Required Reading! Diana Price, Author of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, Reviews Shakespeare Beyond Doubt Edited by Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson

Everybody who is interested in the Shakespeare authorship question should read Diana Price’s entire review of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt.  I’m pasting below a long section from Diana Price’s review.  To read the entire review, please visit Diana’s website (http://www.shakespeare-authorship.com) or click on this link:  http://shakespeare-authorship.com/Articles/Shakespeare%20Beyond%20Doubt%20review%20website.htm.

A long section of Diana Price’s review follows.  I encourage you to read the entire review.  It’s well worth a careful read.

*****

i.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy is a collection of essays that purports to put an end to the so-called Shakespeare Authorship Question, once and for all. Its editors, Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson, recruited 20 contributors, most of whom also contributed to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s “60 Minutes with Shakespeare,” a project that provided 60 seconds each to 60 scholars addressing various topics, most with significance for the authorship question.

The essay collection was prompted in part by the release of Roland Emmerich’s 2011 film Anonymous (a box office flop dramatizing a fringe version of a “royal birth” theory positing the earl of Oxford as the real Shakespeare) and the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt” (now signed by over 2,700 individuals) published on the website DoubtAboutWill. The substance of the Declaration is, in some measure, based on the research in my own book, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem. It was the first book challenging the traditional biography to be published by a mainstream publisher in a peer-reviewed series (Greenwood Press, 2001, “Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies” no. 94; now revised and published in paperback by shakespeare-authorship.com, 2012). A major argument in the book is based on a comparative analysis of documentary evidence left behind by Shakespeare and two dozen writers active during his lifetime. The results of that analysis demonstrate that Shakespeare is the only alleged writer of consequence from the time period who left behind no evidence that he wrote for a living, or even as a vocation.

At the April 2013 launch of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt in Stratford-on-Avon, Ros Barber (author of the prize-winning The Marlowe Papers, a fictionalized case for Marlowe’s authorship) criticized the editors of the essay collection for failing to contend with their peer-reviewed opposition. In this review essay, I focus on particular contributors who defend the traditional biography, with the hope that my critique will move the debate forward.

As a general comment, it is unfortunate that a decision on nomenclature was made in this collection to re-label authorship skeptics as “anti-Shakespeareans,” rather than the more accurately descriptive “anti-Stratfordians. “Anti-Shakespearean” is unnecessarily pejorative (and it was a relief to read James Shapiro’s reversion to the term “anti-Stratfordian” in his Afterword). Also, in several places, some contributors assert that the authorship question first emerged, not during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but in 1856-57, when Delia Bacon published her unreadable tome (2, 87, 246). But Miss Bacon was not the first to ask questions about Shakespeare’s authorship. She was the first to formalize the question. Expressions of confusion about Shakespeare’s authorship were recorded during Shakespeare’s lifetime by Thomas Edwards, the Parnassus authors, Gabriel Harvey, and John Davies of Hereford, among others.

Now to particulars.

ii.

Andrew Hadfield is the author of the recent and well-received biography of Edmund Spenser. Spenser left behind good evidence of his literary interests and activities, the evidence that I call personal literary paper trails. These include books exchanged with his friend, Gabriel Harvey, his handwritten transcription of a Latin poem, and records of his education. Despite such evidence for Spenser, in his essay “Theorizing Shakespeare’s authorship,” Hadfield attempts to lower his reader’s expectations for evidence surviving for writers from the time period, essentially excusing the absence of literary paper trails for Shakespeare:

Even a superficial trawl through the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography will reveal how little we know about many important figures, making the gaps in the biographical records of Shakespeare seem typical rather than unusual and therefore in no need of explanation. . . What are left are scraps, fragments, and clues in parish registers, court records, and probate offices” (65, 66).

To which list I would add personal literary paper trails.

Hadfield admits that “there are virtually no literary remains left behind by Shakespeare” (66), but he also claims that in that sense, Shakespeare is no different than other writers, such as Henry Chettle, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, Anthony Munday, and Thomas Nashe, among others (66). While the canons of these writers, like Shakespeare’s, present various attribution or authenticity problems, unlike Shakespeare, these writers left behind solid records of their activities as writers. To take one example (chosen here because Hadfield singled out Nashe in his 60 seconds contribution to the SBT program), among the personal literary paper trails for Nashe are an autograph poem from his days at Cambridge; a record of how much he was rewarded for writing by one of his patrons, as specified in a letter from Sir George Carey to his wife (the dedicatee of the pamphlet in question); and a letter to Carey’s servant describing his difficulties “writing for the stage and for the press.” Despite the survival of that letter, Hadfield claims that “personal letters did not survive in an age when paper was scarce and expensive” (64). Yet additional autograph letters DO survive for, among others, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Michael Drayton, and all of them contain reference to literary topics (Price, Unorthodox, 314-18). There are no comparable records for Shakespeare, so Hadfield’s claims do not hold up. The deficiency of personal literary paper trails for a writer from the time period is not an expected or common phenomenon; the deficiency is unique to Shakespeare.

iii.

