Just to be clear: you’re agreeing that the Sonnets seems “bizarre” compared with what is known about Shaksper? Even those who are certain Shaksper wrote the Sonnets should agree there’s some puzzles, but most avoid admitting it.
There’s relatively little contemporaneous document about Shaksper; even laymen like myself can acquaint ourselves with much of the evidence.
I hope to present some serious arguments that will be judged on their merits. If the response is just going to be “You’ve already admitted to ignorance, septimus; we’ll ignore your ‘evidence’ because the PhD’s say …; Yadda, yadda yadda” perhaps I shouldn’t bother.
There certainly are some intriguing pieces of evidence I’ve never seen “traditional” Shakespeare scholars even acknowledge.
If I say something crackpottish, call me on it. Let’s not call me a crackpot a priori!
Don’t the Intelligence services have some sort of programme where by word analysis/count etc.they can determine who exactly wrote anonymus letters and suchlike ?
And if so couldn’t they put this to use by determining that all the works attributed to an author named Shakespeare were actually written by the same person ?
That is simply irrelevant. That is a prefatory poem by Jonson (or at least ‘B. I.’) to Cinthias Revenge by ‘I. S.’, who is usually thought to be John Stephens. There is no reason at all to think that Jonson’s comments have anything whatsoever to do with Shakespeare.
How many sonnets by other Elizabethan poets have you read? Because, far from them merely agreeing that there are ‘some puzzles’ in Shakespeare’s sonnets, all literary scholars revel in the fact that those sonnets - and most of those of his contemporaries as well - are crammed with them. Sonnets were supposed to be cryptic, obscure, playful, ambiguous, surprising and, yes, bizarre. Which means that this is not exactly the strongest grounds on which to question Shakespeare’s authorship.
You’re comparing a single work to a body of work. A person might take on a character for a particular piece, but for him to take on that same exact character for all or nearly all of his works is unlikely.
The bigger issue would be trying to presume an age, profession, etc. for the writer. Authors often come back to certain themes and ideas in their works, but those represent their interests as concerns poetic topics, not necessarily their interests in daily life. Writing romantic poetry may just have been considered fun by the author. It doesn’t need to imply that there was actually a romantic interest.
I wouldn’t say the sonnets seem bizarre given what we know of Shakespeare. We don’t know much about him to begin with. 99% of what we know about him comes from his writings.
And that link you have in your OP - I couldn’t even get past the first paragraph.
Seriously, what? Point me to one notable Shakespeare scholar that says “Shakespeare is highly objective” or “the best writers are the most objective.” That first paragraph reads like a crap high school term paper.
Thank you. I’d included that poem in the same “confusing poems” notebook as some of the Sonnets and thoughtlessly posted it with them. Glad to get that cleared up.
Thank you again. By the way, as a mathematician I approach many questions as probabilistic. If the Sonnets match Oxford like a glove but are incongruous with Shaksper, I do not think of that as proof. Rather it affects my guesses of a priori probabilities.
Thanks. I was beginning to wonder if those posting here had acquainted themselves with the issues! (“Shakespeare’s Sonnets were unattributed” ! … in an earlier SDMB thread “The Oxfordian case is based on alleged ciphers” ! etc.)
Both the Stratford case and the Oxford case have serious weaknesses. I’m agnostic myself. One comment I would make is that many of the vociferous Stratford supporters have a knack for pedantry or taking their eyes off the ball. That it was the Oxfordians with the favorable review may support my finding that that side, perhaps surprisingly, often seems most objective.
On the matter of Oxfordian URL’s (and surely it’s not too much to ask that participants click on a few, rather than relying on Why we know Oxfordians are idiots Google hits to learn of Oxfordian ideas? ) some of the better ones have disappeared :mad: I don’t see Tom Bethel’s articles on-line; a periodical with interesting articles is now pay-per-view. (Fortunately I often download rather than bookmark and have some pages now otherwise gone.)
