A common problem in conspiracy theories is to assume that of course documentation must exist for some fact, then assume that it must have been kept, its location known, and is easily accessible. Then, when this turns out not to be true, it’s evidence for the conspiracy. But if documents are found, it’s also evidence of conspiracy, or is simply ignored and poeple move on to the next document, etc.
It isn’t interesting enough.
Yes, those are about him. They’re contemporary references to Shakespeare - the kind of thing deniers often say do not exist - so they’re pretty good evidence that he was writing plays and being Shakespeare in London at that time. How is this supposed to be evidence against his authorship?
That’s not something I’m familiar with, but apparently he did. Wouldn’t that indicate that he didn’t need a pseudonym in the first place?
I’ve thought the same, but George Martin. No uneducated working class drug abusers could write stuff with unusual time signatures, or in unusual keys.
Septimus, you bullet-pointed your own claims. They were set aside from the rest of the text. Those were the bits I was asking for cites for. That is really not difficult to understand.
I clearly wasn’t asking for a cite that you consider yourself an agnostic. Why would I ever want a cite on that? It’s your own personal way of describing your personal stance (and it makes perfect sense too) - how could that even have a cite?
You’re being disingenuous if you’re claiming that ‘all of that’ actually could ever mean ‘cite everything in the ENTIRE WORLD now!’ And you could have just said ‘which specific bits please?’ rather than being rude - you quoted your own posts; you were rude in them.
Because the Oxford side seems to rely on quantity, not quality, of evidence (I suspect they’d agree), it might be helpful to log the points that have been shot down, as well as the ones that still need answers.
By my understanding, these points have been so thoroughly refuted that they require no further discussion:
-The illiteracy of the daughters.
-The Shake-Spear thingy.
-The different spellings of the names.
-Shakespeare’s scientific understanding.
-Shakespeare’s Latin and Greek.
-Shakespeare’s knowledge of the court.
Do any of the Oxfordians still think any of these points have any worth, or are they all conceded as spurious arguments? On the other side, did I leave out any specific claims that have been refuted thoroughly? (The King James business may be thoroughly refuted–I’m not entirely clear on what the claim is supposed to be there).
There were claims scattered throughout my longish post. Indeed the three bullet points were, AFAIK, less controversial than some of these other scattered claims. That you were referring specifically to the bullet points never occurred to me, honestly. Perhaps next time you can spend a few seconds removing the irrelevant part of the quote. I use click-drag-any_key; perhaps in your editor it’s more difficult.
Since there were only four bullets, my reply to you should have led to resolution. Perhaps my reply fell off the page:
As to the 4 bullet points in question, I myself questioned #4 above, and the others are NOT controversial. #2 or #3 are AFAIK accepted by all without argument; #1 is accepted but often viewed as half-truth, the “best” referring to de Vere’s noble status, not his writing skill.
Does this answer your question?
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
His comments about it being a hoax were in response to your statements
and
If the author is a nobleman pretending to be a commoner, why would his nobleman status be relevant? Greene would not knowingly be making an attack on a nobleman, he would think he is making an attack on a commoner. The author was pretending to be a commoner. He couldn’t very well write it from the perspective of a noble, or his ruse would be up.
Your statements hardly refute the idea that some nobleman was masquerading as a commoner, because the conspiracy theory itself posits the ruse. All you’ve shown is that Greene was fooled by the ruse and that the author was smart enough to realize that if he was using a false identity of a commoner, he’d damned well better be consistent.
None of that makes the false identity theory any stronger, but your rebuttals don’t make it any weaker.
SciFiSam, I, too, was unclear which claims for which you wished cites.
This reminds me of the theory that one of John Coltrane’s most famous compositions is “Allah Supreme,” nevermind that the title of the piece reads differently.
