I Love Shakespeare

I found this expose of Sh’s life on a link to Judge Stephen’s in the Wall Street Journal. The triple H is the German professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel. She’s one of us BUT she is a believer in Catholic Shakespeare.

At least her scenario gives poor Will of Stratford a chance to actually live and breathe. And gain an education. Ever since I first read of Jesuit drama I thought it may have an influence on WIll’s (as well as others and members of a theatre going public) development.

But then Catholic Shakespeare is ruled a heresy in Orthodoxy. All the pieces are put together by Triple H from education to death mask. There is no mystery. So agree or not agree? Judge for yourself:

William Shakespeare: The Features, Education and Diseases of a Genius

The genius of William Shakespeare, the creator of immortal works for the stage who is celebrated today as an icon of world literature, was already fully recognised in his own day.

One drama in particular, Hamlet, after 400 years still among the most fascinating, most read, most frequently staged, most discussed and surely most intensively studied plays of all time, had a profound emotional effect on its contemporary audience, in part because of its dangerous political content.

However, the student youth of his day had a penchant for Romeo and Juliet, and eagerly devoured his lubricious verse epic, Venus and Adonis. According to one literary source, they kept a copy of the text under their pillow, and hung a picture of the author above their bed.

As befitted the famous author, Shakespeare’s family had a lavish funerary monument erected to him, in the Jacobean Renaissance style. It was a monument that can be classed among the funerary memorials of scholars and writers of Tudor and Stuart times, to which Shakespeare as an outstanding poet was entitled.

It was embellished with a coloured, true-to-life limestone bust, based on a death mask, and bore eulogising inscriptions putting the deceased on a par with the great literary authorities of classical antiquity (Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil).

In 1623 his actor colleagues and friends published the first edition of his plays, in which they included for the first time those dramas that were politically explosive. (say what)?

Perhaps the most precious book in the world, the First Folio contains a frontispiece engraving depicting the dramatist, proclaiming his ‘work-author identity’ and thus safeguarding Shakespeare’s intellectual property. Many laudatory poems were included in the volume.

This early homage to the poet was negated, however, by the effect of the English Civil War from which the iconoclastic Puritans emerged victorious. Stratford-upon-Avon did not escape their ravages, which almost certainly included serious damage to Shakespeare’s bust in Holy Trinity Church.

But where, one may ask, did Shakespeare, the son of John and Mary Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, obtain his sound education in the humanities and also his early training as a playwright?

It all has to do with the change in religion. Just like hundreds of Catholic parents in England at that time, the Shakespeares, adherents to the old faith, must also have sent their son William to the then only Catholic English College on the Continent at Douai (which was moved to Rheims from 1578 to 1593) as soon as he had reached the entrance age of fourteen. This was in 1578.

The Shakespeares knew that they were breaking the law. It was the English ambassador to France who advised his government to punish the parents of these students severely.

Hitherto it could not be explained why John Shakespeare was summoned to appear before the Queen’s Bench in Westminster in 1580 – together with 140 other persons from all over the country. At that time the number of students at the English College was c. 140. (need to see more info on this)

It is no accident that William, who would have finished his studies in 1580, was employed as an illegal Catholic teacher or tutor in the household of Alexander Hoghton in Lancashire. Hoghton’s brother, Thomas de Hoghton, the head of the family, had left his native England for reasons of conscience and emigrated to Flanders in the late 1560s. He was a close friend of the founder of the English College (William Allen, formerly a fellow at Oxford University) and had helped building it. He also left the college 100 pounds when he died.

It is significant that the theatrical performances at Douai/Rheims were modelled on the great Jesuit theatre of the time. The Jesuits were astonishingly indifferent to Aristotle’s concept of the Three Unities of Action, Place, and Time. They preferred hybrid forms of drama, and tragicomedy in particular.

All this can easily be recognised in Shakespeare’s theatre. It was the English College at Douai/Rheims where the young Shakespeare must have obtained his academic education and his early theatrical training and practice.[1]

Despite his illustrious literary career, the playwright was only 49 years old when he withdrew to the seclusion of his Stratford retreat.

He died three years later – probably as the result of a systemic skin sarcoidosis, an internal disease to which all organs are vulnerable, and which leads to death normally after many years.

The outer signs of this illness can be seen in all four likenesses of Shakespeare whose authenticity I was able to establish,[2] working closely with many scientists and academics from other disciplines, including a number of medics and experts from the German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BKA = CID or FBI).

