An Old Man and the Sea: Herman Melville. Engraving kindness Barry Moser.

Well, its been a few weeks since I’ve done a post, and I can only plead in my own defense for such lack of productivity that I have in fact been very productive indeed, just not on Facebook or on this blog  (Hey, we old fuddy-duddy scholars have to do real work sometimes…..with such primitive tools as WORD, pencils, and pieces of paper, read and comment on student papers, and all of the usual academic fol-de-rol).

Here’s the News that’s fit to print:

1) I haven’t mentioned here yet that Lynne Kositsky and I have had our Tempest book accepted by McFarland.  The manuscript will be delivered in June.

We are grateful to have the assistance of such a well established and professional academic publisher. So during a good bit of January I stayed with Lynne and Michael to put a few finishing touches on the manuscript.

2) I’ve been working hard on a classified de Vere project to be discussed at the Spring Concordia conference.

3) This is the best.  The internet is a strange and wonderful place, a kind of eddy in time-space where all sorts of rickety old broken pieces from the past seem to be swirling around to the dervish music, diamonds and junk alike.

Having grown up in Washington State, where the tides of the Pacific pile the driftwood high and shuttle on their bouncing waves the Japanese glass fishing floats of yesteryore,  I like to go beachcombing  as frequently as possible. I find  it works on the internet too.

Sometimes you will even find that what were looking for was yourself, and —  there your are.

A few days ago  I accepted Richard Waugaman’s invitation to join Google scholar.

When you join Google Scholar the first thing you will see is a list of all the papers Google scholar has by you as well as those who’ve cited you (whether to cuss you out or add something significant to the conversation).  While I was looking over the list of publications I’ve written and I discovered one I forgot I had written (well, actually, listed as a rather inconsequential co-author along with the folks who actually did most of the work), and didn’t know had been published.  And if you were ever going to find such a paper on the internet, this little gem from the good folks at CEDAR  (Center of Excellence for Document  Analysis and Recognition at the University of Buffalo) would be the one you’d want.

Here’s the abstract:

Over the last century forensic document science has developed progressively more sophisticated pattern recognition methodologies for ascertaining the authorship of disputed documents.

These include advances not only in computer assisted stylometrics, but forensic handwriting analysis. We present a writer verification method and an evaluation of an actual historical document written by an unknown writer.

The questioned document is compared against two known handwriting samples of Herman Melville, a 19th century American author who has been hypothesized to be the writer of this document. The comparison led to a high confidence result that the questioned document was written by the same writer as the known documents. Such methodology can be applied to many such questioned documents in historical writing, both in literary and legal fields.

Of course, I did  already know about CEDAR’s  preliminary findings on the same subject,  written up in a previous paper.  Like the second test, the first one concluded that

The comparison led to a high confidence result that the questioned document was written by the same writer as the known documents.

But that test had one significant flaw in it. Suggestive as it was, it used 20th century controls to test a proposition about a 19th century piece of writing.  Given the resources available to them, this wasn’t a bad place to start, but the experimental design was open to the criticism of not taking into consideration the possibly confounding variable of historical evolution of handwriting styles.

The second test tested to see if this variable was relevant to the outcome of the report. It was not. Unless handwriting lies, the document is by Herman Melville.

What is this document, you ask?

Well, you came to the right place to find out.

For a few sample handwriting comparisons between the manuscript and Melville, check out the pdf.

The Chetham Library Image of Ben Jonson's Plato, gift of the "most generous and heroic" 18th Earl of Oxford. Jonson's inscription dates the gift (or at least its acknowledgement) to the period circa 1622, when de Vere became a popular hero for being jailed after his protest against the Spanish Marriage Crisis.*

Ben Jonson, propelled in part by his central role in Anonymous, which provides an intriguing reconstruction of his possible relationship with “Shakespeare,” is in the news again.

With thanks to Lisa W. for the tipoff, here’s the  Science Daily article, reporting on the possible discovery of a a major new Jonson-related manuscript by University of Nottingham and University of Edinburgh researchers:

Researchers….are now examining the anonymous 41-page journal in a major research project which will reconstruct a large missing piece of the colourful jigsaw of Ben Jonson’s life story. Dr James Loxley, Head of the Department of English at the University of Edinburgh, and Professor Julie Sanders, Head of the School of English Studies at The University of Nottingham, are working with a postdoctoral fellow, Dr Anna Groundwater to unlock the meanings and significance of this intriguing document.

The 7,500-word handwritten manuscript, apparently the work of a “previously unsuspected travelling companion,”  involves Jonson’s legendary 1618 walking tour, that took him all the way to his own Scottish roots in Edinburgh, as otherwise recounted in Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond and other contemporary documents.

*For more information on this fascinating volume, visit the Chetham library online.

“Do the right thing” — Spike Lee

This is going to be perhaps the most important post I’ve made to Shake-Speares-Bible.com. I put a lot of effort into the two detailed posts on James Shapiro’s hyphen error, and several other posts may be of some long term interest as well. Certainly its worthwhile to find a larger audience for articles originally published in somewhat obscure professional venues.

But the truth is that when I read Shapiro’s book — and especially when I read all the claptrap of the fawning reviewers — I got depressed.

Here’s the good news: I’m not depressed any more.

One reason I’ve given it up is that this evening I watched an impressive documentary, After Innocence, which chronicles the experiences of several wrongfully convicted men through the process of their exoneration, often achieved through the recent intervention of The Innocence Project, a program affiliated with the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. The Innocence Project has successfully fought for the freedom of  at least 214 men (and women?) convicted in the United States for crimes they did not commit, including rape and murder.

There is nothing like the sobering realization that some of your fellow citizens have spent 6, 10, or twenty years behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit to remind you that your own life isn’t as bad as it could be.

The key to the freedom of these wrongfully convicted men and women isn’t moral indignation — although moral indignation, passion, and intelligence were all necessary. It’s DNA testing.

As Innocence Project activist Eddie Joe Lloyd used to say,  “DNA is God’s signature. God’s signature is never a forgery, and His checks never bounce.”

There are a lot of ways to try to wrap your mind around how it could happen that several thousand English literary professionals could be so blinking wrong about something so important as Shakespeare as they, by all appearances, are. But one of the most natural metaphors for the condition of these sad folks is that of the Prosecuting Attorney who put someone away for twenty years based on eyewitness evidence.

News Flash!

For well over a century, eyewitness identification has been recognized, by anyone who knows anything about forensic methods,  as one of the least reliable forms of evidence on the planet. What is the prosecutor who is suddenly confronted with DNA evidence proving by an overwhelming preponderance of evidence not only that the convicted party may be innocent, but can’t possibly by any stretch of the imagination be guilty, supposed to do? I mean, some of these cases are so far beyond “reasonable doubt” that you have to wonder what kind of drugs the prosecution is still on.

