranks–i.e., people who are pretty much permanently certain that someone other than the rube from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works of Shakespeare. So far there are three major kinds of Shakespeare cranks on my list: the rigidnikal, milyoopian and eurekan cranks. According to my wholly uncertified “knowlecular” theory of psychology, each of these cranks is the victim of a closely related but not quite identical group of inter-connected brain-cells in his cerebrum called a fallaciplex (fuh LAY shih plehks).
A fallaciplex is one of the brain’s two kinds of “knowleplexes,” or sets of brain-cell’s involved with a person’s understanding of some fairly large portion of reality (astronomy, say, rather than the moon as simply a bright object in the sky). If the understanding of a given knowleplex is obviously wrong (i.e., demonstrated to be invalid by rigorous logic applied to nothing by the known relevant facts of the subject of the knowleplex under analysis–in the view of an overwhelming majority of people with knowledge of the subject involved), it is a fallaciplex. The opposite of this is the validiplex. This, as should be obvious, is a knowleplex that logic and all the facts have shown–for an overwhelming majority of those with relevant knowledge–to be valid beyond reasonable doubt. All other knowleplexes can be considered validiplexes-in-progress until are shown to be maxilutely (i.e. as close to absolute certainty as any understanding can come) valid or invalid.
The crank’s fallaciplex is activated whenever he encounters the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ (more than briefly). It then fills his mind with a delusional system concerning the SAQ that he is almost completely unable to free himself from–although he’s unlikely to want to.
The fallaciplex a rigidnikal crank is victimized by is a rigidniplex. Almost all of a rigidnik’s knowlexplexes in his magniscipience (where his involvement with questions outside the everyday like the SAQ) rigidniplexes due to his innately excessively high basal cerebral energy (while in or mostly in his magniscipience and defective accommodance (i.e., ability to lower the level of his cerebral energy, which is the basis of creativity, among other things). Nonetheless, some of his rigidniplexes are valid: Newton’s understanding of physics may have been rigidnikal, for instance. (I have this suspicion that all the best theoretical mathematicians and physicists are rigidniks.) The SAQ one is not, as I will later demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt.
Soundbite definition of a rigidniplex: a mental structure that results in an understanding of some relatively large subject (that is much more often invalid than valid) that one possessing it can’t change his mind about.
The fallaciplex a milyoopan crank is victimized by is the opposite of a rigidniplex, for milyoops, as I classify those who tend to form milyooplexes, suffer from a too low level of cerebral energy. This causes them to form knowleplexes they are too weak of mind to defend.
To be continued tomorrow, I hope. Right now, I suddenly need a nap–or a shot of cocaine, and I don’t know where to get any.
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Entry 1681 — Diana Price, Part 3
Saturday, January 3rd, 2015
A digression: to this point I have been speaking of “authorship evidence” whereas Price came to refer to such evidence as “literary evidence.” Hence, her final term for the evidence all the writers of Shakespeare’s time had but he didn’t is CPLE, Contemporary Personal Literary Evidence. Hence, it seems to me appropriate for me to switch from “authorship” to “literary” from now on, and use “CPLE” when writing of the invention of what she calls that—alone, except for other authorship skeptics.
As for Price’s two Shakespeare-Elimination Machines, we’re not finished with their components, for Price was too large a champion of her cause to be satisfied with any old victory: she wanted an overwhelming one. How she did it, I’ll never know, but she found a brilliant addition to her UAEA-Machine to do so, a mechanism I have dubbed her UnShakespeare Authorship Evidence Multiplier, or UAE-Multiplier.
Prior to her thinking of this, she had just one kind of contemporary evidence her 24 writers from Shakespeare’s time had but Shakespeare did not. Not too impressive, especially since Shakespeare had a monument, which none of the others had, and a thick folio collection of his plays that only one of them had. But maybe she never thought of the UnShakespeare evidence as of one kind only. But not ten different kinds. At some point the idea of ten different kinds, ten being a standard quantity for pop lists of things like a year’s best movies or America’s favorite names for boys or girls struck her. From then on, she had ten different kinds of CPLE that 24 writers of Shakespeare’s time had and, according to her, Shakespeare did not.