David Kathman’s essay “Shakespeare and Warwickshire” attempts to situate Shakespeare in the intellectual and literary communities in Stratford-on-Avon, investing him with intellectual credentials in a sort of literacy-by-association. Yet his sections on Shakespeare’s Stratford associates do nothing to establish Shakespeare as a man interested in literary matters. Identifying neighbors, such as Richard Quiney or Abraham Sturley, who read books or wrote letters, sometimes in Latin, is not evidence that Shakespeare read books or wrote letters. Indeed, the reason Kathman can state categorically that Quiney or Sturley read books or wrote letters is because letters survive to support those statements (124-27). No comparable evidence survives for Shakespeare.

Kathman claims that the plays “include numerous offhand references to people and places from the area around Stratford” (129). But those “numerous” Warwickshire characters and locations appear in only two plays, Henry IV (2) and The Taming of the Shrew. He further claims that the plays “are peppered with dialect words from Warwickshire and the West Midlands” (129). He cites three sources in his endnote, primarily C.T. Onions, and also R.C. Churchill (actually Ivor Brown’s introduction) and Hilda M. Hulme. Not only do these sources fail to verify all his claims, he omits other resources that would compromise or invalidate several of them. After consulting Joseph Wright’s still valuable six-volume The English Dialect Dictionary, James Orchard Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic Words, James Appleton Morgan’s Warwickshire Glossary, and the OED, I would propose that at least five of the nine words Kathman mentions don’t belong on his list.

For example, Kathman defines a “ballow” as a ‘cudgel,’ which Onions locates in the north Midlands (12). But the texts of King Lear (IV.vi.238) read, variously, “battero” (Qq), “bat” (Q1 and Q2), and “ballow” (F), so there is not even a secure basis for accepting “ballow” as the intended word. The OED elaborates:

Only in the Shakes. Folio of 1623, and subseq. editions, in loc. cit., where the Quartos have battero, and bat (stick, rough walking-stick); besides which, batton, battoun, ‘stick, cudgel’ obs. f. baton n. (q.v.) is a probable emendation. Bailey (1742) has ‘Ballow, a pole, a long stick, quarter-staff, etc. Shakesp.’ (quoted by Halliwell as ‘Northern’): but no such word seems to exist, or to have any etymological justification.

The Arden 2 editor goes with “ballow” and cites Wright’s entry (1:145) for the word as common to Nottinghamshire (Muir, 173; Wright also specifies the word as in use in the shire of Kent). The Arden 3 editor goes with “baton,” rejecting the Folio reading of “ballow” since he could find “no convincing parallels” (Foakes, 346).

According to Onions, “potch,” meaning to thrust, “survives in Warwickshire” (165). Wright lists the word “potch” as a variant form of “poach” (4:562), defines “poach” (and its variant spellings) as “to poke, esp. with the fingers; to thrust, push suddenly,” etc., and locates the variant “potch” not only in Warwickshire, but also in Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Gloucestershire. The Arden 2 editor of Coriolanus glosses potch as “jab, poke” but is silent on the matter of dialect (Brockbank, 149), as are the editors of recent Oxford and Cambridge editions, as well as Halliwell. Morgan’s Glossary contains neither “poach” nor “potch.”

The word “batlet,” meaning ‘club (for washing)’ is described by Onions as “current recently in Yorks[hire] and Warwick[shire] (13). “Batler” is in the OED with reference to the modified word “batlet” in modern editions of As You Like It, but no dialect is mentioned. The word in the Arden 2 edition of As You Like It (II.iv.46) reads “batler.” Halliwell lists “batler” but does not assign a shire of origin or use (149). The New Variorum editor (Knowles, 93) cites [John R.] Wise’s list of Warwickshire words, but also cites Wright, who specifies Yorkshire and Warwickshire (per Wise’s list) and adds a disclaimer: “not known to our correspondents in Warwickshire” (1:186). Morgan’s glossary contains only “batten,” defined as “a stick used in washing clothes” (76), but provides no examples in the Shakespeare canon.

At least two other words in Kathman’s list, “pash” and “tarre,” fare no better. Of the nine dialect words cited by Kathman, only four may withstand scrutiny. Kathman acknowledges that while the dialect words that he cites “don’t prove anything,” they are “consistent” with the Stratford man’s authorship (129). But they are not. In order to make that case, he would need to show  (1) that Warwickshire and West Midlands dialect words are particular to, or better yet, usually exclusive to, those shires, and  (2) that the Shakespeare canon contains disproportionately higher numbers of dialect words from those regions. When a word such as “batlet” is found in Yorkshire as well as (possibly) Warwickshire, Kathman’s argument is weakened. It is further diluted as the known use of a word is discovered in additional shires or regions. It is difficult to give credence to words that he claims as Warwickshire dialect, even those found in Onions’s Glossary, when there is no further support or corroboration from Halliwell, Morgan, the OED, various critical editions, or especially Wright.