What are you supposed to do?

When you put the proposition in that way its easy to feel sorry for the Stratfordians. They’ve had the wrong guy in jail for more than four hundred years, and it’s not hard to imagine how difficult it might be to just “do the right thing” and say “I’m sorry.  Will you forgive me?”

Still, when one reads the sort of, um, creative rearrangements with the truth that James Shapiro published about me and my PhD dissertation in his  Contested Will, it’s easy to recover from feeling depressed by getting hopping mad. Trust me. A self-righteous prosecutor who spends taxpayer money fighting against  any attempt for an evidential hearing using the kind of smart-ass deceptions Shapiro brings to bear in his book is not someone for whom it’s easy to feel sorry.

Now, you may be wondering, dear reader, why I’m only putting this out on the internet more than a year after the publication of Shapiro’s book.  Well, there are several valid answers.

One is that when Shapiro’s book came out I was so dumbfounded by the lies mistakes he repeated about my PhD dissertation that it rendered me speechless for eighteen months.  Then again, I already admitted that I wasn’t just speechless. I was also depressed.

As anyone who has been falsely convicted of a capital crime can (I’m sure) attest, its not easy to have your name dragged through the mud by a guy who works for “the law” but has only half of the ethics gene in his DNA makeup.

So it was easier to write about Shapiro’s more public mistakes, like his inability to open a facsimile of Venus and Adonis to check whether his memory about hyphens was correct.  In that case no one could accuse me of being partisan. I like it when Shapiro makes those kinds of mistakes — it only shows the world how little the emperor is really wearing.

The truth is, though, I’ve known about how bad eyewitness identification is since about 1966, when I was eight years old. That’s because my Dad, who was a special education teacher, kept a book, Edwin M. Borchard’s Convicting the Innocent, which attracted my attention at an early age. The book documents the conviction and imprisonment (and, in some cases, execution) of sixty-five men who were undeniably innocent.

My father had read the book and understood very well not only its implications  for criminal law and justice, but its larger lessons about the fallibility of human cognition and the dangers of placing too much arbitrary trust in authority, which tends when institutionalized to take on a life of its own and to defend its erroneous presuppositions against any challenge, even — as in the case of criminal law — when it means keeping innocent men and women in jail indefinitely just to avoid admitting that you may have been wrong.

I was glad to see, just tonight, that the University of Albany library recognizes the importance of this classic work, first published in 1932, and has made it freely available on the internet.

The most shocking thing about Borchard’s book, however, is that after more than twenty five years of DNA identification as a forensic tool, prosecuting attorneys are still fighting the reopening of cases, for which significant DNA evidence is available, by citing eyewitness testimony and delivering the kind of sarcastic temper tantrums documented on film in After Innocence.

As Lenin asked, “what is to be done?” (No, I’m not a Marxist — I just think its a good quote — and even if what Lenin did was the wrong thing, he did ask the right question).  Well, the good people at the Innocence Project aren’t sitting around — when it comes to reforming the US criminal justice system, they have a plan, and they’re implementing it, one person at a time (it’s a start, and it has the advantage of being the right thing even if larger strategic reforms are slow to implement). So if you haven’t seen the documentary, I highly recommend, as a first step, doing so. Its an educational experience.

My dilemma is perhaps more difficult. For some time I wondered if should write to Shapiro’s publishers, laying out in excruciating detail the astounding lapses of scholarly method that led him to publish the things he did about me. I may still do so — and if I do, you can be sure I’ll release a copy of the letter on the site.  Meanwhile, you’ll just have to take my word for it that almost the only true things on the page Shapiro devotes to to discussing my dissertation are the commas and the periods.

Meanwhile, the beat does go on even if Shapiro has no sense of rhythm:

Politicians have a phrase, apropos of the dilemma faced not by the Oxfordians, but by the guardians of public morality about Shakespeare who are so adamant that it would be a betrayal of professional ethics to even admit that the authorship question  exists:  they like to talk, when it gets really necessary to do so, about “getting out in front of the story.”

You’ve really got to wonder how much longer institutions like the Folger or Harvard are going to sit idly by while the story escapes them entirely and they begin to take on the air of irrelevancy that the Catholic Church knows so much about from the days when its inquisitors refused to look into Galileo’s “looking glass.”  At what point in the elaborate charade game known in modern parlance as “Shakespeare scholarship” are those responsible for protecting the public image of the academic institutions going to realize that its time to….

“Get out in front of the story”?

Your guess, dear reader, is as good as mine.

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.

However, there’s a lot more to be said about Shapiro’s gaffe.

Let’s resume our discussion with this quote, in which Shapiro advanced this already defunct claim about the hyphen:

dedicatory letters addressed to the Earl of Southampton and signed ‘William Shake-speare’ are included in italics in the front-matter of both. (“Advance Reviewers Copy,” 226)

Of course this statement  is misleading for more than one reason: the letters aren’t actually “signed” with Shakespeare’s name – the name is printed on the page. Nor, as we have seen, is the name spelled  “Shake-speare,” as Professor Shapiro assures us it is.

But there is another problem posed by an ambiguity in Shapiro’s wording, which remains to be investigated. Is he actually claiming that the name is italicized, or just the “letter” (technically known, in the parlance of early modern scholarship, as a “dedicatory epistle”)?

Beats me.

But it does make a difference.

As even a fourth grader can see, the name is not (unlike the preceding dedicatory epistle) italicized, so if Shapiro meant to say that it was, he may be on the verge of setting a Guinness book of world record for the number of erroneous statements about one tiny piece of early modern typography.

On the other hand, to give Shapiro the benefit of the doubt (temporarily, of course!), if the name were italicized but not hyphenated, then his  theory would have failed before it started, so perhaps its a good thing that he was wrong about the facts.

Its always been my own motto to never let a fact get in the way of a good theory, and I guess that Professor Shapiro and I are brothers under the skin in that regard.

And while one hates to cast undocumented aspersions, it does occur that perhaps this dilemma could explain an ambiguity in Shapiro’s narrative; for while he seems certain that the name is hyphenated, he seems to be a little less certain whether or not it’s italicized.

In a strict grammatical construction, he’s not saying that it is. But I venture to suggest that most readers without a copy of the Venus and Adonis dedication page in front of them, would conclude that Shapiro  means to also claim that the name is italicized, especially since he builds on this assumption in the analysis which follows.

Certainly, if Shapiro knew that the name was not italicized, he didn’t go out of his way to  make that clear.

