Did Shakespeare—correction, William Shaksper— write "Shakespeare"?* (continued from post No. 215 of the original thread)

RE : (Post No. 215 (original thread) ) "May I suggest you continue this topic in another topic in the New Year?"

Yes. Or even before the New Year (2018).

Voilà, vous, bibliomaniac, for you (and all other interested readers).

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* Note: Continuing "Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?." Edit the subject as appropriate.

I suggest that this thread continuation be abandoned, since well-known troll prolixity1 has 'begged the question' in his partisan title.

Here's the impartial thread continuation to use.
http://www.librarything.com/topic/278305

Podras > 214 from the original thread refers to the Sept. 2017 debate between Alexander Waugh and Jonathan Bate, headlined, "Who Wrote Shakespeare?"* It was produced by the "How to: Academy" and novelist Hermione Eyre, author of Viper Wine, was the program's moderator.

The whole discussion is worth taking in. Questions from the audience at the end of the formal presentation of arguments are interesting for what in some cases they show of people's confused reasoning habits.

Podras points out Waugh's mention of "a 1796 source he (Waugh) claimed said 'the thief of all thieves is a Warwickshire thief.' "

Waugh misstated the actual year of the item's publication as 1796 when, as Podras showed, it was from a 1769 poem/song presented September 7, 1769 at the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford upon Avon by David Garrick (1717–1779).

I think it's true, as Podras asserts, that the poem's import is ambiguous and could as easily be read as a favoring Stratford's William Shaksper as it could be read as a satire on Shaksper's role as author of "Shakespeare."

In sum, the poem is, by itself, inconclusive--like so much of the items of evidence real or imagined in the Authorship Question. Bringing it up is perhaps a gesture intended to undermine the authority of Alexander Waugh, as one indication of a lapse of care on his part. I agree, it shows that and, unfortunately, it isn't necessarily the only example one might cite.

However, besides taking a jab at Waugh, making reference to the source-text has really no particular value since, as far as the balance of evidence is concerned, it is effectively a Null entity: it doesn't move the scales one way or the other. Thus, I see it as mainly a side-show, an attempt to draw attention away from what ought to be our focus:

So far, and for the present, it isn't any single piece of evidence which matters above all in this issue. Rather, it's the totality of the evidence, taken together and examined in all its interrelated context which results in a compelling demonstration of the utter emptiness of the Stratfordians' case and, on the other hand, the overwhelming case which supports Edward, Earl of Oxford as author.

Without any cogent evidence of their own to bring us, such side-show diversions as this concerning Waugh's reference to "The Lad of all lads was a Warwickshire Lad" is about all that the Stratfordians can do to occupy themselves. ( Excuse me, see post #4, below: they can also do what amounts to writing, "Surrender, Dorothy!" in black smoke across a patch of sky.)

Is there anyone who's going to dismiss the whole edifice of evidence in favor of Edward Oxford simply because Mr. Waugh misstated a year and didn't give due regard to the fact that, as evidence of anything in this debate, the poem is simply not really impressive one way or another?

I'd welcome a real worthy piece of evidence in favor of William Shaksper--if only a Stratfordian could produce one, if only there was something. But there is no such evidence and, despite repeatedly claiming it as a fact, it is simply not true that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Unfortunately, the entire case is built on a demand for and expectation of a prior supposition, (accepted by all from the outset before any consideration of actual issues and evidence, and demanded and expected without other support) that the author of "Shakespeare" simply cannot have been other than William Shaksper of Stratford on Avon. Without that prior "win-by-default" position, they have simply nothing at all in evidence to offer. And, rather disgracefully on his part, in my opinion, the whole point of the post at 214 was to distract from that fact.

The absence of evidence for Aztecs or Mayans having written the works of Shakespeare is, in the minds of most people, quite reasonably "evidence of absence" of any valid ground on which to base a respectable claim that an Aztec or a Mayan native wrote or might have written "Shakespeare's" works. We do not actually know for a certain fact that there were no Aztec or Mayan children in attendance at the Straford On Avon grammar school of William Shaksper's day. Thus....

A question from a member of the audience apparently took both Waugh and Bate to task for their mutual lack of respect for the other's evidentiary claims--as though both cases were equally weak and each disputant owed his counterpart's arguments equal respect. But this same audience-member would, I expect, be shocked at the idea that the Bible's creation-myth should be held in the same esteem as the work of Charles Darwin on evolution or that Ptolemy's Almagest remains just as valid as any other work since its appearance sometime in the Second century.

Bate spoke of a readiness on the part of the fair-minded person to be persuaded by the best-evidence-based case. Yet he demonstrates no such readiness.

Extremely few Oxfordians ever started from their view of the Authorship Question. Instead, nearly every one of us got here precisely because we were open to being persuaded by a competing case based on another and different reading of, consideration of, both Strafordians' claims of evidence and, of course, the counter evidence the preemption of which they, having nothing like it, are so eager to effect.

________________________

* Waugh pointed out that his understanding of the debate's resolution was on whether William Shaksper of Stratford Upon Avon was the author of "Shakespeare" 's works and not about which of the alternative candidates he favored and why.

>2 Crypto-Willobie:

LOL! "Beggging the Question" is a specialty I leave to Stratfordians--the unrivaled experts in that endeavor. You can "suggest" "abandonment" all you like but---*

Try and make your case via argument and evidence rather than seeking your own little private reserve. EVERYONE, regardless of his view on Shaksper or "Shakespeare" is welcome to participate in the thread. It is, after all, common 'property'.

So, if you have any, you could actually try to present a respectable case based on respectable evidnence. No one is stopping you from that other than your apparent lackings.

And, by the way, it's particularly amusing to read you suggesting "abandoning" what you've never really gotten into in the first place. Everything about your side of this matter is, again, demonstrated in the appeal that everyone accept a priori the Stratfordian view-- hence your call for an abandonment here, for these are effectively the same things.

As I say, in a call for "abandonment," you effectively attempt to beg-the-question rather than address it.

Stratfordians' " 'Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare,' now let's just everybody 'move on' and drop the issue" won't fly any more.

______________________________

ETA: BUT AS I READ THEM; creating a counter-thread in order to attempt to undermine an already-existing continuing thread, claiming that the secondary post-facto thread is the 'real' or the 'impartial' thread violates the spirit or the letter or both of the site's terms of service :

"Do not create "pointless," "meaningless" or "random" groups or topics. We give all groups the benefit of the doubt, but the creation of multiple, duplicative and contentless groups is against these terms."

Need another example of what is shitty about Stratfordians?

Here:

Over at a Piece-Of-Shit site called "Oxfraud," a comment was posted addressed to me in the past 24 hours.

In a thread entitled Were the plays written by a courtier? it goes like this:

headlight > proximity1 • 20 hours ago

One more point here. There is good evidence that Shakespeare was concerned about his social status -- why else would he have gone to the trouble of applying for and obtaining family arms? He bought the largest private home in his hometown. Rather than staying in London (where as a player he was famous, but in a profession that was looked down on by many) he moved back to Stratford where he would be seen as a prosperous gentleman.
It's a ridiculous premise that "only people of high social standing . . . could be concerned about such a matter." Look at the lists of people from all walks of life applying to the Heralds for arms and spending a lot of money to get them. Shakespeare wasn't trying to become a nobleman -- just to be a gentleman and respected by his neighbors.

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My reply, posted three times, was removed each time within minutes and without comment. Apparently, the editors there cannot allow this kind of reply--

Right: commoners who were, by inclination, those who sought as much status, money and prestige as their native talents might afford them opportunities to obtain--in the far more regimented and strictly class-confined society of that time--did indeed desire and seek the outward signs of membership in the gentry. They wanted, yes, to be granted some entry into this mainly closed social world. But that entry was granted to precious few of them. The most notable example is William Cecil, later, Baron Burghley, who, through his political instincts, became one of the most powerful and important members of Elizabeth's court. Burghley was consumed with his obsession to gain these titles, coveted them and jealously gaurded what he acquired in position and power. But his case is a extraordinary as it is spectacular.

Oxford spent a significant part of his youth as a ward of Burghley, living in his household. It was the kind of proximity to power and prestige which Oxford would have known anyway as the heritor of one of the kingdom's oldest and most prestigious earldoms--only much closer to the court's most important figures. Burghley, though he disingenuously denied it, was avid to see his daughter, Ann, married off to Oxford, thereby gaining both for himself and his children direct entry into the noble class. Oxford did marry Ann--with whom he'd known for years in his youth in the household. She became Countess of Oxford--and, for this union, which Elizabeth personally approved, Cecil had to be granted a title of his own.

RE: "Shakespeare wasn't trying to become a nobleman -- just to be a gentleman and respected by his neighbors."

It takes a stunningly tin ear to fail to grasp throughout the work of "Shakespeare" the extreme importance of the sort of conceptions of honor

which were inseparable from the nobility's formal codes of behavior, despite their far from perfect application in practical life. Indeed, one of the central themes of Oxford's work writing as "Shakespeare" is just this discrepancy between the nobles' theories and codes of honor and their practices of these. And that is exactly the kind of "ear" with which Stratfordians are nearly always fitted.

In a certain very precise and true sense, your observation is strictly correct and revealing for that fact:

Indeed, "Shakespeare" wasn't "trying" to be a nobleman. Just so. Oxford was by birth, training and education, body and soul, not just a nobleman but a high member of this elite society. Unlike Burghely, this was given him as his birthright and he certainly didn't strain to obtain it nor need to.

That doesn't mean that, even with all his natural genius, he didn't have to work hard at his studies of all the arts of a high-ranking nobleman's position--horsemanship, fencing, falconry, knowledge of language arts (Latin and Greek, above all) poetry (which then meant all kinds of creative writing, dramatic or non-dramatic) and sciences as these were then known.

More to the point, this purported "concern" on the part of William Shaksper, the guy from Stratford who is put up as the author, springs from what? Anyone could be interested in, "concerned" about social status--from precisely the point of view of a nobleman?--why? how? You simply leave us to wonder why this person had such a passion about this and made it such an important part of his written work.

With Oxford, those are not puzzling questions; he was intimately concerned about social status as nobles viewed because he was a nobleman himself.

Nor do you explain how having a "concern" for such a factor as social status also automatically imbues one with what is clearly an elite-society insider's appreciation for this matter.

In all this we find ourselves in the kind of unanswered questions which apply to virtually everything which constitutes the Stratfordian case.

So, here, you bunch of censorious shithole motherfucking assholes at Oxfraud --

you don't get to delete this one. Go fuck yourselves.

Hi. I'm the site manager and Disqus Moderator at the "Piece-Of-Shit site called "Oxfraud,"

Disqus stores all moderated comments in an index where any moderator-deleted comments also appear. They can be re-approved at any time. This index has been running for 4 years and contains 21 comments, none of which are from you. 16 of them are my own or from other moderators (when mods delete their own work, it counts as moderation). We hardly ever delete a comment, although Disqus can surprise us with a change of strategy and, for example, automatically put comments containing links in a queue for moderation. If that had happened your comment would still be there. It is not.

Having read your posts now, my moderatorial diagnosis is finger trouble. Find a grown up and ask them if this sort of thing reoccurs. Or post your reply here and I'll add it for you. I'm a grown up.

If that's your missing comment and you don't want to be torn to shreds, however, you might first want to look a bit harder at Elizabethan social structures. And possibly look up the word "coherence" in a suitable dictionary.

Always keen to help.

Oxfraud.com

"So, here, you bunch of censorious shithole motherfucking assholes at Oxfraud --

you don't get to delete this one. Go fuck yourselves."

Do you kiss your mother with that mouth, proximity1?

>8 dkathman:

Sure, but not since about sometime in 1996 I'd say.

She died in 1997.

She was very old fashioned and would say "darn" or, one of her most-often used exclamations: "Bad words!"

My father was similar in this. Both were old fashioned in that way.

And both absolutely despised goddammned fucking lying bastards. They imbued me with that sentiment. How I express it is my repsonsibility and they're not to be blamed for my preferences in manner of expression.

But, to me, the kind of bald-faced vile deceit that typifies people like those who operate the Oxfraud site is beyond all measure a more foul obscenity than any words I have ever uttered--or written.

(redirected reply to a post #19 from a bogus "continued from..." thread
___________________________________________

You see from posts and replies that this is a battlefield. You cannot take at face-value what the Stratfordian (orthodox academics) tell you and the posts by podras are typical examples. None of his referenced sites are trustworthy.

He's claimed that,

(quote)"Very broadly speaking, scholars mostly base their views on an examination of the historical record"... (endquote)

In fact, no, they don't.

and that,

(quote) ... "which is much more substantial that most people appreciate." (endquote)

The records, such as they are, while far more extensive than some would imagine, but the pertinent point is that the mass of the record points to Edward Oxford above and beyond any other candidate; indeed, one must torture facts and honesty to force these into the service of other candidates as author. "Most scholars", being closed-minded Stratfordians, will not admit this.

(quote) "Alternate authorship proposers mostly base their views on reading between the lines of the canon and finding hidden clues, including ciphers that nobody else has discovered, about who the 'true' author was." (endquote)

That, again, is a distorted picture--or, a.k.a. a fucking lie. When you consider things honestly, in the case of this controversy concerning the identity of the author of the work attributed to "William Shakespeare", either one takes the work commonly agreed as that of this author and looks 'into it' for indications about that author's personality and life or, in this case and in so many others like it, one simply has nothing to say of any interest about these matters since, without using the texts' details, we have no other reasonable basis on which to form an opinion. AND THAT IS WHY all the respected Stratfordians have, for centuries, taken it for granted that we must take and use the texts to tell us whatever it's possible to discern about this author's personality and life.

T.S. Eliot, whatever else he was, was, when it came to "Shakespeare", a moron with _zero_ insight.

In any other context, the insulting stupidity of such a suggestion as that the life of Thomas Stearns Eliot is useful—for purposes of comparison with the author of “Shakespeare” ’s writings—about what might or might not reasonably be surmised about an author from a close study of his texts would be too astounding for words. There is no comparison between these two—not in their persons, not in the times and conditions in which they lived and worked, not in their attitudes about their relationship to their work. No such comparisons are possible.

Thus, it is simply irrelevant how much or how little—according to him or others—Eliot’s writings reveal about his life. There’s no such relevance as that which is implied: that if we aren’t able to find sound evidence for Eliot’s personality in his writing, then, on that account alone, it’s not reasonable to try and find any such evidence in the work which is ascribed to the pseudonym, “William Shakespeare.”

The life of T. S. Eliot is amply documented*. There are published interviews, films, photographs, audio recordings of him speaking. To compare the two in this context is patently absurd. No sane person doubts Eliot as author of the work ascribed to his name. With Eliot we know him to be the individual associated with the works of the poet, Thomas Stearns Eliot—there is no controversy about this!—, while, with “Shakespeare”, we know nothing of the sort.

No one seriously doubts that G.B. Shaw’s work reflects its author through and through. No one doubts that the same is true of Eric Blair—whose real birth-name didn’t appear as the author’s name on his writings. We know, never the less, that works which bear the name ‘George Orwell’ were written by Eric Blair—because we have the fully-documented story of his life, for fuck’s sake!

When we read Henry Fielding’s novels with any insight at all, we look straight into the personality of this author. We know his passions, his burning faiths, the things he rejected as false and hypocritical. All of this is clear from the tenor of his work through the plot turns and the characterization. No one ever says, “Well, reading Fielding tells us simply nothing about the man. We just don’t know about him from his novels.” It’s idiotic to assert such bullshit. The same is true of Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingwy, Wright Morris, Henry Miller, Sean O'Casey, Alferd Kazin, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Marguerite Duras, William Faulkner, or, to cite poets of genius, Fernando Pessoa, Pablo Neruda, or Emily Dickenson.


A rather good indication that orthodox academics don't know what the hell they're talking about when discussing "Shakespeare" is found in the many things--often hilariously ridiculous--which they've just gotten flat wrong and which at times some have even been forced by a blushing sense of intellectual responsibility to admit they got wrong. Still, even today, many won't own up to errors that even some of their predecessor fellow academics have admitted. A key example is the misreading of Ben Jonson's famous "though you hadst small latin and lesse greek" to mean that the author suffered a deficiency in these languages. Some Stratfordians have admitted that is not the import of Jonson's words there. But, in doing that, they're in another difficulty since they have no sane and credible theory of how their Stratford boy came to so master Latin, Greek, French, and Italian.

P:S:

BTW: As I understand it, you live and teach in China. Are your students Chinese or do you teach at an international school with students mainly using English? Huge difference for "Shakespeare" study.

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* there must be scores of studies and biographies of T. S. Eliot--moreover, they can be based on documents and first-person accounts rather than only on mythology.

The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922.
by James E. Miller Jr. The Pennsylvania State University Press

T.S. Eliot: A Life, by Peter Ackroyd, 1984, Simon & Schuster Inc.,

T. S. Eliot: A Literary Life, by Tony Sharpe, St. Martins Press, (1991)

T. S. Eliot by Philip R. Headings

Eliot by Stephen Spender

(redirected here in resonse to a post # 19 )

I'm curious. What (grade) level students do you teach? (please mention all levels you treat).

How much detail do you enter into in the Authorship Question controversy?

Do you / your students believe it matters whether we get the author's identity correct?

What are your courses' or your classroom efforts' objectives in teaching this? -- in other words, if you teach students in grades earlier than 17 or 18 year-olds, what is it you hope they can and do learn from and about "Shakespeare"?

One thing you could do practically speaking is to take and use the sonnets as what they are: the author's thinly-veiled autobiographical story.

I really recommend you review these threads:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/286187

http://www.librarything.com/topic/219312

http://www.librarything.com/topic/220544
____________________________

Also, I'm always interested in hearing anecdotes from current teachers (primary through university) recounting comments from their students about "Shakespeare", the author, and about his plays, sonnets and poems.

(duplicate of >11 proximity1:)

The records, such as they are, while far more extensive than some would imagine, but the pertinent point is that the mass of the record points to Edward Oxford above and beyond any other candidate; indeed, one must torture facts and honesty to force these into the service of other candidates as author. "Most scholars", being closed-minded Stratfordians, will not admit this.

"Alternate authorship proposers mostly base their views on reading between the lines of the canon and finding hidden clues, including ciphers that nobody else has discovered, about who the "true" author was."

That, again, is a distorted picture--or, a.k.a. a fucking lie.

In fact (you know what a fact is, right?) there are no records at all to connect DeVere to the works in the Shakespeare canon. You and your ilk are the ones who are providing "a distorted picture" full of "fucking lies". You can assert the contrary with all your might but that doesn't change reality.

There were numerous people named William Shakespeare--variously spelled.

So why, then, didn't your guy, who all agree wrote this:

Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read,
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live--such virtue hath my pen--
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

simply clearly identify himself as the author?

Why'd he leave nothing about his writings in his will?

Why did those who apparently cared enough to see his sonnets through the press not care enough to put his full-name on their title-page?