It is puzzling that Kathman cites Hulme’s research in his endnote. Her examples of Warwickshire or Midlands dialects are either qualified or introduced as speculative. She also shares the skeptical opinion that future research will likely “establish as more widely current such elements of apparently ‘Stratford’ language as occur in his text” and cites G.D. Willcock’s opinion that the Shakespeare corpus “shows no sign of surviving local patriotism” (316, 315). Hulme cites some idiosyncratic Shakespearean spellings consistent with, if not unique to, Warwickshire spellings (316, 318), but some of her citations depend upon the unfounded assumption that the printing house’s orthography faithfully followed the author’s manuscript (the hypothetical ‘foul papers’), when spellings are more likely scribal, compositorial, or editorial.

The last section in Kathman’s chapter is about “Shakespeare and Stratford after 1616,” in which he claims that “a wealth of evidence from the decade after Shakespeare’s death illustrates Stratford’s fame” (130). That “wealth of evidence” is, by definition, posthumous. The first testimony in the historic record explicitly identifying Shakespeare of Stratford as the dramatist appeared in the 1623 First Folio, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Kathman failed to establish any significant connection between the author of Shakespeare’s canon and Warwickshire during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

*****

To read the rest of Diana Price’s excellent, insightful, well-argued review of SBD, please click on this link:

http://shakespeare-authorship.com/Articles/Shakespeare%20Beyond%20Doubt%20review%20website.htm

Still Plenty Of Room For Doubt — “Macduff’s” Insightful Review On Amazon.com Of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy

The following review, penned by “Macduff,” is certainly worth reading.  Here’s the link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A6LSWAP1OPLEB/ref=cm_pdp_rev_title_2?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview#R2AHSYAEJA9BMW

Review of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy by Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson

This book’s overriding theme is that readers should stop thinking for themselves and accept the word of “authority” when it comes to the Shakespeare authorship question. It disparages open-mindedness, belittles its ideological adversaries, presupposes the truth of the thesis for which it is purportedly presenting evidence, ignores its most able opponents while making mincemeat of weaker opponents, dodges some of the most critical questions regarding the Shakespeare authorship question, and attempts to shame the reader away from even considering the possibility that the traditional authorship theory might be flawed. And yet this book accuses its opponents of being dogmatic and unreasonable.

Anonymity and use of pseudonyms were common among writers in Elizabethan times, when people could be punished for expressing views that offended the authorities. Furthermore, as George Puttenham wrote in 1589, many noblemen wrote literary works, including plays, but would not allow them to be published under their own names because writing for publication was regarded as beneath a nobleman’s dignity. Such facts make it reasonable to entertain the possibility that “William Shakespeare” was a pen name. Yet Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (SBD) summarily considers that hypothesis out of the question.

SBD never once mentions Diana Price’s seminal 2001 book, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem, which demonstrated that the Stratford man, whose name was spelled “William Shakspere,” left no literary paper trail during his lifetime: out of the 70 or so existing documents from the Stratford man’s life, not one identifies him personally as a writer of any kind or links him to the works published and performed under the name “William Shakespeare.” Price looked for a literary paper trail for 24 other Elizabethan writers and found evidence identifying each one personally as a writer during his lifetime, but found no such evidence for Shakspere.

But even though SBD doesn’t mention Price’s book, it more or less concedes her point. Stanley Wells admits in chapter 7 that no reference to the works of “William Shakespeare” before 1623, when the First Folio was published, explicitly identifies the writer with Stratford. SBD has no plausible explanation for the fact that the Stratford man’s death in 1616 was greeted by complete silence from the literary world, the nobility, and the public. Is it possible that no one at that time connected the Stratford man to the works of Shakespeare? Likewise, in chapter 6, Andrew Hadfield concedes that “there are virtually no literary remains left behind by Shakespeare outside his published works, and most of the surviving records deal with property and legal disputes.” Yet SBD insists that documentary evidence proves “beyond doubt” that the Stratford man was the true Bard.

While SBD ignores Price and other serious anti-Stratfordian scholars, such as George Greenwood, The Shakespeare Problem Restated, Mark Anderson, Shakespeare By Another Name, and Tony Pointon, The Man Who Was Never Shakespeare: The Theft of William Shakspeare’s Identity, it devotes three chapters to Delia Bacon, who wrote an unreadable book about the authorship controversy in the 19th century and later went mad. While no serious authorship skeptic of the past century relies on Delia Bacon’s work, she is an easy target for the authors of SBD. Its stratagem is to paint all doubters with the same brush as Delia Bacon and make the reader think that she epitomizes anti-Stratfordianism.

SBD categorically dismisses the idea of looking for a connection between the author’s life and his works. Matt Kubus in chapter 5 insists that there is no “inherent connection” between an author and “the content of his works.” While not all literature is thinly disguised autobiography, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that a writer might inadvertently reveal something about himself in the stories he chooses to tell? This should be an open question, one for debate and discussion, but the Stratfordians do not seem interested in discussion.