In any case, it’s Shapiro’s lucky day in the scholarship sweepstakes: his factual error ends up supporting his theory: anyone can see that the name is not italicized, and if anyone  is in a mood to make excuses for Professor Shapiro,  he could reason as follows: “unlike the dedicatory epistle, the name is clearly printed in Roman and not Italic type. That explains why it’s not hyphenated.”

Right?

Wrong. The Lord giveth and he taketh away.

In yesterday’s post we already saw the example from the 1623 folio of the hyphenated name printed in Roman type, but there are many others as well.

Let’s take a look at the actual earliest appearance of the hyphenated name, “Shake-speare.”

It’s from a dedicatory poem to a mysterious and pseudonymous 1594 publication, Willowbie His Avisa.

Avisa has a long and intriguing publication history, but since it has little to do with our present quest, and the history would no doubt put professor Shapiro to sleep, let’s focus on the essentials, shall we?

Its not surprising that the interests Shapiro represents would want to distract attention away from Avisa by inventing a cock and bull story about the name “Shake-speare” being italicized and hyphenated in the 1593 edition of Venus and Adonis.

While the name as it appears in that context seems to reassuringly connect the author with the flesh-and-blood Henry Wriostheley, stabilizing our preconceptions about the author and his milieu, the appearance in Avisa seems more inclined to induce vertigo than complacency in the average Stratfordian college professor.

Verses from the 1594 Willobie His Avisa, showing the first ever instance of the name "Shake-speare" hyphenated. Note the Roman type.

Not only is the name hyphenated here,  for the first time, but it appears in a pseudonymous publication. Moreover, the close reader will notice that the logic of the passage associates “Shake-speare,” by parallelism, with a fictional character in his own poem – the rapist Tarquin, who steals the jewel of Lucrece’s female honor while her husband, Collatine, is off sporting about in Italy (I refer to RL, 106-112).

Have we just run smack dab into our first good clue that Elizabethans could read, god forbid, allegorically?

Could this association between Tarquin and “Shake-speare” have meant something?

Hold that thought – we’ll fish in that stream another day. For now, let’s just note this in passing: for Stratfordians, this is not a propitious moment. No wonder they’d prefer to just sing the chorus to Shapiro’s convenient fiction about the origins of the hyphen.

There is another, more subtle problem here.

In Avisa the hyphenated name is not, as Shapiro’s theory requires us to predict, italicized. It is also spelled with the –e- after the k.

This is more bad news for Shapiro’s credibility.

From the very first appearance of the hyphenated name in the historical record, it would seem that the scenario Professor Shapiro assures us would have caused any Elizabethan typographer to chuckle at those foolish modern Oxfordians, is starting to look like not like a scholarly analysis from a distinguished academician dispassionately examining the evidence, but as an example of the inflationary gab of a gifted storyteller with an ax to grind and a rather low standard of the ethics of debate.

As John Thomas Looney wrote in reply to O.J. Campbell’s 1948 review of “Shakespeare” Identified, “This is the kind of argumentation one associates with political maneuvering rather than a serious quest for the truth on great issues and it makes one suspect that he is not very easy in his own mind about the case.”

But, wait a minute. Surely there are some examples of Elizabethan typography which actually do support Professor Shapiro’s argument. Aren’t there?

After all, I can hear you saying, Stritmatter, you teach at Coppin State University in Urban Baltimore. James Shapiro is an important man and a distinguished scholar; he hails from the heart of the Ivy League, hobnobs over tea and biscuits at the Folger library, and gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to write books like Contested Will. You’re a blogger who doesn’t get paid anything and teaches on North Avenue in Baltimore! Who are you to question his scholarship?

Shall we agree to ignore invidious comparison, for a few more  moments anyway, long enough to follow the trail of our logic to its embarrassing denouement? Or would you prefer to avert your eyes and stop reading, for fear that your hero will turn out to have clay feet and be suffering from an identity crisis?

There are by my count (which may be incomplete) 6 independent occurrences of the hyphenated name on the title pages of early Shakespearean texts. These are Richard II Q2 (1598), Richard III Q2 (1598), Hamlet Q1 (1601), SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (1609), King Lear Q1 (1608), and Romeo and Juliet Q3 (possibly Q4, date uncertain, see Chambers I: 340).*

Of these, all but Hamlet continue the hyphenation in at least one successive edition.

There are, additionally, eight other texts, printed between 1594 and 1623, in which the name is hyphenated. Aside from the Sonnets, the largest number of examples occurs in the 1623 folio, in which poems by Leonard Digges (3x) and I.M. (2x) consistently hyphenate the name.

Now, the inquiring mind wants to know: how many of these examples conform to the requirements set forth by Shapiro’s analysis, that the hyphen is justified when the name is set in italics and spelled Shakspeare – without the medial –e-?

The answer is: None.

At least three of the examples (Richard II Q2, “I.M.”, Sh. Folio 1623, and John Webster, 1612), are italicized. However, each of them also spells the name Shake-speare, with the medial –e-, obviating the logic of Professor Shapiro’s argument.

More typical is this example from the first quarto of Hamlet – where there is obviously no more danger of breaking any type by removing the hyphen than there would be in removing it from such conspicuous examples of early modern pseudonyms as Lucres-Avis (Avisa, 1594, A4v), Martin Mar-prelate, Tom Tell-truth, or Cuthbert Curry-knave.

Hamlet Q1, showing the hyphenated name with Roman type.

Lear Q1 prints “Shak-speare,” with the hyphen and without the medial -e-, but in Roman type face. This is corrected in Lear Q2 within less than a year to “Shake-speare,” suggesting that, contrary to Shapiro’s initial assumption, the normative literary spelling of the name was Shakespeare, or Shake-speare, not Shakspeare.

Lear Q1 (1608) showing spelling "Shak-speare" in Roman type.

For anyone who believes that theories should be rooted in verifiable facts, Shapiro’s goes downhill fast from here.

Enter, stage left, John Bodenham’s (1600) Bel-vedére, the first collection of popular Elizabethan lyrics to include many selections from Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It spells the name, in italics, Shakspeare – without the medial –e- and without any hyphenation!

Five ways from Sunday, Shapiro’s theory is apparently not worth the paper used to print it:

1) It departs from a manifest error (there is no hyphenated form of the name in Venus and Adonis Q1);

2) It follows this error by insinuating another false claim (that the name is not only hyphenated but italicized in Venus and Adonis);

3) It depends on the undemonstrated (and apparently false) proposition that “Shakspeare” was the normative print spelling of the name;

4) It ignores or suppresses numerous instances of positive evidence (e.g. the title pages of Hamlet Q1, Lear Q1, and SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS) which disprove it;

5) It ignores or suppresses instances of negative evidence (e.g. Bel-vedére) which, independently, also disprove it.