All the tests used to establish identity led to the same unexpected and sensational result, namely that all the images investigated show the same man: William Shakespeare, taken from life.

The symptoms – in the same location each time, though reproduced at different stages of development – diagnosed by the medics show that the artists must have seen them on the living model or that they were extant in Shakespeare’s face after his death.

Thus they are significant indicators that the Chandos and Flower portraits, the Davenant bust and the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask are true-to-life or true-to-nature representations of Shakespeare.

The thoroughly researched and publicly documented morphological and pathological characteristics of Shakespeare’s face now form a kind of catalogue of criteria, which can be applied whenever the claim is made that a well-known or newly-discovered portrait represents Shakespeare.

The Janssen portrait in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and the Cobbe portrait in the collection of Alec Cobbe, have both been tested for authenticity.

The investigations showed that the painter of the Janssen portrait was quite familiar with Shakespeare’s characteristic features and with the symptoms of his early-stage illnesses.

The artist who painted the Cobbe picture, however, was not acquainted with all the morphological characteristics of Shakespeare’s face, and in particular was unaware of pathological details, apart from a slight swelling of the left upper eyelid, of which there is only a ‘suggestion’ in his portrait.

Therefore the Cobbe picture can hardly be an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare painted from life. Neither can it have served as the model for the Droeshout engraving.

Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel
Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz

[1] See H. Hammerschmidt-Hummel, The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. London. Chaucer Press, 2007).

[2] The images concerned are the Chandos portrait, dating from c. 1594-99 (National Portrait Gallery, London); the Flower portrait, painted in 1609 (in the Royal Shakespeare Company collection until c. 1999, and since vanished without trace); the terracotta Davenant bust of c. 1613 (Garrick Club, London);

and the Darmstadt Shakespeare death mask, taken one or two days after Shakespeare’s death (Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Darmstadt). See Hammerschmidt-Hummel, The True Face of William Shakespeare. The Poet’s Death Mask and Likenesses from Three Periods of His Life. London: Chaucer Press, 2006).

So she doesn’t think the Cobbe portrait is life-like. Already enough to make her unliked in Stratters. Is this documentary of hers about the death mask in English or German? Stick around, I will be true.

And what about that politically charged plays entered the Folio comment? Where’s that list of 18?

As usual, more questions than answers.

If you are tired of hearing the guff about illiterate daughters and women as toys and playthings while the men do all the work and thinking. Just have a read of Aemilia Lanyer’s work.

The introductory poem to Queen Anne has so many echoes of the sonnets it makes my head spin. I’m not saying she’s Shakespeare but he was lucky if she was the Dark Lady!

William S. on Will Sh’s literacy, in him and his family.

Will’s mum and dad may have been unable to write but able to read. His father certainly was numerate. He was a successful dealer in wool and maker of gloves. Running a town council and presiding over your fellow townsfolk and a market stall in its chiefest place, speak volumes in support of his numeracy.

John Sh from the historical record sounds like a forceful figure who could act as bailiff or ale taster and be counted on to take the town’s accounts to London. To slander his name with illiterate nobody is not to take the man into account.

Backward village is how the Orksfordians describe Stratford on Avon. Sorry but backward village is where the witches live close to in Macbeth. His was a goodly market town. It lay on a transport route from the North with Lancashire, and from Wales there was a centuries old route to London.

John Harvard’s mum was brought up there. Why didn’t she mention Shakespeare or Oxford or Marlowe? In fact for not mentioning Sh i blame his son in law, Dr John Hall. Whose book on his patients starts just after Sh’s death. And is the only one extant of the two.

Can you imagine Sh’s medical records as recorded by his son in law, presumably his physician? But John Hall in 1607 married Sh’s eldest daughter, Susanna, whose signature we have, so she could write and presumably read. The reading preceding the writing one assumes.

Brother Gilbert too the haberdasher who followed Will to London left a signature so I guess he could read and write too. And Edward the youngest, the actor in London who really followed his big brother’s footsteps. He was an actor and therefore must have been literate.

In fact it would be a distinct disadvantage to be illiterate if you were an Elizabethan and Jacobean actor. But again that doesn’t necessarily mean they could write.

I suppose there may have been the odd dyslexic actor who memorised his lines as another read them to him. I have done this with an Israeli actor I know. So if Sh was an actor, and actors were literate, Sh could read and write. Sort of, according to his signatures. Love the cheeky dot in the W in each of the them.

