After installing WordPress 3.21, and reactivating all plugins, the problem has disappeared. You’ll now find posts corrected sorted by category.

Maybe you didn’t notice.

I’m happy now. : )

The Columbia University Library. Columbia is alma mater - according to "MytimeMattersblog.com" - to 15 Billionaires. We print the facts, you decide.

The Universities are coming. Within the last twenty-four hours, coincident with a huge general upsurge in traffic (a subject for another post) over the last several days, we have  hosted traffic  –direct, ip validated traffic —  from the following academic venues (some of them — which ones is classified! —  for multiple visits):

Georgia Southern University
University Of Toronto
University Of North Carolina At Greensboro
University Of Texas At Austin
Keene State College
Mass College Of Liberal Arts
University Of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Bard College
University Of Georgia
Columbia University
Ohio State University
Campbell University
National Endowment For The Humanities (neh)
Harvard University
Yale University
University Of Richmond
University Of Missouri
Indiana Department Of Education
University Of East Anglia
The University Of Hong Kong
Los Rios Community College District
City College Of New York
West Virginia University
The Chronicle Of Higher Education
University Of California, Irvine
University Of California – Office Of The President
Sandia National Laboratories
University Of Texas At El Paso

I think that says a lot. Exactly what it means, time shall tell. Meanwhile, welcome, colleagues, whatever your persuasion. Assuming you have a sense of humor and a relatively open mind, here are a few links you might enjoy.

William J. Ray: Rowing in the Sea of Disinformation

Dr. Helen Gordon, PhD:  Six Brand New Lies

Dr. Heward Wilkinson, PhD: James Shapiro and the Sources of Imagination

Dr. Paul Nelson, MD: Walt Whitman on Shakespeare

Dr. Richard Waugaman, MD and Dr. Roger Stritmatter, PhD: Bards in Collision

What was it that Coyote said?

From the moment he posted himself up here, almost a month ago,  Coyote has been a minor hit.  For a long time I thought that he would be a one-hit wonder.

Exactly the opposite has happened. Who would have thought that, almost a month after his initial appearance, Coyote is steadily rising through the ranks of the most visited posts of the site, having racked up more than forty sixty hits in the last three days?

What does this mean? Is there some reverbbing going on? Has Coyote hallowed out our language? You tell me. I don’t have a clue. But, FYI, just to prove to you that I was not following the tracks of a Heffalump, here’s the list (with a few duplicates removed) of Coyote’s visitors for the last three days:

Hayward, California, Huntington Beach, California, Peoria, Arizona, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Manila, Philippines, West Haven, Connecticut, Saint Louis, Missouri, North Richland Hills, Texas, Calgary, Alberta,  San Francisco, California, Akron, Ohio, Humble, Texas, Savannah, Georgia, Allen, Texas, Tainan, T’ai-wan, Taiwan, Columbia, Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, Lafayette, Indiana, Loudon, Tennessee, United States, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Fremont, California, Fremont, California, Ottawa, Ontario,  Canada, Scappoose, Oregon, Scappoose, Oregon, Baltimore, Maryland, Fountain Hills, Arizona, United States Quito, Pichincha, Ecuador, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Houston, Texas, Houston, Texas, Annandale,  Minnesota Jasper, Indiana, Wilson, North Carolina.

At first glance it occurred to me that maybe these are all coyote regions. But some time before reaching Cambridgeshire that theory was dashed on the rocks of cruel reality. There are no Coyotes, that I know of, in Baltimore.

Then again, I will say that the distribution of these locations suggests a very definite regional pattern favoring the states where the Tricksters still run wild and provoke all sorts of all-too-human difficulties, pitting the spirit of the wild against the sturdy values of our American farmers and their need to protect livestock. Somehow we need both.

Signing off from right near North Avenue.

A website creates a “we.”

We may or may not want to belong to that “we,” but it does exist, independent of our intent.

But, who are we?

Think about it.

Based on polling about 70% of us feel confident that Oxford probably or certainly wrote the plays.

About 85% agree with the statement that “The Shakespeare authorship Question is a real subject, deserving the attention of all scholars of early modern studies.”

Of course, applying a sampling bias analysis, I’ll bet the approval numbers are not that high.   If you belong to the silent minority who disagrees, and you haven’t polled your opinion, now’s your chance.

Let’s see those numbers clicking.

