I would add to this the argument by anti Stratfordians that Shakespeare was not known as a poet or playwright by his Stratford contemporaries. Hence the silence in Stratford during his lifetime. He only had such a reputation in London. To believe this we have to assume the “conspiracy” did not fool the townpeople of Stratford but somehow did successfully fool Londoners. Well, this would be strange indeed. That the conspiracy was so complete in London, but at the very same time something of a failure in Stratford.
Its far more likely to assume Stratfordians of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period were not particularly concerned with the status of Playwrights. Indeed this seems to have been the case with most playwrights of the period and in most corners of England. With a few noticeable exceptions such as Ben Jonson.
Don’t get me wrong: I agree that Jonson’s eulogy in the First Folio, coupled with the Heminges/Condell roles in compiling it, are - by themselves - all but conclusive on Stratford authorship.
My point is that it seems odd for an author of Stratford’s background (his language training, his need to provide for a working theater, and his general use of English-language primary sources) to be using source material from other languages.
I have reached the pass that the Elizabethans did most deliberately conspire amongst themselves to sow the seeds of fear, uncertainty and doubt about the question, that we might ever engage in debate and ne’er be resolved on’t.
Which even if it was the case, which isn’t actually ‘generally believed’ at all, would be completely irrelevant. You couldn’t just turn up and erect a random monument in a parish church. It would, at the very least, have required the involvement of the vicar, the church wardens and, in this case, the holders of the advowson. And wouldn’t the family have taken at least a passing interest in the matter.
Because the important point is not who erected it but the fact that no one in Stratford was puzzled. If they didn’t think Shakespeare was a famous writer, the lack of comment you seem to think is so significant would be odd after all.
The poor evidence of Jonson, Heminges and Condell has been written about for at least 100 years. Go to the Forum at playshakespeare.com to read a new post on this. Also, you can read the best Stratfordian evidence in their new book Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, and then read the non-Stratfordian response book with that title plus a question mark - Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? And then sign up for Ros Barber’s book, a work in progress, that is looking at all the evidence and get’s revised every month or two. There are many other great books but these are the best for the two sides basic arguments.
It’s an interesting argument, but makes many assumptions. The plaque does not clearly identify Shakespere as either a poet, playwright, or actor. It’s quite vague and challenging to onlookers. The bust originally may have looked quite different than the current one. The vagueness and ambiguity would have made it easier to be presented as somehow honoring the man regardless of what the vicar or churchgoers thought of him. Plus, Fulke Greville, an Elizabethan courtier, was a Recorder for Stratford, and could easily have been connected to a hidden author, and have had influence in getting the plaque, and possibly a new bust, put in the church.
I have gone to the forum cited and read 25 posts by a single poster. What I gleaned is that someone believes that the Heminges/Condell introduction to the First Folio is similar to a mash-up of particular translations of separate poems by Horace and Pliny. and that Heminges and Condell may not have known Horace or Pliny, and that therefore Ben Jonson may have written those laudatory comments in addition to his own. Is that a fair summary? I am sure that I am missing something, but I don’t see anything there that changes my view, at all.
Bacon’s hypothetical cryptography has been written about for 100 years, and then some. The age of the theory has not added to its persuasiveness.
Shakespeare Beyond Doubt was published by the Cambridge University Press on April 18, 2013, a two-year comprehensive response to the Oxfordian movie Anonymous. The Oxfordian Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? managed to be self-published on … May 23, 2013. That’s correct. Three weeks.
I once needed two years of my life to compile and edit a collection of essays. Three weeks? No.
Actually, in the village I want to primary school, there was a church with a fake grave marker inside. It covered the entrance to an English civil war era ‘priest-hole’ tunnel. This is somewhat different to a fake memorial to assist in bizarre subterfuge, but in certain circumstances, actually relatively close to Shakespeare’s era, at least one priest was OK with the idea of a dummy grave.
I don’t mention this because I think it gives any credence to the conspiracy theorists, I just found it really interesting (especially when it was discovered when I was 10, and the tunnel went under the school… awesome!)
The plaque does compare Shakespeare to the poet Virgil. It then goes on to describe Shakespeare as quick witted, or quick natured. It then mentions “all he hath writ”. I think it is nitpicking to point out the lack of specific words such as “playwright” or “poet”.
Stay Passenger, why goest thou by so fast?
Read if thou canst, whom envious Death hath plast
Within this monument Shakspeare: with whom
Quick nature died: whose name doth deck this tomb
Far more than cost: sith [since] all that he hath writ
Leaves living art, but page to serve his wit.