Good thing his name wasn't "Smith" or "Johnson" or "Thompson" or "Wilson" or "Davis" or "Jones", huh?

or note that he was of Stratford Upon Avon--to distinguish him from the other William Shaksperes?

Why? why? why?

Why didn't his medical-doctor son-in-law mention the illustrious playwright, father of his wife, in his journals where he recorded far more mundane facts about far more mundane people?

Stratfordians have no answers to these questions.

>11 proximity1: Since you asked about my course... I teach in the international department of a private high school. So my students are English as a second language learners. I have the near-impossible task of teaching them 500 years of English literature in one semester(!) We read a couple of scenes from Romeo and Juliet, and I tell them about William Shakespeare's life and times. I tried teaching them his sonnets one year... that was an epic fail... If you've ever taught English literature to someone who is just learning the language, you'll understand what a Herculean task that is.

As far as the controversy goes, I just barely touch on it. I don't really have the time, and they don't have the understanding, for me to go into details. I just tell them there are various theories of authorship, mainly because William Shakespeare was not educated at university, and did not travel to Italy, where many of his plays were set. Personally, I've read all of Shakespeare's plays and most of his sonnets, and I know a fair bit about Elizabethan times, but I am not an expert in the authorship debate, so I couldn't really get into it, even if I wanted to.

I would love to teach a proper course on Shakespeare someday. I'd like to study more myself.

>15 madpoet:

"As far as the controversy goes, I just barely touch on it. I don't really have the time, and they don't have the understanding, for me to go into details."

That's completely understandable and I'd guessed as much already. In fact, I think that all primary and secondary school teachers are given an impossible task when told to "teach the students about Shakespeare", but in your special circumstances, the challenge is greater by orders of magnitude.

There's really no good way to treat the person and work of this author in those circumstances and, if it were possible, the best course would be for the school administration to be 'helped to understand' that these students--like English-language native-speaking pupils their age--are simply not ready for this work. One day, depending on the command they come to have of the language, they may take it up on their own initiative. If they don't, then at least they won't have been saddled with a load of rank humbug which shall forever stand in their way of understanding what the works are about.

As I learned from a westerner who I knew well and who was fluent in mandarin and cantonese, Chinese literature presents similar challenges to those who come to it as non-native speakers. And, to understand 16th century (by the western calendar / (latter Ming Dynasty)) Chinese or any early periods from the Han dynasty through Ming dynasty or even earlier periods--just imagine the challenge--a reader must take on the study of the society of those times in order to have any hope of an even fair idea of what the texts are saying.

_______________________________________________

"I would love to teach a proper course on Shakespeare someday. I'd like to study more myself."

One day, you may have time for that.

This is a good place to start to get a good overview. All the most important matters are treated clearly and well:

http://www.politicworm.com (the site edited by Stephanie Hopkins Hughes).

The only major point on which I differ with her views is that she thinks it plausible that Oxford, as an elder noble, put out a false report of his own death so that he could escape the rigors of court life in order to free himself to devote his time to the final polishing of his life's work--especially the plays. According to this view, he'd supposedly have taken refuge somewhere and lived his final years in effective isolation from his social peers. I don't see that as plausible for many purely practical reasons--though I don't deny that he could well have wished to do this; I just don't agree that he probably did.

(Podras bullshit Post #25 )

My personal view is that the authorship question is not essential and could be skipped entirely without loss. The problem with that is that Shakespeare deniers, though few in number, are a noisy bunch, so it is possible that some of your students may have heard some claims of theirs. Doing what you have been doing seems like a good approach. You might consider recommending some optional reading for those that express an interest in learning more on their own. Shakespeare Bites Back is the quickest introduction to the topic and may be enough for most.

Something you might consider pointing out while covering Shakespeare's biography is that while the historical evidence about him is much sparser than we would like, there is more than enough to firmly establish him as the author of the works bearing his name. Recent stylometric research has shown that he collaborated with others more than had previously been understood, but Shakespeare's authorship was real. The name wasn't a pseudonym, and he wasn't a front man for someone else. What the historical record lacks is information about what kind of person he was; what his religious beliefs were, how he really felt about Anne and his children, what his interests were, etc. The record holds only a few hints about that part of his life, and though his works may hold some clues, nothing like that can be extracted from them with any degree of certainty.

--- Added note: I saw in the information you provided in the other thread that you tell your students that Shakespeare never traveled to Italy. As far as we know, that is correct. The people who believe that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was the real author think that is an important point because de Vere did travel to Italy in the 1570s. They claim that the Italian plays contain information that only someone who had been to Italy could have written those plays. Without troubling you with the arcane details (unless you are really interested), the argument is full of holes.

LOL! What bullshit.

Guess what? Neo-Nazis have the same view of the "Allied-Forces'" version of World War II history: it can just as well be skipped entirely 'without loss.' If you doubt that, just ask one of them.

... "The problem with that is that Shakespeare deniers, though few in number, are a noisy bunch," ...

Yeah, it sucks when Oxfordians show up the idiocy of the Stratfordian case--disingenuously described as "anti-Shakespeare" when it's anti-Stratfordian--rather than Oxfordians' saying and doing nothing as the Stratfordians propagate noxious myths.

. "Shakespeare" was a pen-name Edward, Earl of Oxford used. Oxford's advocates needn't, therefore, think they must abjure the pen-name itself--only the fact that it's so shamelessly abused by Stratfordians.

..." so it is possible that some of your students may have heard some claims of theirs. " ...

Possible, yes. Likely, no. And that's because the Stratfordians want it that way and intend to keep it that way.

"Doing what you have been doing seems like a good approach. You might consider recommending some optional reading for those that express an interest in learning more on their own. Shakespeare Bites Back is the quickest introduction to the topic and may be enough for most." ...

LOL! Yeah, what does one do with those students who simply perfer not to take little or nothing--as Podras contends is quite enough about the Authorship Question--and instead would seek more information from out-of-class sources? Well, (thank heavens) for them there's a tailor-made Statfordian bullshit site where they may go and fully misinform themselves. And Podras wants you and your students to know about it; isn't that precious?!

"Something you might consider pointing out while covering Shakespeare's biography is that while the historical evidence about him is much sparser than we would like,

"there is more than enough to firmly establish him as the author of the works bearing his name. Recent stylometric research has shown that he collaborated with others more than had previously been understood, but Shakespeare's authorship was real.'

... "while the historical evidence about him is much sparser than we would like, " ...

One almost wants to shed tears! "Oh!, how we've wished for more information!" Give me a fucking break! --when they got that much-less-sparser historical evidence in the form of a hand-fits-glove picture of Edward Oxford, they went back to bemoaning the lack of a biography. Some people deserve their bad luck.

"Recent stylometric research has shown that he collaborated with others more than had previously been understood, but Shakespeare's authorship was real. "

No, in fact it doesn't "show that" at all.

"The name wasn't a pseudonym, and he wasn't a front man for someone else. "

Then he had an amazing indifference to the very work which of which he expressed such certainty that it would endure--as long as men have breath. He clearly took no hand in his plays' quarto publications--those which appeared in his lifetime--full of shocking gaffes, misprints, fouled directions and corrupted lines. "Fascinating, captain," as a certain Vulcan First Officer used to say.

"What the historical record lacks is information about what kind of person he was;"

WTF?! What's this!? "modesty"!?

The record tells us plenty: this guy from Stratford was a businessman; a businessman first, last and always.

He hounded his debtors into court for pennies and shillings. This is a man who is supposed to have put into the mouth of one (in his role, the supposed-respected) character; the irony of Iago's delivering these lines should not obscure their part in the author's own view; Shaksper would never have spoken this way about money; but Oxford, today pilloried by his detractors as having been a 'spend-thrift', was actually a model of what in his own time the most faithful respect for the code of noble behavior required as the highest duty* (See below):

IAGO:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands:
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

He traded in wool, sheep-skins, was in the glove-making and selling trade, invested in property and, see below, demonstrated his interests and "what kind of person he was" in other ways:

... "what his religious beliefs were, how he really felt about Anne and his children, what his interests were, etc. The record holds only a few hints about that part of his life,"...

Well, let's see. How'd he feel about his wife, Anne, and the kids? Apparently, he felt that they could fend for themselves while he trotted off to the big city while the babes were still in diapers. How's that? Did he write home to them? Not that we have any record of; but, then why would a great poet and playwright take it into his head to write a letter home-- in an age which was (if one was of the literate class) virtually swimming in a flood of paper correspondence? Letters? No. No letters from our William to Anne. And none from her to him. Maybe she didn't get his address in town? Aye! That's love!

" though his works may hold some clues, nothing like that can be extracted from them with any degree of certainty."

Thank goodness, too! Right? Because all of it points to Edward Oxford, not to the Straford illiterate of whose school career no record survives. Though the records prior to and after his supposed school career--those records did survive. Alas, he came after they ceased--or were "lost"-- and left before they resumed. Of all the rotten luck!

" Added note: I saw in the information you provided in the other thread that you tell your students that Shakespeare never traveled to Italy. As far as we know, that is correct."

Dear! dear! What to do? What to do?

" The people who believe that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was the real author think that is an important point because de Vere did travel to Italy in the 1570s. They claim that the Italian plays contain information that only someone who had been to Italy could have written those plays. Without troubling you with the arcane details (unless you are really interested), the argument is full of holes.

Well! Here's Rescue! We'll just lie and say that " the argument" that " the Italian plays contain information that only someone who had been to Italy could have written" "is full of holes."

There's your Stratfordianism in spades.

More, generally, on the problem faced by all teachers who are obliged to try and teach about the author and work which go by the pen-name of "Shakespeare":

The point really--and the reason this is in fact practically important for teachers--is that the works take on very different significance all around depending on how the identity of the author is assumed to have been. The plays and sonnets simply don't and can't mean and convey the same things regardless of whether the premier earl of the time was their author or the author was, instead, a man for whom we have essentially no record of any intellectual life; readers who suppose that William Shaksper of Stratford wrote the works must take that as an a priori assumption without any evidential basis. This is intellectually not tenable and sets a terrible standard of practice for the use of reason more generally.. How is it possible to reason otherwise repsonsibly but make a huge exception in this case?

Unless students take up the authorship issue in some way themselves and not only think about it but arrive at some resolution of it which accords with their best judgment, they aren't going to find much of anything interesting and useful in the work because, what it means--and meant--depends on who wrote it.

To reply to the question, "Who wrote these plays and this poetry?" with "We don't know and we can't really know," is to also say that same in answer to the question, "What does this play, this sonnet, mean?"

_______________________________

*
“Along with the supremacy of land went a continued respect for medieval aristocratic ideals. One of the most characteristic features of the age was its hyper-sensitive insistence upon the overriding importance of reputation. Many of the punishments of the day, the stocks, the pillory, the apology read out in the market-place, were based upon the theory that public humiliation was a more effective penalty than a swingeing fine. The extraordinary seventeenth-century code of the duel, under which men felt impelled to risk their lives to avenge a casual word, was merely a cancerous growth from the same cells. A by-product of this cult of reputation was an insistence upon the aristocratic virtue of generosity. Though contemporaries lamented the decay of hospitality—and it undoubtedly did fall away during this period—this is less remarkable than the vigorous persistence of the ideal, and in some measure the practice, in direct opposition to Calvinist ideals of frugality and thrift. The prime test of rank was liberality, the pagan virtue of openhandedness. It involved wearing rich clothes, living in a substantial well-furnished house, keeping plenty of servants and above all maintaining a lavish table to which anyone of the right social standing was welcome. This was the quality most admired by the leading squires and nobles of England, and this that they were most anxious to impress upon posterity."

-- (p. 24, Lawrence Stone, (1967), Oxford Univ. Press)

______________________________

Edward Oxford is routinely treated by his 20th- and, now, 21st-century critics as having been a cad, a wastrel, a person who was irresponsible, a vain and conceited person and always one who did whatever he did for disgraceful motives. His critics never credit him with a benign, let alone honorable, thought or deed. It's the easiest thing in the world to find examples of this-- look wherever Stratfordians are dominant and can depict Oxford as it pleases their prejudices to do.

Referring to his marriage, writing at Wikipedia's pages on Anne Cecil (daughter of William Cecil, Elizabeth's powerful first secretary, Oxford's critics have this to say about him:

"The wedding was celebrated with great pomp. According to some accounts, Anne genuinely loved Oxford, who as her father's ward had partly grown up in the Cecil household. However, his reasons for marrying Anne were largely mercenary, as he had hoped her father would pay his many outstanding debts."

the writer here can't even afford enough imagination to credit Oxford with having had something better at heart than to have married Anne for "largely mercenary " reasons (motives). That is a very ugly charge to lay against a man who placed honor and people and principles ahead of monetary gain.

And here's what Sarah Gwyneth Ross has to say about Oxford as husband:

The marriage was

... “a match considered advantageous for both sides because Oxford was a significant matrimonial prize and ((my note): future father-in-law: William) Cecil’s fortune would rescue the unstable finances of the de Vere family. It seems, at least on her side, to have been a love match. The marriage did not prosper, mostly on account of de Vere’s famously uncertain temper, which caused him to repudiate his wife, slander her virtue (by disclaiming paternity of their daughter born in 1575 (this note part of the original text)), and go on a ruinous spending spree, reputedly because Cecil failed to save de Vere’s uncle (Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk) from execution.”
_______________________

—Sarah Gwyneth Ross, Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England , p. 380 (ABC-CLIO (2007))

You might notice some rather strange anomalous assumptions going on there.

First, Edward was raised in the Cecil household from his youth--after the death of his father, the 16th Earl. So both William and Anne, his daughter, six years Edward's junior, had years of direct personal experience and knowledge of him. That being the case, it ought to tell us something in Oxford's favor that so critical a historian could credit Anne with having felt herself to be engaged with her marriage-mate in "a love match"; while it cannot prove in and of itself a clear and unambigous 'happy marriage', there's still the fact that this was a marriage which produced five live-births, four of those children living to adulthood and a marriage of their own. And, second, it would further seem to be to Oxford's credit that, after years of experience of him, WIlliam Cecil, consumate man of the world and Elizabeth's virtual right-hand man, could never the less regard Oxford as "a significant matrimonial prize." But prize for whom? Anne, we're told, loved Edward. And so, it seems that if William Cecil eyed Oxford as a matrimonial 'prize' for his daughter Anne, this was for reasons which were his own. That tells us about both Oxford and Cecil.

__________________________

Wikipedia's pages, as concerns Edward de Vere, Earl, are unrelieved calumny. See for yourself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Cecil,_Countess_of_Oxford

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere,_17th_Earl_of_Oxford#Marriage

Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England by Diana Maury Robin, Anne R. Larsen, Carole Levin. (ABC-CLIO, (2007))

RE

post #13 Crypto-Willobie :
“In fact (you know what a fact is, right?) there are no records at all to connect (Edward) De Vere to the works in the Shakespeare canon.”

__________________________________

For the benefit of others who, unlike Crypto-Willobie, are not already quite well aware of the following—I explain how it makes very good sense that, as he, full of hot anger, pointed out: there are no documents, or, rather, none which directly and openly "connect" or indicate Edward, Earl of Oxford as the author of the work ascribed to (his) pen-name, “William Shakespeare”—and this, while true, is also part of the keystone point of the whole Oxfordian thesis.

We'd be extremely surprised to find any such open and direct documentation indicating that Oxford was the person behind the pen-name “William Shakespeare.” If such a document, especially if it were in English, did surface, it would be subject to the closest scrutiny in order to verify its authenticity. We don't expect this for a simple reason: all such records were expunged wherever they may have once existed and were within the reach of William Cecil or, later, Robert Cecil, his son—again, particularly in English-language manuscripts. Over the succeeding centuries the record has been scoured by researchers for the smallest trace of a mention of “Shakespeare” this or "Shakespeare" that.

And the reason they were expunged is that as the premier Earl of his time, Oxford could not have been publicly known as a professional writer of poetry and, still less, of plays for the public theatre. To have been known for this would have been the ruin of his standing as a nobleman. These have been scoured by researchers for the smallest trace of a mention of “Shakespeare”.

Thus, it is central to the Oxfordian thesis that we don't find these in English. Nothing mysterious or odd about that.

What is odd, on the other hand, is why, if William Shaksper of Stratford on Avon had really been the rightful author, as the so-far-still-orthodox academic view has it, he, Shaksper, didn't make that authorship very clear as belonging to him and not some other person named “Shakespeare”. What's very odd is that if William Shaksper of Stratford on Avon had really been the rightful author, he somehow left all that writing and only five puny, barely-legible, hopelessly-cramped signatures to survive him. No letters, no diaries, no books, and no mention by anyone else in a way which directly and unambiguously identifies him—Shaksper of Stratford—as the poet and playwright.

Now, as it happens, Oxfordians' theory can explain both of these facts by the same reason. In each of their cases, neither Oxford nor Shaksper were at liberty to make this claim open and apparent to all. Oxford couldn't for the reason already mentioned; Shaksper couldn't for a different but no less inescapable reason: he wasn't the author and of course he knew that just as his closest family knew that. This also explains the otherwise inexplicable fact that none of them ever made the slightest effort to publicize their relative's (potential) claim to the authorship of the work ascribed to “William Shakespeare.”

Every Stratfordian is well aware of all the above. So, when Crypto-Willobie protests that we Oxfordians “also” aren't able to produce a document in English clearly establishing 'our man' as the rightful author, he's pretending that this fact is hard to explain; when the fact of the matter is that, for us, it's a simple and expected matter of fact. Only the Stratfordians' case is confounded by the lack of such a document.

I have repeatedly made a point of distinguishing documents in English from those in other languages because, while it's not to be expected that an English-language document survived the purge of records showing Oxford's role as the author behind the pen-name of “William Shakespeare”, there's a reasonable possibility that such a document still exists somewhere—but it is in Latin, or French, or Italian, or Flemish, German, Spanish or Danish. It's especially in Latin where there exists what I think is the best possibility for discovery of such a document. Think of the characteristics of a person who could combine all the essential attributes for

► the knowledge of Oxford as the playwright,

► the freedom and the interest to write about this fact in a letter, a diary, an official report, a record of service, etc. which could survive to our time,

► the ability to write—and usual habit or writing—in Latin, French, Italian, Flemish, German, Spanish or Danish; that is, any language which would stand a higher chance of having been exported on a document out of England where it would escape the notice and control of the English authorities.

Such is a person who probably travelled, who was certainly literate and who had first-hand or, at least, second-hand connections to the world of the privileged and powerful in and around the court of Elizabeth—where some would know, because they could not have failed to have known, the truth about this author-identity.

Thus, we have, first and foremost, diplomats, envoys of foreign crowned heads who were sent as ambassadors to the court of Elizabeth I. They'd have been professionally interested in all the goings on in and around the court. That would include such things as its favorite entertainments and their authors and sponsors. This, when it comes to staged dramatic works, could and did sometimes have international implications—as when, for example, a play was produced in which a foreign person (or even an English person, for that matter) of importance was depicted in an unflattering way. Secondly, we have wealthy businessmen who resided in London and worked in important international trade. Both of these types would make good potential sources for a surviving document which directly names the association of Edward Oxford as a poet and playwright and his pen-name, “William Shakespeare.”