It was not the easiest list to create. In fact, she was unable to do so without full-scale or partial cheating. For instance, one of her ten categories of Contemporary Personal Literary Evidence was “Evidence of formal education.” How is that evidence of authorship, or what Price called “literary?” Note, too, that she ignores the strong circumstantial evidence that Shakespeare went to his local grammar school—all the attendance records of which have been lost, as they have at many other such schools of the time.
Sudden digression—to the fact that Price considers Ben Jonson’s personal testimony that he attended a grammar school as CPLE of his formal education, but does not consider WS’s personal testimony in the two dedications to his narrative poems as CPLE that he was the author of those poems. I earlier posted my finding the latter to be good CPLE—what could be more personal that a man’s claiming in a prefatory text to a book that he was its author? Sure, it could be a lie, but so could any other bit of CPLE. If Jonson’s evidence of formal education stands, Shakespeare’s evidence of his vocation as a writer must also–In Price’s “Miscellaneous records (e.g., referred to personally as a writer).”
To get one extra kind of evidence into her list, she had to divide “Evidence of having been paid to write” in two, one of them keeping that name, the other taking the name, “Evidence of a direct relation to a patron.” The latter, by the way, is taken not to apply to Shakespeare’s direct personal relationship with his patron, Southampton although his dedication to The Rape of Lucrece speaks of the “warrant” he has of Southampton’s “honourable disposition” strongly suggests that he had won patronage from the Earl with his Venus & Adonis, since in it he says that that warrant make Lucrece “assured of acceptance”—as does its tone of worshipful thankfulness.
True, neither of Shakespeare’s dedications explicitly mentions money changing hands, but so far as I know, about the only way poets made money from poems then was through the patronage of aristocrats, and the standard way of seeking it was via dedications. But I can’t say for sure that Southampton didn’t receive Venus & Adonis by parcel post, and sending a thank you note to Shakespeare without meeting him that gave Shakespeare and orgasm. We can also ignore the anecdotal evidence that Shakespeare received a large amount of money from Southampton in the nineties, not too long before he bought the second finest house in Stratford.
An even sillier multiplication of the evidence is Price’s having one category for “handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., touching on literary matters”; and a second for “record of correspondence, especially concerning literary matters” (although how could this be literary if not about literary matters?) . . . and also the afore-mentioned category for “Miscellaneous Records!” Not to mention a category for “Commendatory verses, epistles, or epigrams contributed or received!!!”
Yes, the members of each category differ ever-so-slightly from one another, but who other than Price would not put them all in one category for documentary identification as a writer by the writer himself or another writer?
Then there’s Price’s category for “Evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given” which has nothing necessarily to do with a career as a writer. Neither it nor the category for evidence of formal education belong on the list. Which leaves four categories: (1) documentary identification as a writer by the writer himself or another writer; (2) the only 100% valid category, “Extant original manuscript”; (3) Evidence of making money from writing (although it could just as well be in category (1); and (4) “Notice of death as a writer”—oops, scratch that; why should one way of identifying someone as a writer be considered different from another? In other words, why should my saying that my friend Joe is a good writer be considered a different kind of CPLE than my saying my friend Joe, the writer, died yesterday?
Except, of course, to win the approval of those incapable of rejecting any “evidence” apparently supporting their delusional system.
I can’t knock it. Price’s book has become the Bible of those against WS. It is worthless as scholarship, but a ringing success as propaganda.
This essay, I just realized, lacks a proper beginning. I had one, but chopped it off before posting the first part of the essay two entries ago. I guess I felt it needed revision. No worry, I won’t bother you with it. I will let you know if I get the thing published anywhere. Eventually, I’ll stick it into my “Pages.” I liked it for a while, by the way, but toward the end, began thinking it not very good. Oh, well.
