Entry 1122 — Piddling Against the Shakespeare Authorship Wacks
I’m over-involved with a thread at Amazon.com concerning the Shakespeare Authorship Thread (by way of a review of the movie Anonymous in which the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford is depicted as the True Author of the works of Shakespeare). At present I’ve been sounding off more and more against the unscholarly practices of the wacks rather than their insane delusions, which I feel I’ve skewered sufficiently. The following is a post inspired by their forever proclaiming that whoever wrote the works of Shakespeare must have had knowledge of the law, medicine, Italy, philosophy, various languages, etc. that the man fools like me think wrote the plays could not possibly have had. They rarely do more than assert their position, although a few of them have written reasonably articulate books in support of this contention that I consider excessively one-sided and incomplete. Hence:
You know, if anti-Stratfordians really had any confidence in their authorship theory, they would raise money for the following book, or something like it: An Analysis of the Knowledge of the Author of Twelfth Night. It would consist of two sections. One would be broken into subsections, each of which covered some field such as law, and contained every passage in the play having to do with that subject–AND all reasonable explanations of where the data in the passage could have come from (i.e., a particular book, personal knowledge, common sense) taken from both sides.
The other would consist of the commentary of some scholar chosen by the anti-Stratfordians who presented the case for his side’s explanations and against the other side’s, and a scholar chosen by the Shakespeare establishment doing the reverse.
We will never have such a book because the anti-Stratfordians know it would destroy their central thesis, and the Stratfordians would not think it worth their time. Or: pay for the publication of such a book by Steve and me. I’d have to be paid, though–half in advance. If I were, I’d do the research, and probably be able to get help from . . . the Trust. Of course, I could stiff you. Against that is my Word. Tah Dah. But also the fact that I’ve done a lot of similar writing for free which suggests I’d do this. Indeed, I’d do THIS for free except that it requires a lot of tedious research, and I hate tedious research (although I believe I can do it competently).
Okay, my suggestion is unfeasible but I’m trying anything I can think of to get someone to send me money, because I’m about as poverty-stricken as can be, even though I DID earn $200 as a writer last year.
Other than that, I believe my suggestion focuses nicely on the kind of necessary scholarly methods of pursuing the truth that anti-Stratfordians are habitually unable or unwilling to take up.
NOTE: Apologies for this post, but remember, for a while I’m going to be filling this blog with just about anything I can think of. As I fear I’ve too often done before. It may be worse this time, though!
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