In Latin alone the mass of manuscripts and printed records, books, etc, is vast and still largely unexamined for its potential in this respect. Indeed, a scholar who was not specifically looking for such a connection might overlook a document which suggests something relevant to the connection without stating it straight out.

So there's your world-class world-wide Oxford-Egg Hunt all cut out for you. To the finder of the prized document or documents, the prize: worldwide immortal fame. How's that? Where ought one look? For starters, if one is anywere near and can gain access to a surviving grand old sixteenth and seventeenth-century family's manorial library, that's a good place to look. Dusty old volumes, diaries, journals, personal or business correspondence, diplomatic reports, and volumes of printed period-works on any topic, literature or other, at all. There may be notes in the margins of the most unlikely-seeming of these.

On this, I'm reminded to add:

We occasionally see in the press reports that excitedly describe some purported grand discovery which is supposed to relate Shaksper of Stratford to "William Shakespeare," (Edward Oxford's pen-name). In each and every case, it turns out—as it's bound to do—that the discovery isn't at all what it's cracked up to be. The reason for this is simple:

William Shaksper as "Shakespeare" is a virtual as well as a literal "dead end". There isn't anything "new" to be discovered which authentically and credibly links the two because, when Shaksper died, so did the "mask"-front which never once was anything other than that.

I'm 'full of hot anger'?? That's rich, coming from you...

>19 Crypto-Willobie:

Yeah, well, Oxfordians have cause for their anger: we're the accessory-as-heirs victims of a four-hundred-year-old literary imposture while, today, Stratfordians are the perpetuators of that imposture.

Your anger is about as justified and as worthy of consideration as the Menendez (Lyle and Erik) brothers' appeal for the court's leniency due to their being orphans.

You flatter yourself that you have inspired anger in me. Auntie Strat is just a mild irritant. Most of the time I can't be arsed to even think about it.

>21 Crypto-Willobie:

Hilarious. You forget. I can read and understand what I read--and that includes, of course, Oxford's work, work which you manifestly do not "get" for whatever reason and, believe it or not, I've spent some time pondering the matter of how and why some people do "get" Oxford and his work while others just don't, bless their little hearts.

So, you can sing and dance around here all you like but this,

"In fact (you know what a fact is, right?) there are no records at all to connect DeVere to the works in the Shakespeare canon. You and your ilk are the ones who are providing 'a distorted picture' full of 'fucking lies'."

is a clear expression of genuine anger on the part of its author--that would be you.

Personally, I don't see any shame in feeling anger per se provided, of course, that it's justifiable. Now, your anger in this case is related to the fact that you simply don't have a good reply available. So you get angry. Why do I assser that? Because, as is so often the case, unlike what I did above in >18 proximity1: you don't address these things on the merits and, of course, again, the reason is obvious.

You can't. So what else is there for you but an anger? --which you don't even own up to.

RE a post by Dinadansfriend

23

Every bit of this absurd and desperate conjecture has been considered and exploded by much-better-informed Oxfordians.

This gets very tiresome when people trot out sheer make-believe which indicates they've not even checked on the implausibility of their wildly imagined scenarios.

Oxford leaves for his European travels in 1576. William Shaksper is a boy of twelve years old. Had he even been caught poaching at that time? How is Shaksper, aged twelve, living in Stratford, supposed to have come to the attention of the Earl of Oxford? And why, if he did, would he have been invited to make that journey?

Yes, Oxford travelled with a retinue of servants--and some were actually people of some social standing. The idea that he'd have been inclined to meet and know William Shaksper as a youth and to invite him to travel to the continent is really absurd. Had Oxford had such an inclination, why wouldn't he have invited someone from his acquaintace--say, a youth of fifteen to seventeen who, as he himself had previously been, a ward of the court of Elizabeth and residing in William Cecils's household? Oxford, at 27, would have known numerous young men between fifteen and seventeen from the court's circle.

The much more likely scenario, in the case that Oxford had wanted such a youngster to make the journey in his group, you just pass over without comment. As it happens, Oxford did return to England with an Italian youth, one he'd met when he heard him sing in a cathedral choir. That youth, Orazio Cuoco (Cook) returned to England and spent something around eleven months living in Oxford's household before returning to Venice.

See: Richard Malim's Great Oxford: Essays on the Life and Work of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604

Chapter Nine: The Venetian Inquisition Inquiry Regarding Orazio Cuoco (1577) by Dr. Noemi Magri

____________________________

As for cobbling together a bunch of haphazardly-gathered scuttlebutt from all manner of people, second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand hearsay about "things over there" on the contintent--are you serious? have you actually thought about this? How did it work? Did Shacky-sper carry a quill and ink and some foolscap everywhere with him on the off chance he'd overhear or be told some odds and bits of one-day-potentially-useful gossip? Or did he go about quizzing people: "Eh! Been anywere on the continent lately? Can you give me some colorful descriptions for my play scenes?" Was it like that?

Think again:

from (PBS) "Frontline"

THE SHAKESPEARE MYSTERY #710F
Repeat Airdate: 4/23/96

PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY Kevin Sim
CORRESPONDENT Al Austin

The Shakespeare Mystery
_________________________________

Narrator:

The doubts are getting closer to Shakespeare's home. This is a rare visit to Stratford for former British cabinet minister Enoch Powell, whose study of Shakespeare's plays convinced him that the town was built on a lie.

Enoch Powell, Former British Cabinet Minister:

At that time I had been a member of the cabinet and I'd been in politics for twenty years and I had some idea of what it's like in the kitchen. And my astonishment was to discover that these were the best works of somebody who'd been in the kitchen. They're written by someone who has lived the life, who has been part of a life of politics and power, who knows what people feel when they are near to the center of power, near to the heat of the kitchen. It's not something which can be transferred, it's not something on which an author, just an author, can be briefed: "Oh, this is how it happened"; it comes straight out of experience--straight out of personal observation--straight out of personal feeling, that's the difference which comes over you when you read Shakespeare detached from the Stratfordian fantasy.

Narrator:

For Powell, the British politician, just as for Twain, the American riverboater, the Stratford man had failed the crucial test of experience. The real Shakespeare was at home in worlds they believed the glovemaker's son could not have known, and the Stratford fantasy had made a bard out of bumpkin, transforming a common duck into the "Swan of Avon."

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shakespeare/tapes/shakespearescript.htm...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkqcLJZ9I3s

>22 proximity1: >23 proximity1:

{yawn}

Stratfordians' standard reply to a key criticism of their theory of authorship—namely, the complete lack of evidence for the suggestion that William Shaksper could somehow have had direct experience as a visitor to the 16th-century Italian peninsula—is that he, Shaksper, needn't have had any such. According to one of their rationales, the author is supposed to have found all of the detail contained in his eleven or twelve plays set partly or wholly in Italy through second-hand acquaintance—travellers' verbal reports, printed book and manuscript histories, geographies and travel-log descriptions. From these, we are told, or it's implied, he should have had all that he required in information about this distant place, all he needed to infuse his drama with the vivid and electrically-charged emotion of place and physical experience which these plays carry.

In just one example of the various unstated assumptions behind such a rationale, it’s claimed (in the following excerpt) that

“It is well known that Shakespeare used numerous sources of inspiration as the basis for his works. By modern standards, some would call that plagiarism. But drawing from the work of others, sometimes almost verbatim, and improving on it was a standard practice in early modern England that had been handed down from the Middle Ages. Shakespeare’s importance lies not in creating totally original plots but in what he creatively did with his sources that improved so much on them. Roe would have it that his author never used his creative imagination for Italian matters.

“Question: In what way does the very existence of Roe’s book contradict his own thesis?(1) Roe’s author has, he says, to have been to Italy in order for him to have written what he did. Only by seeing Italy with his own eyes could he have learned what he knew about the place. After reading Roe’s book, we now know what his author knew, too, assuming that we accept what Roe says he knew. We know that because Roe told us. Roe used the printed word. Oral ones would have done as well. We didn’t have to go to Italy to know it because Roe told us in his book. We were sitting in our easy chair at home or at our desks, far from Italy, while we read Roe’s book and learned what Roe says his author could only have known by traveling to Italy. We must be smarter than Roe's author.”(2)

That is an amazingly naive view of mental life and what it is to “know” things. Facts and lived experience are, according to this view, not just reduced and not just reducable to a textual account, it’s implied here that, indeed, such a textual account transmits—or could—the entirety of lived-experience, that, once read, “we now know what his author knew, too”.

Suppose someone tried to tell you that, by the time you’d finished reading Defoe’s A tour through the whole island of Great Britain (1724), you’d have learned and, so, you’d not only ‘know’ everything Defoe did on his journey, and have also as- good-as ‘visited’ with him every place he visited, saw everything he saw, but also that his entire experience has been transfered to you—from him, through his manuscript, to your brain—you now ‘possess’ Defoe’s experience and you may take that and create out of it something which is, by dramatic presentation equal to, as realistic and as true as, or, indeed, even “more than” its original author’s experience. Would you actually believe such a claim?

If, from the foregoing, it isn’t already plain enough that this sort of assumption is monstrous nonsense and that, as a basis for the claim that, because he could have been the recipient of numerous second-hand travellers’ accounts, Shaksper, never having set foot outside of England, was endowed with all the knowledge of his interlocutors’ travel-experiences—because maybe they related parts of some of these to him in a tavern or while waiting to go in to see a playhouse performance—it’s flagrantly insulting, then I offer the following excerpt from a new book by Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (New York, Pantheon Books (2018)) .

Damasio :

“This book is about one interest and one idea. I have long been intrigued in human affect—the world of emotions and feelings—and have spent many years investigating it: why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct our selves; how feelings assist or undermine our best intentions; why and how brains interact with the body to support such functions. I have new facts and interpretations to share on these matters.

“As for the idea, it is very simple: feelings have not been given the credit they deserve as motives, monitors, and negotiators of human cultural endeavors. Humans have distinguished themselves from all other beings by creating a spectacular collection of objects, practices, and ideas, collectively known as cultures. The collection includes the arts, philosophical inquiry, moral systems and religious beliefs, justice, governance, economic institutions, and technology and science. Why and how did this process begin? A frequent answer to this question invokes an important faculty of the human mind—verbal language—along with distinctive features such as intense sociality and superior intellect. For those who are biologically inclined the answer also includes natural selection operating at the level of genes. I have no doubt that intellect, sociality, and language have played key roles in the process, and it goes without saying that the organisms capable of cultural invention, along with the specific faculties used in the invention, are present in humans by the grace of natural selection and genetic transmission. The idea is that something else was required to jump-start the saga of human cultures. That something else was a motive. I am referring specifically to feelings, from pain and suffering to well-being and pleasure.

“Consider medicine, one of our most significant cultural enterprises. Medicine’s combination of technology and science began as a response to the pain and suffering caused by diseases of every sort, from physical trauma and infections to cancers, contrasted with the very opposite of pain and suffering: well-being, pleasures, the prospect of thriving. Medicine did not begin as an intellectual sport meant to exercise one’s wits over a diagnostic puzzle or a physiological mystery. It began as a consequence of specific feelings of patients and specific feelings of early physicians, including but not limited to the compassion that may be born of empathy. Those motives remain today. No reader will have failed to notice how visits to the dentist and surgical procedures have changed for the better in our own lifetime. The primary motive behind improvements such as efficient anesthetics and precise instrumentation is the management of feelings of discomfort. The activity of engineers and scientists plays a commendable role in this endeavor, but it is a motivated role. The profit motive of the drug and instrumentation industries also plays a significant part because the public does need to reduce its suffering and industries respond to that need. The pursuit of profit is fueled by varied yearnings, a desire for advancement, prestige, even greed, which are none other than feelings. It is not possible to comprehend the intense effort to develop cures for cancers or Alzheimer’s disease without considering feelings as motives, monitors, and negotiators of the process. Nor is it possible to comprehend, for example, the less intense effort with which Western cultures have pursued cures for malaria in Africa or the management of drug addictions most everywhere without considering the respective web of motivating and inhibiting feelings. Language, sociality, knowledge, and reason are the primary inventors and executors of these complicated processes. But feelings get to motivate them, stay on to check the results, and help negotiate the necessary adjustments.

The idea, in essence, is that cultural activity began and remains deeply embedded in feeling. The favorable and(3) unfavorable interplay of feeling and reason must be acknowledged if we are to understand the conflicts and contradictions of the human condition.” ...

Whatever these supposed travel-accounts contained in details and facts—with all their inevitable error and omission—the listeners' complement is and can only be a pale copy of their original tellers' lived feelings throughout the experiences related. There is simply no way that the second-hand receiver's view could ever match in clarity and strength the felt-knowledge of original teller's first-hand experience.

No, after reading Defoe or Roe, we do not in fact "know what his author knew, too,".... Far, far from it. We have, instead, a glimpse of a portion of the author's original full and felt lived-experience. We have a shadow of the original feelings of the lived events. We can perhaps try and mentally reconstruct these as far as our own life-experiences are similar to original author's experiences as conveyed by his conceptions, through his time's words and ideas.

The naiveté exhibited by the assumption that a second-hand listener's knowledge can serve as the basis for everything this author needed to present to us the places on the Italian peninsula described in the plays is emblematic of the kind of simplistic nonsense in which Stratfordians typically trade. Intellectually, it's ridiculous.

_____________________

(1) : emphasis in the original
(2) : emphasis added
(3) : Italicized in the original: other emphasis added

Sun in an Empty Room (1963) Edward Hopper (American)

See the above small-scale pixelated reproduction of Edward Hopper's Sun in an Empty Room ?
It's even in color. So I guess many readers would suppose that they've "seen" all about this painting. And, I wonder: would any of them be so foolish as to suppose that, in seeing this copy here, they now "know" all about this painting's elements?—that its author has "told them" all that he knew "by it"?

Let me assure those readers: you have a very poor idea of this painting if the above (or other similar pixel reproduction) is all that you know of it. I have seen the original work up close and it is—despite that it may seem to be a very "simple", "modest", "uncomplicated" work of art—among the three or four most arresting, startling paintings I have ever viewed in real-life. That includes numerous of Salvador Dalí 's most famous paintings; it includes numerous long afternoons in the Louvre museum's galleries and the Musée d'Orsay, where there is a world-class collection of work by Vincent Van Gogh.

But what Hopper achieves in this painting's presentation of light is nothing short of amazing. A simple room, its image is mesmerizing. I found it very difficult to walk away from it and so I returned to stand and stare at it again and again. The painting evoked such strong feelings as I stood in front of it and what I feel from gazing on this reproduction is simply not even a pale shadow of that experience.

I turn then to a different painting—the original of this puny digital reproduction—



seeing it up close—in Italy, of course— inspired Edward Oxford to write, under the pen-name "William Shake-speare", Venus and Adonis. Unless you have seen the original work, too, you have little idea of his experience of seeing it; but his poem came directly out of that. There are numerous artists' renditions of "Venus and Adonis" but none and no recorded description of any quite like this. Only in this version is Adonis wearing a hat—a detail which Oxford mentions directly and which indicates he had to have somehow seen this version. There is no record of the painting's ever coming to England in the lifetime of either Oxford or Shaksper.

References to "Oxfraud" articles amount to sheer bullshit referring to other bullshit.

RE: ..."someone has now done an analysis"...

Yeah, "someone"--but who wrote that? The article is unsigned.

Concerning the details of teh claims and the assumptions contained in this bullshit article, there is simply no such thing as "Shakespeare's writing" when what is meant by that is authenticated writing by William Shaksper of Stratford (perhaps) apart from, that is, the five horribly cramped signatures.

Further, RE :

"Printers often worked from eye to ear to hand, respelling as they set. Fortunately, manuscripts in holograph survive for all three poets: Oxford’s letters, Golding’s prose translation of a Latin Aesop, and Shakespeare’s additions to Sir Thomas More. By a close comparison of their orthographies, unchanged by printers, and by a study of their rhyme-words, it is quite possible to hear where they diverge."

there are no known surviving period manuscripts which are authenticated as written by the playwright himself--i.e. Oxford. One day some may be found. But if, as is claimed and pointed out in the article, ""Printers often worked from eye to ear to hand, respelling as they set.". then comparing manuscripts form Oxforrd's hand to printed work--which is all that is available for the plays, poems and sonnets, then the article's premise is nonsense because the supposed import of the "comparisons"is spurious.

This is once more a typical example of how Stratfordians can't think worth shit and make up these claims which, on examination, always prove to be plain crap.

Nearly a century ago, a Stratfordian scholar wrote this:

(Chapter) X. Plays of Uncertain Authorship Attributed to Shakespeare. | § 1. Classification of extant Plays.

By F. W. MOORMAN, B.A. (London), Ph.D. (Strassburg), Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Leeds

_____________________

... "In considering the question of Shakespeare’s share in any of the above plays, it is unfortunate that our main evidence has to be sought in the plays themselves. The appearance of his name on the Stationers’ register, or on the title-page of a play, is of interest as showing the extent of his popularity with the reading public of his time, but is no evidence whatever that the play is his. On the other hand, it is uncritical to reject a play as Shakespeare’s solely because it does not find a place in the first folio of 1623. Valuable as that edition is as a standard of authenticity, it does not include Pericles, portions of which are almost unanimously claimed for Shakespeare, while it includes The First Part of Henry VI, portions of which are just as unanimously believed not to be his. There remains, therefore, the evidence furnished by the plays themselves—evidence which, for the most part, consists in the resemblance which these plays bear, in respect of diction and metre, characterisation and plot construction, to the accepted works of Shakespeare. Such evidence, confessedly, is unsatisfactory and leaves the whole question under the undisputed sway of that fickle jade, Opinion.

But the question of Shakespearean authorship is not the only point of interest presented by the doubtful plays. So varied in character are the works which go to form the Shakespearean apocrypha, that they may fairly be said to furnish us with an epitome of the Elizabethan drama during the period of its greatest achievement. Almost every class of play is here represented, and one class—that of domestic tragedy—finds, in Arden of Feversham and in A Yorkshire Tragedy, two of its most illustrious examples. The Senecan tragedy of vengeance is represented by Locrine; the history or chronicle play by Edward III, The First Part of the Contention, The True Tragedie, The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, Sir Thomas More and Cromwell, and, less precisely, by The Birth of Merlin and Faire Em. The romantic comedy of the period is illustrated by Mucedorus, The Merry Devill and The Two Noble Kinsmen, while The London Prodigall and The Puritane are types of that realistic bourgeois comedy which, in Stewart days, won a firm hold upon the affections of the play-going community."