MacDonald P. Jackson in chapter 9 discusses stylometrics, the use of computer analysis of grammatical patterns and word usage, which allegedly shows that the Stratford man wrote the majority of Shakespeare’s plays with a little help from other playwrights of his time. But stylometrics is not a science: different stylometrics analyses come out with different answers as to who wrote what. Besides, the most that stylometric studies show is that the person who wrote the bulk of the plays (whoever that was) sometimes collaborated with others. They cannot prove that that central figure was the Stratford man because there is no known writing unquestionably belonging to the Stratford man to be used as a standard. Stylometrics may be a useful tool, but it cannot provide the total answer to the authorship question.

SBD never addresses the question of how the Stratford man acquired the vast knowledge of law, philosophy, classical literature, ancient and modern history, mathematics, astronomy, art, music, medicine, horticulture, heraldry, the military; etiquette and manners of the nobility; English, French and Italian court life; Italy; and aristocratic pastimes such as falconry, equestrian sports, and royal tennis, that is seen in the plays. Many books and articles have been written on Shakespeare’s intimate knowledge of these and other subjects. The author must have had extensive formal education, easy access to books, abundant leisure time to study on his own, and wide experience of the world gained through travel. This simply does not fit with the life of the Stratford man, who may or may not have had a few years of a grammar school education (documentary evidence is completely lacking on that subject), yet SBD makes no attempt to answer this anomaly.

Finally, and most disgracefully, SBD never ceases to use shaming techniques to frighten the reader away from questioning orthodoxy. One of its most unattractive ploys is to label anti-Stratfordians as “anti-Shakespearians.” As Edmondson and Wells explain in their introduction, the authors employ that word because “anti-Stratfordian . . . allows the work attributed to Shakespeare to be separated from the social and cultural context of its author.” How’s that for circular reasoning? It assumes that the Stratford man was the true author and implies that anyone who disagrees opposes the great playwright and all he stands for. Edmondson, in chapter 19, says that “open-mindedness” is merely a rhetorical maneuver and should be allowed only after the evidence for Shakespeare has been disproven, not (as Edmondson says) “merely ignored.” If Edmondson had read the better anti-Stratfordian writers, he would know that they have not ignored the evidence; rather, they have examined it and found serious flaws in it. “There is, too,” says Edmondson, “the loaded assumption that even though one may lack the necessary knowledge and expertise, it is always acceptable to challenge or contradict a knowledgeable and expert authority. It is not.”

That is the message of SBD: don’t question the authorities, who know better than you; don’t be open-minded; don’t read anti-Stratfordian books because you’ll go mad like Delia Bacon. It is an attempt to lull the reader into drowsy acceptance of authority. I hope that readers of SBD will resist its call for intellectual servitude, will explore the subject on their own, and will reach their own conclusions. Any reader who likes to hear both sides of an argument before making up his or her mind is encouraged to read Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? — Exposing an Industry in Denial.

Last Will and Testament — New Shakespeare Authorship Documentary Previews at Shakespeare’s Globe in London November 27, 2011

Shakespearean Authorship Trust Conference 2011

http://www.shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org.uk/pages/conf.htm

The Shakespearean Authorship Trust, in collaboration with Brunel University, hosts an advance screening of a major new authorship documentary, Last Will. & Testament at Shakespeare’s Globe on Sunday 27 November.

At a time when the Shakespeare world is being rocked by the imminent appearance of Roland Emmerich’s feature film, Anonymous, as well as the publication of several books based on new research, including Richard Roe’s The Shakespeare Guide to Italy and Katherine Chiljan’s Shakespeare Suppressed, there comes the first major documentary on the authorship question for 22 years. The timing could not be better, and we are very fortunate to have the film’s director Lisa Wilson with us to introduce the work and answer questions on it. (Lisa was also a consultant on Anonymous, and is a trustee of the SAT.) She will be joined by no fewer than seven luminaries who took part in the documentary: Diana Price, author of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, Professor Roger Stritmatter of Coppin State University in Baltimore, actors Sir Derek Jacobi* and Vanessa Redgrave*, the Chairman of the SAT, Mark Rylance, Dr. William Leahy, Head of the School of Arts at Brunel University, and Charles Beauclerk, author of Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom.

Last Will. & Testament is a 90-minute film that explores the evolution of the authorship question since Shakespeare’s time, with particular reference to William Shakspere of Stratford and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, though other candidates are discussed. Among those defending the orthodox position are Stanley Wells and Jonathan Bate, both of whom were invited to speak at the conference. The documentary is beautifully shot and has exclusive access to footage of Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, which is due for general release on 28 October 2011. The film will be shown in three parts in order to give conference attendees proper time to digest and discuss the material as the day unfolds. It promises to be a fascinating and provocative experience, with plenty of opportunity for the audience to engage with guest speakers.
*subject to availability

Date: Sunday 27 November 2011
Time: 11:00 – 18:15 (Tea and coffee available from 10:30)
Venue: Shakespeare’s Globe, 21 New Globe Walk, Bankside,               London, SE1 9DT
Tickets: £35 (including tea and coffee)
Booking: Shakespeare’s Globe Box Office: Tel: 020 7401 9919
Booking opens: 17 October 2011

Click here for the programme schedule in pdf format.