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Entry 1680 — Diana Price, Part 2
Friday, January 2nd, 2015
Here’s the next section of my essay on Diana Price:
The other half of it was the copious evidence from Shakespeare’s lifetime, particularly the forty some odd instances of his name on the title pages of editions of plays published while he was still living, but also such important strong evidence as the private note by Gabriel Harvey previously mentioned referring to my boy Will as the author of Hamlet, Venus & Adonis and Lucrece, and Francis Mere’s many mentions of him in his Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury, which may contain the strongest evidence for Shakespeare from his lifetime aside from the title-page names.
Price’s move against this was much more original than her disposal of posthumous evidence. Rather than strike it down, as all authorship-skeptics before her as just a name that could as well be a pseudonym as a real name, she nailed it as impersonal, for she had found, or thought she had found, that not any of the evidence for Shakespeare from his lifetime was from him personally, such as a manuscript in his hand of one of his plays, or from anyone who knew him personally, such as a letter to him about how much the letter’s writer had enjoyed some play of his. Obviously, such . . . “evidence” can have little status compared to the personal literary effects of the man whose authorship qualifications are being examined or the testimony of those who actually personally knew him!
Certainly, it can’t be argued that such evidence is not far stronger than the testimony of someone who did not know Shakespeare. After all, the latter could be mere hearsay evidence. Be that as it may, Price was now able to eliminate, or at least greatly diminish, just about all the strong evidence for WS (all of it, in fact, so far as she was concerned, but—as I will eventually show, she was not necessarily right). With its two filters, one for posthumous evidence she didn’t like, and one for what she came to call contemporary evidence that bothered her, the mean little Shakespeare Authorship Evidence Elimination Machine (or “SAEE-Machine”) she had, in effect, been working on (very likely without being aware of it) was, as so far described, enough to make her the equal of such greats in the WS-elimination cause as Delia Bacon, Mark Twain and John Looney.
The SAEE-Machine was only half of Price’s remarkable achievement, for she was acute of mind enough to see the need for a defense against the Shakespeare-affirmers who shrugged off the limited evidence for Shakespeare as inevitable considering how far from his times we are, and as no more limited than the evidence for all but one or two of the other known writers of his time, and ingenious enough to find one I deem the equal of her SAEE-Machine, which is high praise.
What she came up with, in effect, was a second invention, an UnShakespeare Authorship Evidence Acceptance Machine (or “UAEA-Machine”). The function of this was to demonstrate the uniqueness of Shakespeare’s lack of contemporary personal evidence of authorship by finding it for a reasonably large sample of writers of the time. This it succeeded in doing for 24 of them!
Price thus to this date feels justified in maintaining that only WS of the significant known writers of his time lacked what she has come to call “contemporary personal literary evidence” that he was a writer. This is an interestingly propagandistic . . . misstatement. I want to call it an outright lie, but can’t because I suspect Price believes it accurately to describe the evidence her SAEE-Machine (in her view) shows WS not to have had. In any case, I feel a need to discuss it at some length.
First of all, the SAEE-Machine does not eliminate personal evidence. It only eliminates explicitly personal evidence. For instance, it eliminates Francis Meres’s testimony that Shakespeare wrote certain plays (twelve of them) that Meres names as not personal although it has no way of knowing whether Meres personally knew Shakespeare or not. Nor do I or anyone else. But he certainly could have. After all, he seems to have known a great deal about Shakespeare’s literary career, including the suggestively personal fact that Shakespeare was distributing copies of his sonnets to friends. He also expressed a large amount of admiration for him, enough that one would think he’d have tried to get the know him personally—perhaps through one of those among whom Shakespeare’s sonnets were circulating (if he wasn’t already one of them). Can we conclude that Meres personally knew Shakespeare? Of course not. But we can’t say Meres did not know him personally; we cannot set his testimony aside, as Price does, for not being personal.