(bold-face emphasis added)

(Chapter) X Plays of Uncertain Authorship Attributed to Shakespeare.
§ 7. Sir Thomas More: its scholarly character and political tone

By F. W. MOORMAN, B.A. (London), Ph.D. (Strassburg), Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Leeds

"In every respect, Sir Thomas More is superior to Cromwell. There is nothing to show that this play was ever published in Elizabethan times; but the original manuscript is preserved in the British Museum and was edited by Dyce for the Shakespeare Society in 1844. The sources of the play, indicated by Dyce, are Hall’s Chronicle, and the biographies of More by his son-in-law, William Roper, and his great-grandson, Cresacre More. The dramatist shows considerable skill in the use of his materials, and the plot, though episodic, approaches much nearer to dramatic unity than that of Cromwell, The interest of the play lies chiefly in the masterly and sympathetic portraiture of the great lord chancellor. The idealism, the winning grace and fine sense of humour, the large humanity and the courage under affliction, which we associate with the name of Sir Thomas More, are admirably brought out. The quotations from Seneca and other Latin writers show that the author was a scholar, and the burden of some of More's speeches reveals a political thinker of no mean calibre. The introduction of the play within the play, together with More’s speeches to the actors and his insertion into their scenes of an extempore speech of his own, is a curious anticipation of Hamlet. But those who attribute portions of the play to Shakespeare base their arguments not upon this, but upon the view that certain scenes are in his handwriting, and that the thought and diction of these scenes is unmistakably Shakespearean. As our knowledge of Shakespeare’s handwriting is limited to five autograph signatures, it is difficult to attach great weight to the theory of Simpson and Spedding that “hand D” in the More MS. is the hand of Shakespeare; and there is also a good deal of difference of opinion among the experts as to how far “hand D” extends. Simpson claimed for it act II, sc. 3 and 4, 1–172; act III, sc. 2 and 3. Subsequent investigators have detached some of these scenes, and the latest opinion—that of G. F. Warner, the keeper of MSS. in the British Museum—is that only act II, sc. 4, 1–172 are in this hand. Since this passage is also that on which the literary claim for Shakespearean authorship mainly rests, a close examination of it is necessary. It tells the story of the insurrection of London citizens against the Lombard merchants settled in their midst, and contains the long and spirited speech with which More quells the riot. The talk of the rioters in the opening lines of the scene resembles, but is inferior to, that of Jack Cade’s followers in Part II of Henry VI (act IV, sc. 2 and 3, and 6–8), and there was more than one dramatist in the last decade of the sixteenth century who, having the Jack Cade episode in mind, might have written these lines. The speech of More which follows is full of vigour, and is of peculiar interest as giving expression to the theory of the divinity of kings, which, in the late Tudor period, had come to be a widely accepted tenet of political faith. “God,” says More,

hath not only lent the king his figure,
His throne and sword, but giv’n him his own name,
Calls him a god on earth. What do you, then,
Rising gainst him that God himself installs,
But rise gainst God? …

"It may be said that a similar view as to the divinity of the royal office is put forward by the aged bishop of Carlisle in Richard II; but can it seriously be contended that this was Shakespeare’s own view? A scorner of democracy, he was far from being a believer in the divinity of kings. He treats the theory with mordant irony in Richard II, placing it on the lips of the hapless king (16) and proving its insufficiency by the remorseless logic of subsequent events. In Henry V, he returns to the same theme, and, in words which give forth no uncertain sound, makes his hero declare: “I think the king is but a man as I am … all his senses have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man.” (17)

"The fact that Sir Thomas More was probably written about the same time as Richard II, and only a few years before Henry V, makes it hard to believe that such varying views as to the nature of the kingly office could have been held by the same man. Nor can escape from the difficulty be found by regarding More’s speech as merely dramatic. It is more than this: it is lyrical in tone and doctrinaire in purpose; and was probably intended to appease the master of the revels, who, when the first draft of the MS. had been submitted to him, had demanded the excision of the whole of the insurrection scene."

(bold-face emphasis added)

__________________

and a different scholar, writing in the same general history work, wrote, below,

(Chapter ) VIII. Shakespeare: Life and Plays.

§ 1. Character of our knowledge about Shakespeare. (of Volume V.)
__________________

By GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M.A., Merton College, Oxford, LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh

__________________

… “We are not quite certain of the identity of Shakespeare’s father; we are by no means certain of the identity of his wife; we do not know, save by inference, that Shakespeare and she ever went through the actual ceremony of marriage; we do not know when he began his dramatic career; we know the actual date of the first production of very few of his pieces, let alone that of their composition. Almost all the commonly received stuff of his life story is shreds and patches of tradition, if not positive dream work. We do not know whether he ever went to school. The early journey to London is first heard of a hundred years after date. The deer stealing reason for it is probably twenty years later. The crystallisation of these and other traditions in Rowe’s biography took place a hundred and forty-six years after the poet’s supposed birth.” ...

while a different Stratfordian scholar, in the same general History, wrote this:

(Chapter ) XI. The Text of Shakespeare.

§ 1. Reasons for reluctance of authors and companies to publish . (of Volume V.)

by Rev. ERNEST WALDER, M.A., Gonville and Caius College, Headmaster of Ockbrook School, Derby (and sections following this one, below)

“THE text of Shakespeare is as uncertain as are the facts of his life. In neither case are we in possession of any real authorities. But, while there is evidence to establish the certainty of some of the incidents in his career, we cannot be sure of the accuracy of a single line in his plays. Not only are we without Shakespeare’s manuscript, but we do not even possess an authorised edition of any play, such as we have of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. The conditions under which plays were produced in the Elizabethan age supply us with two reasons for this, at first sight, extraordinary fact. Shakespeare, like his fellow dramatists, wrote for the stage and not for publication. The playwright’s sole ambition was to see his play on the stage. Hardly any play was published by its author without some apology.”

(emphasis added)
________________________________________

§ 5. Carelessness of Players and Printers.

"The mangled state of the text in the first quartos of Parts II and III of Henry VI, The Merry Wives, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet shows another disintegrating factor at work besides adaptation. Publishers who could not secure a copy of a play by any other means would employ a shorthand writer to report it, while it was being acted. This report, naturally, would be very imperfect; some poetaster would patch it up as best he could, and thus it found its way into print. 7 The numerous mistakes due to imperfect hearing confirm this view of the origin of these texts, such as “tigers of Arcadia” for “tigers of Hyrcania,” “Cophetua” for “Caveto,” etc. (11)

"The first quartos of these plays have been regarded as earlier drafts subsequently revised by the poet. This theory is plausible with regard to The Merry Wives, where the quarto contains passages which evidently do not go back to the same original as the corresponding passages in the folio, and to the two parts of Henry VI, which appear under a different title. But the causes already enumerated are sufficient to account for the state of the quarto text; and, wherever this is admitted to be not only an adaptation of the supposed earlier draft, but a garbled version of the adaptation, it is difficult to see how the question of revision can be fruitfully discussed."

(emphasis added)


________________________________________

§ 6. Lack of evidence making Shakespeare responsible for Corrections or Additions.

“Some critics have held that Shakespeare was responsible for corrections and additions in the folio text of these plays. This assumption leaves out of account two important facts. In certain cases, it is unquestionably the quarto text which has been altered, and which has received additions. Moreover, it is obvious that these changes could not have been made for stage purposes. They must, therefore, have been made with a view to printing the plays; but it is surely inconceivable that Shakespeare should have made these minute corrections without also authorising an edition of the revised plays.”

_____________________________

§ 9. Subsequent history of the Text of Shakespeare.

by Rev. ERNEST WALDER, (as cited above)
______________________

“Special causes for these mistakes are to be found, first, in differences of spelling in vogue in the Elizabethan age, e.g. “antique” and “antick,” “rights” and “rites,” “symboles” and “cymbals.” Again, an uncommon word sometimes caused the substitution of one more usual: “moe” and “more”; “intentively” and “instinctively”; “foysons” and “poisons”; “prescience” and “patience”; “unprevented” and “unprepared.” This practice was a thoroughly characteristic licence at a time when an editor had no hesitation in substituting a word which he considered more suitable to the context—“unprofitable” for “improbable”; “the way to study death” for “the way to dusty death”; “phlegmatick” for “choleric.” Thirdly, contractions commonly used in manuscripts often caused variations in the endings of words: “h’as” and “hath”; wc=which; ye=the; yt=that; yu=thou or you; I=ay; “ignomie” and “ignominy”; “conster” and “construe.” The abbreviation “L.” doubtless accounts for such variations as “liege” and “lord.” Finally, there were the ordinary misprints with which everyone is familiar—due to the dropping out of letters (“contradict” and “contract”; “remuneration” and “remuration”); to the omission of words (“his trusty Thisby’s” Qq, “his Thisby’s” F1, “his gentle Thisby’s” F2 F3 F4); to wrong letters (“Loue” Q1 (Duke of Devonshire’s copy), “Ioue” Q1, “Ioane” F1, F2, “Joan” F3 F4); to wrong punctuation (the first folio reads “Dispatch Enobarbus.” As Enobarbus is not present, the second, third and fourth read “Dispatch Eros.” The right punctuation solves the difficulty: “Dispatch Enobarbus!”); to permutation of letters (“Athica” for “Ithaca”); to repetition of letters (“involverable” F1, “invaluerable” F2 F3 F4, for “invulnerable”). Such is the process by which the text of Shakespeare has been evolved—a process precisely similar to that undergone by any classical text. The quartos and folios represent the work of copyists—that of editing follows. 20 The subsequent history of Shakespeare’s text falls, naturally, into two divisions—a period of conjecture, during which the great bulk of accepted emendations were made, and a period of consolidation, in which a fuller knowledge of the old copies and a firmer grasp of textual principles combined to produce the received text of to-day.”

— Volume V : THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE (1907-21)



So it would seem that the work of the above-cited Stratfordians demolishes the nonsense offered up in the anonymous article at the bullshit site “Oxfraud.”

The pertinent point--which this silly business is probably intended to obscure--is that there is zero independent documentary evidence for the view that the Stratford Shaksper ever wrote anything, never mind whether it was a play, a poem, a sonnet or a letter home to his supposed wife or whether it falls "inside" or "outside" of the presumed "Shakespeare canon." In the matter of the authorship of the play Sir Thomas More it is just as ridiculous to attempt to ascribe this work to William Shaksper as it is to attempt to ascribe any other literary work to him. There is no supporting evidence in either case.

So comparisons of handwriting, of regional dialects and of their rendering on a manuscript page are useless as material by which to try to make up for that signal failing.

While Shaksper didn't write Sir Thomas More, the same evidence which favors--or rather, which establishes -- Edward Oxford as the author of the "William Shakespeare" pen-named works also recommends Oxford as the likely author of Sir Thomas More, and this is for a variety of reasons, some of which are reflected in the excerpts above of essays from Waller and Ward Cambridge History of English Literature.

_______________________

Related reading:

"Hand D and Shakespeare's Unorthodox Literary Paper Trail,"
Price, Diana ; Journal of Early Modern Studies, 2016, Vol.5; p.329 :
Link: http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Oxmyths/MythsHandD.pdf

__________________________

And, from Stephanie Hopkins Hughes' site, "PoliticWorm.com" :

(in 2013!: Did Shakespeare write The Spanish Tragedy? ||
Posted on August 15, 2013

"There they go again! ...

... " Since when, for instance, did the British Library succeed in proving that Hand D in the manuscript “The Play of Sir Thomas More” is in fact Shakespeare’s own? Through what new discovery or process of analysis has this now been determined? The media perps don’t say, of course, probably because they don’t know that neither this nor anything else in any play manuscript is in Shakespeare’s hand because, first, except for this and one or two others in manuscript, there simply aren’t any manuscript plays from that era for comparison; and second, there’s no existing document of any sort confirmed to be in William’s hand with which to compare them even if there were." ...

Don't bruise your head on the wall...

A reminder:

THIS THREAD
is the original continuation of Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?" with, for title. the corrected reference to William Shaksper--thus avoiding the question-begging use of a disputed identitification of the supposedly-authorial name of "William Shakespeare" with the historical fellow-- as he, an apparently illiterate fellow of Stratford-Upon-Avon, left to posterity a mere five barely-legibly-scribbled signatures for his entire written "works " :

Excerpted from Memoirs of the Life and Administration of the Right Honourable William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Secretary of State ... (1828) by Edward Nares

__________________________________________

(Vol. II, pp. 574-75)

______________________

"In the Christmas holidays of this year, 1571, Anne, eldest daughter of Lord Burghley, a young lady of singular accomplishments, was married to the Earl of Oxford. The Queen honoured the marriage with her presence and great hopes seemed to be entertained of its proving a fortunate and happy connexion. Lord Burghley, writing to Sir Francis Walsingham on the very day of the ceremony says, 'I can write no more for lack of leisure, being occasioned at this time to write divers ways, and not unoccupied with feasting my friends at the marriage of my daughter, who is this day married to the Earl of Oxford to my comfort, by reason of the Queen's Majesty, who hath very honourably with her presence and great favour accompanied it.' But his Lordship's expectations were deceived; it was by no means a happy marriage, as we shall have occasion to notice hereafter.--- A circumstance the more to be lamented because the lady had had two other proposals of marriage made to her; first by Sir Henry Sidney for his only son, the very celebrated and highly accomplished Sir Philip Sidney; and secondly by the Earl of Shrewsbury for his son, but which had been declined by Lord Burghley for reasons which will be stated elsewhere. Though we must reserve much of what we have to say of the unworthy husband of this unfortunate Lady, for another place, yet as his character had something in it very peculiar, we shall add the following sketch of it from the interesting work of Miss Aiken, Memoirs of the Court of Elizabeth ---

'Edward, Earl of Oxford, was the seventeenth of the illustrious family of Vere who had borne that title; his character presented an extraordinary union of the haughtiness, violence, and impetuosity of the feudal Baron, with many of the elegant propensities and mental accomplishments which adorn the Nobleman of a happier age. It was, probably, to his travels in Italy that he owed his more refined taste both in literature and in luxury; and it was thence that he brought those perfumed and embroidered gloves which he was the first to introduce into England*; a superb pair which he presented to her Majesty, were so much approved by her that she sat for her portrait with them on her hands. This Earl enjoyed, in his own times, a high poetic reputation; but his once celebrated comedies have perished, and two or three fugitive pieces, inserted in collections, are the only legacy bequeathed to posterity by his Muse. In the chivilrous exercises of the tilt and tournament, the Earl of Oxford had few superiors; he was victor in the justs (i.e. 'jousts') both of this year (1571) and of the year 1580, when he was led by two ladies into the presence-chamber, all armed as he was, to receive a prize from her Majesty's own hand.' (1)

But we must have done with this Noble Lord for the present." ...

_______________________________

* See more Aiken, ii. 6, 7; (John) Strype's Annals, ii. 178, 179; and Peck's Desiderata Curiosa, vol. i., 27
Also Nares, Vol. III, Chap. V., pp. 76-79 and Strype's Annals, ii., Part ii., pp.179-80.

(1) Aiken, Lucy Memoirs of the Court of Elizabeth, (1818) London: Longman, Hurst, Rus, Orme, Brown & Green. Paternoster Row. (in two volumes).
______________________________

We're forced to suppose that either William Cecil intervened against the wishes of his daughter, Anne, in declining the marriage proposals of both Sir Henry Sidney (on behalf of his son, Sir Philip) and that of the Earl of Shrewsbury (on behalf of his son) or, failing that, she herself was not favorably inclined to these proposals of marriage and, as I think it is most likely, her father was not disposed to insist on a marriage which did not have her own full consent.

There are many criticisms which could be fairly laid against William Cecil--and they even include imposing his own selfish will, on occasion, on his children or grand-children. But there is no clear example of his ever having imposed on one of his own children a marriage which was against their own felt desires. So, I think that it is practically certain that Anne knew and preferred Edward for husband, having spent years in close company with Edward, his having grown up in the Cecil household from the age of about eleven or twelve. The same, obviously, would go for Cecil, who, if he did not by this time have a very good basis on which to know and judge his future son-in-law, could have no one but himself to blame for it.

As for Edward and his desires, I think that he had a rather good and clear awareness of Anne's father's short-comings and, despite them, he married her because he genuinely cared for her as she seems to have for him.

Edward Nares' biography of Cecil could not be more fulsomely flattering if Cecil himself had dictated it to Nares. We can be sure that, in all the derogatory remarks levelled at the Earl of Oxford, Nares is giving us not the views of Burghley as he found his son-in-law on the wedding day of his daughter, Anne, but as Burghley eventually and later came to regard Oxford: no longer the tractable, dependent and obedient youth but now a grown man, having come into his titles and lands with full legal effect, able to determine his own ways for himself and his new wife.

With, on one hand, a man like Burghley, immensely driven, full cunning and of stop-at-nothing political ambition, full of pride of titles and money and material possessions, and, on the other, Oxford, born into nobility, with everything Cecil could not at first take for granted, and with little personal concern for offices, for wealth, or prestige, these being his automatically, he cared about honor and about tradition and about the arts in which his genius flourished. Burghley not only didn't have these, he could not, with all his later-gained wealth, even purchase them and this was bound to lead to stress, strain, friction and conflict.

Oxford had little reason to envy or feel jealous of the person or place of his father-in-law. While Cecil, on the other hand, could easily have regarded Oxford with a certain envy. For Oxford was fully and naturally at ease, as only one born with them can be, with all the things which Cecil had to struggle and fight to obtain and to keep. Once grown, Oxford was bound to come to understand this about his father-in-law.

Laurence Nowell's letter to Burghley is available to read here (in both the original Latin and an English translation) at the site published by Nina Green, Oxford-Shakespeare

Just as Bernard M. Ward made clear in his work on Oxford, Edward De Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604 From Contemporary Documents (1928) , (at page 20 of the book's pagination), the context of the letter makes Nowell's meanings perfectly clear:

… ”His (Oxford’s) tutor at Cecil House was Lawrence Nowell (also spelled “Laurence”), Dean of Lichfield, brother of the learned Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Pauls. In June 1563 Lawrence Nowell wrote a letter to Lord Burghley, drawing his attention to the slip-shod manner in which the cartographers and geographers of England were doing their work. 'I have, moreover, noticed,' he writes, 'that those writers who have taken up the work of describing the geography of England have not been satisfactory to you in any way'; the reason being, 'That without any art or judgment ... they jumble up together haphazard in their maps imaginary sites of localities.' He goes on to ask Lord Burghley that to him may be entrusted the task of compiling an accurate map because ‘I can see that my work for the Earl of Oxford cannot be much longer required.’ (2)*
__________________________________
(2) Landsdowne MSS., No. 6. Item 54 (Latin)

__________________________________________________

It is patently absurd to argue, as some proponents of the Stratford view of Shake-speare authorship do, that Nowell is informing Burghley that his tutoring of Oxford has produced little or nothing in a successful outcome and that, now, Nowell is ready and asking for Burghley's aid in getting a next assignment to a desired task.

This idiotic and flatly dishonest ruse of an argument would have us believe that Nowell is writing to Burghley, in effect,

"my dear colleague and good friend, I hope you'll intervene to ensure that some new work comes my way: namely, that of correcting and improving on the slip-shod work of our contemporary geographers' descriptions of England in some of their recent maps, for, you see, it is now clear to me that, in the present work you entrusted to me—tutoring our Lord Oxenforde—well, in this I have made so little progress that there remains now nothing more worth attempting toward his education."