Do you recommend the Shapiro book? Googling just know I see excerpts from a Google book which do not impress me: McCrea arguing against Bethel. I object to his argument and would argue that it is guilty of the circular thinking it accuses Oxfordians of. (I’m curious if you’d see what I mean there, APB. I’ll send the page numbers if you wish, but basically searched for Bethel.)
[This is what I get for posting late at night.] I deny the bizarrity. There is a lot we don’t know about the sonnets: we’re not sure about their subjects or intended audience. But I’m denying the conclusion you are attempting to draw from this.
To quote from the article in the OP:
What this essentially comes down to is “Shakespeare must have experienced the things he wrote about,” which is an enormous assumption. You haven’t convinced anybody to make it.
And that is the problem. Maybe Shakespeare did work in a law office. We don’t have any evidence that he DIDN’T. Lack of evidence is not proof it didn’t happen - its just an unknown hole - and history is full of places where we just don’t have evidence one way or another. When you try to build a case for history on lack of evidence, its likely to be a pretty weak case. It can be a fun case of “did the future of England hinge on Anne Boleyn being Rh negative?” and “How much did Catherine the Great have to do with killing her husband?” But there aren’t answers.
Oh, please. This is the same argument made by Jenny McCarthy saying that autism is caused by vaccines and the guy on the Texas School Board who said that somebody has to take a stand against the experts. Saying that people who have spent their entire lives studying an issue know more about it than amateurs dabbling for a few hours is not elitism, but sheer common sense. I’ve spent decades on certain subjects and I’m damn sure I know more about them than you do. Not because I’m elitist but because I did the hard, and often boring, work. When people come onto the Board and proclaim that 0.9999+ can’t be equal to 1 do you say, you may be right, after all I’m just a mathematician and my understanding of the subject is only as good as yours?
Shapiro is one of the very best Shakespeare scholars working today and he’s now at the very top of his game. He’s also doing what the anti-Stratfordians always accuse their opponents of not doing - taking them on directly. Will he convince them to change their minds? Almost certainly not. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he hasn’t just shifted the terms of the whole controversy. He also manages the neat trick of being very funny, while, at the same time, scrupulously avoiding any of the obvious cheap laughs.
I also second the recommendation of Love’s Attributing Authorship.
Actually, I think my comparison does hold up. Cash had a veritable crapload of songs about committing crimes and being in jail. A number of people actually believe he had been in jail because of nothing more than his songs. But whether it’s 1 song or a dozen songs with the same character or narrator, it’s still never a good idea to think that the narrator’s voice is the author’s.
I agree 100%.
Also, if you’re reading the sonnets simply to figure out who they’re about or why Shakespeare wrote them (or why Shakespeare didn’t write them as it were), I think you’re really missing the point of the sonnets. There’s so much going on in the sonnets on so many levels. You could spend hours reading and analyzing them, choosing a different, legitimate angle for each one. It’s like reading Petrarch and getting all caught up in figuring out Laura’s identity.
I have some specific questions which might help me evaluate conflicting authorship theories. Are you in contact with any of these scholars, and willing to relay my questions? If so, should I post the questions here? Or via pm?
I’ve already thanked you for this APB. It’s good to feel like we’re “on the same page.” But…
Do you want to debate APB in a side thread? Or do you accept the “bizarrity” now, but “deny the conclusion [septimus is] attempting to draw …”?
More unfinished business:
I’m sorry if I annoyed you. I’ll back out altogether if someone else agrees I was being “precious”, let alone extremely so.
Marley23: Reread the thread and tell me if you think anyone else is interested in any contribution septimus might make.
One intriguing mystery is King James’ behavior on 24 June 1604. But it doesn’t prove anything about the authorship.
Well, I feel stupid. I don’t know where I got that. I was certain the sonnets were printed without an author - so certain I didn’t need to check. And obviously wrong.