Meh, you are jumping to claim all the rebuttals are, (and they are not mine BTW) when you only take care of one bit that was confusing… it still is, if that is the hoax he was referring to then… that is not really a demonstration of much of anything it is just a mistake by the writer of the piece, it does not mean that automatically that supports the oxfordian position, I still then go for the simplest explanation, the evidence supports Shakespeare as the writer. e
I said nothing about all rebuttals, I only mentioned those two specific statements that you cited as rebuttals.
I haven’t put any time into this issue, I have no care and am fully convinced the actor William Shakespeare is the most likely author of the plays that bear his name. I was simply pointing out septimus had a valid point about the claim being a hoax. The cited rebuttal points were idiocy in the face of the actual claim made. So if you know the claim is that the hoax is the point, why did you cite the arguments?
You brought those claims to the discussion. septimus pointed out how silly they are, and yet you still think that he is “attempting to make things more complicated than needed”?
Well, you are, why is the hoax point important regarding the issue, besides already accepting that the cites are not dealing with that hoax?
This BTW is an important reason why I think skeptics are the ones not making any substantive points, I already mentioned what is the simplest answer and I haven’t seen anything to counteract that.
[quote=“septimus, post:52, topic:602003”]
[li] De Vere was a playwright, described as “best”?[/li][/quote]
What’s your cite for this claim, especially the passive-voice part? That is, who described him as “best”? I’ve seen the claim that McDonald’s makes the best french fries on the planet, but that doesn’t mean McDonald’s is secretly run by Julia Child.
Good grief–of course it does! Watch this list of playwrights:
-Sam Shepard
-William Shakespeare
-De Vere
Did you notice that Eugene Ionesco didn’t appear on that list? What does that tell you?
These two fascinate me in light of the claim of “It was a conspiracy!” We seem to be supposing a conspiracy by which
[ul]
[li]a famous noble playwright was supposed to disguise himself as Shakespeare, but [/li][li]the conspiracy was so incompetent that the famous playwright forgot to publish any plays under his own name, and[/li][li]it was so widely known about that people didn’t list him and his pseudonym on the same list of playwrights, since it’d be redundant, and[/li][li]King James was either so stupid that he didn’t know about it (in which case the point about the players makes no sense), or else he was so stupid that he blew the conspiracy wide open at the playwright’s death by putting on a performance of his pseudonymously-written plays, instead of keeping it secret, and[/li][li]the conspiracy was either so widely known that it was literally unremarkable at the time, OR people were so bafflingly stupid that despite the errors mentioned above, nobody picked up on it at the time[/ul][/li]
This is literally the worst conspiracy theory I’ve ever encountered. Usually they at least hold together under cursory examination.
Well, not any more, of course.
That whoever compiled that list and I have nothing to talk about. The Bald Soprano is possibly one of the funniest things I have ever read.
(Yeah, I’m done arguing about Shakespeare now. It’s pretty clear who the winners here are and my dead horse flog hasn’t arrived from amazon yet.)
Look, Shakespeare’s sexuality is a topic for whole other thread.
You love that play? I, too, love that play! How very strange! How very strange, how odd, and what a coincidence!
TBH, no, it doesn’t, but I’m just responding because completely ignoring you would be rude - I’m afraid I don’t have the time to carry on with this debate.
More evidence for the Sticklerian theory about the authorship of Left Hand’s posts!
I’ll support the mutual decision to back away from this thread, each side amazed by the other side’s obstinacy. I’m quite sincere rather than snarky when I state that the Stratfordian refusal to even understand the “conspiracy theories” now seems more interesting to me than the debate itself. There’s no point presenting a case when discussion of de Vere is limited to his fictitious fart, when Stratford is permitted unlimited special pleadings, and other candidates none, when that evidence of Shakespeare’s career is utterly absent from Stratford, despite preservation of documents like the 1616 yearbook) is unremarkable …
… and when debaters are so ignorant they seem not even to acknowledge that de Vere was a playwright:
I volunteered to post URL’s, but the other side has made clear they’re not even interesting in skimming the Wikipedia summary. If the debate is now over whether Oxford appeared on lists of playwrights, I’ll refer to one page you might actually click
Oxford's Literary Reputation
which is an anti-Oxford debunking page, while still admitting he was a playwright. (Now watch the other side prattle on about this debunking, while still refusing to even click on pro-Oxford pages.)