It is here, by the way, that one of the most shrewdly propagandistic tricks Price uses (very subtlely most of the time) comes in, the either/or presentation of possibilities. For her there are only two kinds of evidence having to do with whether it’s personal or impersonal: either indubitably personal evidence, or evidence that cannot be said to be personal. That Meres’s testimony is much more likely to be personal than, say, John Weever’s in his poem of 1599 that praises three named works of WS’s but mentions nothing personal about him like Meres’s reference to the circulation of his sonnet to friends gives it no more evidentiary weight for Price than Weever’s has (close to zero, in other words). That’s not how it’s done. Genuine scholars may not literally give every piece of evidence concerning some question they are trying to answer some explicit value, but they due put it on an evidentiary continuum from maximally strong down to maximally weak with spots on it for various degrees of strength. This has, over the centuries, proven to be helpful in solving problems things, especially those for which some answer has no piece of maximally-strong evidence supporting it, but a lot of reasonably strong pieces of evidence in its favor. Propagandists rarely use such continuums, though, except when forced to—as, for instance, authorship skeptics are when arguing on behalf of the candidate to replace Shakespeare that they’re backing and even they can see they lack anything like even one maximally strong piece of evidence for him.
Not that what I call Price’s anti-continuumism matters to a great many of the people on the Shakespeare-elimination bandwagon, for they all take her to have shown (or, in many cases, proven) not that there is no personal evidence from his lifetime for WS but that there is no evidence at all from his lifetime for him.
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I expect to continue this thing for at least two more entries, so those of you uninterested in it would be wise to skip them.
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Entry 1679 — A Master Propagandist
Thursday, January 1st, 2015
Today I’ve been working on an essay about a book called Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, which I consider a ridiculously stupid but very clever exercise in pure propaganda. Its intention is to persuade fools that Shakespeare was not a writer. I’ve written a great deal about Price and, in my opinion, completely destroyed her credibility as a genuine scholar. But I have yet to do it effectively, which–for me–means not only cogently, but entertainingly. Hard to do because of the complexity of what Price has done. Anyway, so far I have the following:
First of all, she sifted through as much data about the life of Shakespeare as she could, focusing on anything that indicated him to have been a writer. Then, because her goal was not to answer the question of whether or not the evidence supported his being a writer, but to show that he could not have been one, she faced a huge problem: what to do about the copious evidence indicating that he was a writer. As for the lack of any direct evidence that he was not, such as some letter by someone who mentioning his having pretended to write Hamlet, a play the letter-writer knew to have been by his fencing master; and the absence of any kind of half-reasonable circumstantial evidence against him, other than trivialities like his allegedly poor penmanship, or his not spending three pages of his will speaking of how much he had loved the books he must have owned had ha been a writer, and whom he was leaving them to, she would just ignore that.
Her main chore, then, was to find ways to discredit the evidence for Shakespeare. She was intelligent enough to understand that there had to be some evidence for him (although a substantial number of authorship … skeptics, I’ll be polite and call them … deny this). There’s no way he could have become known as the great poet written of in all the standard college and pre-college textbooks if there had been no evidence that he was what the textbooks say he was. While it may be true that many academics make their way in life by gathering credentials and positions rather than actually accomplishing anything, very few of them of entirely stupid. The best of them, in fact, are true scholars (or more), and don’t accept conclusions about anything in their field that are entirely unsupported by valid evidence. Moreover, they have time-tested, widely trusted standard ways of determining the validity of evidence. Not that fraudulence never works on them, but that it almost never does for long. Similarly, they certainly (rather too often) fail to perceive conclusions that a reasonable amount of valid evidence supports, although—again—almost never for anything like the length of time that the expert academics in the field of Shakespeare Studies, for example, have rejected the theory that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
So far as the SAQ is concerned, Price had to have known from the outset what even authorship skeptics have long recognized as the two central strong-points on the evidentiary map of those convinced that Shakespeare was Shakespeare: the monument to him in his hometown, and the First Folio collection of the plays attributed to someone bearing his name. The first of these provides enough evidence by itself (in the absence of any counter evidence) to establish beyond reasonable doubt that Shakespeare was a prominent author; the other provides a good deal more than enough evidence to establish beyond reasonable doubt that he was specifically the author of such famous plays as Hamlet and King Lear. In short, Price had somehow to topple these two strong-points.