Its true, you can’t curse in a poll, but still, I’m just saying…

If you want to register an objection beyond polling, post a comment. All civil comments will be published.

Any theory is only as good as its ability to explain rational objections of a competing premise. Give it your best shot, and let’s have some discussion and friendly debate.

Site traffic is going up exponentially.

Year over year, total site visits are up about 10x over October 2010. A year ago we were averaging perhaps 80 hits a week. This week – which is a bit more than average over the last month but not by much –we had 881.

Most of these are new, with about 15% being returning visitors. Returning visitors averaged 10/day for the week.

Our readership truly is international. Although a majority of readers from the U.S. or U.K., just in the last two days we also had readers from Canada, Germany, Bangledesh, the Philippines, Australia, Armenia, Ukraine, South Africa, and India.

Colleges and Universities are well represented, with at least seven Colleges and Universities appearing over the last few days: Jamestown in North Dakota, Columbia and Rochester in New York, Midland Lutheran College in Fremont, Nebraska, The University of Massachusetts,  Amherst, Mass., Minnesota State Colleges And Universities, and the University of Maryland as well as the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Within the U.S.,  visitors came from twenty-eight states:  Rhode Island, New Mexico, Ohio, New York, Maryland, Oregon, the District of Columbia, California, Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Connecticut, Idaho, Colorado, Tennessee, Washington, Missouri, Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas.

Turning to the UK, we saw virtual traffic from Gloucestershire, London, Manchester, Leeds, Basinstoke, Uxbridge, and Liverpool.

By far the most represented state seems to be…..hm. Maryland.

That either means I’m about to be fired for heresy, or Maryland has a head start on responding creatively to the present intellectual ferment.  Hi neighbors!

Here’s the list of visitor locales since Oct. 19:

Newport, Rhode Island, Somerville, Massachusetts, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom, Saint-laurent, Quebec, Canada, Albuquerque, New Mexico,  Forest City, Iowa,  Jamestown College, North Dakota,  University of Rochester, New York,  Columbia University, New York,  Cleveland, Ohio,   Baltimore, Maryland,  Gloucester, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, Lebanon, Oregon,  Hamburg, Germany, Belchertown, Massachusetts,  Washington, District of Columbia,  Uxbridge, Hillingdon, United Kingdom, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, London, United Kingdom, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, White Plains, New York,  Dhaka, Bangladesh, Manila, Philippines, Medford, Oregon,  Palo Cedro, California,  West Linn, Oregon,  Chicago, Illinois,  Yerevan, Armenia, Brooklyn, New York,  Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, Buffalo Grove, Illinois,  Lafayette, Louisiana,  El Paso, Texas,  Midlothian, Virginia,  Rochester, New York,  Lakeville, Connecticut,  Ketchum, Idaho,  Broomfield, Colorado,  Mountain View, California,  Johnson City, Tennessee,  Anderson, California,  Potomac, Maryland,  Bethesda, Maryland,  Midland Lutheran College, Fremont, Nebraska,  Saint Louis, Missouri,  Tarzana, California,  Tallahassee, Florida, Seattle, Washington,  University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland, Newport, Washington, Flagstaff, Arizona,  Midland, Michigan,  Pasadena, California,  Alexandria, Virginia,  Silver Spring, Maryland,  Champaign, Illinois,  Sunnyvale, California,  Bowie, Maryland,  Acton, Massachusetts,  Liverpool, United Kingdom, Lynnwood, Washington,  Norristown, Pennsylvania,  Central District, Hong Kong, New London, New Hampshire,  Brooklyn, New York,  Meridian, Mississippi,  Allston, Massachusetts,  The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass., Andover, Massachusetts,  Brattleboro, Vermont,  Manchester, New Hampshire,  Newport, Rhode Island,  Hatboro, Pennsylvania,  Los Angeles, California,  Basingstoke, Hampshire, United Kingdom, Saint Petersburg, Florida,  Saddle River, New Jersey,  Washington, District of Columbia,  Hermanus, Western Cape, South Africa, Hamburg, Germany, Sacramento, California,  Minnesota State Colleges And Universities Saint Paul, Minnesota,  Carrizo Springs, Texas,  Creedmoor, North Carolina,  Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, Conshohocken, Pennsylvania,  Manchester, United Kingdom, Manila, Philippines, Mineral Point, Wisconsin,  Schalksmühle, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, Springfield, Massachusetts,  West Bloomfield, Michigan,  Nikolaev, Mykolayivs’ka Oblast’, Ukraine, Quezon City, Philippines,  Leeds, United Kingdom, and Shawnee, Kansas.