As for your farcical synopsis of the “hoax” theory, Left Hand of Dorkness, we understand you’ll refuse to click on any actual Oxford-related page unless it focuses strictly on the fart. But I’d have thought even an intelligent Stratfordian could have come up with a better hoax theory, just with his own imagination.
What about this page which puts together evidence that:
[ul][li]The name “William Shakespeare” appears on the plays and poems.[/li][li]William Shakespeare was an actor in the company that performed the plays of William Shakespeare.[/li][li]William Shakespeare the actor was William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.[/li][li]William Shakespeare the Globe-sharer was also William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.[/li][li]William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, the actor and Globe-sharer, was the playwright and poet William Shakespeare.[/ul][/li]Some snippets from that page that I found to be most relevant include:
Another page about Shakespeare’s Stratford Monument.
It’s a historical fact that de Vere was acknowledged as a poet and playwright. However, analysis of his work shows that it is inconsistent with Shakespeare’s work, has a different voice and style, and just isn’t as good.
Also, I thought the whole idea of the Oxfordian “hoax” POV was that Shakespeare was used as a pseudonym by de Vere because it would be too scandalous for the nobility to be a playwright due to some social or political stigma. However, if you are saying that de Vere was known as a playwright, then why would he manufacture some hoax to pretend that he’s not a playwright? What’s the point? You can’t say that he assumed a false identity because he didn’t want anyone to know he wrote plays, and then say that he was widely known in his own time to write plays. Does not compute.
Upthread an understandable complaint was made that Oxfordians rely on quantity of evidence. But Strafordians rely on repetition of the obvious:
My goodness, the “Howdowe” page yet again?? And all the quoted evidence fully compatible with the hoax model??
And do Dopers here really not understand that a pen name like “Mark Twain” was not intended to conceal, whereas (for the hoax theory), the hoaxing author needed a living, breathing frontman, not just a “pen name”? There is support for the notion that “Will shakes speare” had a special meaning in literacy circles and/or related to the de Vere family crest, and that Oxford, chancing upon the man from Stratford, saw an opportunity to “solve his problem” with delight. Farfetched? Perhaps, but prattling “How do we know” over and OVER and OVER merely shows you’ve not even looked into the Oxfordian case.
The details of the hoax are unknown. Some knew; many did not; those who knew were aware it was a severely regarded secret. To pretend that if anyone knew, then everyone did and there would have been no reason to attempt secrecy is disingenuous. There is evidence that one early publisher, attributing de Vere’s poems to “E.O.” was reprimanded for it, and subsequent editions attributed the poems to Incognito, or Ignoto, or some such.
Here’s a pdf which attempts to connect de Vere to “Ignoto.” Warning: AFAIK, it doesn’t mention de Vere’s fart, so I guess it must be a biased source. 
In my opinion, all of the following cases can be made. In roughly decreasing order of strength:
- Stratford was the author.
- Oxford was the author.
- Oxford was not the author.
- Stratford was not the author.
If I think case 1 is stronger than 2, and 3 stronger than 4, why am I arguing here? I think the Oxford case, even if wrong, is stronger than many seem to think. U.S. Supreme Court Justices seem to agree with me; in fact Blackmun disagrees with me, finding Oxford’s case stronger than Stratford’s. I do hope Dopers will now impugn those Justices, and point out hearing evidence is not their specialty. (And, AFAIK, de Vere’s fictitious fart was not entered into evidence at their mock trial. )
Perhaps scholars in this thread can help enlighten us on one relevant point which intrigues me:
I ask not about the truth of the 1000 pound reward itself. I just wonder how the evidence for the fact or rumor developed by 1709.