Business was what was driving London’s economy and the first multi-nationals came into being as a result of this thinking. The English East India Company formed in 1600. Though it was the Dutch East India Company who traded stocks on the Amsterdam Bourse for the first time in 1602. Oxford’s still alive, so’s Shakespeare.

The Dutch were a driving force in business in early modern europe. Literacy I’m sure helped them, but numeracy had to have been a must.

Of all the nations in Europe, the Dutch, the most commercial, are the most faithful to their word . . . This is not at all to be imputed to national character, as some pretend . . .

It is far more reduceable to self interest, that general principle which regulates the actions of every man, and which leads men to act in a certain manner from views of advantage, and is as
deeply implanted in an Englishman as a Dutchman.

A dealer is afraid of losing his character,
and is scrupulous in observing every engagement. When a person makes 20 contracts in
a day, he cannot gain so much by endeavouring to impose on his neighbours, as the very
appearance of a cheat would make him lose.

324 E. Stringham / The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance 43 (2003) 321–344 (1766/1982, p. 538)

Shakespeare has something to say on pretty much every aspect of being human and having human passions. To do this he touches on many subjects and his knowledge is encyclopaedic. Does this mean he is a polymath? Is he also an expert of these subjects?

I don’t think so. Definitely not when compared to the knowledge certainties of Bacon, or Marlowe, or Jonson.

Shakespeare was a natural. You can define natural all you want but it defies description. It just is. The closest commmentary we have about him tells us that was how he was considered.

A good print shop inventory might contain a bunch of sources for example. Now how could dumbass actor Shagsberds get his hands on that? Hmmm. His fellow grammar school student and London friend, Richard Field apprenticed to one of Belgiums finest printer perhaps.

Sh needed a place of study for his sources for his plays, as above, or anyone with the right library. He needed to physically write the stuff: quill to ink to paper. He needed candles if it was dark. He needed to want to write what he wrote. He needed someone to sell his work to. That’s it.

He worked for the leading theatre company of his time. A job I’m sure they didn’t give to morons.

Today Shakespeare is a brand. Stronger perhaps than the Queen of England. Coca Cola and Nike are tikes in comparison. Shakespeare, however you spell or hyphenate it, is a juggernaut of a brand. And every generation since his own, has had an ever-increasing earful of what, or who he was.

Actually the only people who cared after his death were those that had known him in the best: the world of theatre. It was they who kept his memory and plays alive. That would be scanned.

Changing taste lead to his plays ironically being out of date and remained unpopular for the stage until the Restoration. Whereupon the stage changed the sad endings for happy, or added speeches of their own devising. Then a whole line of theatre actor/managers revived his roles, bringing fame and fortune to themselves.

Also don’t forget from his time the quartos of the plays remained alive and well. Early readers bought him and his collected works in the First Folio took its toll from a reading public, if it wasn’t available in their local theatre.

Amateur productions of Shakespeare date to his time as well as on the East India Company ship waiting for wind off the coast of Africa. Hamlet got played. Oh to have been a sailor on that ship that night.

Would they have talked of the author or more likely, as all the marginalia and accounts of the early modern tells us, of the details of the play, some moral lesson to be learned, or as a pointer to something elsewhere.

Who wrote it is of least importance. Unless you were a rival purveyor of the same craft or trade. The Elizabethans slandered and libelled each other all over the place. Lawsuits were common; from piddling amounts to complicated estate escrow.

But now he began to be talked about as a writer. His plays re-edited and published to a wider audience. Copyright appeared in 1709 and suddenly the rights to Shakespeare the product were available. Now a biography is needed and no one has thought to question the people closest to him. Either family, or theatre, or writer friends.

Over the next hundred years a romantic vision of Shakespeare grows from the sparse information we have. THEN the problem of authorship appears.

My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more, to shame nor me nor you.

What’s the purpose of knowing who an anonymous playwright/ poet was, if knowing alters nothing?

Shakespeare was a playwright first and poet second…no that would be scanned. A poet first…

What’s the purpose of play writing?

Is it to create a piece of literary genius?
Or write a play to be played by actors?

We can praise the ‘genius’ of the written piece of work, its poetry, its mellifluity. All of which happens in our head as we read.

Or we can re-mint the words anew in voice, body and soul by memorising the lines and performing them for a paying audience.

How do we know and admire Monteverdi?
Because of his music.

