Archive for the ‘Diana Price’ Category
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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