The most popular referral link was Bill Boyle’s Shakespeare Adventure, a great clearinghouse for some of the best Oxfordian blogs on the net, but we also got significant traffic from the Oxfreudian, from google searches, Facebook, etc.

By far the most popular page over that time period has been the Abbreviated History of the Authorship Question (going back a week or two the chart buster was William Ray Delivers the Mail, but there are a gratifying number of hits on the FAQ and About pages, which tells me that visitors are starting to drill down and learn more about the site’s purposes.

Tom Weedy’s  classic guest post Seventeen Answers to the Deniers remains, naturally, a perennial favorite.

Quite a number have been looking for the new post, still password protected, “A Curious Inscription.”  I hate to sound melodramatic, but for  the present this post is going to remain accessible only by request.

Email me if you think you may have a “need to know” about that inscription. Otherwise, its still classified….:)

As fate would have it, a long delayed package arrived today from England in my Baltimore office on North Avenue. By all accounts this was its fourth voyage across the Atlantic in search of a recipient.

It contained not only a copy of  the delightfully appointed new publication on the Cobb portrait (on which, of course, more anon)  issued by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust fund under the imprimatur of several leading scholars, among them none other than James Shapiro and Stanley Wells, but also a check for $200 dollars to support the purchase of rights to reproduce the first of said Folger images.

Since the sender did not give me permission to use her official  name in public, I will for the present conceal her identity but simply add, “thank you ~~~little^raft^^in the  ~~rapids^^^.”  — And FINISH that DISS, hear me?

I do remember that incredibly tall beer. Your boat has arrived and your gift will not go unclaimed.

Everyone else, look for some photos soon.

But quality also matters — especially if, like me, you are in the business not of making money but of raising consciousness and transforming lives.

One  thing I really admire about Wikipedia, for example, is how the organization has resisted introducing advertising on its pages. Those at Wiki’s helm  understand that to do so would be to jeopardize forever, if not to destroy in one fell swoop, Wikipedia’s reputation for neutrality.

Of course, Wikipedia is not always — authorship question a case in point — authentically neutral, but most of the time given the constraints of human nature and the institutional pressures (bureaucratic influence, in particular) of various special interest groups, it does a pretty good job of things.

Everyone once in a while you have a blogger’s red letter day, and today is such a day. Behind the scenes of one’s own blog, one can sometimes see something that is invisible to the general reader but that can still be celebrated in one’s own mind.

Sometimes one new reader can be as important as a million others. Yes, that’s elitist. Call me a populist elitist.

I hope the general reader will forgive my coyness:  As Edward de Vere says to Willow in A Question of Will (the book that seems to have started the current academic trend towards titles that play on the polyvocality of  the word “Will”), some things should not be advertised.

Instead permit me to follow the Elizabethan custom of practicing my limited bilingualism: “si vales,” Sir, “gaudeo. ego valeo recte.”

The only known photo of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburgh. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” — Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863.

More details.

The article doesn’t come right out and say “Oxford was Shakespeare” — I have too much respect for the editors at Cahiers to ask them to endorse that heresy. But if you read between the lines you’ll see what I mean. By 1579 Oxford’s contemporaries were already urging him to “Shake his speare” by writing some serious tragedy.

All in all the peer review gods and goddesses have not been too unkind during the last year or two — in addition to the Cahiers article, Lynne Kositsky and I finally saw in print in 2010 our “Tempest as Shrovetide Revelry” article in the Shakespeare Yearbook.

Publication of that essay was unfortunately delayed by three years due to the illness of Douglas Brooks, who passed away from Cancer at age 52 in January 2009.   Of all the articles we wrote together on The Tempest we enjoyed this one the most, and although most of the blood is going to be shed over the other essays and wrangling about the date (which the Stratfordians have gotten horribly wrong for far too long now) of the play, this is also the essay that has the greatest significance for reading, performing, or appreciating the play.

The article seems to be causing some healthy stir on the internet (the chief problem with Stratfordian stirs is that most of them happen behind closed doors), already provoking one (rather eccentric) review by Marie Merkel.   However much it is angled at a particular conclusion (namely the “argument” that The Tempest was written by Ben Jonson!), Merkel’s response does make at least one significant criticism — namely the lack of attention we paid to the case made by John Bender for a Hallowmass orientation of Tempest.