It was not difficult for her, for other authorship skeptics had already chosen to make the absence of evidence supporting the beliefs of their opponents their chief weapon (nearly their only weapon, in fact)—shrewd enough not to rely on evidence supporting their own beliefs since that was in very short supply, if not non-existent. Hence, for over a century, they had simply ignored the monument and First Folio, chanting over and over, “There is no evidence from his lifetime that Shakespeare was a writer.” Were they totally insane, one might wonder (let’s be polite for now, and consider this a rhetorical question). What about his name on title-pages of so many published plays? Ah, that was no problem for them: the title-page names only tell us that someone using the name William Shakespeare wrote the plays. That is, they give us the author’s name—but nothing else.
From there, the authorship skeptics hop quickly into triumphant declarations about various absences of significant evidence for my boy Will, like someone’s referring not to William Shakespeare as an author, as Gabriel Harvey and many others did while he was living, but to William Shakespeare, resident of Stratford-upon-Avon where he was born in 1564, as a writer. (Practically a complete description of a crank is, “One who can always find where some belief he considers invalid is incompletely supported evidentiarily: show a crank proof OJ’s blood was at the scene of the murder of his estranged wife, for example: interesting, but a crank refusing to accept OJ’s guilt will immediately ask for a photograph of him in the commission of the murder. If someone had, the absence of the murder weapon would keep his guilt insufficiently demonstrated. Etc.)
Hence, authorship skeptics had disposed of the monument and First Folio as evidentiarily relevant by pointing out that Shakespeare was not alive when the former was erected or the latter published. They also declared both fraudulent or mistaken or some combination of the two. In other words, they knew that saying the monument and First Folio were too late to count (although, scholars do find that the closer a witness’s testimony about some event is to the time of the event, the more likely it is to be valid—IF one ignores all other possible factors. Which is to say, that the testimony of an inscription on a monument about someone dead for seven years, may nonetheless be near-maximally valid—if, as is the case with Shakespeare’s monument—the inscription would have been seen by hundreds of people who had known the person it was about, including his daughters and others who had known him intimately, and the monument was in a church unlikely to want it to become known that it . . . churched an outrageously-lying monument, and had a bust of the person it was about as well as his corroborated date of death to strengthen its evidentiary value—and there was no direct evidence or strong circumstantial evidence against it.
True, let me digress to say, that it could still have been fraudulent, but only if a hoax so complex that no authorship skeptic has come up with a plausible scenario to account for it, and near-impossibly so secret that no one has found a single unambiguous hint that it ever took place.
So, authorship skeptics have not utterly disposed of the monument and First Folio as evidence. Instead, by reminding all that the evidence they provide is belated, and could have resulted from fraud or honest error, they have made them seem—to their followers if not to the sane . . . sorry, to their opponents . . . to some degree questionable, and even to some Shakespeare scholars, not sufficient to make the beliefs of Shakespeare-affirmers undeniable. If you can’t obliterate a truth you don’t like, the next best thing to do is weaken it. And, of course, push it as far from the center of the debate it is a part of, or should be a part of, as possible.
Following their example, Price decided that she would use only authorship evidence from Shakespeare’s lifetime to “answer” (i.e., reject) the question as to whether he had been a writer. Half her battle was thus won.
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If anyone can point out any errors or unfairness so far in my case, or where what I say gets tedious, or goes off into irrelevance, or anything else that might help me make the essay the very bestest it can be, please let me know, in a comment or an email to me, [email protected]. I’m not sure what I’ll do with my essay once it’s done, assuming I feel it is the very bestest it can be, but I may try to sell it somewhere. In any case, it will become part of one of my life’s works, my definitive study of the SAQ (Shakespeare Authorship Question).