From The “In Case You Missed It” Department: Anonymous Screenwriter John Orloff Answers Critics In The Guardian

This appeared several weeks ago.  In case you missed it … or in case you want to review again … well worth reading.  Here’s the link followed by a few paragraphs.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/27/shakespeare-scholars-authorship-plays-anonymous?intcmp=239

Our film Anonymous asks viewers to think for themselves about Shakespeare

Criticism of Anonymous has been vitriolic. But scholarship about Shakespeare’s life relies on smoke and mirrors

John Orloff

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 October 2011 11.00 EDT

As the screenwriter of Anonymous, I’ve watched the reactions to the film both here in the UK and in the US with great interest and not a little surprise. The film-makers, myself included, expected controversy – one does not take on sacred cows naively – but I must confess that the vitriol of our critics has been impressive.

One American Ivy League professor, James Shapiro, has insinuated that our film is like Nazi propaganda. The county of Warwickshire allowed the Shakespeare Trust to temporarily remove Shakespeare’s name from public signs – an act of protest against our film that seems counter-productive; anti-Stratfordians couldn’t agree more with that act.

Throughout the run-up to the film’s release, I have been reminded that one does not take on people’s livelihoods lightly.

While our little film not only does not disparage the genius of Hamlet and Lear, but rather honours, rightly, the genius of the work, it does challenge two Bard-related industries – tourism and, perhaps more provocatively, Shakespearean scholarship itself.

Read More:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/27/shakespeare-scholars-authorship-plays-anonymous?intcmp=239

Actor Michael York and Shakespeare Authorship Coalition challenge Stratford’s Shakespeare Birthplace Trust with new reasons to doubt the identity of author William Shakespeare in the wake of Sony Pictures’ heretical film, “Anonymous.”

Note: This story is embargoed until the date specified in the release: November 21, 2011. Los Angeles, CA., Nov. 21, 2011 – amidst all the controversy surrounding Sony Pictures’ recently-released film Anonymous, actor and author Michael York, O.B.E., launched a powerful, multi-pronged counter-offensive against the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) in Stratford-upon-Avon, and its “60 Minutes with Shakespeare” authorship campaign, initiated in response to the film. York also announced a monumental breakthrough in the controversy – detailed evidence that Shakespeare traveled all over Italy. The problem for orthodox Shakespeare scholars is that the traditional author, Mr. William “Shakspere” of Stratford-upon-Avon, never left England. During a briefing at the Los Angeles Press Club’s Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood (10:00 a.m.  to ~noon at 4773 Hollywood Blvd. – one block west of Vermont Avenue on the north side of street) Michael York, Hilary Roe Metternich, daughter of the man who discovered the new evidence, and John M. Shahan, Chairman of the California-based Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (SAC) lambasted the SBT for its Orwellianattacks against doubters, and for poor scholarship in its “60 Minutes with Shakespeare” website, featuring 60 SBT supporters, each giving a 60-second audio-recorded response to one of 60 questions posed by the SBT. Michael York, in language echoing that which brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy, castigated Professor Stanley Wells, Honorary President of the SBT, and Paul Edmondson, Head of Learning and Research at the SBT, for suggesting that the authorship controversy is merely another “conspiracy theory,” and for labeling doubters “anti-Shakespeareans.” “Have you no sense of decency sirs, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”* York asked. “Or, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, ‘O shame! Where is thy blush?'” he added. “Doubters are not ‘anti-Shakespeare,'” York insisted, “but your behaviour is most un-Shakespearean.” SAC Chairman John Shahan announced that a coalition of a dozen authorship organizations, based in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, has rebutted each point in the SBT “60 Minutes.” The rebuttal document, titled Exposing an Industry in Denial: Authorship Doubters Respond to “60 Minutes with Shakespeare,“ is at the SAC website at doubtaboutwill.org. “The SBT erred in coming down from their ivory tower to attack,” Shahan said, “This rebuttal document makes clear that the best of our scholars are far superior to theirs.” Shahan challenged the SBT (online petition) to write a declaration of the reasons why they claim there is “no room for doubt” about the identity of “Shakespeare” and post it with the names of those who have endorsed it. He noted that the SAC wrote and posted a statement of its own position, the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare, in 2007. It has now been signed by over 2,200 people – over 800 with advanced degrees, and nearly 400 current or former college/university faculty members. Hilary Roe Metternich announced the discovery of powerful new evidence in the controversy, contained in the newly-released book,  The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels, by Richard Paul Roe (HarperPerennial). Ms. Metternich, the daughter of the author, a prominent Pasadena attorney who died late last year, said that her father spent more than 20 years traveling in Italy, his only guide being the texts of Shakespeare’s 10 “Italian Plays” (not counting three plays set in ancient Rome). “The clues were all right there in the plays” Metternich said. “My father found the locations of nearly every scene in all 10 of these plays – locations unnoticed by Shakespeare scholars and biographers for 400 years.” “His great chronicle – a tour de force of travel, analysis and discovery – paints with amazing clarity a picture of what the author ‘Shakespeare,’ whoever he was, almost surely witnessed before writing his Italian plays.” Contact persons: Re: Coalition and rebuttals: John Shahan at (909) 896-2006;  jmshahan@verizon.net Re: The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Hilary Roe Metternich: hrm3325@aol.com —————— *Question put to Senator Joseph McCarthy on June 9, 1954, at the Army-McCarthy Hearings.

