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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Mar 2007
    Location
    New Orleans

    Shakespeare authorship question -- Olympic Fan

    Good points, Olympic Fan (others: see thread on going back in history). Count me as moving happily in the direction of being a democrat on the question of literary genius and towards respectable Stratfordianism on the authorship question. I will also stipulate that Joe Sobran, while being a voracious reader, is not meticulous as a historical scholar. I'm sure he, as I, would be happy to know that the author of the plays was a hard-working actor rather than some debauched aristocrat. Sobran is (somewhat famously) a social conservative who cannot have taken any pleasure in fingering his favorite writer as a pederast.

    But I'm still troubled by the lack of evidence of literacy in Shakespeare's private life. No books owned, no letters written that we have any record of. It seems improbable for someone who employed twice as many words as any other writer in English. My most fundamental belief about writing -- and I don't think I can be persuaded away from this one -- is that great writers are people who read a lot.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Mar 2007
    Location
    Waterloo, Ontario (unfortunately, no longer in London England).
    Quote Originally Posted by dkbaseball View Post
    Good points, Olympic Fan (others: see thread on going back in history). Count me as moving happily in the direction of being a democrat on the question of literary genius and towards respectable Stratfordianism on the authorship question. I will also stipulate that Joe Sobran, while being a voracious reader, is not meticulous as a historical scholar. I'm sure he, as I, would be happy to know that the author of the plays was a hard-working actor rather than some debauched aristocrat. Sobran is (somewhat famously) a social conservative who cannot have taken any pleasure in fingering his favorite writer as a pederast.

    But I'm still troubled by the lack of evidence of literacy in Shakespeare's private life. No books owned, no letters written that we have any record of. It seems improbable for someone who employed twice as many words as any other writer in English. My most fundamental belief about writing -- and I don't think I can be persuaded away from this one -- is that great writers are people who read a lot.

    While we have no proof of his having owned any books, that does not mean that he didn't...we just have no evidence. And, even if he hadn't, he could still have borrowed from others. Or he could have been exposed to them while in school.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Boston area, OK, Newton, right by Heartbreak Hill
    I have had many 'Who wrote the Shakespeare plays?' discussions in my life. One thing I've discovered, the most strident Oxford supporters usually haven't actually read the plays and rarely attend performances of them. I've stated many times that maybe, just maybe, there's enough evidence to prove that Shakespeare (Shakspear to the Oxfordians) didn't write them but there's absolutely no way to prove someone else did. Personally, I'm on the man from Stratford's side.

    Another criticism of him that hasn't been brought up yet is that he did not educate his daughters. I've heard it stated that they were illiterate. I'm not sure how we know that but it might also be true. I'm often reminded of Virgina Wolfe's A Room of One's Own which makes many great points about women in the 16th century. Shakespeare probably didn't educate his daughters because no one else did. Grammar schools were not open to females at the time. Virginia Wolfe also argues that we do not know Shakespeare and we do not know Jane Austen. True, so very true, if her family had not exposed her to the world, after her death, I might add, we would not know who wrote her books. Her sister Cassandra burned most of their correspondence after her death. In the extant letters, no proof of her authorship survives. We take it on her family's say so that she wrote those brilliant novels.

    There's a book out the called Shakespeare: The Evidence which looks at unusual words in the Shakespeare canon. I don't remember all the details but there are a few words that are used exactly twice in all of Shakespeare. The actor is known to have played the Ghost in Hamlet. One of the ghost's speeches contains two or three of these unusual words, the play it is supposed by scholars that was written next has those same words scattered in the text. The actor is speaking these words each afternoon in performance and uses them again while writing. That settled it for me right there. (Aside, I'm a playwright myself.)

    In my day job I'm a statistician. I used to work for a man named Fred Mosteller who was one of the more influential statisticians of the 20th Century. He made his name analyzing the Federalist Papers to determine who wrote which parts. The text analysis he developed has been used to analyze Shakespeare's work. Unfortunately not enough samples of plays of some of the disputed authors survive to do text analysis on plays, but plenty of poetry does, including Oxford. Shakespeare is extremely internally consistent, meaning that comparing known Shakespeare to known Shakespeare scores very high on the correlation measures, higher than any author of the period, if I remember correctly. No examples of any other author's work even comes close when correlated with Shakespeare's work. The argument raised by the Oxfordians against this is that the examples of poems known to be by the Earl were written when he was a young man. OK, run through your hoops, they aren't as internally consistent as Shakespeare, and they aren't consistent with later Shakespeare.

    One last comment, it was rare at the time to have any plays published under the authors name, Shakespeare was one of the few who did. Now, I'm going to get just a tiny bit sexist here, if Shakespeare really wasn't who we think he is, it would have to be a woman, cause I just can't imagine any man with that kind of talent allowing someone else to get the credit for as long as he did. (I'm positive that at least a deathbed confession would have come from DeVere.)

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