septimus, there’s a recurring pattern in your style of argument across these threads. We get a series of half-remembered claims based on asserted factual details. Then when these are queried, we get ‘‘I’ve read far too much and kept too few bookmarks to track this down.’’ or, now, the demand that we read Anderson. The result is that it’s the Stratfordians – like Fuzzy_wuzzy, APB and others – who either have the knowledge or can do the legwork to recognise or figure out what the hell the claim is even referring to.
The deeper snag is that in not nailing down the details yourself, your missing that the same details being half-remembered are usually fudged or lacking context in the Oxfordian websites you probably originally got them from. The result is an intrinsically foggy argument.
A few examples from this thread.
[quote=“septimus, post:30, topic:701197”]
[li] A minor government official prepared “who’s who” and yearbooks for Stratford. Mentions of the playwright: ZERO[/li][/QUOTE]
When challenged, this was later clarified to:
This superficially sounds like a promising cite, though it’s odd to have one of the most famous British antiquarians and someone who was one of the senior heralds in the College of Arms dismissed as ‘‘a minor government official’’. Now when one Googles Camden + Stratford + Worthies, one certainly gets lots of hits with some variation of ‘‘Stratford Worthies’’, but they’re overwhelmingly to Oxfordian websites. And the snag is that this is a spurious citation: there is no such book or pamphlet of that title.
With no help from such websites, we have to realise from elsewhere that what you and they are trying to refer to is Camden’s Britannia. This book went through multiple editions in Latin, including one in 1605; that website also gives the 1607 English translation. As the title suggests, this is actually a whole mass of antiquarian material covering the whole of Britain. This includes a short passage on Stratford – see this page:
Aside from the following (long) sentence about Sir Hugh’s descendants (who probably didn’t live in Stratford), that’s it. There isn’t even a chapter or section heading that would explain ‘‘Stratford Worthies’’. That title was entirely the result of Oxfordian Chinese whispers.
Of course, one might argue that the underlying point stands: Camden doesn’t see fit to mention Shakespeare here. Except that the archbishop died several centuries earlier and Sir Hugh about a century before. These are notable men from the town’s past history. The one thing Camden clearly wasn’t doing was writing the suggested ‘‘who’s who’’ of the Stratford of 1605.
Then:
[QUOTE]
[li] Shakespeare had a literate son-in-law with many letters preserved who commented on the talents for poetry of other Stratfordians. Mentions of his father-in-law’s poetry: ZERO[/li][/QUOTE]
Since John Hall’s ‘‘letters’’ keep being invoked in these threads, we might as well put them to rest here.
AFAIK, there are no known surviving letters by Hall. (There is at least one letter to him, from 1632 – so a similar survival rate as for his father-in-law.) There are certainly no published collection of them, which makes your frustration in previous theads at not being pointed to an online version of them all somewhat misplaced.
One of the best known Oxfordian websites puts the claim slightly differently:
So it’s an ‘‘extensive journal’’ now rather than ‘‘letters’’. This is slightly better, but still misleading. What actually survive are a set of medical cases notes on particular patients kept by Hall. These were edited and published after his death as a book called Select Observations on English Bodies of Eminent Persons in Desperate Diseases in 1657. The recentish excellent edition of this is Joan Lane, John Hall and his Patients (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 1996). The text consists of 182 sections, each detailing the cure administered to a specific patient. As an example of the style, here’s the whole (unusually short) entry on Drayton:
The whole book is like this and this is what has made it a fascinating source for medical historians seeking evidence of what a doctor like Hall would actually administer. Each patient is given a cursory identification, though he was scrupulous with titles, but that’s it on the non-medical details. Susanna is thus just ‘‘Mrs. Hall of Stratford, my Wife’’, before he dives into her cholic and wind. There is a fascination to the entries because many of the individuals are people specifically known to have known Shakespeare in Stratford, but in terms of biographical detail about them it’s all indigestion, toothache, dropsy and worms.
The frustration with Hall’s case notes is not that he fails to mention Shakespeare’s fame and merits, it’s that he doesn’t mention his father-in-law at all. Regardless of whether he was the playwright or not. There are several possible reasons. One is that few of the treatments can be dated to before 1616; the notetaking may not have been a regular habit at the time of the playwright’s death. More likely, he omitted the case because the patient had died: these are overwhelmingly notes taken with an eye to eventual publication of successful treatments. He passed over almost all his failures in silence.
In summary, there are no gossipy John Hall letters or a journal in which he mysteriously never discusses the playwright’s fame. They’re another mirage.
Finally,
True to form, the last time this came up, it was someone else (myself, as it happens) who had to go away and figure out what the hell astronomical references in the plays supposedly had to do with Oxford. At least on that occasion you were gracious enough to concede that:
Four years on, the old discredited claim thus swirls out of the fog again, while its “half-truths” weaknesses have been forgotten.
Incidentally, you can’t hide behind Anderson in these instances. Judging from the Google Books previews - I know - he doesn’t cite Camden in this context, doesn’t mention John Hall at all and merely repeats Altschuler’s arguments on the astronomy.