However, assume for a second you are correct. That a new bust and plaque were installed years later. This implies the earlier criticism of the lack of specific words such as “poet” or “playwright” is moot. A more competent conspiracy would have said something like:
Here lyeth William Shakespeare
Poet, Playwright and Actor.
It is because of these discrepancies that I cannot take anti Stratfordian arguments too seriously(the aforementioned Ros Barber being one of the exceptions). They continually point to evidence which is contradictory.
No, that’s not really a fair summary. The argument goes that in “The Epistle Dedicatorie”:
There isn’t evidence that Heminges or Condell were experienced at such composition.
That there’s no evidence that they read the classics, especially of Horace and Pliny.
That some reviewers think that one needed to have read Horace and Pliny in Latin, and if that seems to be the case, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that H&C knew Latin.
On the other hand, Ben Jonson is known to have the skills to write that piece ascribed to H&C. Further, there are other parallels between Jonson and “To the great Variety of Readers”, also supposedly written by H&C, that suggest he was the author of that piece. Therefore, the evidence suggests that neither H nor C wrote what was ascribed to them, and that Jonson actually wrote both pieces. The challenge is for those favoring the Stratfordian position to provide evidence that supports the belief that H&C actually did write the two pieces.
To say that ‘it hasn’t changed my views’ is not a rational argument. What evidence do you have to support the standard interpretation?
Baconian theory doesn’t need any arguments based on cryptography. But since you mention it there’s been several new counterarguments that are based on cryptography that have yet to be answered. If you’re interested this can be found at http://bacon-shakespeare-evidence.blogspot.com/
The SBD? book used a lot of material previously published. Plus, the authors had maybe 6 months advance notice that the first SBD book was coming out. So they had plenty of time, if they focused on it, to get it ready for a quick response.
Supposing it was a conspiracy, it would seem to be one that invited future readers to question appearances and to solve the seeming mystery. That would explain why the plaque, for example, didn’t say explicitly that Shakspere buried there was a “Poet, Playwright, and Actor”.
Your standard for “evidence” may need some recalibration.
The First Folio valedictory was publicly attributed to Heminges and Condell, during their lifetimes, without any known contradiction. The pieces are on a subject (a fellow actor and friend) about which Heminges and Condell could reasonably be expected to write, in a volume that likely could not have been compiled without their cooperation, and which certainly could not have been published without their knowledge. The presumption is not only in favor of H/C authorship of the valedictory, but near-conclusively so.
The contrary position is that the valedictory may have been based on separate poems by Horace and Pliny, and that H/C may not have been familiar with those poems, and that even if they are familiar with them the Horace/Pliny poems may not have existed in English translation, and that if there were no English translation then it may be the case that neither H nor C had the schooling to read the original Latin, and that H/C may not have been gifted enough to mimic the style, and that therefore Ben Jonson may have been ghost writing in the name of living, public figures, and that Jonson may have been doing so in furtherance of a conspiracy years - and even decades - after the deaths of the principals. I certainly am willing to entertain non-Stratfordian notions - the whole subject is entertaining - but I would not call this a compelling point.
IOW, they issued boilerplate that does not address the book itself but repeats standard Oxfordian arguments.
Arguments based on cryptography are what have made your side look ridiculous, if not delusional, for two centuries. You don’t want to make this argument, ever. It cannot help you in any way.
The logic behind the conspiracy theory depends upon the plotters strewing numerous clues across the landscape that provide a nudge and a wink to all those who were in on the joke. You then have to ask why no one of the time ever mentioned what a splendid joke they perpetrated. Yet the clues have been found in so many places that the conspiracy must have required dozens of people all talking amongst themselves for decades with not a word of it leaking out. You also have to ask what nobody at the time ever mentioned that they figured it out. Obviously, nobody anywhere understood the clues, because they have come up with 87 answers. Therefore the clues were so fantastically subtle that people who were alive at the time to understand the references and personally knew the players in the game were unable to play. This requires that the dozens of people in the game all agreed to make the game unwinnable. That is, unwinnable among the contemporaries they were addressing but easily understood by people hundreds of years later, all for a set of plays that they keep insisting were of minor importance in their day because so few references to them exist.
