One of the most amusing aspects of the anti-Shakespeare cabal is, to me, how they assume that the burden of proof is somehow on the orthodox opinion. The idea that plays from Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors to King Lear and The Tempest were written by William Shakespeare is a very old one, with the first printed connection between him and the canon appearing in 1592. That’s 416 years and still running.
The first attempt to connect Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, with the canon came in 1920 when it was put forward by a man named Looney. That still puts the Man from Stratford up by 328 years. A sizable gap.
The burden of proof falls to them.
Can they show any facts that show that anyone other than William Shakespeare wrote those plays and poems? In the case of Shakespeare, as I have already shown, his name is attached to the plays and poems repeatedly in his lifetime and immediately following. That is fact. Combing the works for stray references that might be twisted to fit the facts of someone else’s life is not proof. If I worked hard enough, I could probably use that technique to “prove” that I wrote the plays.
Facts. Show me. The burden is yours.
The burden of proof is always on those who would upend any traditional point of view. Agreed.
In 1592, the satirist Thomas Nashe wrote a book dedication describing his admiration for a “copious” poet whom Nashe styled “Gentle Master William.” As a paper referenced below describes in detail, that poet’s name was Edward de Vere. Two years later, a book of poems appeared in print (*Willobie His Avisa*) which satirized the harried life of Edward de Vere’s second wife, Elizabeth Trentham. Her husband, Edward de Vere, is referred to in this book as “W.S.”
Those are just two little tidbits, though.
You, presumably, want lots of facts… all adding up to a single conclusion. I have 410 pages of facts for you, with 2000 endnotes, referencing some of the top orthodox scholarly journals in English literary studies, history, etc. It’s a book called “Shakespeare” By Another Name. Here. http://shakespearebyanothername.com
We’re all extremely busy, though, right? Who’s got time to read a big book? Well, I also produced a series of nine podcasts, free for the taking, at the same website. Also on iTunes. (Search for “Shakespeare-upon-iPod”) If you’re more of a visual thinker, there’s also a free Google Earth atlas of Edward de Vere’s life, at the same website.
The facts are there. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called Shakespeare By Another Name “especially impressive”; USA Today said it “makes a compelling argument”; while the New York Times said it “deserves serious attention.”
Drop on by some time. Thanks for the interest.
Mark Anderson
[re "Gentle Master William," cf. http://shakespearebyanothername.com/links . See the link 2/3 of the way down the page]
[re Trentham/Willobie, cf. "New LIght on the Dark Lady," Publications of the Modern Language Association 52:3 (Sept. 1937) 652-74; Shakespeare By Another Name, p. 281-4]
Comment by Mark — May 1, 2008 @ 1:16 pm |
Don’t know how that smiley face got into my last post… ugh. Must have had an extra punctuation mark before the close-parentheses…
Comment by Mark — May 1, 2008 @ 1:18 pm |
Mark–
Thanks for coming by. In the name of fairness, I reserved your book at the library. I will post about it once I’ve gone through it.
My initial reaction to the “fact” that you posted above is that what you present is not fact, but interpretation. Texts are approached with a conclusion already in mind and “facts” withdrawn from them. What should be writ plain is suddenly discovered to be in a code that must be deciphered.
The paper you refer to makes certain assumptions that I would still need to check out. For example, Charles Wisner Barrell assumes that the term “Your Worship” (as Chaucer would have used the term) is an appropriate way of addressing an Earl. An Earl who was acquitted of murdering a servant when the jury found that the servant had somehow run onto the end of the Earl’s sword. This, allegedly, is the guy that Robert Greene attacked as “Shake-scene.” This, in a time when they would cut out your heart and show it to you before you died. Not likely.
But I’ll check on the “Your Worship” thing, even though it sounds more clerical than anything else to me. Until I find out (and I am acquainted with more than one Chaucer scholar, believe it or not) that Chaucer referred to Earls as “Your Worship” rather than “Your Lordship” I will have to remain with the opinion that Mr. Wisner Barrell has identified the wrong man. And since he calls him “Master William” rather than “Lord William” (again that whole ruthless killer thing plays into this), it will take quite a bit of conclusive evidence to persuade me.
A fact is that there are books and documents that tie Shakespeare to those works both during and immediately following his passing and that no one comes out and says, “Sorry. Sorry. It’s the Earl of Oxford what really done it.”
There’s nothing to decode, nothing to interpret in this information. It is what it is.
And, in re the smiley face: In the digital world, that kind of stuff can happen to anybody. As a chronic sufferer of “Fat Typing Fingers Syndrome,” I can wholly sympathize.
Comment by Len — May 1, 2008 @ 2:04 pm |
Hi, Len. Thanks for the feedback. One thing to know about Nashe is this guy was basically Lenny Bruce. If you take nothing else away from this exchange, know this: Thomas Nashe was one amazingly funny Elizabethan. Absolute razor wit. The other thing, as you’ll see in my book, Nashe and de Vere caroused together. If you want a good portrait of Nashe in Shakespeare, check out the character Moth in Love’s Labor’s Lost. Poll the history of scholarship on this character, and you’ll see, It’s not just nutters like me who recognize that Moth is based on ol’ Thom Nashe.