If we return once more to Shapiro’s narrative with these examples in mind, it is easy to wonder just what he must have been thinking when he invented the story about the hyphenated name in Venus and Adonis.

Does he believe his own story? Apparently so. His explanation for a typographical dilemma, the existence of which is predicated on a single false example, and which every known actual example contradicts, is that

The easiest solution was inserting a letter ‘e’, a hyphen or both; as we’ll soon see, compositors settled on different strategies. And as the title pages of the 1608 quarto of Lear and the 1609 Sonnets indicate, it’s a habit that carried over when setting roman font as well. (“Readers Advance Edition,” 226)

But if there never was  any typographical rationale for the first uses of the hyphen, one cannot very well explain later uses as instances of habit established through precedent.

And the sole example which might conform, barely, to Shapiro’s model is not, as he has so glibly led his readers to believe, the first, but actually the last, or nearly the last, in the series (“I.M.” in the 1623 folio). Even in the best of all possible Stratfordian worlds, it cannot therefore logically have had any impact whatsoever on the typographical practices  informing the prior examples.

Finally, anyone who pauses long enough to test alternative theories must realize that it makes no sense at all to suggest that the compositors of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS would have included an unnecessary hyphen in the name in 32 running half-titles of that book merely out of loyalty to the precedent established in, say Hamlet Q1, a book which they probably had never seen.

The very suggestion reveals Shapiro’s alienation from the gritty circumstances of early modern book producers, who favored economy and thrift over adherence to irrelevant precedent, and  would, one thinks, have more readily laughed at  Shapiro’s ignorance of their trade than at the informed suspicions of the Oxfordians.

No. Whatever reason the publishers and compositors of the Sonnets and other texts had for hyphenating the name Shake-speare, it is safe to conclude that it is not the one offered, with such sweeping and grandiloquent authority but so little credibility, by Professor Shapiro.

Now, this has been a rather long and detailed digression on early modern typographical conventions; if you’ve made it this far, congratulations. You’re living proof that the internet may not after all kill off literate culture, and that maybe the life of common sense can survive the current Stratfordian press releases.

Before I sign off, however, prudence obliges me to offer a specific disclaimer of what I have not said in this blog post.

I am very far from claiming that the existence of the hyphenated variants in the printed versions of the name Shakespeare between 1594 and 1623 obliges the modern scholar to conclude that anyone thought that the name was a pseudonym.

Naturally it would be convenient for Professor Shapiro if I were to make such a claim, and his cup overfloweth with examples of  unprincipled use of the straw man argument of imputing such beliefs (and much worse) to people who never held them (a depressingly recurrent tactic in the authorship debate of which Shapiro is only the most recent and enthusiastic practitioner).

The fact is, I don’t really know why these typographical irregularities occur.

Shapiro is the Professor from Columbia with all the answers.  I’m just a blogger from Baltimore, who barely got through graduate school without having his Department shut down by Professor Shapiro’s colleagues.

But, knowing that I don’t know, I cannot help but wonder if, just possibly, the “holy hyphen” (as Richard Kennedy, in a lovely piece of self-deprecating Oxfordian irony, has dubbed it) signifies exactly what Shapiro goes to such extravagant and self-defeating lengths to deny it does. As the aphorism goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And there sure is a lot of smoke being blown in the eyes of the jury over one little hyphen.

In any case, it seems safe to offer at least one probative conclusion: if anyone had no prior basis for questioning the reasoning  employed by the Shakespearean elite to sustain the cliché that “Shakespeare is Shakespeare,” then this little parable of the “notorious hyphen” provides a damn good illustration of why everyone should revisit his or her assumptions about authorship.

Indeed one is irresistibly reminded of the acerbic comment of former Folger Library Educational Director Richmond Crinkley, summarizing the history of similar errors documented in Charlton Ogburn’s Mysterious William Shakespeare – a book which James Shapiro can hardly bring himself to mention: ” if the intellectual standards of Shakespeare scholarship quoted in such embarrassing abundance by Ogburn are representative, then it is not just authorship about which which we have to be worried.”

Ironically, these words were published in the Folger Library’s own Shakespeare Quarterly in 1985. A quarter century later, they seem to be forgotten by an industry which seems only to remember those parts of its own history – and its own subject – which flatter  its narcissism.

Any reasonable person, after all,  must wonder why Professor Shapiro would enlist the weighty authorities cited in the “acknowledgments” section of his book, and get paid the huge sums of money he’s banked, and be invited to narrate his own BBC documentary to back up his printed fallacies with the imprimatur of the mass media, on the back of a theory which  is so manifestly erroneous from a  factual point of view and so twisted from a  logical one.

If someone really did pay Shapiro a million bucks for this book, then I hope they have a really big truck. They’re going to need it to carry away all the bullshit they paid for.

*I’d like to acknowledge the assistance of Robert Detobel in assembling these data.

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” that the Wilmot Manuscript may well be a forgery is largely if not wholly derivative of the research of two anti-Stratfordian scholars, Daniel Wright and John Rollett,  whom Shapiro 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.

Heward Wilkinson, in one of the more sophisticated Oxfordian responses to Shapiro, sees that “Shapiro’s neglect of contextual reading is astonishing,” and laments “the degree to which Shapiro’s own position, and those he repudiates, as formulated by him, simply mirror one another, take in one anothers’ washing, and readily reverse, flip over, and mutate into one another.”

Wilkinson does an excellent job of doing what a good psychoanalyst does: seeing the world from the point of view of his patient’s subjectivity, and pointing out some of the internal contradictions and limitations, concluding that Shapiro (more than once, actually) “completely violates his own criterion [of interpretation], without noticing he does.”

To Warren Hope, PhD, the author of a book which actually does what Shapiro claims to be doing, by offering an objective scholarly history of the authorship question,  the hero of Shapiro’s narrative is the anonymous fourth grader who motivated Shapiro to write his book by saying, “My brother told me that Shakespeare really didn’t write Romeo and Juliet. Is that true?”

As Hope notes, the fourth grader “cited his source, quoted him fully and accurately, and then asked the most relevant question he could think of.”

Would that Shapiro’s reviewers could live up to these modest standards.

Instead, such critically-aware reviews as Niederkorn’s, Wilkinson’s, or Hope’s have been few and far between, written on the margins of the mainstream discourse. And perhaps  the most striking characteristic of many others is how effortlessly they manage combine star-struck gullibility about Shapiro’s accomplishments with savagely uninformed attacks on authorship skeptics.

Clearly the race is on to see which reviewer in which periodical can outdo the other in falling all over himself to sing Shapiro’s praises and heap contempt on anyone who would dare to question whether Shapiro’s book is really all its cracked up to be.

