Posted By Roger Stritmatter on November 29, 2009

Welcome to Shake-Speare’s Bible.com.

Our topic is Shake-speare’s Bible. The one he owned. Really. No joke.

To learn what that means, please visit the “about” page.

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Posted By Roger Stritmatter on April 18, 2010

Yesterday we took a long hard look at James Shapiro’s faux pas in claiming, in Contested Will, that the first appearance of the name Shakespeare in print, on the dedicatory page of the first edition of Venus and Adonis (1593), is hyphenated.

It’s not.

The first appearance of the name "William Shakespeare" in print, attached to dedicatory epistle to Venus and Adonis (1593). It is neither italicized nor hyphenated.

We also saw that Shapiro builds on this misconception to create an elaborate theory that the name is hyphenated in a significant number of later publications only to avoid the typographical problem which could result from placing a -k- next to an long italic -s- such that the two letters would collide and “break,” creating a messy delay in the print shop.

The theory is not originally Shapiro’s own, but that’s a subject for another post.

Shapiro, who admits to prefer studying Shakespeare in performance rather than in the study, and seems to have a rather dim understanding of what goes on in an early modern print shop,  has apparently never heard of the typesetter’s device known as a “spacer” – a thin metal blank, existing in five different widths. Such blanks were regularly used by early modern compositors  to avoid the problem of colliding letters; they allowed compositors to introduce white space as needed to regulate the distribution of printed letters without needing to use any hyphens. (more…)

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Posted By Roger Stritmatter on April 18, 2010

In case you were wondering if the internet is going to make us any smarter, the evidence is now in.

The answer is, “no” – at least if one may draw any conclusion from the depressingly conformist hallelujah chorus which has issued from so many mass media internet reviewers in response to James Shapiro’s Contested Will.

This is not to deny that there have been some excellent parries of the pretzel logic, factual lapses, and subtly malicious innuendo of Professor Shapiro’s book. One skeptical review, William Niederkorn’s Brooklyn Rail analysis, even received notice as the National Book Circle Critics April 7 Review of the Day.

Among other merits of his review which might lead one to conclude that investigative journalism is not quite dead, Niederkorn points out that Shapiro’s most widely self-touted “discovery” is largely if not wholly derivative of the research of two anti-Stratfordian scholars, Daniel Wright and John Rollett,  whom he does not mention in the body of his work. In fact only Wright’s contribution  is acknowledged at all by Shapiro,  and that only in an obscure “bibliographical essay” disconnected from the body of his narrative.

Shapiro’s attempt to pass the discovery off as his own should be a red flag for  any reader capable of processing factual information from a perspective of even modest skepticism. “As we all know,” contemporary academicians are often tempted to seek the limelight for themselves by appropriating the labor of others who may be less powerful or well-connected – or even, remarkably, as in this case, as a prelude to slamming them in absentia as retrograde mental defectives. (more…)

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Posted By Roger Stritmatter on March 6, 2010

Leslie Howard’s classic anti-Nazi film, after being widely available on vhs in the late 1990s, appears to be out of print again except for this Spanish version (good for the Spanish!) on Amazon. Still, fair use doctrine has its uses, and I’ve managed despite my technological incompetence to break out a few relevant clips, which I’ve always thought to use in a short YouTube on Oxford.

Alas, I can’t easily seem to find the time for such an ambitious project.

Meanwhile, however, I’ve had some requests to see Howard live on the internet. Howard’s character does an inimitably charming and comical send-up  of Nazi pretensions. Moreover,  his comments are still relevant to those reactionary folk who in 2010 still seem to think that insinuating that  anti-Stratfordians are the moral and intellectual equivalent of  “holocaust deniers”  edifies their own preening sense of self worth. For this and other reasons, the film has become  a cult classic among the Oxfordians.

So, without further ado,  here’s Leslie Howard (who produced as well as starred in the film),  in persona “Horatio” Smith, on Shakespeare and Oxford (clip #1):

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Posted By Roger Stritmatter on March 6, 2010

This new video-musical collage, posted to “Under the Radar” under the title “Mind Thoughts,” goes in Oxfordville (where you can also find my Cape Cod with the white picket fence)  under the charming alternative title, “Bubbles for Ever.”

Some, you see, have marveled how its author, “Edward de Vere,” can still be writing musical video, four-hundred-and-six years after his decease.

When I wondered that out loud to myself on Utube, my comment was speedily deleted by the censors  (apparently not the brightest stars in the firmament), who may have taken it for a death threat against Sam Handley from An Emerald City, who seems to be the agent provocateur responsible for channeling this modern gem by the long-dead “no longer mourn for me when I am gone” Edward.

(more…)

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