This is clearly a nonsense construction of Nowell's meaning. We know that not only from anyone's plain common-sense reading, we know it as well from the fact that, in the course of centuries of scholarship on these matters, there is not and there never has been a single competent Latinist who has advanced and defended such a ridiculous construction of Nowell's words.

Those who claim otherwise ought, to prove that they are not shameless liars, cite the Latin scholar who does or who has defended such a view.




________________________

* foot-note (2) as in the original text’s references

ETA 30 August 2019 :

Gray's Inn Admission Register : 1521 - 1887

(from page 36)

Right column:

Folio 563

1566. JER. PIERREPOINT

1566-7. EDWARD VERE (Earl of Oxford).
(Feb, 1).

" ROGER BODENHAM.

" WILLIAM ALCOCKE.

" ROBERT MOYLE.

" ROBERT BRACKYN.

" JOHN ELLIS.

" EDMUND EVENDEN.

" THOMAS BUTLER (Earl of Ormond and Ossory), (Mar. 7),

from The Register of Admissions to Gray's Inn, 1521-1889, Together with the Register of Marriages
in Gray's Inn Chapel, 1695-1754 by Joseph Foster,

London, Privately printed by The Hansard Publishing Union, Limited, Great Queen Street, 1889.
______________________________________________________________

Sam Harris interviews comedian Ricky Gervais. Toward the interview's end, Harris poses his series of stock questions put to each of his guests:

Harris: (Q:) (@ time-marker 02 hrs, 03 mins. : 42 secs. into the interview) "What's most worries you about our collective future?" ...

Gervais: ..."of all the things we've talked about--freedom of speech and opportunity and ego and--dying--the thing that makes my blood boil more than ever now is injustice.... I watched all these documentaries on Netflicks...and it's so frustrating. And it comes back to all those things we talked about--equality and being maligned for something that isn't your fault and being--it comes down to injustice; and that's why rights are so important. And that's why freedom of speech--fuck me!, if ever there was a sacred cow, it's that one.

Harris : ... Well for me it's--I refer to it as the "master variable" because it is the only mechanism we have to 'course-correct'. If there's something we can't talk about then there's this whole area of human-error where our 'map' doesn't fit the 'territory' anymore and we can't figure any of that out--because we can't talk about it." ...

..."For those studying historical cultures, letters seem to promise a unique kind of access to the lives and thoughts of the past."

______________

-- James Daybell & Andrew Gordon, from the Introduction to Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (2016) Univ. of Pennsylvania Press; p. 1
______________

... "Who would read through (Samuel) Harsnet's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures just to give a few devil's names Flibbertigibbet or Hoppididance?"

_____________

--G. K. Hunter, from "Shakespeare's Reading," in (Kenneth Muir & S. Schoenbaum, (eds.)) A New Companion to Shalespeare Studies (1971) Cambridge University Press; p. 66
_____________

... "There are echoes of Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, not only in King Lear, but also in The Tempest. David Kaula has recently argued42 that Shakespeare echoed a whole series of pamphlets in the arch-priest controversy--I find this hard to believe." ..,.
______________

--Kenneth Muir, from the Introduction to The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1977; Methuen & Co., Ltd; and (reprint) Abingdon, Oxon, 2005; Routledge Library Series--Shakespeare, Taylor & Francis Group. p. 8
_______________

... "Exactly why (Alberico) Gentili chose to initiate a correspondence, in Latin, with (John) Rainolds remains unsolved; he may have been a close friend of (William) Gager's, but no evidence supports this. Perhaps he felt duty bound to defend a fellow lawyer and member of Oxford (University) ...
_______________

--Leon Markowicz, from "Latin Correspondence by Alberico Gentili and John Rainolds on Academic Drama" (Latin translations with introduction by Leon Markowicz) in Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 68, (1977)
_______________

The following summary is based on facts and information drawn from David Kaula's (2015) Shakespeare and the Archpriest Controversy: A Study of some New Sources; Studies In English Literature series, volume 85 (De Gruyter Mouton; Berlin, Boston, New York) and other sources, as noted :

(pp. 4-5) (quoting or paraphrasing Markowicz)
____________

"Alberico Gentili came to London, arriving sometime in August of 1580 with letters of introduction to -->Giambatisto Castiglione (of Milan) who (in turn) introduced Gentili to --> Sir Philip Sydney (&) to --> Sidney's uncle, the Earl of Leicester, and to --> Dr. Tobie Matthews, Vice chancellor of Oxford and later Bishop of Durham and Archbishop of York."

With Matthews' help "Alberico came to Oxford in late November or early December, 1580 with Leicester's letter of recommendation" (to a teaching post there) ....

Having passed some time living in England, Gentili, in the summer of 1586, left England to go to Wittenberg. Later that same year, in November, Elizabeth I appointed Gentili to the post of Regius Professor of law at Oxford university. Gentili returns to London in 1600 and, on August 14 of that year, he is admitted to membership at Gray's Inn, (Inns of Court).

In volume II of Anthony a Wood's Athenae Oxonienses (reprint, 1815, Bliss, (ed.)) Wood describes Gentili as, at his death, "the most noted and famous civilian, and the greatest ornament of the universe of his time," (p. 90, Vol. II - "Alberico Gentili")

These factors combined strongly suggest that it is beyond reasonable doubt that Edward Oxford was well acquainted with Gentili. Both men were members of Gray's Inn inns of court; Gentili arrived in London from Italy where he'd been a noted writer and teacher on the law. Oxford had traveled around Italy only two to three years before Gentili's coming to London, visiting Milan, among other places. Oxford was, of course, well acquainted with Sir Philip Sydney, spoke and read Italian, and would have been interested to know anyone with Gentili's personal and professional profile.

The so-called "archpriest *(or "Appellant") controversy" (1598-1602) itself was the concern of a relatively tiny segment of important society--religious people, clerics of the Catholic church and the Church of England, and, with them, others, key lay people and nobility in important offices in Elizabeth's court and official government and other interested members of the nobility; these made up a minority within a minority of society's lay or religious activists and elite. The controversy played out, in its publicly visible phase, in the form of published pamphlets through which two principal groups, known in shorthand as "jesuits" versus "seculars", though both groups were, mainly, active clergy disputing where, by whom and how authority over Catholic clergy in England could and ought to be exercised. The details of the dispute are part of highly interested groups' power relations. For the vast majority of the public in England, this controversy was hardly known. Even many in the Church of England's own clergy observed it as a bizarre internecine affair which did not concern them at all directly. It also concerned the issue of the church's proper attitude toward dramatic theatre, staged plays--with Rainolds arguing that all play-acting, whether amateur (academically-produced) or "professional" (which, then, would have been even more damnable to a conservative clergyman) was ruinous to the souls of players and audience alike.

So, why should Gentili have become interested and involved? Perhaps because, among his circle of important and influential friends was a certain Edward Oxenforde, fellow member of Gray's Inn, sometime patron of his own company of actors, poet, playwright (known for his plays staged at court) and in so many ways, (Latinist, lover of song, poetry, music and the arts in general, a humanist, a master of languages and astute historian of Italy, continental Europe and the worlds of classical Greece and Rome) these men would have shared many interests and passions. And, for all these reasons, they'd have been certain to have known each other well over years of acquaintance within and outside the court of Elizabeth the First.

The issues involved in the Archpriest controversy concerned those in power and their power-relations and especially their particular religious interests and affiliations--whether in these were with the Catholic church and its clergy in England, on the continent of Europe and at Rome, or were important members of protestant society in Elizabeth's court and councils--those for whom the relations between Catholic teachers and clergy and the English nobility and professional classes counted as a factor in their exercise of influence and privilege.


_______________________________________________

* David Kaula, (p. 9) The Archpriest Controversy: A Study of Some New Sources :

Between May of 1601 and November of 1602 the seculars "mangaged to produce eighteen pamphlets" ; sixteen in English, 2 in Latin (to the Pope & Roman Inquisition), all but one of them (Paris) printed in London.

Both of the opposing groups were composed mainly of clergymen. "The 'seculars' were a minority among the approximately 300 secular priests then in England working on the underground mission or biding their time in prison." (p. 4, Introduction, D. Kaula)

" 'Jesuits', committed to the Counter-Reformation, included : Edmund Campion (1540-1581), Robert Southwell (1561-1595), (Robert) Persons (1546-1610), Friar (Henry) Garnet (1555-1606) & Friar (John) Gerard (1564-1637)

"Seculars", also known as the "Appellants" group, were opposed to the appointment of Father George Blackwell (1545-1613) as "archpriest to oversee the mission in England" (Wikipedia) four years after the death of Cardinal William Allen in 1594. Their leading figures were Christopher Bagshaw and Thomas Bluet.

____________________________

Related reading:

@ LT: Catholic-Protestant Controversy and the Shakespearean Stage, (2012) (doctoral thesis) by Daniel C. Cattell, Exeter University, U.K.

... "Suppose we abandon all attempts at description and turn our attention to the origins of this curious impression of unity which meets us in the classics,* in eighteenth-century literature and elsewhere. When we do this, various possibilities present themselves, some of which can be speedily eliminated. Language, or to be more precise, the more obvious elements of linguistic usage, would appear to be largely irrelevant. La Princesse de Clèves makes use of the same vocabulary and the same classical French syntax as Les Liaisons Dangereuses; yet there is a world of difference between the impressions produced by the two books. On the other hand, Pantagruel and the Moriae Encomium, written the first in French, the second in Latin, belong manifestly together. Form in its broader aspects is similarly unimportant. The sonnets of Mallarmé have more in common with the free verse of Laforgue than they have with the sonnets of Du Bellay or Ronsard. The impression gained by the reader cannot be associated with the utilisation of a particular genre or group of genres: It seems to attach itself, like some pervasive scent, to every kind of writing within a period. It derives not from the literary forms themselves, which we may find elsewhere used with a different impact, not from niceties of construction, metaphors, epithets or tricks of speech, but rather from the kind of choice which is made with regard to each of these separate elements of style. It is the perfume of the personality behind the writing.

"A work of art reflects the landscape of its creator's mind. It enshrines some aspects of his sensibility, some of his attitudes to experience. The picture it gives is incomplete. A single poem or even a group of poems never contains more than a sample of the poet's mental world. But at the same time it never adds successfully to the content of that world from alien sources. The personality of the creative artist sets the limits within which his art can move. (emphasis added)

"What is true of art applies more or less to all forms of writing. The limiting factor is always the mind of the writer. But the human mind bears the stamp of society. It is moulded by the education, the language, the experience which each individual shares with a larger or smaller group of his contemporaries. Man is culturally conditioned; and those indefinable common characteristics, which we note for example in all the productions of the eighteenth century, are nothing else than the reflection at the level of creative activity of the coherent eighteenth century culture pattern.

"This relationship between literature and culture is of primary importance for our purposes; and we shall do well to take a closer look at the concepts involved. Many of them are self-explanatory, but they need to be kept in mind. Each society has its own way of life, its particular apparatus of practical and intellectual techniques. Some of these techniques may be the private endowment of individuals, but most are held in common, either in the sense that they are used simultaneously by a great number, or in the sense that they are handed down from generation to generation for the performance of specific tasks. In a tribe, this common stock of cultural techniques is shared by nearly everybody. Where we have a large society, made up of several distinct social groups, each group has of course its own stock and the several traditions merge more or less successfully into an overall pattern." ...

_______________________________

--R. R. Bolgar, from The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries, (1954) Cambridge University Press; pp. 14-15: Chapter I: "The Background" (1)

__________

(Chapter I, Section II: "The Educational Inheritance")

"The road to the classical heritage has always lain through the schools. Classical Greek and Latin are not easy languages to master; and the fact that since the Dark Ages they have been learnt for the most part from books has added substantially to the labour involved. To toil through a grammar unsupported demands a degree of will-power, zeal and efficiency which very few possess. Most people perform that arid task best with help and under compulsion. So we find that at all periods the majority of those who came to know something about the classics started young and, even if they later became great scholars through their private efforts, acquired the beginnings of their competence through the daily routine of the class-room: which makes that routine of primary importance.

"The first evidence we have about how Latin was taught comes in the writings of the scholars who worked in the Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian schools; and there we meet a reasonably comprehensive curriculum, effective text-books and well-planned techniques of instruction. But neither the curriculum, nor the methods, are original. ...

"We know next to nothing about the schools of the Dark Ages except that they were very sparse on the ground. Small groups of teachers in the Italian towns probably kept alive to some extent the learning of their ancestors. But they were not sufficiently numerous, nor sufficiently active, to justify our regarding them as the main channel through which Roman pedagogic ideas were transmitted to the ninth century. Books undoubtedly played a much more important part than this uncertain verbal tradition." (pp. 26-27, ibid)
___________________

____________________

* my note: i.e. what is commonly regarded as the literary works of classical Greece (or Greek, esp. 5th c. B.C. Athens) or Rome, in its Republican or imperial periods ( or Latin, esp. the writers of Latin works from roughly 75 B.C. to the Third century, A.D.)

NOTES
(1) page references above and hereafter are to the 1973 paperback reprint edition of Cambridge University Press.

... "letters exchanged in Shakespeare's day ... give the clearest idea of how relative social positioning affected language and style in ways that have been seldom discussed. Few studies of Shakespeare's language have tried to read the dialogue within the historical context of verbal exchange in early modern England: 'historicizing' Shakespeare's language is usually confined to glossing word meanings or, in the more specialized work of linguists, mapping grammatical shifts. Nonetheless, this study does not read Elizabethan letters merely as a background for Shakespeare's plays, as contexts for 'the text.' My point is not to show that Shakespeare's artistry builds up complex structures out of more primitive verbal forms such as as letters but to show that Shakespeare's prized artistry partakes of the sophisticated social creativity on display in the Elizabethan language of letter-writing. (pp. 3-4) ...

"Shakespeare assimilated" ... "a historically situated complexity and eloquence that has been largely neglected in the formalist study of Shakespeare's stylistic artistry." (p. 1)

"I use" ... "a comparative study of the theory and practice of Elizabethan letter-writing" ... "to learn to read the socially situated verbal interaction of his time." (p. 1)

"The significance of Erasmus's treatise "On the Writing of Letters" (De conscribendis epistolis), ... "goes beyond the immediate goal of teaching letter-writing. The world he represents, like the Elizabethan court, is a world of vertical relations, in which one is almost always negotiating one's position within a graduated hierarchy, and all the while reproducing forms of symbolic domination and subordination that reinforce the hierarchy." (p. 3)

____________

Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, (1999) Cambridge University Press. from the Introduction, pp. 1-14

In Elizabethan letter-writing, according to Erasmus, the letters' topical points and "the relative position(ing) of the addressor and the addressee"---their "relative ages, temperaments, moods, wealth, education and a multitude of other factors" "primarily determine" ... "the language of the letter. For Angel Day*, in The English Secretary, the language of the letter is also a function of relative positioning but primarily determined by the social superiority or inferiority of the addressee. Day " (cited parts here are from p. 3, Magnusson ibid)

If so, fine. But we cannot "fit" the known documented facts about William Shaksper of Stratford into such a social setting. There is no documented support for such a view and simply no place for the author's mistakenly supposed identity, this William Shaksper, in it. On the other hand, everything we know about him testifies to the way in which the person and profile of Edward, Earl of Oxford (Edward Oxenforde) responds to this picture of social hierarchy and these find their counterpart aspects in the poetry and the plays written by Oxford under one, the most illustrious of several, of his pen-names: "William Shake-speare."

As happens again and again, some scholar's insights into the works ascribed to "Shakespeare" reveal to us, to the extent to which they are remarkably good ones, things which, on inspection, invalidate the reasoning by which other less insightful scholars presuppose William Shaksper of Stratford-Upon-Avon's authorship even as these same insights reinforce the claim to the identity of the works' author as none other than Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

...
"On the way to Manchester, I stopped at Stratford-on-Avon, a place I had never visited. I arrived late Saturday night, and after supper took a walk, hoping to find Shakespeare's cottage. The night was pitch-black but instinctively i turned down a street and stopped outside a house, lit a match and saw a sign: 'Shakespeare's Cottage'. No doubt a kindred spirit had led the way--possibly the Bard!

"In the morning Sir Archibald Flower, the mayor of Stratford, called at the hotel and conducted me over Shakespeare's cottage. I can by no means associate the Bard with it; that such a mind ever dwelt or had its beginnings there, seems incredible. It is easy to imagine a farmer's boy emigrating to London and becoming a successful actor and theatre-owner; but for him to have become the great poet and dramatist, and to have such knowledge of foreign courts, cardinals and kings, in inconceivable to me. I am not concerned with who wrote the works of Shakespeare, whether Bacon, Southampton, or Richmond, but I can hardly think it was the Stratford boy. Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude. His utter disregard for grammar could only have been the attitude of a princely, gifted mind. And after seeing the cottage and hearing the scant bits of local information concerning his desultory boyhood, his indifferent school record*, his poaching and his country bumpkin point of view, I cannot believe he went through such a mental metamorphosis as to become the greatest of all poets. In the work of the greatest geniuses(,) humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere--but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare." ** ...

_______________

--Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography 1964, London, the Bodley Head, Publishers; 1966 & 1973, Harmondsworth, Middlesex; Penguin Books, Ltd. pp. 358-59

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* There is no 'school record' of any kind concerning this fellow! No document attests to his ever having spent as much as an hour in any educational establishment. All comment to the contrary is sheer fable or conjecture.

** Chaplin's point bears clarifying: in the work of the greatest geniuses(,) humble beginnings (had there ever been any such) will reveal themselves somewhere--but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare. (Emphasis and punctuation added.)

notes & excerpts from the Preface to Don Cameron Allen's Mysteriously Meant : The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance, Baltimore, 1970 Johns Hopkins Press.

___________________________

(my summarization here)
(I)

for Plutarch, "allegory" ----> "the sense beneath", that is, the underlying sense or the Greek's 'hyponoia'

for Cicero, allegory ----> "translatio"

and (from Rhetorica Ad Herennium) -----> "permutatio"

for Demetrius of Phaleron,

"allegory" ----> "hyponooumenon" ("something that hides the real meaning")

for Quintilian, "allegory" ----> "inversio" ("to mean something more than (or absolutely opposite to) what the words suggest" (also) ----> "ironia", "illusio".