Christopher Paul’s Review of Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom Now Available in German, Also in English on Various Websites

Oxfordian researcher and writer Christopher Paul reports that his review of Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom by Charles Beauclerk has been translated into German by the Neue Shake-speare Gesellschaft (New Shake-speare Society) for the current edition of the NEW SHAKE-SPEARE JOURNAL: Christopher Paul, “Shakespeares verlorenes Königreich,” NEUES SHAKE-SPEARE JOURNAL New Series 2 (2011), 13-31. The German-language review is available online in pdf at http://shake-speare-today.de/front_content.php?idart=568.

 

With Roland Emmerich’s movie Anonymous now in theaters, this is a particularly good time to read Christopher Paul’s timely and insightful review.  If you haven’t read his review yet, you now have many options for getting your hands and eyes on this article.

The original English version of the review was published in Brief Chronicles II (2010, Print Edition), 244-57. For information about Brief Chronicles, see: http://www.briefchronicles.com/ojs/index.php/bc/index.php.

Paul announced that his review is now available as a downloadable pdf at the following weblog/sites:

• The De Vere Society: http://www.deveresociety.co.uk/News%26Events-26.html.

• The Elizabethan Review: http://www.elizabethanreview.com/tudor.html.

• The Oxford Authorship Site: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/documents.html. 
  

• “SHAKESPEARE” BY ANOTHER NAME: http://shakespearebyanothername.blogspot.com/2011/08/anonymous-questions-did-queen-elizabeth.html.

New York Times Magazine Piece by Stephen Marche — Attacking Snobbery With Snobbery!

Here’s a wonderful example of someone with what appears to be a superficial grasp of the Oxfordian theory trashing that theory based on a few favorite straw men —  Oxfordians are snobs, Shakespeare “wrote” plays after Oxford’s death in 1604, Looney was “aptly named,” etc.

But the amazing thing to me about this piece is how much it depends on snobbery as a way to attack the snobbery of Oxfordians.  Maybe Marche should devise an exam for “undergraduates” that counts how many unfounded assumptions and appeals to snobbish expertise his article contains.  Anyway, it’s worth reading.  He does make several good points about the historical inaccuracies of Anonymous.  Hey, I’m not here to defend Anonymous the movie.

But attacking the movie’s flaws should not be allowed to be a substitute for attacking the Oxford theory in general.  That’s too broad a brush.  It continues to amaze me that the traditional assumption — and it’s nothing more than that — that “Shakespeare” continued to write plays after 1604 — some with partners? — is presented so often as the slam dunk refutation of the Oxford theory.  The hard evidence for this is … what exactly?

The fact that so many so-called experts accept the traditional “narrative’ as fact is not the same thing as real evidence.  And I love that Galileo is invoked without any sense of irony since Galileo was punished — forced to recant what he knew to be true — by an establishment view of the world that was … well … flat wrong.  Sometimes those who come up with alternative theories that challenge orthodox opinion turn out to be right after all.  Not always.  But sometimes.  And resorting to emotional appeals, reckless ad hominem attacks, branding them as heretics, etc. is neither constructive or productive.

It’s not particularly helpful to make an argument based on historical analogies.  Those can easily cut both ways and don’t really advance the state of the debate.  They usually inflame the debate and only serve to generate much more heat that light.  There may be lots of legitimate reasons to question the validity of the Oxfordian theory, but the alleged snobbery of Oxfordians, Rick Perry’s anti-climate change or anti-evolutionary views, the “aptly named” proponent of the theory, or the unfounded assertion that Shakespeare “wrote” plays after 1604 are not among them.  Why do anti-Oxfordians so often stoop to these specious lines of attack?  Can’t they muster a real case against Oxford without injecting these bogus and logically challenged arguments?  Apparently not.

the good news about this article … and other reviews of the movie … is that the authorship question is being discussed widely in the media.  It would be a shame if various parties to the debate simply resort to their tried-and-true arguments to put down the other side.  This isn’t an election campaign.  We don’t have to “go negative” to get votes.  We should be evaluating and assessing evidence, not trying to score debate points.  Maybe one day we’ll evolve to that stage in this discussion.  Matthew

Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?