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Entry 1655 — Back to the SAQ
Monday, December 8th, 2014
I’m hoping to get some worthwhile work done today, so am going to take care of this entry quickly with a comment I just wrote in answer to a comment by Robert A. Leff on a book about the SAQ (i.e., “Shake- speare Authorship Question”) by Richard M. Waugaman, M.D.
Leff: “I’m surprised there have been only three reviews of Dr. Waugaman’s book. I guess his many fans are busy writing their own books and articles, so they don’t have the time to post the usual five star Oxfordian reviews. On the other hand, perhaps his friends haven’t bought the book because the essays have been previously published. I have no problem with Dr. Waugaman gathering some of his many essays into one collection.
“Knowing how touchy Oxfordians are, I should start by saying I did not buy Dr. Waugaman’s book; I read the essays before. I decided to save my money.
“I’m aware of the long standing Oxfordian practice of declaring Edward de Vere wrote works scholars have said other authors wrote. Dr. Waugaman’s claim that Edward de Vere wrote The Art of English Poesy. It is true that when the book was published in 1589, the author’s name does not appear on the title page. Dr. Waugaman is free to propose any candidate of his choice as the author, so he selects Edward de Vere. The majority of English literary scholars and English professors say The Art of English Poesy was written by George Puttenham. Being a good Oxfordian, Dr. Waugaman hisses when the word orthodox is spoken or written.
“I’m sure Dr. Waugaman has read The Art of English Poesy many times, so it is a surprise he missed or overlooked the eighteen words that render his claim that Edward de Vere wrote the book nonsense. In Book 3 Chapter 13, the author writes,”Also in our ecologue entitled “Elpine, which we made being but eighteen years old to King Edward VI…” “Elpine” is a lost work. What is not lost are some important dates.
“George Puttenham was born in 1529 and died in 1590.
Edward VI was born in 1537, became King in 1547 and died in 1553.
If you subtract 1529 from 1547, the answer is 18. Refer back to the quote above and it is clear that 18 year old George Puttenham wrote an ecologue for the new king.
“But wait, you ask, what about Edward de Vere? In 1547, Edward de Vere wasn’t even a gleam in his parents’ eyes. Edward de Vere was born in 1550. When King Edward IV died in 1553, little Eddie was 3 years old!
“Dr. Waugaman and his fellow Oxfordians would have a difficult time convincing themselves and anyone that 3 comes close to 18 no matter how hard they spin things.
“Sorry, Richard M. Waugaman M.D., Edward de Vere did not write The Art of English Poesy.”
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Grumman: “Good argument, Robert, but it has a flaw, I think: why need whoever wrote the eclogue to Edward have written it at any particularly time? Why couldn’t Oxford have written it when 18 in homage to the dead king whose name he shared?
“For me the only flaw in Dr. Waughaman’s book is its failing to give more to the True Shakespeare than he rather timidly does; indeed, I can’t understand how it is that even the best Shakespeare scholars (i.e., those able to read past mere title-page names and such rubbish) cannot see that whoever wrote the plays of Shakespeare had to have written more than just the great literature in all European languages that he clearly did, but all the great music, starting with Campion’s. And painted all the masterpieces of the age. I fear I’m not well-versed enough in the history of science to say which works of science and philosophy he was responsible for, aside from Bacon’s.
“In conclusion, I commend Dr. Waugaman for a fine beginning to a list of Oxford’s works, but hope even more energetic experts will come to the fore and complete our knowledge of his achievements. I would myself, but–alas–am too tied up with my work on Oxford’s invention of the English language, and the way his friends made it seem it had existed before he was born because they didn’t want his family embarrassed by the number of obscenities he included in his new language, to be able to do so.”
Amusing Aside: I am frequently characterized by those clever enough to see through the authorship hoax to back Willie because I am the kind of person who takes what he was taught in school as gospel! Ah, if only it were not quite so completely untrue! I might have gotten somewhere socioeconomically in my poor life.
