I have heard some interesting presentations by supporters of Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford, but nothing interesting enough to persuade me.
But then I’m not enough of an expert to be entitled to an opinion, am I? Whether I was persuaded or not, of what value is my opinion on this subject? Not much, I’m afraid.
As an amateur historian, I love the Shakespeare authorship question. It invites review of primary sources, review of secondary sources, literary analysis, and consideration of historical customs and mores. There is ample room for supposition, yet there also is a need for disciplined historiography and an understanding of where the presumptions lay.
To top it off, there is an unequivocal answer in an unimpeachable source, the First Folio. Heminges and Condell plainly knew the historical Stratford, and knew him in the context of his authorship. Jonson knew both Stratford and de Vere, and wrote a eulogy that can refer only to the former. So either all three (and therefore, it stands to reason, the remaining Kings Men and many others) were so invested in a hoax that they maintained it decades after the death of the principal, and years after the death of other relevant persons (QE I, Stratford, Cecil) – or, more parsimoniously, there was no hoax. As between those two choices, there is not much contest, and that is without considering any of the other contemporaneous evidence of Stratford as not just an author but The Author.
That said, I have not read enough of the Stratford literature to respond to these points:
From: The Case for Oxford - The Atlantic
2. The alleged discovery of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a de Vere estate, dated before their publication:
http://www.thehypertexts.com/Shakespeare%20Edward%20de%20Vere.htm
3. The many coincidences between de Vere’s biography and Hamlet, most notably to me the (a) pirates and (b) apparent knowledge of the names Rosencranz and Guildenstern:
http://www.whowasshakespeare.org/Who_Was_Shakespeare/Oxford_Was_Shakespeare.html
These points each have several possible explanations, and no doubt have been addressed somewhere in the literature. Based on my current knowledge, for me at least they are just about the only points in the Oxford argumentation that even raise an eyebrow.
Why is it so crazy that Shakespeare either spoke French (etc) or had some co-writer or player who did? French was commonly spoken in England.
I am curious which way the arguments break for some of his more daring stuff. Two small quotes come to mind,
Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay
Might stop a hole to keep the wind at bay
and
Go to thy lady’s chamber, tell her,
Let her paint an inch thick,
To this favour she must come
These seem like rather dangerous things to be putting out there, on the verge of insulting the royal court. Do they argue for or against a titled ghost-writer? Or neither way?
After five minutes of googling I can persuasively explain why this *could *happen, if it ever did occur the way described by Oxfordians(which I doubt).
After a further google the issue is yet more complicated. The claim above does not mention the fact that the “Shakespeare poem” in this manuscript is probably not by Shakespeare, but has admittedly been attributed to him previously. It also fails to mention that dozens of poems were in this manuscript. Poems by Sidney, Dyer, Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford and others. This manuscript was a gathering of a variety of poets, not only linking Oxford and Shakespeare.
The story as presented in the previous post was too good to be true imo. Thats why it is rarely trotted out(no offence meant to the poster who posted it).
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.
I generally have no use for the Oxfordian arguments about Shakespeare’s education, handwriting, etc. When it comes to languages, however:
Shakespeare was mocked for his poor learning, and specifically his poor language skills. He has “small Latin and little Greek” and is an “upstart crow.” His primary sources are English or already translated.
Shakespeare’s modus operandi, of grabbing well-known stories and retelling them better, comports well with the interests of a working actor seeking to keep the klieg candles lit, as it were. Engaging in translation - or, worse still, taking time to converse with a translator/collaborator - runs contrary to those interests.
Now, could it be that Shakespeare was a polyglot, or had a language-skilled collaborator? Of course. It’s probably even more likely that there were then-extant, but today unknown, translations of the referenced sources. I’m just not aware of the educated response.
There have been a number of plausible links between these two names and Shakespeare. None are as yet proven. The most interesting link is the Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. Here is a link below to Brahe’s coat of arms. This coat of arms was published in the frontispiece of a book he published. A book he sent to an English astronomer, Thomas Digges. There are a number of proven links between the Digges family and Shakespeare. The names of Brahe’s ancestors on this coat of arms is interestig as it includes Rosencranz and Guildenstern. Though its also worth sayiing they were both very common names in Denmark at the time.
I’m amused by the notion that the surnames Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are “very common” anywhere outside of literature, but the 1592 visit to England by a real-life Wittenberg-educated duo seems very much in line with Shakespearean naming. Ignorance fought. Thank you.
Do you know which of the Passionate Pilgrim poems are at issue in the story? Because I do not.
If the poems are among the authenticated Shakespeare, I would think that the most parsimonious explanation is that Stratford visited de Vere’s house, which seems to have hosted something of an informal writers’ workshop.
It’s less that the names were common than that the Brahe, Rosencranz, Guildenstern and Bille families were the four most eminent Danish noble families of the time. They not only all intermarried, they were exactly the sort to be sent abroad as part of diplomatic missions. It’s neither remarkable that Oxford met some of them nor that those were the sort of names for Danish nobles that Shakespeare might latch onto when writing Hamlet.
BTW, septimus and others who claim that specific Oxfordian claims are never addressed might want to check Shakespeare Authorship, which has been around since 1999.