"As definite as Quintilian is about the meaning of 'allegory,' he is indefinite about 'enigma' and 'symbol.' For him, 'symbol' is 'nota' and 'enigma' is 'obscure allegory'. ... When these ancients talk about something more obscure than the clear literal, or something obscure in the literal, they use 'mystery,' 'enigma,' and 'hyponoia' with about the same emphasis. ... Although the Renaissance most frequently used 'symbol' in the legal sense, when it employed the word otherwise, it thought of it as a motionless (i.e. static) 'sign' which the eye transfers to the brain for an agreed meaning that had been established by a long literary or theological tradition. One could not invent a symbol. Allegory which made use of symbols the way a noun uses adjectives had wider possibilities and could be invented by an artist or found by the interpreter." ... (pp. viii-ix)

(II)

"A half dozen years ago in Image and Meaning, and to a certain extent in the earlier The Harmonious Vision, I attempted to demonstrate that some understanding of what the Renaissance knew about allegory and symbol might help modern readers understand the poetry of that period. ... I also felt that modern man, who has abandoned allegory and invented his own private symbols, might not easily understand an imaginative mind of three centuries ago unless he knew its traditional symbolism. I hoped to establish a balance between the modern readers of this literature who insist that its meaning is superficial and nothing more and those free-wheeling interpreters ignorant of tradition who concoct inadequate and absurd readings of their own."

...

"In the course of the following chapters I have attempted to explain how the arguments of the apologists of the first four centuries were revived by men of the Renaissance, eager to find Christian theology and sacred history in pagan documents. With the discovery of the allegorical and symbolic readings of Homer written by his Greek apologists, men of the sixteenth century were given new reason to take up the deeper reading of Virgil, Ovid, and the mythology which had been passed on to them by medieval men." (pp. ix-x)

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Notes from Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, Irving Louis Horowitz, (ed.), New York, 1963, Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 8: Culture and Politics
_________________________

... (IV) "The Underdeveloped Country as you know, is one in which the focus of life is necessarily opon economic subsistence; " ... (p. 240)

"But consider now the major clue to our condition, to the shape of the overdeveloped society in The Fourth Epoch. In modern industrial society the means of economic production are developed and centralized, as peasants and artisans are replaced by private corporations and government industries. ... (p. 244)

(VII)

"In the overdeveloped society, where is the intelligensia that is carrying on the big discourse of the Western world and whose work as intellectuals is influential among parties and publics and relevant to the great decisions of our time? Where are the mass media open to such men? Who among those in charge of the two-party state and its ferocious military machines are alert to what goes on in the world of knowledge and reason and sensibility? Why is the free intellect so divorced from decisions of power? Why does there now prevail among men of power such a higher and irresponsible ignorance?

"In The Fourth Epoch, must we not face the possibility that the human mind as a social fact might be deteriorating in quality and cultural level, and yet not many would notice it because of the overwhelming accumulation of technological gadgets? Is not that the meaning of rationality without reason? Of human alienation? Of the absence of any role for reason in human affairs? The accumulation of gadgets hides these meanings: those who use them do not understand much else. That is why we may not, without great ambiguity, use technological abundance as the index of human quality and cultural progress." ...

(VIII)

"To formulate any problem requires that we state the values involved and the threat to these values." ... (p. 245)

“I am 'Richard II'. Know ye not that?”

-- Elizabeth I, cited by William Lambarde.

____________________________________

Queen Margaret:
...
"Say Warwick was our anchor; what of that?
And Montague our topmost; what of him?
Our slaughter'd friends the tackles; what of these?
Why, is not Oxford here another anchor?
And Somerset another goodly mast?
The friends of France our shrouds and tacklings? "
...
— Henry VI Part III (V, iv)

____________________________________

Iul:
Ah Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Denie thy Father, and refuse thy name,
Or if thou wilt not be but sworne my loue,
And il'e no longer be a Capulet.

Rom:
Shall I heare more, or shall I speake to this?

Iul:
Tis but thy name that is mine enemie.
Whats Mountague? It is nor hand nor foote,
Nor arme, nor face, nor any other part.
Whats in a name? That which we call a Rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet:
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo cald,
Retaine the diuine perfection he owes:
Without that title Romeo part thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee,
Take all I haue.

Rom:
I take thee at thy word,
Call me but loue, and il'e be new Baptisde,
Henceforth I neuer will be Romeo.

Iu:
What man art thou, that thus beskrind in night,
Doest stumble on my counsaile?

Ro:
By a name I know not how to tell thee.
My name deare Saint is hatefull to my selfe,
Because it is an enemie to thee.
Had I it written I would teare the word.

Iul:
My eares haue not yet drunk a hundred words
Of that tongues vtterance, yet I know the sound:
Art thou not Romeo and a Mountague?

Ro:
Neyther faire Saint, if eyther thee displease.

Iu:
How camst thou hether, tell me and wherfore?
The Orchard walles are high and hard to clime,
And the place death considering who thou art,
If any of my kinsmen finde thee here.

Ro:
By loues light winges did I oreperch these wals,
For stonie limits cannot hold loue out,
And what loue can doo,that dares loue attempt,
Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.

Iul:
If they doe finde thee they will murder thee.

Ro:
Alas there lies more perrill in thine eyes,
Then twentie of their swords, looke thou but sweete,
And I am proofe against their enmitie.
...

— Romeo and Juliet, (First Quarto text)

______________________________________________

Catherine Grace Canino, with her Shakespeare and the Nobility: The Negotiation of Lineage, 2007 (Cambridge University Press) and Penny McCarthy, with her Pseudonymous Shakespeare: Rioting Language in the Sidney Circle, 2006 (Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot, Hampshire & Burlington, Vermont) have each in their own ways offered us examples of how fascinating can be the spectacle of clever scholarship which reveals an abundance of insight into various matters while, at the same time, failing miserably to see and understand some of the most important implications of the insights--their key import.

Unwittingly, Canino and McCarthy also illustrate what is happening and in all probability shall continue to happen in the scholarly work on "Shakespeare" and his times: The Stratfordian Shakespeare-scholars or those who tread the same ground in search of other related things, are going to "back their way into" a "discovery" of, a "revelation" of, Edward Oxford as the true author of the work attributed to "William Shakespeare." But that is a "discovery", "revealed" already by other scholars long, long ago.

Canino, in particular, and McCarthy, to a somewhat lesser extent, though with no less interesting results, have in effect "stumbled" upon the "body" of the true author of "Shakespeare"'s works and tell us a great many interesting things in detail about the person--all completely without any direct or avowed recognition of this "body" being that of none other than Edward De Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford.

These studies are very interesting and very important contributions to their fields of scholarship. They show how scholars who are apparently Stratfordian are, almost despite themselves, actually turning to some interesting angles of investigation and coming up with findings that point directly to Edward Oxford as a personality and author. No one interested in the literary history of Tudor and Jacobean England or interested in the work attributed to the pen-name "William Shakespeare" and the person, the real author, behind that pen-name can afford to leave these texts unread. These are both fascinating texts and that is not least because it seems that neither author fully appreciates or understands who the real author of the work under review, as their studies suggest him to have been, in fact was and exactly how and why that is the case.

For all we can tell from their bibliographies and citations, neither Canino nor McCarthy indicates any familiarity with the work of J. Thomas Looney (Shakespeare Identified (1920)) or of Charlton Ogburn Jr (The Mysterious William Shakespeare (1983)) whose names, like that of Edward de Vere, are never mentioned* and who preceded Canino and McCarthy by 86 to 87 years in the first instance and by 23 to 24 years in the second instance.

Reading them, I'm reminded of the old joke—old when I heard it while still in college years and years ago—in which a potential editor/publisher is writing a letter to an author declining to accept the auhor's work for publication which ran,

"Your book is both interesting and original. Unfortunately, the parts which are interesting are not original and the parts which are original are not interesting."

We need vary that only slightly to highlight the trouble with McCarthy's and Canino's work:

The parts which are most interesting are not only not original, they do not lend support to the view that William Shaksper of Stratford was the real author; on the contrary, whether our scholars recognize it or not, they support the case for Edward Oxford as author writing under a pen-name.

Canino, to her credit, points out a number of questions which have gone unasked by their Stratfordian colleagues in Shakespearean literary criticism and, unlike them, she poses these questions. The results of this are the best part of her book. But Oxfordian scholars had already posed these questions or, if they didn't pose them expressly, they are and they were entirely implied as a given part of their expositions about the author of the work attributed to "William Shakespeare."

There's a very interesting question which Canino asks—correction—doesn't ask:

If the characteristics of the authorial profile I present is correct, how do I fit the Stratfordian "William Shakespeare" into that profile?

from McCarthy, Penny : Pseudonymous Shakespeare: Rioting Language in the Sidney Circle (2006), Ashgate.
___________________________________

(Preface) "My study runs so counter to most interpretations of English literary works of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century that it was not easy to consult anyone." (p. ix)

...

"This is a study of a particular pseudonym, R.L., found in or attached to diverse works written and published between 1575 and 1601. The question posed is whether this pseudonym could attach to one particular author, and the answer given is that it does. It is equally an investigation into sixteenth-century modes of 'indirection.' The pursuit of R. L. provides the narrative line on which to hang the devices used by early modern English writers to perplex and mislead their readers while simultaneously offering them the clues to solve the enigmas posed. I claim that he (i.e. "R. L.") is someone in whose biography many have been interested, and whose works are still generally admired. (xiii)

...

"I follow R. L.'s identity as it transmorgrifies into other authorial pseudonyms--A. W. Humphrey King and some others. There is one name that hovers doubtfully between pseudonym and real name: 'William Smith' straddles the literary and the real worlds. Other nicknames for R. L. are ones used by his contemporaries to refer to him. These covert references are mined in the poetry of George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, Robert Armin, Ben Jonson, John Davies of Hereford and some others. Prose works of Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, William Covell, William Kemp and John Harrington are also found to be a fruitful source of covert reference, as are the dedicatory poems, prose prefaces, epigraphs and marginalia. The investigation extends into works published in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Some of these were genuine seventeenth-century compositions; but others, it is argued, were written long before they were published, and are essentially sixteenth-century works.

"As the roll-call of names may suggest, the Sidney circle looms large in this enquiry. This is widely understood to comprise Philip Sidney and his sister Mary Sidney (later Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke), and the writers enjoying their patronage and that of their powerful uncle, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Its contours will be somewhat redefined here; and not one, but two great poets will be added to it.

"R. L. was in this coterie. The secrecy of the shrouding of this fact was necessitated in part by the scandal of his low birth and cross-class liasons, in part by the 'dangerous' politics. The poetry of the Earl of Leicester's protégés is saturated with covert anti-Elizabethan sentiment, as I shall show. Shared terms of reference and sleights of hand learned from each other meant that much was left opaque in the work of Sidnean writers, intended to be deciphered only by 'understanders' (initiates)--those in the inner circle. My aim is to put modern readers in the position of that inner circle, rather than that of benighted outsiders.

"For the purposes of this study, the subtext--that which is concealed under the bland surface of the text--is the important text. This does not involve ignoring what each work appears to be 'about'--what its matter is--but it does pay particular attention to what it is 'about'--what its designs on us are. Accordingly, I pay much attention to puns, for they are a prime means of masking an author's intent: it requires an act of attention on the reader's part to notice their presence.

"Censorship is another useful hermeneutic tool in the study. It is treated as a potential marker of a concealed meaning that 'authority' of whatever kind, was attempting to suppress. I draw into its orbit those texts that the Stationers' Company stipulated should be 'lawfully authorized' before publication, even if publication was not long delayed. This was an unusual demand, and has a particular implication, I shall argue." (xiv-xv)

(Envoi)

"If each and every one of the Supposes (i.e. suppositions) argued for in this book were correct, there would be effects of various kinds on scholarship in various fields of early modern studies. I shall sketch here what I think would be the main ones, without assuming that the final picture will turn out to be exactly as I have described," ...

"My study has elevated the notion of coterie and patronage to a central position with great explanatory potential; and it is from these two notions that an assessment of the effects should start. I have implied the need for new criteria for identifying a coterie circle or a sphere of patronage, which in turn implies slightly altered understandings of coteries' (and patronage's) effects, whether one is working in the purely literary field, the paraliterary, the social, the political, historical or biographical." ...

..."My study may contribute to the discussion on authorial revision; alter the conception of the growth of Shakespeare's reputation; extend and alter the notion of coterie names. The concept of authoring a work will be affected, as will the interpretation of particular authors, markedly so in the case of Shakespeare, Nashe, and Spenser; to a lesser degree in the case of Gascoigne, Greene, Marlowe, Lyly, Harvey, Chapman; diminishing further with Harington, Holinshed, Jonson, and so for all the other writers whom I have suspected of referring to R. L. R. L. himself will need consideration as an author previously unknown to criticism (or known only piecemeal), and as Shakespeare's juvenile self. (p. 215)

...

"The centrality of the Dudley/Sidney coterie to sixteenth-century literary culture has of course long been recognized. ...

"What has been underestimated is the impact that belonging to a coterie has on the literary practice of its members. While some punning, some contemporary reference encoded in classical names, some point to the use of a source or a classical allusion, some teasing and satirizing of fellow writers, has been 'seen and allowed' in modern criticism, the tricks and encoding of persons have not been seen as the almost ubiquitous phenomena they were." (p. 216)
...

Note: (parenthetical italics) are my own additions, clarifications; other parenthetical remarks are in the original text.
__________________________________________
__________________________________________

from Canino, Catherine Grace: Shakespeare and the Nobility: The Negotiation of Lineage, (2007) Cambridge University Press.
________________________________________

… "The centrality of family to early modern societal structure has long been understood by anthropologists but was only studied seriously by historians in the later part of the twentieth century. The most influential historical work on the early modern family is Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, which argues that the early modern family was distinguished by distance and deference, lacking even the most basic attachment of maternal devotion.(5) Stone's assertions have been roundly disputed and fundamentally disproved by more recent historians such as Alan MacFarlane, Judith Hurwich, David Cressy, Ralph Houlbrooke, and Diana O'Hara, each of whom provides substantial evidence of close bonds within the early modern extended family unit.(6) The historians' interest in the early modern family, however, has not entirely breached the citadels of Shakespearean scholarship. Although some critics, such as Catherine Belsey, Valerie Traube, Lynda Boose, and Stephen Orgel, have written extensively about the family in Shakespeare, they and most other scholars concentrate on issues of gender or relationships within the nuclear family, rather than kinship networks.(7) Nevertheless, when addressing Shakespeare's history plays, it is important that we understand precisely the imbroglio he was embarking upon when he decided to realistically depict the ancestors of the English aristocracy, to whom he was obliged to pay at least a minimal and ostensible deference. Shakespeare and his audience, however that audience is defined, lived in a society founded and embedded in the notion of family. The system of kinship that dominated and drove English society was a living network of favor and reciprocity that was more secure, more private, and more exclusionary than the patronage offered by either church or court. It persevered as a still vital remnant of tribal and clannish mentality, whereby blood alone could admit one into a charmed circle of interdependence and mutual obligation that could be activated merely by the appropriate appellation. A letter or petition addressed to a 'cousin' was rarely ignored; it implied an intimacy and inferred an obligation. Often, favors were granted, money disbursed, and patronage given between strangers based on nothing more than the most distant claim of mutual kinship.(8) The importance and reliability of family was a notion that was instilled in childhood. Every schoolboy was required to read Cicero's De Officiis, which placed family as the first of four degrees of social groups, 'as the foundation of civil government, the nursery as it were, of the state.' Every literate Englishman was familiar with Thomas Elyot's intonement that:

Where vertue joined with great possession or dignitie, hath longe continued in the bloode of house of a gentilman, as it were an inheritance, there nobilitie is most shewed, and these noble men be most to be honoured.(9)

“If, as David Cressy points out, a living family provided a 'basis for sympathy, linkage, and collaboration,' then a family history or genealogy provided the basis for self-definition and societal recognition.(10) In early modern England, the past legitimized the present and guaranteed the future, and both the legitimization and the guarantee were bound up in the notion of family pedigree. Consequently, the creation of family genealogies, the composition of family histories, and the reliance on family connections permeated, and in many cases warranted, Elizabethan life.

…

… “Although there were humanist polemics (Elyot's among them) that argued for a man's personal reputation and responsibility, popular opinion continued to support the biblical notion that a man's familial connections were the overriding factors in determining personal merit. As a result of this belief, genealogical research and the composition of family histories became an obligation, and in many cases, a preoccupation, for the respublica litteratum of Early Modern England.(13) Lord Burghley, for example, was one of the many who passed his leisure time studying family histories of himself and others.(14) Although pedigrees were required reading for the assessment and distribution of titles, more often than not Burghley would 'request' a family tree simply to satisfy his own curiosity.(15) This was not merely the idiosyncratic pastime of an elderly aristocrat. It was a common practice among all classes of London society to annotate personal chronicles and histories with anecdotes from proud if sometimes meager family trees.(16)

“Among the aristocracy, family lineage was far more than a pastime, however. Pedigree was the overriding consideration in granting titles, arranging marriages, and determining the fate of extant and potential peers. It was genealogy that decided the monarchical destiny of particular families and, consequently, it was genealogy that ultimately defined the character and fortune of the entire country. An extensive family tree not only spoke to the continuity of the family, but of English society. This was significant at every point in English history, but it was particularly critical in the early 1590s, when speculation regarding succession to the English throne had reached a fevered, if secretive, pitch.” ...
(pp. 3-5)

…

… “There were multiple benefits, both tangible and intangible, that could be derived from an impressive lineage. Societal position and personal respectability were directly related to the length and quality of the genealogical scroll and so too was a family's case for nobility. Without a genealogy, or with an inferior genealogy,* an aristocrat, however moneyed, was as Phyllis Rackin notes 'nothing more than a commoner.'(31) The queen herself tacitly endorsed the importance of a venerable and extensive ancestry. Elizabeth's reluctance to grant new peerages is legendary, but it may have been based more on elitism than parsimony: of the eighteen peerages that the queen did create, only two of them, Lord Burghley and Lord Compton, belonged to 'new' families without ancient ancestral claims.(32) The flaunting of a genealogy was simply a more effective method of attaining favor than the flaunting of a purse or a sword. Although their family histories were often used for less than altruistic purposes, the aristocrats' passion for genealogy should not be discounted as a mere ostentation. Belonging to a well-established and famous family was a source of genuine pride for them. Quite naturally, this pride of family led to a congruous preoccupation with family reputation. Stone refers to it, in fact as a 'cult of reputation.' Nothing could be more damaging than to cast aspersions on someone's ancestry or ancestors, and the consequence of such aspersions often led to duels and/or generational feuding.(33)

“The peculiarities of aristocratic history necessitate a slight digression in our discussion to address the topic of titular versus familial ancestry. During the Tudor regimes, many loyalists were granted titles which had previously belonged to other families; these other families either died out from natural causes and the lack of male heirs or were attainted of their titles and honors by the Tudors or their predecessors. The titles of Suffolk, Somerset, and Warwick are some cases in point: the titles were, before the Tudors, held by the De La Poles, the Beauforts, and the Beauchamp/Nevilles, respectively. … the Tudors subsequently awarded the title of Suffolk to the Brandons, the title of Somerset to the Seymours, and the title of Warwick to the Dudleys. … The question of whether the new (-titled) family would assume the identity of the old or, more precisely, be affected by the reputation of the old, is one that has not been extensively studied by historians, but it is an important question in the study of genealogical history. The answer is rather simple, if not obvious. The title is larger than the man. When a man is granted a title, his identity is subsumed into that title; he is known, henceforth, not by his surname but by his title. So, for example, Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, is called 'Somerset' by himself and his peers; he is never called 'Seymour.' 'Somerset' is how he is addressed, it is how he signs his letters, it is his legal and personal identity.