None of this logic. None of this is believable. It can only be made logical and believable by assuming the reverse. If you assume there was no conspiracy, then it all becomes a matter of cherrypicking, inventing, and fudging. If you have an answer in mind you are free to roam through all the words and facts in existence and reference them, interpret them, and make claims about them that become evidence for that answer. We know this is true, because this is the essence not just of all other conspiracy theories but all the pattern-creation nonsense that people love to invent. At the low end you have all the meanings for “42” that people in love with Douglas Adams invent and all the ways that “23” is significant that go all the way back past the Jim Carrey movie to the pseudoscience of Wilhelm Fleiss. The Bible Code is a similar exercise in bad thinking. As Martin Gardner has entertainingly shown, there are so many ways of manipulating numbers and inventing codes that you can show any number is meaningful and any code will produce the answers you want, especially if no rigor is ever placed on your methods or interpretations.
The anti-Stratfordian crowd desperately want the argument to be about facts, because they can trot out endless numbers of “facts” that sound impressive, even when careful researchers demonstrate that they are phony, as posters in this thread keep doing. Conspiracy theories purport to be about facts as well, even when they are “just asking questions,” which is not really a demand for answers but a way of discrediting actual facts. All analyses of CTs show instead that they are a particular form of bad thinking, in which facts are mainly irrelevant because they are simply made up. All CTs use similar logic, similar disdain for authority, similar claims of hidden knowledge, similar accusations at cover-ups, and similar violations of standard scholarship. Knowing this, an argument can be judged as a CT - I would say a false CT but that’s redundant - even by non-subject matter experts. All CTs are wrong in the same way. Standard scholarship can be right or wrong, but will be right or wrong in a distinctly different way. It’s no coincidence that belief in one CT often leads to belief in others; if you can accept this style of thinking in one thing you can accept it in any other.
For some reason, Shakespeare denial is held up as serious scholarship by its adherents, who are touchy about having their thinking compared to birthers and truthers and climate change deniers and moon hoaxers and the thousand other CTs that use thinking identical to theirs. Dismissing Shakespeare denial out of hand is somehow more insulting than their notion that the entire profession of academic scholarship is full of shit. But it can be dismissed out of hand. You don’t need to be GIGObuster to dismiss climate change deniers; you don’t need to be Fuzzy Wuzzy to dismiss Shakespeare deniers. You only have to know how to think and how to read an argument.
I don’t agree with this at all. The evidence of Heminges and Condell has little or nothing to do with them writing that verse attributed to them. No-one knows quite how educated they were. They may have written it all. They may have had it written for them, or they may had help writing it. The point is that the piece was acceptable enough to both men that they thought it worthy of publishing in the Folio. These men worked closely with Shakespeare for 20 years. They believed he wrote the works in the Folio.
I dont know enough about this particular subject to comment fully. Other than the suspected fraudulent Maro was only hinted at being a fraud. THat it was not a default belief of Elizabethan authors. Other than this I cant comment on Maro.
The page linked to does have some absolutely incredible arguments.
“it is an odd comparison, insofar as Virgil was a leading pastoral poet and was most often compared in the late 16th and early 17th century with Shakespeare’s rivals, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. The latter authors were far more famous for their achievements in the field of pastoral poetry than Shakespeare – indeed Spenser has been dubbed “England’s Virgil.” Sidney had written a famous pastoral poem called Arcadia, while Spenser wrote a pastoral called The Shepheardes Calendar and explicitly took Virgil as his model for his masterpiece The Faerie Queene. Why choose an ancient poet more identified with Shakespeare’s chief rivals than with Shakespeare himself for the latter’s final praise?”
Sir Philip Sydney and Edmund Spenser were rivals of Shakespeare? At a stretch I can almost believe that Spenser was a rival, again this is still bordering on being extremely far fetched. However, there is no way on earth Sidney was a rival of Shakespeare. I don’t know the educational background of the writer of this blog but he is not an expert on the literary culture of the period. Shakespeare was considered at least a level or two behind Sidney and Spenser, both at a social and artistic level.
If its strange that Shakespeare was compared to the same poet Sidney and Spenser had previously been compared to; why was it not strange for Spenser to be compared in the same way? After all his Spenser’s rival, Sidney, had already been compared to Virgil.
Of course there are about 50 candidates. Part of W. Shakespeare’s genius was assembling a vast group ghost writers who all wrote secretly in a common style, yet had readily available published material of lesser quality and/or different voice. Stratfordians like to point to plays written after de Vere’s demise. Well of course those plays weren’t written by de Vere. They were written by others.
It was a benevolent conspiracy of nobles who wished to prove to the public 200 years hence that a commoner was fully capable of writing such great material. The Illuminati weren’t evil: they were our friends!