I knew many of them were not authenticated as Shakespeare’s. I used wiki as a quick guide as to which poems are thought of as Shakespeare’s and which ones are not(or are in fact definately attributed to others). The list is fairly comprehensive, even if it comes with the usual warnings about wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passionate_Pilgrim#The_poems_.281599_Edition.29
There are a couple of problems that come to my mind about the Cornwallis story as related above.
I dont have all the answers to this particular tale. However, at first glance there are lots of holes in it. Again, I assume this is why we rarely hear of it.
To put the “small Latin and less Greek” claim into context, it comes from Ben Jonson, who was a brilliant classical scholar and rather vain about it.* It doesn’t preclude Shakespeare having a decent reading knowledge of Latin – which he almost certainly did, because anyone with an Elizabethan grammar-school education would have had more Latin than most people with a BA in classics today. It was not a rare attainment. French also wasn’t a particularly rare attainment or hard to acquire; London was full of French Protestant refugees, and Shakespeare lived with a family of them for years. Pretty much the only puzzle about Shakespeare’s language attainments is how he knew Italian (if he did), and I suspect he probably didn’t. He doesn’t drop Italian phrases into the plays like he does with Latin and French, and while there are a couple of Italian sources for the plays for which we don’t have an extant English translation, it’s possible that Shakespeare had access to a translation, or that he simply heard someone telling the story in a pub somewhere.
The way I’ve heard that explained is (and I’m just the messenger here) reading the ‘though’ as ‘even if it you had’ - that is: “even if you had small Latin and less Greek.” That strikes me as an odd thing to note, but whatever.
No it’s not known whether it was placed there at the instigation of fellow writers/actors or whether it was placed there by his family. Either way, it was put there while his wife and family were still alive. And so must have been done with his wife’s knowledge and consent. Not to mention the knowledge and consent of the vicar of the church. As well as the knowledge and consent of the church committee. And the knowledge of all the local people who went to that church every Sunday.
Understand what you’re saying when you make that point - you are saying that this group of unknown conspirators got together sometime after Shakespeare’s death and thought:
“Hmm, maybe we haven’t placed enough bogus clues around to make future generations think Shakespeare wrote the plays. We’d better erect a monument in the church just to make absolutely sure.”
And then they persuaded his wife and family to go along with it, and the vicar of the church and all the local people in the village. It’s insane.
There is absolutely no way you would persuade the priest to go along with it never mind all the other people. He’s not going to allow a bogus plaque to be put up in his church in order to further the aims of some bizarre subterfuge. Churches are very solemn places - I doubt there is an example anywhere of a false monument or plaque in a church.
And there’s no particular reason to think it’s fake anyway when Shakespeare himself is buried right there inside the church. Not outside in the graveyard - in a very prominent place inside the church. I’ve been to Holy Trinity church - it’s a small provincial church. Shakespeare is quite clearly the most important person to have ever been buried in that church. Not only is he buried in a prominent place with his family inside the church but they put a plaque on the wall. Short of erecting a statue outside, there’s not much more they could have done.
It could have been the case that the original idea for the plaque came from fellow writers/actors but it would have needed an ok from Anne and in fact it’s more logical that the whole idea came from Anne and the family anyway - that’s what normally happens with plaques.
There is a fairly good indication of Shakespeare’s mastery of the French language(or lack of it) in Henry V. He wrote almost an entire scene in French. His knowledge of French seems to have been at practical level but 2nd or 3rd rate. He made numerous mistakes. I am not a French speaker, but I did have a great link to a page discussing Shakespeare’s mistakes in French. I have unfortunately lost this link.
If a French speaker had been brought in to help writing this scene I would assume this speaker would have attained a much greater mastery of French. I tentatively believe then that Shakespeare himself wrote the scene.
It’s not particularly odd if you think of it as an early form of “the boy did good despite his shortcomings” or “he beat all the odds”. Jonson was a bit of an educational snob. From other things he attributes to Shakespeare this quote on Latin and Greek is fully in keeping. Jonson said elsewhere Shakespeare was more to be praised than condemned, that he lacked classical knowledge. However, these should be seen in relative terms.
The biggest problem I have with it is the “secret that wasn’t a secret.” The theorists all start out with a reason their candidate absolutely, under no circumstances, could be known as the author of the plays, because there would be dire consequences. Then they go on to explain that X, Y and Z people were in on the secret, and dropped any number of hints that were contemporaneous, plus the author himself couldn’t stand to remain completely anonymous, so he put all these hints in the plays themselves (or in the case of Bacon, bizarre cryptograms), and somehow didn’t worry about being discovered because of them, due to the fact that they somehow knew their contemporaries wouldn’t get them, and yet people in the future would.
It makes no sense.
Either it was a secret, in which case we would expect that it would still be a secret, except that some special thing, like a hidden and cryptic (a la Samuel Pepys, which I guess was actually in a known, but uncommon shorthand) diary being discovered, which owned up to it in a straightforward way, but privately, or it wasn’t a secret, just something kind of on the down low, in which case we would expect occasional references to it in letters and other personal writings, and NOT a first folio dedicated to the authorship of the man from Stratford.
No, my point is that (I have heard some Oxfordians say) the phrase means “even if you had small Latin and less Greek (but we know you don’t).” It’s in the subjunctive.
So it would be an odd thing to stick in a poem. “You’re a Greek and Latin scholar, but even if you weren’t, you would still be compared to the classics.”
Ah, I understand the point now. Forgive me but that was an explanation I had not heard before.