POETICKS

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.
.

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.
.