So the fascinating (and amazingly frustrating) thing about Nashe is that he was pumping out wild jokes and crazy non-sequitors like Eddie Izzard after drinking 20 cups of coffee. It’s not always easy to keep tabs on everything this guy was saying. But you can be fairly certain that rules of courtly decorum were not exactly the first thing on his list. Nashe’s epistle to “Gentle Master William” is a letter to *somebody* that Nashe is having great fun ribbing. Celebrity roast style. An example: There’s a ceremonial sword that the Lord Great Chamberlain carries in official state processions. (De Vere held the office of Lord Great Chamberlain.) And Nashe calls it a “dudgeon dagger” — dudgeon being a type of wood-hilted blade. Not exactly ceremonial grade stuff. It’s a pretty funny joke, and one suspects it’s that “allowed fool” quality to Nashe that managed to keep him on some powerful Elizabethans’ good side.
“Your Worship” and “Master William” are, I think, all part of the roast. (In fact, as far as I can tell, those two terms are a contradiction, if one wants to be precise about it. I would be surprised if one could hold an office that commanded both the royal honorific “your worship” and the more yeoman-ly “master.”)
As for “Shake-scene” and Robert Greene, there are differing interpretations… but in my view, I still think Will Shakespeare of Stratford is the guy Greene was roasting. (Others still argue that the actor Edward Alleyn was “shake-scene.”) I don’t know of anyone who thinks “Shake-scene” was de Vere. We can get into that one more, if you like, but let me just close with one final observation:
You will find no smoking gun in the Shakespeare authorship controversy. That’s why, in no small part, it’s a controversy. Instead, it’s a case and a story that’s built up from circumstantial evidence. Of course, any lawyer will tell you, circumstantial evidence wins cases in courtrooms around the world every day. But it’s tougher to build a circumstantial case…because it requires patient accumulation of many different converging lines of argument, evidence and fact. And it is that approach that’s needed here. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly a subject that lends itself well to our soundbite age and short attention span media. But we try. One blog post at a time.
Comment by Mark — May 1, 2008 @ 6:58 pm |
Argh! A pox on these smiley faces!
Too funny…
Comment by Mark — May 1, 2008 @ 7:00 pm |
Mark–
Thanks for keeping this discussion civil. That’s not always a given on the Internet, and I appreciate it always.
Okay. Where to start? Let’s start with circumstantial evidence. While it is true that a case can be made in a court of law circumstantially, there is one thing that always trumps circumstantial evidence: direct evidence. And all the direct evidence points to Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.
I’ve seen nothing in the article by Mr. Wisner Barrell that proves anything. It all works on supposition. If you read my main post for today, you will see why I find his epigraph from Sherlock Holmes amusing. I’ve never enjoyed the Holmes stories because life just doesn’t work that way. It’s all–to use a Britishism–bollocks. Nothing like them ever happened in life. I have the same prejudice against Poe’s Dupain (I mean, come on! an orangutan? really?) and the oeuvre of Agatha Christie. The method that’s palmed off in these stories as “ratiocination” and logic is actually nonsense. What could never happened is explained by what could never be. In fact, my theory is that Poirot actually committed all those murders and pinned them on whatever dupes he had available with piles of outrageous nonsense. I mean, think about it. He couldn’t go out for a loaf of bread without the corpses piling up around him.
As Mr. Wisner Barrell accidentally attests, this false logic has spilled out of these books and into the society at large. True logic goes out the window, and supposition and assertion get presented as fact.
Now, I will agree with you that Nashe was something of an Elizabethan Sam Kinison, and he can’t be taken any more seriously than any other polemicist. Orthodox scholars have also identified Master William as being–perhaps–Shakespeare. That’s simple enough and maybe defensible and maybe not. It does have the advantage of being direct. The Oxfordian, on the other hand, has to build an entire conceit in order to link it to Edward de Vere. He and Nashe have to be friends. Nashe has to be referring to him–in a public pamphlet–in code. For what reason, I am not sure, other than that is how it has to be in order for “Master William” to become de Vere. (Just as a side note, if Nashe were really being all that clever, wouldn’t he have called him Lord William or some other such sobriquet that would be more suitable to call an Earl?)
If De Vere were so concerned with being associated with the theater (despite his sponsorship of an acting troupe that did not perform the plays of Shakespeare), why would he tolerate anyone–friend or foe–calling him out in public and using the character of a commoner to do so? These class divisions were very real, and just because Shakespeare and his fellows became part of the royal retinue during the reign of James I doesn’t mean that they suddenly started calling him Jimmy.
Anything could have been. That doesn’t mean that something in particular was. Unless there is evidence. Direct evidence. Circumstantial evidence is permissible in court, and many an innocent man has suffered for it.
Comment by Len — May 2, 2008 @ 8:24 am |
It’s a common tactic of conspiracy theorists/denialists/etc to shift the burden of proof onto someone other than themselves, along the lines of “I say there’s an invisible pink elephant in the room, now prove me wrong!”
I agree with you that you can use the Oxfordian argument to prove that anyone is Shakespeare.
A few months ago, I wrote an essay in which I “prove” that my father was Shakespeare.
Comment by PrimroseRoad — May 2, 2008 @ 9:07 am |
PrimroseRoad–
I enjoyed the post on your blog quite a bit. thanks for adding to the conversation. I was thinking that it might be possible to prove that Ringo Starr wrote the plays. I mean, Richard III spent all that time in the north of England.
Comment by Len — May 2, 2008 @ 9:21 am |