A few examples will suffice to illustrate the tone of the present operation:

Peter Conrad, writing in The Guardian, assures us that he has it on the best authority that the Oxfordians are a gabble of “cranks” and a “reprehensible reactionary lot,” unable to adapt themselves to the post-modern reality, in which “Literary theory delights in…the ‘death of the author,’ because the writer’s annihilation licenses the critic’s self display.” Hmm…

The Irish Times gushes that “Contested Will brings in the forensic skills of the academic researcher—Shapiro has visited archives all over the US and British Isles.” Gosh.

Not to be outdone, The Independent‘s Boyd Tonkin admires “the absolutely high speed express of modern research,” which is modernizing the romantic view of Shakespeare as a “lofty demigod” by transforming him into a “shrewd creative industry entrepreneur” – that is to, say, someone not unlike Shapiro himself, who surely has the shrewdness of a canny entrepreneur,  easily able to swim past the big fish in the shark tank without blinking, and even reportedly received a million dollar advance for his book!

Talk about licensing the critic’s “self display….”

Over the next few weeks and months, doubtless there will be many more such screeds. And just as doubtless, I’ll have a lot to say about Shapiro’s book – which certainly contains enough striking instances of error of one kind or another to keep scholarship employed for some time mopping up the mess he’s made of things.

As I remarked in this interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, in a comment which did not make the cut into print, from the point of view of the intellectual historian, Shapiro has just made the biggest blunder of his long and successful career.

Contested Will is a work of tragi-comic overreaching, the result of a “perfect storm” of opportunism,  cheering from the Shakespeare industry (especially its real-estate theme-park wing headquartered in Stratford-upon-Avon), and a growing fear among Shakespearean scholars that they may have been dupes in a cosmic joke which is about to take an abrupt turn for the worse.

History beckoned for Shapiro to write a truly significant book on the Shakespearean question – a book that might have helped lead his colleagues out of the mess they’re in as a result of nearly two hundred years of failing to honestly confront the limitations of their own knowledge, or to admit the real and significant discrepancies in their narratives which have contributed to widespread public distrust of their scholarly bona fides.

Now, more than ever, the Shakespearean industry needs leadership of this kind.

Instead, Shapiro elected to take the easy way out.  The result is a book which deprives readers of the opportunity to experience critical thinking, promotes Shapiro’s own career at the expense of a failure to  grapple honestly with the real perplexities of the case he purports to examine, and apparently has fooled an awful lot of gullible reviewers into thinking that the mythology from Stratford has any future.

Sure, the Oxfordians have done their share of playing into Shapiro’s deceptions, but that is another story for another day.

For now, on the other hand,  let’s start  by conceding a point made by Shapiro-pumpers like Tonkin. Shapiro’s book indeed contains a number of startling revelations, the fruits of his industrious scouring of archives on that jet-pack-driven “high speed express of modern research” which so thrills Mr. Tonkin’s intellect.

These revelations are, indeed,  remarkable for what they illustrate about the “state of the debate” in Shakespearean authorship studies. Indeed, if anyone should require examples of why Shapiro insists, a little like Al Gore was doing just last summer about Global Warming, that “the debate is over,” and that the only thing left to be done is to dissect the brains of the non-conformists to determine what was wrong with them, then surely Shapiro’s original archival discoveries qualify.

Nor should we  lose sight of the fact that Shapiro’s high-tech whizz-bang discoveries were not only supported with generous grants from the Guggenhiem foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullmen Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, among others, but were cheered on  by a host of Shapiro’s luminary literary colleagues who are generously thanked in the acknowledgments section of the book.

With this critical context in mind, let us begin by considering what is perhaps the single most original and  impressive example of Shapiro’s discoveries (we’ll get to some others in subsequent blog entries).

Unknown to two hundred and five years of scholarship, Shapiro reveals to us for the first time in his book that the first printing of the name “Shakespeare,” attached to the dedication page of the first quarto of Venus and Adonis (1593) (discovered by Edmund Malone in 1805), contains the “notorious hyphen,” about which so much ink has been spilt.

As Shapiro intimates, this little hyphen is truly “notorious.”

It might even easily be blamed as the root of all authorship evils, a typographical glitch even more deleterious in its long term consequences than the naiveté of Edmund Malone about biography, Delia Bacon’s insane search for the real meaning of Shakespeare’s works, or Mark Twain’s plagiarizing (on which see, again, Mr. Niederkorn) of that liberal freak and animal lover, Sir George Greenwood.

Let’s allow Shapiro himself to resume the thread of our search for the origins of this pernicious piece of typographical mischief:

Early in his career Shakespeare showed great care in seeing into print his two great narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, bestsellers that went through many editions. While his name didn’t appear on the title pages of these volumes, dedicatory letters addressed to the Earl of Southampton and signed ‘William Shake-speare’ are included in italics in the front-matter of both. It’s the first time that the notorious hyphen appeared in the printed version of his name, a telling sign, for sceptics, of pseudonymous publication. (225 “advance reader’s edition”)

Now, I have a confession to make.

When I first read this – and I thank Robert Detobel for directing me to the passage in the first place and getting me started thinking about it – I thought I must have stumbled into an alternate universe. I’m thinking of the kind of world in which people are given PhDs for criticizing books they’ve never read, in which the Guggenheim foundation supports literary research which takes place in a bar on 5^th Avenue, and major publishers hire fact checkers who have never made it out of high school.

I even imagined that in this alternate universe, Ivy League professors were in the habit of sticking both their feet in their mouth at the same time, and then not only trying to get everyone to laugh about it, but actually succeeded in doing so, and were afterward praised for their wit.

What do you mean it doesn’t sound so “alternate”?

As the facsimile reproduced below shows, there is no hyphen in the name on the dedication page to Venus and Adonis.

Q1 (1593) title page of Venus and Adonis, showing unhyphenated and Roman type "William Shakespeare" after the epistle dedicatory.

One has to wonder how Professor Shapiro, in his twenty-five years teaching Shakespeare at Columbia, not to mention all that time he spent with Guggenheim grant money writing this book, can have failed to miss this elementary point.

But the reviewers are not worried.

James Williams from “PopMatters,” who teaches English Renaissance literature in Illinois, assures us that Shapiro’s work is “deeply informed,” and opines that “it would be difficult to imagine a better work of scholarship than this.”

Well, sorry, guy: with all due respect, I have no trouble at all imagining a better work of scholarship. I know it may be difficult, but how about “imagining” with me, even for a few seconds, a work of scholarship which does not initiate a fairly extensive discussion of a significant factual and interpretive problem with an unfortunate error of this kind?

Is that so unreasonable or impossible to imagine? Or am I the only one who thinks that just maybe this little literary faux pas might constitute a basis for reconsidering the merits of the rest of Shapiro’s o-so-brilliant work of scholarly detection?