How do we know and admire Michelangelo?
Because of his painting.

How do we know and admire Shakespeare?
Because of his plays. And poems.

The core of the argument for Shakespeare, to have any value whatsoever, rests with his works. Without his works? Nada, noppes, nothing.

So for what purpose did he write the plays?

If I am to believe in an alternative authorship, he did it to embed his name and being within the plays for his own immortality to be discovered at some later date.

This anonymous poet/playwright apparently knew his fame would grow after his death and the plan would at some point be uncovered.

At the same time the anonymous writer shared no profit or name recognition, whilst a rival theatre company acted and printed his works.

The anonymity of the author is irrelevant to the performing of the works, which is their primary purpose. The anonymity of the author is unimportant, except to biography.

Shakespeare remains Shakespeare because of his works. Not because of who he was.

Any theatre professional will not be aided or assisted in mounting a production of any Shakespeare play, by knowing the author was someone else.

This argument about anonymous

o’ersteps the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now is, to hold as ’twere a mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

Biography is a secondary, not a primary argument.

I am well aware of the shortcomings of the historical record in regards to the biography of William Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.

I am also well aware of the long and shortcomings of any alternative candidate for the title of William Shakespeare.

The authorship question focuses purely on biography and intertwines it with one particular life story. So details like Robert Cecil being a hunchback means every production of Richard 3rd recalls this historical biographical fact.

How does this help in understanding Richard 3rd as a play? Or its place in the meta-narrative of the history plays Shakespeare wrote? Richard appears in H6 parts 2 and 3. Was he Robert Cecil there too?

The authorship question throws into doubt the ordering and writing of the plays. No one has managed to correctly date them, save for indisputable performance and publication dates.

However anyone can feel for themselves that Titus Andronicus is an earlier play than A Winter’s Tale. The writing style of the latter has changed and developed.

The authorship question derives from questions thrown up once the plays are written. Who was the writer? When, where, why, and how did he write?

The anonymous theorists suggest endless twists and turns of varying possible and impossibilities. Not once addressing why he wrote the plays in the first place.

They are viciously angry toward the attributed author and feel they are being ignored in their attribution of the ‘true’ biography.

Now they are being justified by a German filmmaker, who is turning their candidate into a cheap grubby whore. Oxford’s reputation is being sullied by crass 21stC commercialism and incestuous slander.

All in the name of a fiction, which the film will remain, and despite their efforts to prove otherwise through their efforts at historical revisionism.

Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

Of course the argument goes that the Stratford man could never have read all the sources from which his plays derive. This too would be scanned. Out of the 37 plays he wrote he had English or Latin sources for the majority.

In dispute are these 9 plays:

1. Love’s Labours Lost with no written source.

2. Measure for Measure derives from Cinthio, who wrote a novella of a real incident in Italy in 1547. However this incident was widely known in other sources. And is not the only source identifiable in the play.

3. The Merchant of Venice derives from Giovanni Fiorentino in 1558, which details all the play’s components in detail, save for the caskets and Shylock’s usury. Given that several plays on Jews appeared before his, they may have had an influence.

4. The Merry Wives of WIndsor has no source and is widely held to have been written on command of Elizabeth 1st.

5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has no source.

6. Othello derives from Cinthio’s Hecatommithi with Shakespeare making significant changes in that source.

7. The Taming of the Shrew has no known source.

8. The Tempest either.

9. Titus Andronicus has no known source.

Source: Shakespeare A to Z. Terry Hands.

Oxfordianism and Baconianism have their sources. Indeed are sullied with the form and pressure of their time. Let be…

Trying to get to the heart of the authorship controversy and tired of hearing about Orloff and Emmerich? This link takes you to the heart of the problem.

I found this pdf by David Chandler, a prof at Kyoto University archived online. It touches the genesis of the authorship controversy with the Baconians in the middle of the 19thC. Finally it suggests the Oxfordians with Looney’s research in the early 20thC were just behind the times to have any real effect.

Until now. A full on new media offensive is taking place. Slick pdf’s based on the film are being sent to educators. Look at their site and see how Oxford gets corporatised alongside other lobby groups for amongst others, the pork board, orthopaedic surgeons and Auto Alliance.

Perhaps this is a film industry thing; an extension of product placement. The Weinstein company has a couple of pdf’s on the site including this one for grades 1-6 called Hoodwinked.

Baconianism the first authorship candidate was an antidote to the Academy Biographies lead by Dowden. The one who opened the floodgates of matching the author to the works.