By STEPHEN MARCHE

Published: October 21, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/wouldnt-it-be-cool-if-shakespeare-wasnt-shakespeare.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1

“Was Shakespeare a fraud?” That’s the question the promotional machinery for Roland Emmerich’s new film, “Anonymous,” wants to usher out of the tiny enclosure of fringe academic conferences into the wider pastures of a Hollywood audience. Shakespeare is finally getting the Oliver Stone/“Da Vinci Code” treatment, with a lurid conspiratorial melodrama involving incest in royal bedchambers, a vapidly simplistic version of court intrigue, nifty costumes and historically inaccurate nonsense. First they came for the Kennedy scholars, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Kennedy scholar. Then they came for Opus Dei, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Catholic scholar. Now they have come for me.

[SNIP]

In the movies, a few mistakes don’t matter, but the liberties with facts in “Anonymous” become serious when they enter our conception of real history. In scholarship, chronology does matter. And the fatal weakness of the Oxfordian theory is chronological, a weakness that “Anonymous” never addresses: the brute fact that Edward de Vere died in 1604, while Shakespeare continued to write, several times with partners, until 1613. “Macbeth” and “The Tempest” were inspired by events posthumous to the Earl of Oxford: the gunpowder plot in 1605 and George Somers’s misadventure to Bermuda in 1609. How can anyone be inspired by events that happened after his death?

[SNIP]

The original Oxfordian, the aptly named J. Thomas Looney, who proposed the theory in 1920, believed that Shakespeare’s true identity remained a secret because, he said, “it has been left mainly in the hands of literary men.” In his rejection of expertise, at least, Looney was far ahead of his time. This same antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” Of all the candidates with their various rejections of the scientific establishment, how many could name the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that students learn in high school? Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.

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Toronto Sun Interview With Roland Emmerich — “Emmerich Takes on Shakespeare”

Here’s a link to the Toronto Sun’s interview with Roland Emmerich. It’s a good interview. One quibble: The movie (and the Shakespeare authorship issue generally) is not really about taking on “Shakespeare.” It’s about seeking the truth about the author. This quest is not anti-Shakespeare in any sense. In fact it’s very much “pro-Shakespeare.” At least that’s how I see it. In any event, here’s some of the interview and the link. Interesting that Emmerich cites Amadeus. Matthew

Emmerich Takes On Shakespeare

http://www.torontosun.com/2011/10/21/emmerich-takes-on-shakespeare

“One of my favourite historical dramas is Amadeus. But when you analyze Amadeus, not much of it is true as it is depicted in the film “¦ That’s why we chose Richard III in Anonymous. The historical Richard III was not a hunchback. Shakespeare made him a hunchback for dramatic reasons.
“That’s how I see this. There’s always an inner truth and there is the storytelling part in which you try and work in as many real facts as you can.”
So, if Shakespeare, as Emmerich paints pretty convincingly, was a fake, one wonders how much longer it will be before this is accepted as a matter of convention.
“I think Stratfordians will have a hard time in the coming decades,” he said. “Don’t forget, the people saying that this is nothing more than a conspiracy all have something to lose. They are all history professors living in Stratford.
“But I’m always very simple. I say, ‘Show me a letter by William Shakespeare that he wrote during his life.’ There’s not one measly letter. That, for me, is the most amazing thing of all. A writer, a man of the word, and not even a note to his wife saying, ‘How’s it going honey? I’m doing fine in Southwark.’
“Even something like that, I’d say, ‘Fine, I’ll stop. You’ve won.’ Until that happens, I’m sure I can stand up to anybody in the literary establishment.”

Katherine Chiljan’s New Authorship Book — Pre-Order on Amazon.com: Shakespeare Suppressed: The Uncensored Truth About Shakespeare and His Works

Congratulations to my friend Katherine Chiljan.  Her new authorship book will be released on September 1, 2011, and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com.  Here’s the book cover graphic … followed by a link to the Amazon.com page.

http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Suppressed-Uncensored-Truth-About/dp/0982940548/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313618470&sr=1-2

Here’s some basic information about the book and the author.  Sounds like a great read.   And great timing in advance of the worldwide release of the Roland Emmerich movie, Anonymous.   Let the Shakespeare authorship debate begin!