Now, in case anyone of a skeptical bent of mind is reading this (“art thou there, truepenny?”), I hope you’ve already asked yourself the next obvious question: is there some other copy of the first edition of Venus and Adonis which contains the “holy hyphen”?

No.

There’s only one copy.

And no, the hyphen isn’t in the first edition (1594) of Rape of Lucrece, either.

So it is obvious that it required an indomitable exercise of the scholarly will to arrive at the brilliant conclusion that the hyphen was there, when opening any copy of any number of books housed in hundreds of libraries all over the world, or even dropping in on the digitized copy of the Folger Library’s own online archive – shows that it isn’t. Nor is it, to the best of my knowledge (which would appear to be shockingly far in advance of that of the learned Professor Shapiro), on any subsequent quartos of either poem, which for most part fastidiously reproduced, down to the last colon and comma, all the introductory matter of the first editions of both poems for the next several decades.

Now that we’ve settled that little problem, there is a deeper question which deserves to be answered: does this even matter?

After all, we all make mistakes. To err is human, isn’t it?

While it may seem shocking to some of Professor Shapiro’s more fervent acolytes, climbing fortune’s hill a little below him but still scrambling to reach the summit where the big checks are written, even college Professors at places like Columbia have from time to time been known to lose their car keys or write books about “notorious hyphens” which on closer inspection just don’t exist.

So, perhaps this is just, after all, just an innocent mistake – which, however embarrassing it may be to Professor Shapiro, his acolytes, and the fact checking department at Simon and Schuster (wake up!) – is really a red herring. Perhaps Stritmatter is mischievously diverting attention from the obviously superior merits of Professor Shapiro’s larger analysis by focusing on a trivial and inconsequential detail.

Well, let’s look at what Shapiro does with this error and see if this explanation is a sound one.

First we might need to clarify one niggling point. Does the name appear hyphenated on any early texts, or is this  something the anti-Stratfordians made up, maybe to embarrass the real scholars like Professor Shapiro?

Of course it does, and no they  didn’t. Instances include Hamlet Q1 (1603), Richard II Q2, Richard III Q2, the Sonnets, and a number of other texts dated 1594-1623 (If anyone cares, I’ll publish a complete census within the next few weeks as we examine this subject in greater forensic detail).

How does Shapiro explain this hyphenation of the name – even though it doesn’t exist where he says it does and it does exist in other places which he omits to mention?

Elizabethan compositors, trying to protect valuable type from breaking, would have smiled at the explanation [that the hyphen was a sign of pseudonymous publication]. They knew from experience that Shakespeare’s name was typesetter’s nightmare. When setting a ‘k’ followed by a long ‘s’ in italic font – with the name Shakspeare, for example – the two letters could easily collide and the font might snap. The easiest solution was inserting a letter ‘e’, a hyphen or both; as we’ll soon see, compositors settled on different strategies. And as the title pages of the 1608 quarto of Lear and the 1609 Sonnets indicate, it’s a habit that carried over when setting roman font as well. (“Advance Readers Edition,” 226)

To rephrase the essential point for the sake of clarity, Shapiro argues that the name Shakspeare (without the medial “e” after the k) was “a nightmare” for compositors; set in an italic font, the long italic s might easily collide with the k, producing big problems in the print-shop, with the result that “the font might snap.”

As even a reader uninitiated into the arcana of early modern printing can see by this example from the 1623 Shakespeare first folio, in the title of a poem by “I.M.,” Shapiro’s argument does have a veneer of plausibility:

Hyphenated and italicized name "Shake-speare," showing the long italic "s."

It’s an unfortunate sign of the lack of attention to detail and logic, not to mention the weak grasp of intellectual history, which lies behind many of the more effusive endorsements of Professor Shapiro’s genius that none of his reviewers can interrupt their hymns of praise long enough to ask,  whether the plausibility is any more than skin-deep, or whether Shapiro’s  theory of the origins of the “notorious hyphen” (like many similar sleights of hand in his book) is really just a species of condescending sophistry.

Heward Wilkinson, for one, seems convinced of Shapiro’s sincerity. But the more one grants Shapiro sincerity, the less plausible his knowledge of early modern typography becomes.

Notice, for example, that Shapiro’s theory as he frames it depends on two critical caveats: the name must not only be in italic, but must also be spelled without the -e- after the –k-. Otherwise the -e- itself takes care of the problem, without any need for the superfluous hyphen. Both conditions are clearly necessary according to Shapiro’s formula.

It seems apparent, even from the “I.M.” sample above,  that Shapiro’s formula is at best dubious correct. Even in this instance, the hyphen is, by Shapiro’s own terms,  superfluous from the typographical point of view, since the name is spelled with the medial -e-.

Any doubt as the accuracy of Shapiro’s logic on this point can easily be assuaged with a little photo-shopping of the original image.

Modified version of "I.M." First Folio poem showing removal of hyphen.

Although it may not show too clearly in the above image, the k is not touching the s.

As long as the name is spelled with that medial -e-, even if it is in italics, there is no typographical necessity for the hyphen.

If the arrangement seemed too close for comfort, any 16th century compositor would have reached into his bin of “spacers” – thin blanks of lead designed for exactly such exigencies as this – to supply a little margin to offset the descender of the k from the long “s.” A hyphen was not required.

This conclusion is proved by a second example, from the same First Folio poem by “I.M.,” where the name appears in Roman type and there is obviously no danger of the typographical disaster which Shapiro fears.

Hyphenated name in Roman type from "I.M." poem in 1623 folio.

As we have seen, Shapiro is mistaken about the origin of the hyphen in Venus and Adonis.

These two examples alone make it pretty clear, also, that his global explanation for the hyphenation phenomenon is bogus.

The reason the hyphen appears in the first instance is shown by the second. The compositor was working from a manuscript in which the name was hyphenated.

Continued here.

I want first to say “thank you” to the visitors who have come, even if for a brief time, to visit my site. Quite a number of you have actually registered, which is lovely, and a few less shy than others have even offered some pingbacks, emails, or commentaries to let me know you’ve read. The weeks since I last wrote here in November  have been full ones.

In late December and January I worked intensively with Lynne Kositsky on material for our Tempest book, and we’ve launched a new website, Shakespeare’s Tempest, as an internet repository for the articles we’ve written and for updating news on the book project. More generally, we hope to keep tabs on at least the most important outlines in current Tempest scholarship, so that the site might eventually become a kind of “one stop shopping” venue for those who are looking for solid scholarship about that particular play.

Currently the book proposal, with sample chapters on the “Tempest as Shrovetide Revelry,” is at a major academic book publisher.