The Oxfordian movement with their opposing candidate started with Looney’s seminal work in 1920′s. Since then Oxfordianism has developed its own literature and authority base.

Now the Oxfordian field extends from the worst PT2 theorists to Ogburnites to the Looneys to Stephanie Hughes the politic worm. An interest in the truth is their only mission. And that with an open mind.

The problem from my side is most authorship detractors start with a full blown positive identity (Oxford or whomever). So all evidence for the Stratford man becomes suspect.

They must explain him away; so they make him into a country bumpkin from an illiterate family in some versions, and a canny businessman in others. Anyway you look at it you cannot ignore him. Without Shakespeare, no conspiracy.

Obviously we disagree with this shoving aside the rightful candidate. (by virtue of the historical evidence, which too is pushed aside). Then when ad hominem attacks rain upon his memory, we respond in kind to those spitting the poison.

In comment threads and probably in reality too, they are super touchy in this regard. They feel they are not being taken seriously. And in turn neither are we.

I want to take them seriously because I feel the more research into the period the better. But not at the cost of how scholars investigate the period. That goes against my grain.

Like most Oxfordians, I’m not a fan of theory or its influence in late 20thC scholarship. There was at that time no centre to the issue of Shakespeare.

He fragmented into theory-speak language: some concerned with mind, politics, or sexuality; others with how words mean or don’t mean, or say by not saying.

Somewhere in there the author died or was killed, and students had to learn a new jargon to understand why.

Each theory grew out of and or in reaction to the others and a spurt of the old profs going out with the new coming in gave us the po-mo pantheon we have today.

This could all change as Universities and their structuring changes. Today’s theory du jour with big Marxist academic wings is presentism. It, as far as I know, ignores the authorship question.

Biography still flourished outside academia even though the author was declared dead. The publishing world takes its authors from anywhere along the spectrum of knowledge. And so it was in Elizabethan printing and publishing. And in the Elizabethan academic world.

Elizabeth as despotic propagandist and her secret service used its power to control printing on matters of state. But it wasn’t silenced. There were a spate of illegal presses mostly on religious matters.

The legal presses made the books which an obviously eager reading public wished to buy.

Literary theory was nowhere near as developed then as it is now. But there were works like Aristotle’s poetics and Longinus on Sublimity and contemporaries of Shakespeare show their concern for how and why a piece of art is created.

For example to show how knowledge bases change, the Ptomely-ean solar system (sun moved around the earth) was fact and the Copernican system (earth moved around the sun) had been accepted by some. The scientific method, like literature, was in its infancy.

Vying ideologies on what is the truth can be really helped out if you can have your opponent burned. And Copernicans like Giordano Bruno burned. Thought and the truth change over time, though each age strives for truth in thought.

There will always be two sides to this argument, irrelevant to how people feel about it. A discovery could be made tomorrow which would clear it up. It’s unlikely, but it could be.

That means there are still a group of antiquarian minded souls out there doing the digging and searching in the archives. A set of skills in early modern transmission is required to do this. Reading early modern handwriting, understanding their Latin etc.

Literature is not science. And science, let’s not forget, is filled with as many fictions as literature. Phlogiston was discounted a hundred years after it was proposed. The circulation of blood put forward in Shakespeare’s time by
William Harvey took over a 150 years to accept into mainstream science.

Some Oxfordians even argue that in time their candidate for authorship too will be accepted. Continental shift is often cited as an example. I don’t think so, but am prepared to eat crow if it does.

Ideas are personal and which ones you accept as real and truthful often need to be examined. Twain thought that it wasn’t Shakespeare and that Queen Elizabeth was a man. Yet radically unusual beliefs are not unusual.

On the comment threads, Mark Johnson’s kickbacks to the Orksfordians are exemplary. And I really admire his detached demeanour. He argues succinctly, clearly and inoffensively.

Paradoxically Roger Strittmater (among others) concludes he is the offensive one. Having long toes, they call that in Dutch. Touchy, I call it. Still he retains his composure and reminds them to re-read his comments and answer his open questioning.

As a comedian I have no restraint and dive in for jugular. I’d like to make a page out of all the best rebuttals to the specific questions and arguments they throw in the ring. Pseudonymous Howard16 likes to ask rambly lists of questions, there’s one on the Forbes site.