About Shakespeare SuppressedWILLIAM SHAKESPEARE is the most celebrated and most read poet and dramatist in history, but his personal life and artistic life is a mystery. How did he obtain the extensive learning and experience displayed in his works? When were his plays written and why were his works so often pirated by printers? Although publicly lauded during his lifetime, why was Shakespeare s death not noticed by those in the literary world near the time that it had occurred? These are only a few problems that the Shakespeare professor cannot answer definitively after two centuries of scholarship. Much contemporary evidence, however, is available that can shed light on many of these problems evidence that gets ignored because it does not fit the experts picture of Shakespeare. This evidence overwhelmingly indicates that William Shakespeare was the great author s pen name, and that he was a nobleman. It shows that he wrote decades earlier than believed, and initially for the private entertainment of Queen Elizabeth I and her court. The pen name idea is easy enough to grasp, but it becomes more complex and tangled by the fact that there was another man, christened William Shakspere, who lived during the same period. A resident of Stratford-upon-Avon, this man was involved in acting companies and theaters in London.  Not one shred of evidence, however, proves the Stratford Man was the great author during his lifetime, and neither he nor his descendents ever made such a claim. These two very different men merged into one identity after both of their deaths, and it was no accident, as this book will explain. The lack of hard facts about Shakespeare and his career has caused the experts to write biographies full of fiction and fantasy. Those who love and appreciate Shakespeare deserve better. Fully documented, Shakespeare Suppressed is a valuable resource for those who want to learn the unadulterated truth about Shakespeare and his works. The book debunks the experts case for the Stratford Man as the great author, and exposes the misleading preface of the First Folio. Features an appendix detailing 93 too early allusions to the plays that destroy orthodox composition dates, and 27 plates.

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About the Author

KATHERINE CHILJAN (BA History, UCLA) is an independent scholar who has studied the Shakespeare authorship question for over 26 years. She has debated the topic with English professors at the Smithsonian Institution and at the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco. Chiljan served as editor of the Shakespeare-Oxford Newsletter, and edited two anthologies: Dedication Letters to the Earl of Oxford, and Letters and Poems of Edward, Earl of Oxford.

Columbia Magazine’s Review of Shapiro: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

Dear Friends … Many thanks to Tom Regnier for sharing this link to the review of James Shapiro’s Contested Will that appeared in Columbia Magazine last summer.  I’ll post several paragraphs below.

Here’s an excerpt that addresses the Oxfordian thesis directly and fairly sympathetically.

“There is no question that Contested Will, which has already occasioned considerable debate, lands at a time of great popular interest in the subject. As Shapiro acknowledges, this is a cultural high-water mark for the presumed authorship of de Vere, a celebrated poet and playwright who would have been intimate with court manners and politics, and whose life story evokes incidents in Hamlet and the rest of the canon. The progenitor of the Oxford hypothesis was the Englishman J. T. Looney, whose 1920 book, “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was embraced by Freud, among others. Shapiro reads it as “a product of Looney’s profound distaste for modernity,” but also calls it a “tour de force.”

And here’s the link to read the entire review on the Columbia Magazine website.

http://magazine.columbia.edu/reviews/summer-2010/brush-your-marlowe?page=0,0

Brush Up Your… Marlowe? by Julia M. Klein

by Julia M. Klein

When James Shapiro ’77CC began plotting out Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, a friend unnerved him by asking, “What difference does it make?” Shapiro, the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, answered, “A lot,” without articulating why. This intellectually passionate book represents his more complete and considered response: The controversy matters, he suggests, because a belief in Shakespeare’s authorship affi rms the power of the human imagination.

The authorship debate, though mostly ignored by specialists, has long intrigued writers from Mark Twain and Henry James to Helen Keller and the now-obscure Delia Bacon. It has fl ourished because so little biographical information has survived about the Stratford-upon-Avon-born actor and grain dealer — and the facts that are known point to a man of modest education, travel, and life experience. How in the world, the doubters say, could such a man, neither an aristocrat nor an intellectual, write such masterpieces, with their literary sophistication and references to law, foreign languages, courtly customs, the classics, and European geography?

In Contested Will, Shapiro has two aims: to provide insight into the debate and to make what is known as the Stratfordian case, which he does with gusto. His account of the theories of skeptics is purposely selective (though a bibliographic essay usefully points readers to more information). “My interest,” Shapiro writes, “is not in what people think — which has been stated again and again in unambiguous terms — but in why they think it.” Shapiro attempts to take the opposition seriously, locating its origins in the Higher Criticism that undermined Homer’s authorship and exposed the piecemeal composition of both the Old and New Testaments. But, in the instance of Shakespeare, he can’t help being dismissive of the briefs for Sir Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, the only two claimants to whom he allots full chapters. (The playwright Christopher Marlowe and other alternative bards receive only passing mentions.)

The history of the skeptics, Shapiro writes, is “strewn with . . . fabricated documents, embellished lives, concealed identity, pseudonymous authorship, contested evidence, bald-faced deception, and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined.” He uncovers a scam himself, involving what he says is a forgery of a 19th-century manuscript that spread doubt about Shakespeare’s capacities.

In Shapiro’s view, to believe that anyone but Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays is to succumb to conspiracy theories, weird cryptographic excesses, social snobbery, and incipient lunacy, not to mention the anachronistic fallacy of reading Elizabethan and Jacobean literature as autobiography. This last is Shapiro’s particular bête noir, and he is lacerating on the subject, indicting such early Shakespeare scholars as Edmond Malone for pointing the (wrong) way. “The plays are not an à la carte menu, from which we pick characters who will satisfy our appetite for Shakespeare’s personality while passing over less appetizing choices,” Shapiro writes.

[SNIP]

Read the entire review:  Click HERE.