We did deal at some length in our article on the parallel arguments set forth by R. Chris Hassel, in his wonderful book, Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year, as well as Grace R. W. Hall in her Tempest as Mystery Play. Everyone, including Hassel in his otherwise brilliant study of the influence of the liturgical calendar on Early Modern drama, assumes that because the first surviving record of a Tempest production is from Hallowmas (Nov. 1) 1611, that if the play has any liturgical orientation, its to that occasion — a notion that we showed Hassel and Hall couldn’t do much with.   But we didn’t specifically weigh and refute Bender’s case.  We look forward to doing so if and when the completed Tempest book can be published and are grateful to Merkel for pointing out the lacuna.

Another long-delayed article that’s recently been published is a collaborative piece, with a psychoanalytical slant, that the prodigious Richard Waugaman and I wrote. Our “Who Was ‘William Shakespeare?’ We propose he was Edward de Vere” not only appeared in the 32:2 (2009)  The Scandinavian Psychoanalytical Review (from the University Press of Southern Denmark) but inspired an editorial comment Editor-in-Chief David Titelman:

“Reading the Waugaman and Stritmatter article, I noted in myself a surprising irritation with [Ernst] Jones’s [anti-Oxfordian] attitude and that I shared the authors’ triumph over the proof offered by De Vere’s annotated Bible” (83).

Waugaman recently started a blog, at the delightful domain The Oxfreudian — on which I’ll have more to say in another post.

The London Times: Catholic Bard on the Brain.

As those who have followed the authorship question over a period of time may be aware, over the last decade a growing showdown has been shaping up within the orthodox Shakespeare community over the question of the bard’s religious affiliations.

A quick and dirty solution to the longterm problem of the “mystery” of Shakespeare’s biography is to postulate that he was a secret catholic.

The Catholic bard theory is like a cheap magic trick.

Voila! Suddenly the misfit between the biographical documents and the literary work is explained.  No need to question who wrote the stuff.  Like many English recusants who practiced the Old Faith, Shakespeare was forced to adopt a public persona at odds with his private faith. He lived life wearing a mask!

The only trouble with this theory is that, while purporting to resolve the biographical problem, it actually only makes it worse, as Peter Dickson argued in a 2004 University of Tennessee Law Review article.

That’s why an impressive roster of older Shakespearean scholars (among them Stanley Wells, Robert Bearman, James Shapiro, Johnathan Bate, and Katherine Duncan-Jones), who are not so easily seduced by the latest fad and know when they are being led into a trap, have steadfastly resisted falling for the Catholic bard theory.

But Richard Owen, in a London Times December 22 story, “Cryptic Signatures that ‘prove Shakespeare Was a Secret Catholic,’” appears as blithely unaware of the problem as he is irresponsible in promoting gossip as credible journalism.

While the biographical record of the Stratford Shakespeare does contain definite traces of Catholic sympathy,  including evidence that he was an investor in the Blackfriars Gatehouse, the Shakespearean works taken as a whole are unmistakably Protestant in their ethos. Adding additional “documentary” evidence for the Bard’s Catholicism,  even if it could pass the smell test for legitimacy — which the “evidence” of Owen’s article most certainly doesn’t — does not salvage the Stratford biography, as Dickson has cogently argued for over ten years now.

Having mentioned the “smell test,” let me disgress for just a moment. The caption to the Times Online graphic assures us with a straight face that the name “Arthurus Stratfordus Wigomiensis,”  which appears “in the visitors’ book at the Venerable English College in Rome” as a visitor in 1587, is “thought to be a pseudonym of William Shakespeare.”

Since William of Stratford’s whereabouts in 1587 are otherwise undocumented, this “Arthurus Stratfordus” must actually be the Bard!

If that doesn’t seem logical, you may not have studied enough theology in an English Department.  Obviously anyone associated with “Stratford” in 16th century Europe (most of which constitutes one or another of the “lost years” of the alleged author of Hamlet and 12th Night),  must be the  divine William, even if his name is actually Arthur and his surname is either Stratford or Wigomienses.

It’s a pseudonym, dummy!