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Entry 1601 — The Genius of Crowley, Part 2
Wednesday, October 15th, 2014
I claim that I don’t post so much at HLAS and elsewhere about Paul Crowley, even giving him a chapter in my book on the authorship question, to sadistically mock him, although I would never claim not to do that. My main use of him, however, is as an incredible example of what I term “rigidnikry.” In fact, I find him so incredible as being uncertain whether he is a real person, or some ingenious fictitious character made up as a caricature of the typical Oxfordian. He has provided little data that would allow anyone to validate his existence. I tend mostly to believe him real, but using a pseudonym.
Here from the other day is a post of his about the Latin inscription on Shakespeare’s monument that the sane have no trouble with but the wacks invariably consider a difficult problem in decoding:
judgement of piles, genius of 50crates, art of a marrow
Geddit?
IVDICIO PYLIUM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM,
TERRA TEGIT, POPULUS MÆRET, OLYMPUS HABET
An answer to the ‘Socrates’ problem.
The hidden meaning is “50 crates”.
This has been a joke among educated English classes
(such as Oxbridge students) since time immemorial.The script as carved shows ‘Socrates’ in the usual form.
The ‘S’ is the same as that shown elsewhere in the
inscription. Clearly the sculptor was not told of the
double meaning, or was told to ignore it.Shame really, I’m sure no one who took the Stratford
story at face value would have noticed a ‘5’ in its place.Paul
They aren’t content to claim that Jonson, whom many believe wrote it, simply wrote a lying epigraph that would fit the fake Shakespeare, they have to show he did that and hid The Truth inside it. Everything by or about Shakespeare is an attempt to hide his true identity and an attempt to reveal it, or at least indicate that he was not Shakespeare. They are thus what I call schizspiracy theorists.
Unable to resist such a gift to reply to, I wrote:
We already know from your superb work in the field, Paul, that no one in Stratford would even have looked at the inscription: it was hard to see, and they were all illiterate, anyway. (Paul actually believes the monument was placed where no one would be able to see it well enough to read, no one would be xurious to know what it said, and only one or two able to read Latin.) It’s really a shame that the author of this wonderful joke didn’t sign it, but no doubt his name is entered on the rolls of Great Authors, anyway, for other works, perhaps the anonymous poem, Queene Marsha, which revealed Queen Elizabeth’s identity as a Martian (albeit only to those in the know).
Entry 1639 — Choice of Ethotactic, Part 4
Saturday, November 22nd, 2014
What I’ve said so far suggests a question to me: can something a person does with no ethical intentions be ethotactical? For instance, say I am with a friend I know to be much more poor than I and we come upon an apple tree in a public forest with one apple on it, and I pick it and eat it, not thinking of my friend. Or, for a more colorful example, say I have been taught that Irishmen are subhuman creatures without the ability to feel pain, and that hunting them will be good practice in the use of firearms that one may one day need to fight off aliens from outer space. So I shoot a few Irishmen between the eyes, inflicting pain on them without realizing it, and even perhaps killing one or two of them. Have I behaved immorally?
According to my theory of knowlecular psychology, no. That’s because an ethotactic, or the choice of a moral or immoral action, can only be the result of some anthroceptual decision based on living in harmony with a known social code.
I think I would go so far as to say that my killing an Irishmen or two in such a case is not immoral even according to most people’s standards. Many would protest, but because it would seem that I would be excusing a Nazi taught to consider Jews sub-human for gassing them. I would excuse the Nazi, but only morally. For me, he would be not immoral, but homicidally stupid—and therefore deserving to be reprimanded! Sorry. I have a weakness for black humor. What I believe is that such a person should be prevented from continuing to gas Jews by being executed—unless one truly believes some kind of re-education can make him accept Jews as human, and he is compelled to repay society for his social stupidity by spending the rest of his life shining the shoes of Jews for free or something.