The day of Oxford’s death, the King went into a panic, seized Henry Wriothesley, along with some of his friends and documents, and may have destroyed some of Wriothesley’s and Oxford’s papers. The incident was not widely noted and, AFAIK, the connection with the date of Oxford’s death was noted only recently. Googling just now, I find it mentioned in a book by Whittemore.
Please be aware I don’t endorse Whittemore’s speculations (this was just the mention of incident I found Googling). Please be aware I don’t consider the incident “proof” of anything. It is however an interesting fact to consider for anyone approaching the mysteries surrounding Oxford, Southampton, and perhaps the Shakespeare Authorship with an open mind.
And please don’t remind us that the incident proves nothing about the Authorship. I already said that, but two people asked about the incident anyway.
Perhaps your half-memory arose from a conflation of an opinion that the provenance and preface of the Sonnets suggest a Shakespeare who was no longer living at the time, or at least had no involvement with their publication(*). (Yes, I know this sentence will attract sarcastic answers, none of which actually address the question.)
(* - bootlegged playscripts could be easily derived, e.g. from actors or even spectators. How these personal poems were published without author’s involvement, however, is just one of many mysteries that are ignored or given only half-answers by “Stratfordians.”)
For those who find “Stratfordian” overly precious, what’s your alternative? “Sane Shakespeare scholars”, I’d guess, judging by some comments here. Please show that you’ve done your research by listing some of the “insane” anti-Stratford thinkers, e.g. Henry James “I am haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.”
When has anyone said that anti-Stratfordians are insane? The point is that most of them aren’t scholars with an extensive knowledge of Shakespeare and his works. Sure, Henry James was a great author, and Walt Whitman was a brilliant poet, but that doesn’t mean they knew more about Shakespeare than, say, modern day scholars like Helen Vendler or Stephen Booth.
Good, then what, to your open mind, is interesting about this? Could you tie this into a larger argument? Why should King James’s reaction to Oxford’s death have anything to do with Oxford’s authorship of the plays? How do you think we can explain Shakespearian influences (not to say “authorship”) on plays after 1604 [influence that has been proven through the analysis of word frequency, etc; see, for example, the introduction to the Arden edition of Timon of Athens)?
How so? Could it be that you’re ignoring the evidence, rather than them? After all, you are leaving out (consciously?) that the 1609 version of the Sonnets was the first complete (so far as we know, because, for one thing, we cannot know if those are actually all the Sonnets Shakespeare wrote) edition, but not only had versions of the sonnets previously appeared in print, we have clear, unambigous evidence that “the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and jhoney-tongued Shakespeare…his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, etc.” [Greenblatt, Will in the World, 235]; so while we don’t know how many of those sonnets were known, we know that some were. Plus it appears that contemporaries attributed them to the “Man-from-Stratford,” as you so cutely put it, rather than the Shakespeare-as-Oxford – unless the good Earl was a cunning man with masks?
Frankly, I can see how anyone would be disinclined to show their research with that kind of offering. Argumentation-by-authority isn’t going to cut it, and your showing of measured opinion hasn’t been too good. Your internet link cites Schlegel and Schiller, two men who, though no doubt great, are among the central figures of German romanticism, and of course would, from their vantage point, have problems admitting that great poetry can come from anything but heartfelt personal experience. Plus, the entire opening paragraph is so profoundly ridiculous that it beggars belief:
If either “Oxfordians” or “Stratfordians” “say” any of these things, good riddance to them. This kind of laughable reification of what “literature” “is” doesn’t belong in a serious discourse about the sonnets, or any writing for that matter. No literary scholar I know (and I work in a literature department) would ever claim objectivity for either themselves or the literature they study.
Could you, perhaps, just suggest a few things that we could actually discuss – facts, problems you see with the attributions of the sonnets, beyond what has already been explained above?
) some of the better ones have disappeared :mad: I don’t see Tom Bethel’s articles on-line; a periodical with interesting articles is now pay-per-view. (Fortunately I often download rather than bookmark and have some pages now otherwise gone.)