More recently, I’ve done a lot of work on Wikipedia, developing what was once one a minor fetish into a real hobby, with my own page, which you can access here if you happen to be curious about what Wiki projects I’m involved in.  One of the more contentious articles was the one I seeded on Brief Chronicles, which swiftly became a candidate for  deletion.

As of today, March 4 (going on March 5), however,  it would appear that the Wiki editors in favor of retaining the entry  outnumber (and have out-argued) those who wanted to delete it on the grounds of its alleged “non-notability.”  As Hamlet would say, “I devised a new commission, wrote it fair…..”

Speaking of Brief Chronicles, there is some big news, “big” at least for the Oxfordians, shortly to announce on that score. But I’ll update that news in a later post within the next week or so.

Work on the Hydrachos project has been somewhat delayed due to circumstances beyond my control, but happily involving the business success of Dr. Carole Chaski, whose work with identifying authorship using computer-assisted analysis of syntactic patterns  continues to grow in influence and attract new clients, both actual and potential,  including government agencies.

As you may imagine, the potential uses for this software, which supplies the closest thing to a linguistic “fingerprint” known to in contemporary  linguistic practice, are enormous. A half-dozen early modern authorship enigmas stand ready to fall, like dominoes in a row, once we can harness the Alias system to the required early modern research strategies.

But the first literary-historical application of the system will be to investigate the authorship of the Hydrachos manuscript, which I hope can still happen some time within the next month.

Meanwhile, researchers at Cedar Buffalo, under the supervision of Dr. Sargur Srihari, are submitting the document to a second round of forensic handwriting analysis to attempt to disprove findings of their first paper, which tentatively identified the Hydrachos author as a famous 19th century American novelist. Assuming the second round of tests is unable to invalidate the first, the results will be made publicly available on this site and elsewhere.

Stay tuned. It promises to be a fun ride.

–R.S.

This blog is the second entry in my “Unsung Heroes” Series: it is dedicated to William Plumer Fowler (1901-1993) — poet, lawyer, and Shakespearean heretic.

From its inception in 1920, the case for Oxford’s authorship of the Shakespearean canon has been supported by stylistic analysis of the poetry and prose surviving under de Vere’s own name.

In Shakespeare Identified, Looney describes how he was first drawn to de Vere as a possible disguised Shakespeare by noticing some distinctly “Shakespearean” characteristics in Oxford’s “If Women Could be Fair” lyric.   This was the starting point for Looney’s attempt to excavate de Vere’s forgotten reputation as one of the most celebrated lyric poets of the early Elizabethan period.  Later Looney draws attention to a number of surprising connections between de Vere’s surviving poetry and the imagery and diction of the Shakespearean plays.

Looney’s approach to the question of style was impressionistic and made no claim to being exhaustive.

Over the years other scholars continued to explore the possibility that style might provide further corroboration of Looney’s theory; Charles Wisner Barrel’s 1947 Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly article, “Proof that Shakespeare’s Though and Imagery Dominate Oxford’s Own Statement of Creative Principles,” was one landmark study that advanced the case by, for the first time, considering Oxford’s prose instead of  his poetry, as a baseline for stylistic comparison.  

The list of lexical concurrencies reproduced by Joseph Sobran (1996) seventy-five years later is far more complete and, in an empirical sense at least, more persuasive than Looney’s was in demonstrating the poetic and linguistic affinity of between de Vere and Shakespeare.

Starting in 1987  however, the  argument that de Vere’s style is consistent with Shakespeare’s was challenged by Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza in a series of articles based on the work of a Claremont McKenna “Stylometric Clinic.” The Clinic, which released results over a period of years in articles co-authored by Elliott and Valenza, compared de Vere’s extant poetry with Shakespeare’s by means of an ostensibly “objective” series of computer tests ( a bibliography of these publications, along with some of the Oxfordian challenges to Elliott and Valenza, is forthcoming on the site).

By far the most persuasive stylistic arguments in favor of de Vere’s authorship, however, are found in William Plumer Fowler’s massive 1986 book, Shakespeare Identified in Oxford’s Letters.

Instead of focusing on Oxford’s poetry,  which consists of at most a couple of dozen juvenile poems, many of them song lyrics, Fowler focused on 37 of de Vere’s surviving letters, which span over forty years and together comprise a sample of over 12,000 words.  A poet and lawyer without formal training in linguistics, and working in the days before computers had radically simplified such an undertaking, Fowler devoted more than fifteen years to exhaustively analyzing the linguistic correspondences connecting “Shakespeare” to Oxford’s extant letters.

A graduate of Roxbury Latin School, Dartmouth College, and Harvard Law School, Fowler was a  life-long “student-scholar” of the works of the poet-dramatist. He served for 12 years as the president of The Shakespeare Club of Boston. By the time he finished his task in 1986, Fowler was legally blind and 85 years old.

Even Oxfordian scholars, let alone their critics, have yet to pay Fowler his due. His  book received almost no publicity, and was eclipsed in the public eye by the high tech but dubious conclusions of the Claremont Clinic, which made no effort to rebut Fowler’s work, and instead followed the (prudent) path of entirely ignoring it (and Oxford’s letters).

Fowler’s book may with justice be described as the most neglected and — ultimately– revelatory of all contributions to the canon of Oxfordian criticism.  The present writer has repeatedly challenged both Oxfordians and their critics (specifically, Terry Ross and David Kathman) to prove that the linguistic correspondences documented in Fowler’s 909 page book are “coincidental” expressions of a generic Elizabethan idiom. This could easily be accomplished by running some control samples on comparable bodies of Elizabethan prose correspondence, of which many are available.

Apparently, however, advocates of the orthodox view of authorship lack the confidence in their own beliefs to undertake this challenge.

Absent such disproof, the present writer is satisfied that the evidence assembled by Fowler goes very far to justify the author’s optimistic conclusion that the letters

effectively corroborate, through the consistency and distinctiveness of their correspondences to Shakespeare, Mr. Looney’s 1920 conclusion, in telling E.  Vere’s story ‘to the yet unknowing world,’ even as Horatio would have spoken…They are far more than just Oxford’s letters, they are Shakespeare’s letters.

(XXXV)

Recto side of 1846 "Hydrachos" Manuscript.

The Following Press release, dated Oct. 19, 2009, is reproduced from the original issued by the  Institute for Linguistic Evidence (ILE). Although it does not directly concern Shakespeare or early modern materials,  the release does report on my ongoing research program in the application of forensic methods to the study of historical and literary documents.

Results of the “Hydrachos” research program, which also involves collaboration with scholars from Buffalo State University’s CEDAR Forensic Handwriting division, should be available by the end of February.