I already called out for a point by point rebuttal of the Declaration of Treasonable Doubt as necessary. Some of the commenters on threads are very naive regarding early modern events and history. Others know their shit and throw in people and events I never heard of.

Bring it on I rejoice. An open mind is open for all pov not just the ones they favour. We may disagree as to the placement and relevance of their argument. But then I disagree on many things on a regular basis.

Knee-jerk reactions aren’t going to help. Superiority feelings either. I am guilty of knee-jerk reactions to comments. And as for superiority if you know a little or know a lot it’s hard not to use that. One potential opponent by admission, only knows Shakespeare through the authorship question.

Well I trump that. But I don’t trump Mark Rylance’s experience acting and interacting with Shakespeare on the stage. Then the same can be said of Patrick Stewart, or Greg Doran if we go the ‘directors of’ route. It’s the reason I don’t bite at the so and so believes it was Oxford arguments. Anymore. yet call to authority is a natural gambit.

There’s something to be said for ambition here too. Everyone who gets into a field they are passionate about, wants to become good at it. You have to measure up and you want to.

When we first begin we have peers approaching the same subject. The top is small so not everyone can achieve it. Many will fail, but some will join those experts that were in that field when they started out. And become the new experts as the old ones die out.

The cynical route that everybody has their price is a common one in the Arts. So Jonson could have been a sell-out as well as Shakespeare. Any Jonson scholars back the Oxfordian claims? Didn’t think so.

Btw every field of knowledge has over-lapping fields. Shakespeare is a large field and is approached from many directions. Add to that fact that it was a very specific field within the Early Modern World.

The one Oxfordian is an ex-postal carrier, the other a Supreme Court Judge. And so too with the Orthodoxian camp. Within the fields that comprise either camp, are larger fields on which the whole Shakespeare field depends. One of these is the who was the author field. It’s not a big or important field. Never has been until now.

Central to the authorship question are the artefacts that make Shakespeare relevant anyway: the plays and poems. Without these who Shakespeare?

i don’t admire Picasso because of who he was. Or Mozart. Or Miles.

Shakespeare the author cannot be the centre of Shakespeare studies.

His plays and poems are the reason we study him.

Was it Oxford’s desire to be anonymous? Then let him be. He obviously found peace with the situation. Just as I believe Shakespeare did with his leaving nary a crumb to be traced.

I give a rat’s ass where he came from. But was it possible for someone of humble (hate class struggle) beginnings to achieve what he did? ie write these 36-41 plays, 2 poems and 154 sonnets?
Is it do-able at the average rate of two a year over the course of a 25-30 year history with the theatre?

Yes is the answer if Jonson, Dekker, Marlowe, Heywood and a slew more contemporaries are anything to go by. They surpass his output, but not his genius.

His genius is not the man, it is within his works. How, or why, does projecting Oxford onto his plays assist me in the interpretation of Anthony’s speech to the Roman mob? Or is Oxford the go-to source for all things Mark Anthony?

That Oxford knew of Mark Anthony and had great intelligence is not at issue. The issue is: could he have gone to all this trouble to write, hire, hide, subvert, ego preen this conspiracy together.

Obviously in Anonymous that is the point. He could. No he did. In a film no worse in historical accuracy or twisting than many another film.

The issue is the acceptance and full identification of the man with the most wounded name in history. ‘Sblood it makes me blood boil when I think on’t! And vice-versa.

I’m trying to find a way to defuse this argument before it takes hold. A simple dichotomy may suffice
:
Should I treat the authorship question as a theatre question?
Or is it literature question?

How relevant to the acting of the plays is the authorship problem?
The truth is none at all.

To act the plays is to re-embody the dead words on the page whilst being beheld upon the stage.

To read the plays is to construct a palace, battlefield or seacoast in your mind with princes to acts and monarchs to behold the swelling scene.

In Germany there’s a Macbeth crediting the play to Edward de Vere Alias William SHakespeare. Some one should make a court case out of it. See how the judges of Europe stack up in favour of an alternative candidate.

The French literary revolutionaries killed the author in the 1950′s-60′s with Barthes and Foucault. Can’t argue for specifics on biography if you’re man is de-constructed can you?

New historicism should be the discipline for Oxfordians. Mark Anderson, author of SBAN, gloats on his blog that the end is nigh. The Stratfordian biography bubble like it or not is being prick’d.

But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

First conclusions:
Biography is not the purpose of Sh studies and doesn’t alter appreciation of Shakespeare.

The debate continues…