“The appropriation of this new identity goes beyond the title. When a new family was given an old title, it was also given the properties and tenants that belonged to former holders of that title.” … (pp. 7-8)

…
“The obsession with genealogy has been acknowledged but not significantly studied by historians or literary critics, who tend, like Phyllis Racklin, to attribute it to self-indulgence, vanity, male domination, or the threatening specter of a female fertility.(46) While genealogies certainly do function as springboards for patriarchal pride and familial precedence, no one has studied genealogy as an alternative history that acts in the same way as any alternative discourse.(47) … In the sixteenth-century, the aristocratic genealogy provided a site for the negotiation, the interrogation, and subversion of the state-sanctioned 'Tudor' histories that were required reading for the literate masses. The Tudor regime had various and sundry methods of retaining its precarious hold on the crown, but one of the most effective of strategies was to keep an inordinately tight grasp on any written representations of history. All publicly-disseminated histories were subject to censorship, but the chronicles, which were designed for public consumption rather than governmental record-keeping, were the most closely scrutinized of all publications, and the only texts to be directly licensed by the Privy Council.(48) The reason for this was, quite simply, that the chronicles were the best and and most efficient vehicles for government propaganda. They were deliberately didactic in nature, instructing the population, particularly the aristocratic population, on the evils of rebellion and the divine sanction of Tudor rule. Perhaps not surprisingly, the chronicles taught these lessons by exemplifying the rise, fall, and extinction of once powerful English households that were destroyed, often quite literally, because of the actions of one or two wayward members. In fact, with the exception of Foxe's (Acts and) Monuments, which focuses on the lives of saintly commoners, the chronicles are themselves little more than elaborate family histories of the English elite.” (p. 10 - 11)

…

...”histories were expected to be moral lessons rather than exercises in analytical neutrality—and the custodians of morality happened to be those who subsidized the historians and regulated their product. This meant that the historian's most important task was to declare his acceptance of the prevailing tradition and hegemony. In effect, any rendition of the past had to be seen as an endorsement of the present.(55) (p. 13)

…

“When Shakespeare decided to breathe life into the flawed grandsires of the aristocracy, therefore, he was placing himself into a delicate and heretofore unique situation. The salient question is whether he recognized and responded to the situation—or indeed, whether any response was necessary.(75) We know that Shakespeare is acutely aware of the importance of genealogy. The first tetralogy, especially, is permeated with the essentiality of family lineage and reputation. In fact, Shakespeare's history plays are unique in that they are affirmations of the sixteenth-century view of family genealogy.” … (p. 18)

“Literary scholars are familiar with the fixation on genealogy that runs rampant through Shakespeare's history plays and frequently cite it.(81) They have not, however, asked the resultant question, which Is whether Shakespeare's general affirmation of family lineage and reputation affected his portrayals of individual families. One reason this question may have been overlooked is that few scholars see the nobles in the history plays as individualized personalities. Except for the hero Talbot and Good Duke Humphrey, the nobles in this play group are seen as an indistinguishable group of squabbling, destructive villains who are either, depeding on one's view, overthrowing the rightful king or oppressing the beleaguered commoners.(82) Certainly, if we read the nobles as nothing more than a mob of murdering Machiavellians with no individuality, it would be difficult to argue that Shakespeare had any concern over offending their descendants. However, the text does not support such a reading. A close examination of each noble character reveals that every one is carefully crafted to reflect a complex individual, with particular motivations, passions, and convictions. This is dramatically significant in terms of characterization, certainly, but it is also historically significant when we gloss the characters according to their sixteenth-century descendants. What we discover is that Shakespeare was keenly aware that he was writing about the ancestors of the most powerful nobles of his time, nobles to whom genealogy and family reputation mattered, and that, in consequence, he consistently modified and revised the portrayal of their ancestors with the status of their descendants in mind.

“In fact when we compare the characters to the historical representations in the chronicle sources, we find that he deliberately and carefully created individuals who, in some way, reflected the position or activities of their Elizabethan descendants. As we shall see in the following chapters, when the descendants are prominent people, Shakespeare seems to improve on the depictions of their ancestors that are found in the chronicle sources. That is, without changing the chronicle stories that were known so well, he succeeds in adding something to make the ancestors' behavior more sympathetic or his motives more understandable. However, when there is no significant descendant, or when the descendant is in some disgrace, Shakespeare capitalizes on London gossip and brings elements of the descendant's disgrace into the ancestor's portrayal.

“This study is not an attempt to establish a motivation, either political or professional, for Shakespeare's characterizations of the ancestors. I am primarily interested in presenting the evidence, rather than proffering an ideological reason behind it. The incentives for creative endeavor are many and multifaceted, but it would be foolish to deny the driving force of artistic creativity and craftsmanship. In all these plays, Shakespeare chooses the artistic path over the political one—he never ignores or whitewashes the dramatic potential of a story merely because it may prove embarrassing to an aristocratic descendant. … However, once Shakespeare chose to write about the recent past, he had to have been aware of the situation in which he placed himself in terms of the aristocracy. This study is an attempt to ascertain and trace that awareness." — (p. 19-20)

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from Introduction: the nobility and genealogy

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* genealogy : I.e. ancestry, blood-line, lineage, family-tree, descent

(Italics and parenthetical remarks above are as in the original unless otherwise indicated; endnotes below are the author's own commentary and references to cited works as presented in her text.)
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(5) Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

(6) Alan MacFarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property: a Social Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978) and Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Judith Hurwich, "Lineage and Kin in the Sixteenth Century Aristocracy: Some Comprehensive Evidence on England and Germany," The First Modern Society: Essays on English History. Essays in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. Al Bleir, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 333-364; David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1997); Ralph Houlebrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480-1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Diana O'Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

(7) Catherine Belsey, “Gender and Family,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 123-141; Valerie Traub, “Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare,” Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129-146; Lynda Boose, “The Family in Shakespeare Studies or Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans or the Politics of Politics,” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987) 707-742; Stephen Orgel, “Prospero's Wife,” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 50-64.

(8) David Cressy, “Kinship and Kin Interaction in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 113 (1996) 38-69. 46-47.

(9) Thomas Elyot, The Governor, Book II, The second boke, Book I, xviii, page 05 r.

(10) Cressy, “Kinship and Kin Interaction,” 48.

(13) William Rockett, "Britannia, Ralph Brooke, and the Representation of Privilege in Elizabethan England," Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000), 474-499, 78-480.

(14) The gallery in Burghley's home at Theobald's was in fact decorated with the Genealogy of Kings of England (quoted in Alan H, Nelson, Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2003), 36.)

(15) See, for instance, Public Record Office, “Genealogical Note, in Burghley's Hand,” March 3, 1581, and “Memoranda, by Lord Burghley, of Public Business,” April 30, 1590, Cal. S. P. Dom., Reign Elizabeth (I) (1581-1590) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendeln, Lichtenstein: Kraus, 1967), II, 661; Public Record Office, “Genealogical Notes on the Descent of Baronies,” 1592; “Proofs on Behalf of Lady Fane,” and “Heraldic MS, being a Dissertation on the Descent of Baronies by Writ,” 1593, Cal. S. P. Dom., Reign of Elizabeth (1591-1594) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendeln, Lichtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 163, 404; and Public Record Office, “Pedigrees (by Lord Burghley),” 1595, and “Genealogical Tables by Lord Burghley of the Kings of Judea,” 1595, Cal. S. P. Dom., Reign of Elizabeth (1595-1597) (London: 1865; reprint, Nendeln, Lichtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 157-158.

(16) D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 88,92,98.

(31) Phyllis Rackin, “Genealogical Anxiety and Female Authority: The Return of the Repressed in Shakespeare's Histories,” Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. Marie Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991) 230-231

(32) Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, “Inflation of Honours,” 45.

(33) Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 42. Stone also quotes Robert Markham, reminding his enemy Gilbert, Earl of Shrewsbury, of his 'bastardlie descent.' 25.

(46) Rackin,”Genalogical Anxiety,” 223.

(47) Although genealogy supported the established patriarchy of the Early Modern world, particularly through patrilineal inheritance and favoritism, there was in genealogical study a general willingness to accord recognition to female descent, and in many cases the dominant and most meritorious family line was the matrilineal one. This was not, unfortunately, the result of any burst of feminism on the part of the aristocracy. Many of the leading families of the Tudor 'new' nobility claimed their titles and their noble lineages from their female lines. And any matrilineal family-tree, as long as it had noble roots, was preferable to a patrilineal tree that could be construed as common. For that matter, even a family-tree founded upon illegitimacy was acceptable as long as it was also founded upon nobility: the Tudors of course set the best example of both of these phenomena. Not only did they base much of their claim to the throne on their descent from Catherine de Valois, the mother of Henry VI, they also by the 1590s found it necessary to rely on two females to continue in the monarchy. See Simon Adams, “The Patronage of the Crown in Elizabethan Politics: The 1590s in Perspective,” The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Guy, 20-45.

(48) Cyndia Clegg has written extensively on the censorship issue. See for example, Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambidge University Press, 1997) and “Liberty, License, and Authority: Press Censorship and Shakespeare,” A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 464-485.

(53) Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian (London: Macmillan, 1996), 32-33.

(54) The most famous case of historical censorship, of course, involved John Hayward and his History of Henry IIII. Hayward's work was little more than a narrative pamphlet, but because it was perceived to promote rebellion he was sent to the Tower and his printer was sent to a common prison. Hayward was tried twice for treason but was never convicted. Nonetheless, Elizabeth was convinced he was a traitor, and he remained in the Tower until James arrived in London as king.

(55) Andreas Hofele, “Making History Memorable: More, Shakespeare and Richard III,” The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 21 (2005) 190.

(75) Of course, as David Kasten and Graham Bradshaw point out, neither the play nor its audience is a stable thing. Performances were as fluid as the people that attended them (Kasten, After Theory, 65; Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 34). But the question is what affected the fluidity.

(81) See David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: “Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition, (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 73; Edna Zwick Boris, Shakespeare's English Kings, the People, and the Law (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978); Moody E. Prior, The Drama of Power (Evansron, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 88; Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: A Study of English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 39; Tennenhouse, Power On Display, 99; Rackin,
Stages, 186, 230-31; Donald Watson, Shakespeare's Early Plays, 53; and Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 230. Phyllis Rackin does explore the genealogical phenomenon and Shakespeare's history plays in her article “Genealogical Anxiety and Female Authority: The Return of the Repressed in Shakespeare's Histories.” However, Rackin proposes that the fixation on patrilineal genealogy and inheritance created an anxiety about women, who were needed to validate patriarchal authority but could not validate paternity, and argues that this anxiety is recreated in the strong women figures of the history plays.


(82) See, for example: Brockbank, who refers to them as 'murderous automatons' (J. P. Brockbank, “Frame of Disorder—Henry VI,” in Early Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961), 94); Berry, who claims that the characters are not developed and do not reveal private passions (Edward I. Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), 116, 174); Alexander Leggatt, who says that what we see is 'not a collection of great individuals but a swarm of ants' (Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London: Routledge, 1988), 9); Pugliatti, who sees the nobles as 'totally treacherous' (Shakespeare the Historian, 157); and Blair Worden, who speaks of the nobles' 'snobbery, selfishness and petulance' and refers to them collectively as 'thugs' (Shakespeare and Politics,' Shakespeare and Politics ed. Alexander, 22-44). Harry Keyishian returns to Brockbank and uses the term ' automaton' to describe them ('The Progress of Revenge in the First Henriad,' 'Henry VI': Critical Essays, ed. Thomas A, Pendleton (New York: Routledge, 2001), 67-77). Maurice Hunt believes that they are all, with the exception of Good Duke Humphrey, overreaching social climbers on the same level as Lucifer ('Climbing for Place in Shakespeare's 'Henry VI,' 'Henry VI,': Critical Essays, ed. Pendleton, 157-176). Stephen Greenblatt calls them 'mentally unbalanced small town criminals: they are capable of incredible nastiness but cannot achieve a hint of grandeur.' Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (New York: Norton, 2004), 197. In Richard III, the nobles only serve to advance Richard's story (Janis Lull, “Pantagenets, Lancastrians,” 96).

* Penny McCarthy does mention the Earls of Oxford generally, once, and Edward Oxford specifically—twice: first, in the Introduction, at page 23, she mentions the Earls of Oxford generally, with, at this point, no specific mention of Edward Oxford; second, near the end of her book (in the final part labelled "Envoi") there's this, at page 217:

"I have laid far more stress on internal markers of coterie membership, to the extent of admitting into the Sidney coterie some whose presence there has not been suspected, purely on the basis of modes of allusion they share with the coterie. Marlowe, Lyly, and Greene may have been the most unexpected writers appearing in this category.(5) "

the end-note reference (5), refers to a comment McCarthy leaves for an end-note-only mention: "I am not ignoring the fact that Lyly also enjoyed the Earl of Oxford's patronage ."

Not "ignoring" it, that is, except to leave out all mention of Oxford in the body of her work except for the third and final mention given nine pages further along, on page 226, the book's next-to-last page, where she writes,

"Changes to Shakespeare's biography are indicated by my study. The amount of auobiographical reference in his plays needs re-assessing. Much will have to be subtracted from the briographies of Marlowe, Bacon, the Earl of Oxford and whoever else has been proposed as the 'real' Shakespeare."

For nowhere in her book's 13 pages of indexed references does one find a mention of Edward Oxford or of the "Earls of Oxford" as a group nor any mention of a hatchet-job biography of Edward de Vere, Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (2003), Liverpool University Press or of its author, Alan H. Nelson; although it seems as though she is familiar with Nelson's book on Oxford.

COMMENTARY

A number of bizarre things are implied about the way that relationships between people worked in practice in Elizabethan England as that is pictured in the analysis by the author of one of the works under consideration here—especially as these relationships concern matters of family and of class.

Whatever they may have become in our very confused twenty-first-century conceptions of them, in sixteenth-century Britain, the meanings of the terms “family” and “class” denoted two essential social phenomena which, while certainly not strictly or entirely synonymous, could not be entirely divorced from each other in the way that, according to our modern conceptions and, in particular, Canino's analysis of them, it seems to be implied that they could be and then were divorced.

For example, here,

..."they and most other scholars concentrate on issues of gender or relationships within the nuclear family, rather than kinship networks.

"Shakespeare and his audience, however that audience is defined, lived in a society founded and embedded in the notion of family."

True enough; but this is no less true of virtually every human society whether before or since "Shakespeare's" time—right up until, that is, the very late twentieth and the eary twenty-first centuries when the term "family" began to lose much of its coherent meaning in large and important portions of the so-called advanced industrialized world and especially so in its English-speaking parts.

"The system of kinship that dominated and drove English society was a living network of favor and reciprocity"...

Indeed. More to the point: a "family" is and means a "system of kinship" and "a living network of favor and reciprocity" at that. The term, in English, has long been synonymous with that; "family" implies these things. We today have "anthropology" and anthropoligists, "sociology" and sociologists, unlike in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had, instead, "theology" and theologians. But this doesn't mean that people of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lacked anything of our grasp of the meaning and importance of what we refer to as "kinship systems" as living networks of favor and reciprocity in their uses of the term "family."

This supposed distinction, "nuclear family" as opposed to "extended family," as though there is some important difference in their fundamental characteristics, is a strained and artificial one. That this distinction meant anything in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English is to be doubted. For the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Ed. (1991, J. A. Simpson & E. S. C. Weiner, eds., Volume X, p. 576) the earliest known published use of "nuclear family" is indicated as that from George Peter Murdock's Social Structure, p. i, I (New York, Macmillan Co., 1949).

In any case, if it is true that "(t)he historians' interest in the early modern family, however, has not entirely breached the citadels of Shakespearean scholarship," that is, for our puposes and interests here, a defect and a problem peculiar to "the citadels of Shakespearean scholarship," (emphasis added) and rather than "Shakespearean scholarship" understood, as it ought to have been, more broadly. By "citadels," of course, we ought to understand, particularly, the Stratfordians' or "orthodox" scholarship of the academic world. Oxfordians, beginning with J. Thomas Looney, in 1920 (hardly "the later part of the twentieth century") have always recognized and "been interested in" the "centrality" of family relations in any understanding of life—literary or otherwise—in Elizabethan England.

..."a living network of favor and reciprocity that was more secure, more private, and more exclusionary than the patronage offered by either church or court. It persevered as a still vital remnant of tribal and clannish mentality, whereby blood alone could admit one into a charmed circle of interdependence and mutual obligation that could be activated merely by the appropriate appellation".

One's family and one's class identities were, conceptually, seamlessly joined, mutually-dependent and, where a male child is concerned, fixed at birth by birth and, where a female child is concerned, may be fixed variously by birth and, later, by marriage. Only in relatively rare cases did either family or class identity alter significantly alter over the lifetime of any given individual man. When a woman's social station changed, this was practically always due to changes in her marital circumstances—a function, by definition, of the junction of both “family” and “class” circumstances. Heritable titles of nobility were also, by definition, affairs of whole families and not simply a matter between the king or queen who granted the noble title and its bearer. The baron's, viscount's, marquess's, earl's or duke's family was enobled by the grant of the title to its bearer. The whole point of heritable titles was the passage of lands, privileges and honors from generation to succeeding generation. No family → no heir; and no generational transfer. In such circumstances, it is bizarre for anyone, hisorian or literary critic at work on the works of that time and their authors to attempt to confine an interest in understanding social relations to members of the "nuclear family," an anachronism when applied to Tudor Britain.

The plain fact of the matter is that for what amounted to practically everyone—that is, with extremely few exceptions—one's family and class status were nearly always determined by the happenstance of one's own birth and, for better or for worse, one was stuck with this result for the duration of one's life.

Why, we might ask, are kinship ties presented only as favorably stronger: "blood alone could admit one into a charmed circle of interdependence and mutual obligation"? Doesn't much of history, including much in Shakespeare's portrayals of family relations, teach us that this same family "circle" could be no less interdependent, no less charged with "mutual obligation" and at the same time have little or nothing of the "charm"? Relations between nobles— as individuals and as families—were just as full of interdependence and mutual obligation, whether these played out in or against one's personal favor, as were many relations between members of the same family; and that is true no matter what the social station of a given family might be. The peerage was, after all, hardly other than a select extended family of sorts, full of a very codified set of interdependences and mutual obligations. And, just as in any natural family, one could (as was the most common case by far) find oneself born into that society rather than granted entry upon the monarch's own direct and personal grant of a title to one deemed a deserving adult.

Professor Emma Depledge is doing some very interesting work on the literary history of the work known as the writing of "William Shakespeare" since the death of the genuine author and that of the supposed author. Hers are important studies which deserve to be read by anyone interested in the life, times and literary works of the author writing under the pen-name"William Shakespeare".

Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Print, Politics and Alteration, 1642-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
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(excerpt)

Introduction

... "The Exclusion Crisis and Popish Plot had a profoundly detrimental impact on the theatre market: they transformed the theatres into battlegrounds for political disputes, disturbances were common, and there was a vogue for highly political plays. ... These factors, I argue, helped to encourage writers to turn to the alteration (note: or the adaptation) of an earlier playwright's work. ... I furthe argue that Shakespeare's low authorial status and the parallels that could be construed between his characters and plots and the figures and events of the Crisis made his plays ideal candidates for topical alteration.

... "(Shakespeare's) plays had been revived and altered before 1678, but their appearance had been sporadic and there is little evidence that audiences would have been aware that the plays they watched had been written by or altered from the works of a man named Shakespeare. This all changed after 1678." ...
(pp. 1-2)

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“Table 2.2 contains all of the known or probable performances of altered or unaltered Shakespeare plays taking place between 1660 and 1677.36 It shows ninety recorded Shakespeare performances: forty-seven performances of ten unaltered plays and forty-three of six altered plays. …

“On the occasions when Shakespeare plays were staged, it is unlikely that audiences would have associated the production they attended with Shakespeare. Indeed, only one dramatic paratext from 1660-77 has been found in which Shakespeare's name is mentioned before a revival of an unaltered Shakespeare play. Covent Garden Drollery (London, 1672) contains a 'prologue to Iulius Caesar' (B5r-v).(39) The prologue compares Shakespeare to 'Country Beauties' who 'cham' without knowing 'they are fair' and so 'take without their spreading of the snare', claiming that he is possessed of 'Artless beauty' and that ' 'Twas well in spite of him what ere he writ' (B5r). The prologue goes on to say (in an allusion to the induction to The Taming of the Shrew) that 'like the drunken Tinker, in his Play / (Shakespeare) grew a Prince, and never knew which way' (B5r).(40) It also compares Shakespeare to 'Great Iohnson', with the latter receiving the bulk of the prologue's praise (B5r). That Shakespeare is the author of the play the audience is about to see is made clear when his name is linked to 'this Caesar which this day you see' (B5r), but the Shakespeare presented to audiences here is best described as an 'artless rustic'.(41)

“Other prologues to unaltered Shakespeare plays tend to emphasize themes rather than authorship. A prologue to 'Richard the third' is printed in the same collection (B7r-v), but this time Shakespeare's name is not mentioned at all. Instead, the prologue uses the example of Richard in order to discuss usurpation and tyranny more generally.” ...

…

(pp. 53; 54-55)
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Notes:
(36) Entries are based on Van Lennep, William et al., The London Stage, 1660-1800 (Carbondale, IL.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965)

(39) Michael Dobson suggests a date of c. 1669 (The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 30). Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1623-1800, attributes the prologue to John Dryden, and reprints the prologue in full (6 vols., Vol. I (London: Routledge, 1974), 141-2).

(40) This prologue may contain an allusion to a—thus far unidentified—play entitled the New Made Nobleman, performed at the Red Bull theatre on 22 January 1662. The prologue's reference to Shakespeare's tinker's rise in status seems to support the theory that the mysterious play was based on 'a droll made out of the Christopher Sly prologue of The Taming of the Shrew (London Stage, 46). This theory was put forward by Ethel Seaton, Literary Relations of England and Scandinavia in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935),333-5; William Van Lennep rejected the theory in 'The New-Made Nobleman', Times Literary Supplement, 20 June 1936, 523, as has Nicholl, Restoration Drama, 309-10.

(41) Dobson, The Making of the National Poet, 13.

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" Emma (Depledge)’s first book, Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Print, Politics and Alteration, 1642-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), argues that the Exclusion Crisis of 1678-82 ought to be seen as the watershed moment in Shakespeare’s authorial afterlife. She is also co-editor of Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640-1740 (with Peter Kirwan, Cambridge University Press, 2017), the first comprehensive study of Shakespeare’s print history, 1640-1740; and co-editor of a collection entitled Making Milton: Writing, Publication, Reception (with John Garrison and Marissa Nicosia, Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a monograph that explores the relationship between mock-heroic poetry and the London book trade, 1660-1740, a minigraph entitled Shakespeare and Paper, and a special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly (with Rachel Willie), entitled ‘Performance and the Paper Stage, 1642-1695’. "

_______________________________________

(from the author's profile as found at the webpage of the Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines / Institute of English studies at the Université de Neuchâtel: https://www.unine.ch/anglais/home/staff/emma-depledge.html)

Although they came of age late in the life of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, there are few if any of Oxford's contemporaries who could rival William Herbert and his younger brother Philip Herbert for the importance they had as aids and allies in support of Oxford the poet-playwright. I suspect that both John Heminge and Henry Condell were either stand-ins for the Herberts, merely taking public credit on the introductory pages of the First Folio for editorial and publishing work done mainly or virtually entirely by the Herbert brothers or that Heminge and Condell worked under the close direct supervision and by the authority of the Herberts who, as effective "producers" of the First Folio, were themselves deciding all the most important matters concerned in its editing and publication.

Following are some excerpts from Brian O'Farrell's work on William Herbert as literary patron: Shakespeare's Patron — William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke 1580-1630 Politics, Patronage & Power ( 2011, London and New York, Continuum International Publishing Group )

_________________________________

Note: For clarity I have supplied within parentheses some names where, in the original text, a prior mention of the individual or individuals concerned has not been included here.


________________________________________

(p. 20) … “These opinions of (William Herbert) the Third Earl (of Pembroke)'s supposed sexual mores have recently been endorsed by scholars who accuse the Third Earl of fathering two other illegitimate children. Michael G. Brennan in his Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance accuses Pembroke later in life of having two illegitimate children by Lady Mary Wroth, the eldest daughter of his old friend Sir Robert Sidney. This he bases on what he calls a 'family history,' Sir Thomas Herbert's 'Herbertorum Prosapial' an early copy of which he found at Wilton House. …

(p. 21) …
“If Pembroke had acted so irresponsibly we would have heard a great deal about it from their mutual friends. The early Jacobean world was a very small one and anybody who was a somebody would have a wide, interconnected group of friends.”

(p. 22) … “We do know that Pembroke had an illegitimate child with Mary Fitton (note: spelled variously Fytton, Fyton) and this he openly admitted, but unless any proof to the contrary turns up we have to assume that this was the only Mary who bore him any children out of wedlock.

… “The Queen may not have been morally shocked, but her sense of decorum was outraged, especially as Pembroke rejected the idea of marriage. Mary Fitton was considered unsuitable as a wife for the ambitious Earl. However, the Queen considered herself as the protectress of her ladies-in-waiting, and any scandals concerning them infuriated her. It was to be expected that she would send Pembroke to prison, or at least banish him from court.”

(p. 23) … “Pembroke was well-educated, handsome and well-connected, the scion of one of the wealthiest families in the country. He was very much a 'gilded youth', pampered and fawned over. But these were Lord Herbert's 'salad days' when he was young in years and green in judgement. He was only twenty and was, at this stage in his life a somewhat immature young man.

(p. 24) … “Pembroke knew he was finished at (Elizabeth's) Court,” ...

“Both (William) Cecil and the Queen may have been flattered by the sentiments expressed (i.e. by Pembroke in a letter of 19 June, 1601 from Baynard's Castle, London ) and the style in which they were couched, but it was not enough to make the Queen forgive her godchild, and on 12 August 1601, the young Earl was banished to his home at Wilton. Pembroke's exile had begun.”

While he was exiled from her Court, Pembroke sought via Cecil's offices the queen's permission to travel on the continent and he was granted it in December of 1601.

(p. 26-27) ... “... Pembroke did not make his Grand Tour. … The Second Earl's (William's father's) terminal illness postponed the Grand Tour, and Pembroke's Court activities further delayed it. It is highly unlikely that the young Earl travelled during his exile. A tour by such a well-known figure would hardly have gone unnoticed (note: that, is, unremarked) by his gossipy contemporaries. Undoubtedly he, like many others was awaiting a change of sovereign and was biding his time, laying the groundwork for his future career. ... It is also likely that the Third Earl did not have the ready cash to finance Continental travel in 1602, even though he was one of the richest landowners in the kingdom.

“The estates of the Third Earl centered on his home county of Wiltshire, though he owned most of his land outside the county. His landholdings were especially extensive in Wales, principally in Glamorgan. He inherited over one hundred manors, nineteen towns or boroughs, including Cardiff, Newport and Neath in Wales, the borough of Wilton in Wiltshire, and six castles, including Baynard's Castle in London. Pembroke owned seven forests and various other parks, hundreds, farms, fishing rights, tolls and markets, and was the proprietor of a large number of advowsons.

“Though we are not certain what Pembroke was 'worth', we do know his magnificent inheritance was, temporarily, a mortgaged one. For his first few months as Earl of Pembroke, he was a ward of the Crown, actually a ward of (William) Cecil's. To his legal guardian he complained of the burden of his wardship, a burden that was considerable indeed. It cost Pembroke £3,200 to 'buy' back his wardship, even though there were only two months left of his minority. In addition to this he had to pay a fine of more than £500 for his livery. His father's debts had to be paid, provision made for his (younger) brother Philip (b. 1584, four years and six months William's junior) and, from his inheritance, pay out jewels and plate to the sum of £1000 to his mother. The widow was also given various lands and the control of the rest of the household jewel and plate while her son was still a minor. More than £3500 had to be found for his brother Philip, and £3000 for his sister Anne on her eighteenth birthday, and £400 a year until then. The executors of the Second Earl's will were given £500, and various other charitable bequests added another £493.”


(p. 28) … “On 10 August 1602, Pembroke was admitted to Gray's Inn to begin his legal studies. He stayed there little more than six months, for Elizabeth I died in March 1603.”

(p. 33-34) … “The Third Earl, through his father, was involved in marriage negotiations as early as 1595, when he went up to London to meet the Queen and to 'deal in the matter of a marriage with Sir George Carey's daughter.' ... The interview was effected, but nothing came of the match, supposedly because of Lord Herbert's 'not liking.' ...

“Two years later, Henry Herbert negotiated with Lord Burghley for a match between Lord Herbert and Bridget Vere, one of the Earl of Oxford's daughters, and Burghley's grand-daughter. The match was of Pembroke's parents' making, the Countess of Pembroke writing to Burghley that 'so far forth I find my son's best affection and resolution to answer my desire herein,' and the Second Earl reporting that the young lord was amenable to the match. Negotiations were carried on in depth, the Second Earl finally offering Burghley 'a jointure proportionable to what you will give in marriage with your daughter. He denied it was his intention to enrich himself by the match, 'whatsoever you give, I am content that the young couple presently have and will increase the same with as great a yearly allowance a my estate ad course of life can spare.'

“The Earl of Oxford was delighted with the match, for he wrote, 'I am pleased that my lord and lady persevere, for Bridget's sake. I always wished her a good husband.' He continued, 'My lord of Pembroke is a sickly man and therefore it is to be gathered he desireth in his lifetime to see his son bestowed to his liking, to compass methinks his offers very honourable, and his desires very reasonable.' He could see no reason to delay the match, though Bridget was still only thirteen. And, as regards the young lord, it was his understanding that he 'hath been well brought up, fair conditioned, and hath many good parts in him.' (n 23) The negotiations continued for several months, but by October 1597 Rowland Whyte could report to Sir Robert Sidney that they were 'upon a sudden quite dashed, and in the opinion of the wise by great fault in (the Earl of Pembroke) who makes the occasion of breach to be a refusal of the portion offered by (Lord Burghley).' The Second Earl insisted on '£3,000 in money and £500 a year in possession, else will he not bargain.' Whyte was worried about the political implications of the rupture, and blamed the Second Earl for it.”

...Whatever the disagreements were they must have been largely amicable, for the breakdown did not affect the Herbert-Cecil relationship. And the amicable connection between the Earls of Oxford and Pembroke was further strengthened in 1604 when Philip Herbert, Pembroke's heir, married Susan de Vere, another of the Earl of Oxford's daughers.” ...

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(23) 'Earl of Oxford to Lord Burghley', 8 September1597, (1, Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1595-1597, p. 499.)

Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Volume I, 1450-1625 : Part 2 : "Douglas" (to) "Wyatt"
( Compiled by Peter Beal; Mansell (Publishers), London & R. R. Bowker Co., New York, 1980 )

(p. 101)
ROBERT GREENE
1558(?) - 92
...

...
INTRODUCTION
____________

"No example of Greene's autograph is known," ...

according to Alexander B. Grosart's (ed.) The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, (1881-6) The Huth Library (privately printed), Greene's works run to fifteen volumes.

“No one is going to be super impressed with the start-up companies until they start recording their lifetimes in years. The Utah array has a lot of issues – but you do measure its lifetime in years,” says Cynthia Chestek, a neural interface researcher at the University of Michigan. Then, even if we are able to record all these extra neuron signals, could we decode them? “We have no idea how the brain works,” says Takashi Kozai, a biomedical engineer at the University of Pittsburgh who studies implantable technologies. “Trying to decode that information and actually produce something useful is a huge problem.” Chestek agrees that more understanding of how neurons compute things would be helpful, but “every algorithm out there” would suddenly just start doing better with a few hundred extra neurons.

There is, however, interesting work done on theories on and investigations into how writers' creative-processes work .

An excerpt from writing by two authors. Each in the vernacular of its time, the first, quite antiquated to our ear, the second, very much in keeping with the way people think, write and speak in our time.

(A)

… “When we have march'd our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God's grace, play a set
Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.
Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler
That all the courts of France will be disturb'd
With chaces. And we understand him well,
How he comes o'er us with our wilder days,
Not measuring what use we made of them.
We never valued this poor seat of England;
And therefore, living hence, did give ourself
To barbarous licence; as 'tis ever common
That men are merriest when they are from home.
But tell the Dauphin I will keep my state,
Be like a king and show my sail of greatness
When I do rouse me in my throne of France:
For that I have laid by my majesty
And plodded like a man for working-days,
But I will rise there with so full a glory
That I will dazzle all the eyes of France,
Yea, strike the Dauphin blind to look on us.
And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones; and his soul
Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance
That shall fly with them: for many a thousand widows
Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands;
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn. …

(B)

... "The explosiveness of Jerry's aggression at a Ping-Pong table exceeded his brother's in any sport. A Ping-Pong ball is, brilliantly, sized and shaped so that it cannot take out your eye. I would not otherwise have played in Jerry Levov's basement. If it weren't for the opportunity to tell people that I knew my way around Swede Levov's house, nobody could have got me down into that basement, defenseless but for a small wooden paddle. Nothing that weighs as little as a Ping-Pong ball can be lethal, yet when Jerry whacked that thing murder couldn't have been far from his mind. It never occurred to me that this violent display might have something to do with what it was like for him to be the kid brother of Swede Levov. Since I couldn't imagine anything better than being the Swede's brother-short of being the Swede himself-I failed to understand that for Jerry it might be difficult to imagine anything worse.

"The Swede's bedroom-which I never dared enter but would pause to gaze into when I used the toilet outside Jerry's room-was tucked under the eaves at the back of the house. With its slanted ceiling and dormer windows and Weequahic pennants on the walls, it looked like what I thought of as a real boy's room. From the two windows that opened out over the back lawn you could see the roof of the Levovs' garage, where the Swede as a grade school kid practiced hitting in the wintertime by swinging at a baseball taped to a cord hung from a rafter-an idea he might have got from a baseball novel by John R. Tunis called The Kid from Tomkinsville. I came to that book and to other of Tunis's baseball books-Iron Duke, The Duke Decides, Champion's Choice, Keystone Kids, Rookie of the Year-by spotting them on the built-in shelf beside the Swede's bed, all lined up alphabetically between two solid bronze bookends that had been a bar mitzvah gift, miniaturized replicas of Rodin's 'The Thinker.' Immediately I went to the library to borrow all the Tunis books I could find and started with The Kid from Tomkinsville, a grim, gripping book to a boy, simply written, stiff in places but direct and dignified, about the Kid, Roy Tucker, a clean-cut young pitcher from the rural Connecticut hills whose father dies when he is four and whose mother dies when he is sixteen and who helps his grandmother make ends meet by working the family farm during the day and working at night in town at "MacKenzie's drugstore on the corner of South Main.'
...

A genuine Robert Green/Grene/Greene connection with the De Veres of Essex.

Where did this pseudonym "Robert Greene" come from? Why that name?

Well, a Robert Green (spellings of names were not regular in the 15th and 16th centuries and certainly not earlier than that) was a tenant for years on one or another De Vere estate in Essex. This, from the time of Edward's childhood--prior to his father, the 16th earl's death--meant that, whoever this man was, he'd have been by name and perhaps in his personality, good or bad, familiar to Edward.

Of course there'd have been many hundreds of people by that name all around England of that time. The point is not to assert or argue here that this Robert Greene ever wrote anything or that he was in any way other than a passing figure in the childhood experiences of Edward Oxford. The point is simply to indicate the clear and obvious source for Edward's having hit upon this name for his own use as a mask, and one of the earliest of his writing career for the simple reason that he'd known someone by that, yes, common, name. Indeed, it's perhaps because it was so common that he found it appealing as a pseudonym. No matter how challenged, it would be easy to suppose that some other "Robert Greene" was intended, if asked.

But a living, breathing, person by that name was part of Edward's childhood world.

I do not mean to suggest that this is "new" information.

It's simply only recently come to my attention because I have never before read of anyone else making this connection between a specific Robert Greene, demonstrably known to Edward and the entire immediate family as a tenant on the family's estate(s).

NOTE: I see that Stephanie Hughes, at her site, PoliticWorm.com has already written about Oxford and Robert Greene. and, as Hughes notes at the start of her article, "All of Oxford’s covers were real people."

... "Oxford’s copyholder

"On February 2, 1586, an agreement was drawn up between Oxford and 16 copyholders (tenants), of a manor in Sible Hedingham known as Grays, in which Oxford, as their landlord, agreed that they had certain traditional rights so long as they paid their rents on time. Whether this had any connection with the previously discussed lawsuit of July 1585 doesn’t appear, although there must have been some situation that created the need for a signed agreement. One of these 16 tenants was a Robert Greene, holder of copy on 'one customary messuage or tenement, and nine acres of land, meadow, and pasture more or less, six shillings and eight pence.'" ...

(a 'messuage' refers to a dwelling-place, a habitation, home.)

This means that, while, yes, it is certainly possible that various of the Bacon family* (as well as others, of course) and any number of other Vere family contemporary associates also knew of this R. Greene, the personal connection is strongest, most direct, with the Veres. And I know of no such direct documented connection which could support any similar familiarity between a known Robt. Greene and William Shaksper, the alleged playwright from Stratford-Upon-Avon.

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* Thus, there's a plausible argument that the writer, having been Bacon, for those who favor that case, also could have, by the same token, known and made use of the name "Robert Greene" because it could arguably have had the same source in Essex county experience for some of the members of the Bacon family.

For continued discussion on this thread's topics, please refer to the Edward de Vere and the Shakespeare Authorship Mystery group