(I-Newswire) October 19, 2009 – Georgetown DE – -Plans to use biometric linguistics to analyze a controversial and potentially important early American literary document were announced by  Institute for for Linguistic Evidence (ILE) founder Dr. Carole E. Chaski. In collaboration with Dr. Roger Stritmatter, a Coppin State University literary historian, Chaski will employ the patent pending ALIAS biometric Linguistic system to solve this 163-year-old literary “Whodunnit?”

This collaboration between the Institute for Linguistic Evidence and Dr. Stritmatter will be the first time that author identification methods developed for the forensic setting, having repeatedly met legal standards for admissible scientific evidence, will be applied to a literary puzzle. This particular document is perfect for this new collaboration because it is brief, just like the typical threat letter or suicide note or nasty letter to the SEC.

“This April 1846 satirical manuscript, The PHILADal GAZETTE – EXTR, includes seven pen and ink drawings accompanying a 437-word commentary on U.S. and World news of the 1840’s, as well as obscure references to contemporary circumstances known only to the writer and the intended recipient(s)” said Dr. Stritmatter. “The document’s leading image is a rider seated on a sea monster, racing several ships to deliver mail and news between Liverpool and America. Several prominent features of the manuscript, purchased from a New Jersey manuscript dealer, suggest that the author may be a well-known 19th century American novelist.”

High quality images of the manuscript with drawings and transcript are available, here.

A clue to the document’s possible genesis lies in an anonymous contribution to the June 19, 1847 issue of Yankee Doodle, a popular humor magazine.

“We are happy to announce on behalf of the Postmaster General,” writes the satire, “that a reward of One thousand Dollars will be paid to any person who will procure him a private interview with the Sea-serpent, of Nahant notoriety. Mr. Johnson is convinced that an economical arrangement can be made with the Serpent, for the transportation of the European Mails from Boston to Halifax.”

Did two anonymous satirists of the 1840’s both hit on the idea of a Sea Serpent carrying the international mail? Or is the author of the anonymous Yankee Doodle squib also the creator of the Hydrachos satire?

“This opportunity to use ALIAS biometric linguistic analysis on an important literary puzzle turns the table on the relationship between literary author identification and forensic author identification,” Dr. Carole E. Chaski, the Executive Director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence said.

“For the last fifteen years, literary scholars have been attempting to apply literary methods of author identification to forensic problems, and have not succeeded for two reasons.

“First, the basic techniques for literary author identification typically require far longer documents than the forensic setting usually allows; a novel is far longer than the typical threat letter, for instance.

“Second, literary author identification is grounded in close reading and other qualitative methods which do not meet the legal bar for admissible scientific evidence, such as repeatability, objectivity and error calculations.”

Dr. Stritmatter, an Associate Professor at Baltimore’s Coppin State, will use the ALIAS biometric linguistic system to further his investigation of the document. Dr. Stritmatter was awarded an ILE mini-grant during the 2009 funding cycle to pursue the research. Investigators will employ ALIAS to test several alternative authorship candidates to cross-validate results and establish the plausibility of the null hypothesis.

“I am excited by the opportunity to employ ALIAS to solve this problem,” said Stritmatter. “Given the small sample size, we need a method that can make fine linguistic discriminations to determine authorship even of short documents. By testing the document against a pool of possible suspects and mid-19th century controls, we will know how definitive any possible attribution might be.”

About The Institute for Linguistic Evidence

The Institute for Linguistic EvidenceEvidence was founded in 1998 by Dr. Carole E. Chaski as a non-profit, scientific research organization. The Institute, also called ILE, conducts pioneering research and development of methods for handling language as evidence and providing validated, tested and proven methods for answering forensically significant questions. ILE is the primary sponsor of the forensic linguistics professional organization, The Association for Linguistic Evidence (TALE).

ILE is the research and development wing of ALIAS Technology LLC. Based on litigation-independent ILE research and method validation, ALIAS provides forensic consulting services and the first on-demand biometric linguistic analysis solutions to law enforcement and investigators, security consultants and government agencies, commercial organizations, attorneys, the academic community and general public.
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The Earl of Oxford's final surviving letter, to James I, Jan. 30, 1603. Copyright, private collection, UK. Please do not reproduce without permission.

As some readers are aware,  a question lurks over the de Vere Bible: who is responsible for the handwriting — and therefore the underlining and other notations –  it contains?  Contradictory statements by some scholars dedicated to the traditional view of Shakespearean authorship have confused the issue.

In the coming weeks, therefore, I will be reproducing a number of samples of de Vere’s handwriting, both in the form of complete documents such as the present Jan. 30, 1603 letter to King James, and in the form of detailed paleographical analysis, that will allow the reader to form his or her own judgment on the matter.

I am pleased to offer this first sample, kindness the English owner, who preferred to remain anonymous. A transcript appears below. I will defer further comment until a later time.

Seinge yt yt hathe pleased yowre Magestye of yowre moste gratious inclinatione to[ward]
Justice & ryght to restore me to be keper of yowre game as well in yowre forest
Waltham, as also in Haveringe parke I can doo no lesse in dwtye and love t[o]
Yowre Magestye, but imploye my selfe in the executione thereof. And to the end
yow myght the better knowe in what sorte boothe the forreste, & the parke have be[ene]
Abused, and yet continued, as well in distroyinge of the Dere, as in spoylinge of yowre
demesne woode, by suche as have patents, & had lycenses heretore for sellinge of Tymb[er]
in the Quienes tyme latlye deceasede, præsuminge therby that they may doo what they
lyste. I was bowlde to send unto yowre Magestye a man skillfull, lerned, & experiencede in foreste causes, who being a dweller and eyewytnes therof myght informe yowe of the
truthe. And because yowre Mtye vpon a bare informatione, cowlde not be so well
satisfyde of every particular as by laufull testemonye & examinatione of credible
wytnese vpon othe, accordinge to yowre Magestyes appoyntmente by commissione
a course hathe bene taken, In which yowre Magestyes shalbe fully satisfysde of [the]
truthe. This commissione together wth the depositiones of the witnes I doo sende to [illeg.]
yowre Mtye by ys bearer, whoo brieflye can informe yow of the whole contence. So yt
now, hauinge laufullye provede unto yowre Magestye yt Sr John Graye hathe kylled
and destroyedge yowre Dere in Haveringe parke wythoute any warrante for the same
hys patent us voyde in lawe, & therefore I moste humblye beseche yowre Magestye
to make hym an example for all others that shall in leke sort abuse there places &
to restore me to the possession thereofe, in boothe whiche yowre Mtye shall doo but
Justice and ryght to the one & other. This 30 of Januarie 1603.

Yowre Magestyes

Most

Humble

Subiect and

Servant

E Oxenforde