As if this isn’t loopy enough, the same article also announces a second sacred relic from the lost land of Elizabeth I: in 1589 arrived  in Rome one “Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensis,” who, the London Times dispatch assures us without even cracking a smile, must also have been Shakespeare of Stratford. Surely this is nothing short of a miracle: two pseudonyms in as many years.

Questions:  Is it possible — however bizarre it might seem to the conspiracy theorists at the Times Online –  that “Arthurus Stratfordus” was actually just Arthur Stratford?  Or that Williamus Clerkue” was just William Clerke?   Has anyone tested this theory?

Is there any reason, beyond the fact that there are “lost years” in the traditional biography, and the two gents in question have names that soundly vaguely like they might have had something to do with Warwickshire, that this pair of pilgrims are identified with with the Bard?   Is “Arthurus Stratford” the same man known known in Lancashire, according to Michael Wood, as “William Shakshafte“?

How many pseudonyms hath Shakespeare, anyway?

The answer, apparently, is “as many as we need to distract the public from the ‘Wolfish Earl’ and ‘Diablo Incarnato,’ Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.”

One would think that Vatican scholars would already know what any internet dummy equipped with Google can now discover in five minutes:Wigomiensis is an early Latin variant for Wigorniensis, and refers to the diocese of Worcester. The name is Arthur Stratford of Worcester, as Robert Bearman pointed out in The Shakespeare Quarterly more than a year ago.

But then, the reasoning must go, if Shakespeare could change his name, he could also change his diocese, couldn’t he?

This is not to say that Shakespeare the writer was unsympathetic to the plight of such recusants as the martyred father Edmund Campion (1540-1581). Indeed, as Oxfordian scholar Richard Desper has pointed out in an article originally published in The Elizabethan Review and reprinted at The Shakespeare Fellowship, Campion’s fate is central to some of the more obscure passages of 12th Night.

Likewise, Poor Tom in Lear can easily be read as  Shakespeare’s comment on the circumstance of recusants, who were hunted down like animals by the Elizabethan security forces.

But being sympathetic to the suffering of recusants is not the same as being one. As Peter Dickson says, read as a whole, it is impossible to reconcile the humanist and Protestant high church ethos of the Shakespearean ouevre with the philosophical outlook of an English recusant.

An example from Hamlet may clarify why this is so.

Hamlet’s father may have gone to his grave “unhouseled and unaneled” — which is to say, without Catholic last rites — but Hamlet himself was a student at Wittenberg,  the 16th century epicenter of academic Protestantism, not to mention, through Georg Joachim Rheticus, a stronghold of Copernican astronomy. All this, as numerous scholars have pointed out, is relevant to the exegesis of the play as a reformation parable.

One may add to this that over a hundred years of careful analysis of Shakespeare’s Biblical influences — which are very significant — shows unmistakably that the Bible with which Shakespeare was most conversant was the Geneva translation, prepared during the 1550′s in Geneva by Calvinist refugees from Mary Tudor’s counter-reformation government and first published in Geneva in 1560.

The Genevan translation was so inflammatory from a Catholic perspective that even the Anglican establishment disapproved of it and quickly attempted to replace it with a more moderate Protestant translation (The Bishop’s, 1576).  To suppose that an Elizabethan recusant would depend primarily for his Biblical instruction on this translation of the Bible makes no sense at all.

Stephen Greenblatt assures us in a recent review of Johnathan Bate’s Soul of the Age that Shakespearean scholars are too timid. They don’t do enough “imagining,” says Greenblatt. Greenblatt, who has flirted with the recusant theory  in a number of his works, might well be gratified by all the bold “imagining” that the London Times seems to be regularly bringing to the task of bardography these days.Certainly it is hard to ask for a better example of how postmodern historiography seems to have abandoned all principle except finding the answers we already want.

But to “imagine” that Shakspeare was a recusant is like imagining an English Puritan who fortified his faith with daily reading of the Vulgate and distributed references to its language and points of doctrine throughout his theological tracts. Indeed, as Concordia University Professor Daniel Wright points out in The Anglican Shakespeare: Elizabethan Orthodoxy in the Great Histories (a book based on Wright’s Ball State University PhD dissertation), and as many historically informed Shakespearean scholars are aware, the Shakespearean history plays are suffused with the rhetoric and spirit of the reformation.

They are no more the work of a recusant that they are the work of William of Stratford, by any of his imagined pseudonyms.

All this, however, is apparently unknown to London Times writers  assigned to cover Shakespearean topics.