Ultimately, I believe all reprehensible acts are acts of stupidity, and that what kind of stupidity is involved—moral stupidity or some other kind of stupidity—is irrelevant. Society should be maximally protected from the person acting reprehensibly (and protected from his genes, for I believe criminals [real criminals], and that’s who I’m talking about, should not be allowed to breed). Of course, I realize I’m making a complex subject seem much more cut&dry than it is. Just ideas to counteract simple-minded bad/good anti-continuumism and the insensitivity of certain sentimentalists to Evil.
About evil I will say that all definitions of it are necessarily subjective, but that it does exist, and can be defined sociobjectively. Sociobjectivity is a view of an idea that is held by such a large majority of the members of a society and which has an objective neurophysiological basis as to be close enough to true objectivity as to be taken as such. Take the evil of killing an innocent child. Almost everyone would disapprove of that, and (I believe) almost all of us are instinctively repelled by the deed, and—in fact—would instinctively try to prevent a child, innocent or not, from being killed.
Not that our instinct to use reason would necessarily not be involved. If effective, it might tell us that our standing in society will go up if we stop someone from murdering a child. Although our instinct to advance statoosnikally would be part of that. Actually, I think in most cases, protecting the child would be reflexive whereas our explanation would be taken care of mostly by our reasoning.
To be honest, if I were dominated by reason, I would never risk my life, even as the old man I now am, for some child, because what I believe I may contribute to World Culture is almost sure to be more than what the child will, however long he lives. The problem with that, of course, is that my ability to reason may be defective, in which case, my not saving a child at the risk of losing my own life would be stupid integrity–that is, acting according to my code that I should protect my own life at all costs because of its great value to the world. I claim that following that code would be absolutely valid if I were another . . . Nietzsche, without his breakdown.
Needless to say, the idea that Evil is what some deity has said it to be is absurd; various deities have universally defined certain acts as evil because the men who invented them were instinctively against those acts. Other non-universal acts, like saying something contemptuous about some deity, have also been said to have been ordained Evil by a deity invented by men not because their inventors were instinctively against such acts but because the definition of Evil helped them gain power or destroy other tribes, or simply because of some personal dislike—of a priest once clawed by a cat that made him claim his main god had defined cats as evil, for example.
I do think that reasoning should dominate every moral choice one makes, but it can’t overcome one’s instincts, all of which are ultimately moral, for a given person. We can only argue about whose individual morals would work best for the society we want to live in, and perhaps use reason to show that giving in to a society’s chosen code will be better for each individual in the long run, the long run excluding some never-seen Heaven or anything like it.
Which brings to mind the question of whether or not it is moral to lie to the masses and tell them some God will do horrible things to them if they don’t accept a society’s code. I realize that there are those who don’t believe that our species naturally, due to our genes, divides into different social classes–three of them, roughly speaking: masters, slaves, and . . . cerebreans. They’re nuts.
I divide ethics into the study of socioethotactics and the study of egoethotactics . . . I think. There are two major problems: formulation of a maximally fair and biologically advantageous set of socioethotactics by a society, and an individuals’ reconciling his inevitably conflicting set of egoethotactics with his society’s socioethotactics.
More on this eventually, if I think I can say anything at all interesting about it.
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Note: on the day I made my first entry here about ethotactics, 36 people checked up on me at my Wikipedia entry; rarely do more than 4 people visit it on a day, and none since the first month it was up have anywhere near that many done so. Were they fans of Jonah Goldberg, whose article I was commenting on? The visits after that have been few, for or five in a day at most.
Last, and definitely least, here’s this SURVEY again:
Please, Dear Reader, I implore thee: when you have read as much of this entry as you feel like reading, let me know whether you have found it worth reading in full or not by clicking “YES” or “NO” below. You would help me a great deal, and might even get me to make my entries more reader-friendly. (And for the love of Jayzuz, please don’t try to spare my feelings by politely declining to click the NO although you think the entry Vile Beyond Imagination. Oh, some of you may need to know that I am not asking you whether you agree with me or not!)
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Note: I will be repeating this request in some of my entries to come. Feel free to click one of my buttons each time I do, but please don’t click either more than once a day.
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