Shakespearean actor Michael York to Wells & Edmondson: “Have you no sense of decency sirs, at long last? Or, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, 'O shame! where is thy blush?’”

The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (SAC), sponsor of the well known “Statement of Reasonable Doubt” campaign, has launched a “multi-pronged counter-offensive against the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) in Stratford-upon-Avon, and its “60 Minutes with Shakespeare” authorship campaign, initiated in response to Anonymous.

SAC released a point-by-point rebuttal to some of the many factual and logical depredations of the Trust’s anti-Oxfordian Campaign, available in pdf here.

So, even as the movie itself fades from theaters into hibernation pending the Oscar season and DVD release, the magic is already working.

Stratfordians have for decades believed that maintaining the Shakespearean status quo required little effort on their part. A character assassination here, a non-sequitur there, was all it took to maintain intellectual hegemony and frighten students and the general public away from a fully informed, all-facts-on-the table discussion from first principles about the true genesis of the Shakespearean plays.

All that went out the window because of two things, the development of the internet and, now, the premiere of Anonymous.

Speaking for the SAC was renowned Shakespearean actor Michael York. York has for some time been an outspoken Oxfordian, but has not until this time taken a major role as spokesman for the movement. York’s involvement was critical because of the character assassination that the Birthplace Trust has directed against other Shakespearean actors such as Sir Derek Jacobi and Vanessa Redgrave, both of whom not only star in Anonymous but have been vocal in supporting the legitimacy of inquiry into the Shakespearean question.

York represents a sizable and growing number of other actors, less well identified by the Stratfordian propaganda machine than Jacobi or Redgrave, who are eager to make their voices heard on the subject.

According to the SAC, York  ”announced a monumental breakthrough in the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy — detailed evidence that William Shakespeare traveled all over Italy. The problem for orthodox Shakespeare scholars is that the Stratford man never left England.”

That evidence is contained in a newly released book by Richard Roe, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels.

As described by the SAC’s press release, York also went after Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Spokesman Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson for some of their more outlandish ad homina, such as claiming that anti-Stratfordians are “anti-Shakespeare”:

During a briefing at the LA Press Club’s Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood, Michael York, Hilary Roe Metternich, daughter of the man who discovered the new [Italian connection] evidence, and John M. Shahan, Chairman & CEO of the California-based Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (SAC), lambasted the SBT for its Orwellian attacks against doubters and for the inferior scholarship in its “60 Minutes with Shakespeare” website, which features 60 prominent SBT supporters, each giving a 60-second audio-recorded response to one of 60 questions posed by the SBT.

Michael York, in language echoing that which brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy, castigated Stanley Wells, Honorary President of the SBT, and Paul Edmondson, Head of Learning and Research at the SBT, for suggesting that the authorship controversy is merely another “conspiracy theory,” and for labeling all doubters as “anti-Shakespeareans.”

“Have you no sense of decency sirs, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” York asked. “Or, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, ‘O shame! where is thy blush?’” he added. “Doubters are not ‘anti-Shakespeare,’” York insisted, “but your behaviour is most un-Shakespearean.”

A recent Library Journalreview gives a pretty clear idea of how the general literate public is responding to Roe’s book, and the news is not good for the Birthplace Trust:

For this literary journey through Shakespeare’s ten plays set in Italy, Roe, an English and history scholar and an attorney who died in 2010, explored the places that inspired many of Shakespeare’s classics and presents a solid argument that Shakespeare was well traveled. Roe spent over 20 years traveling throughout Italy with Shakespeare plays in hand. The thrill of discovery he felt throughout his quest leaps off the page and makes for an accessible read.

The connections he draws among the plays and locales are backed up with pictures, maps, literary references, and well-documented arguments. Particularly striking is Roe’s argument that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not set in Greece, as traditionally accepted, but in a small town in Italy.

VERDICT: A fascinating look at a largely untouched aspect of Shakespeare’s identity and influences. Recommended for Shakespeare enthusiasts and scholars as well as travelers looking for a new perspective, this is also particularly intriguing as a companion to specific plays.

Anonymous may be garnering praise for its meticulous CGI recreation of Elizabethan London, but few critics can bring themselves to laud it as a film. As was noted in Roger’s earlier post, many film critics – the bulk of whom are surely not Shakespearean scholars themselves – apparently feel compelled to decry the film for its Oxfordian thesis, rather than limiting themselves to critiquing it as a film. Even those who do praise Anonymous as a movie nonetheless must affirm for their readers that they believe it to be hokum. Roger Ebert, for example, wrote, “this [is a] marvelous historical film, which I believe to be profoundly mistaken.”

Yes, the film does take substantial liberties with certain historical events, compressing and reordering them for the sake of entertaining drama. For instance, the murder of Christopher Marlowe and the publication of Venus and Adonis are depicted as occurring a good ten years later than they actually did. Yet Anonymous is hardly alone on this score: the 1984 film Amadeus won great acclaim and dozens of awards — including the Best Picture Oscar — for its fanciful “what if” treatment of the life and death of Mozart.

Like Shakespeare, Mozart is a pillar of Western culture, but critics of the time didn’t fall over themselves to condemn it for its inaccuracies. And the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love was of course completely fictional yet was well-received by audience and critics alike, also winning the Academy Award for Best Picture.

What we are dealing with here though is not really a concern over historical fidelity. Rather, what we have in the SAQ are clashing epistemological ideologies, such that entire world views are at stake. It is therefore not surprising that we should see this consistency in the response to Anonymous on the part of the majority of critics, punditry and experts cited in the major media.

A colleague of mine, having recently started reading about Oxford, remarked that it seemed to him like a conspiracy that the  Oxfordian theory would be so routinely belittled. I replied, a conspiracy, no: but a pattern, yes. And one for which we have a ready model and explanation.

In 1988, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The book examines the sympathetic portrayal of American foreign policy in the major media through the lens of what they called a Propaganda Model of News, which consists of “five filters” through which information must pass before it is deemed “fit to print.”

1. Size, ownership and profit orientation of Mass Media
2. Advertising as a major Funding source
3. Sourcing
4. “Flak”
5. Anti-communist ideology as a control mechanism.

While Herman and Chomsky specifically considered how the filters informed reportage and commentary concerning American foreign policy during the Cold War, the filters are equally potent in restraining newspapers and network television from championing any number of perspectives that are deemed “fringe.” The authorship debate is not an exception.

That mass media have structural ties to corporations and are dependent on advertising makes them naturally averse to controversy, and hesitant to challenge dominant narratives that would run counter to the interests of these pillars. When we consider Shakespeare as cultural industry, replete as it is with many thousands of books, films, and consumer paraphernalia of all kinds, it is immediately apparent that a wholesale rejection of the Stratford mythology would be unwelcome for more than the hotels and restaurants in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Furthermore, in an era of ever-greater concentration of ownership and integration between media platforms, the same corporations that run newspapers, TV and radio also own publishing houses. While scarcely on the scale of, say, the oil and gas industries, the commercial interests that might be collectively (and only somewhat facetiously) referred to as “Big Shakespeare” are nonetheless highly influential and naturally unenthusiastic about the upheaval a new Oxfordian reality would mean for their investments.

Therefore the Oxfordian theory is by definition unthinkable; there is no perceived advantage to be gained by it, and reputations hang in the balance. Ridicule, by contrast, is entertaining to read and sells more newspapers.

The third filter, sourcing, is readily observable in the response to Anonymous. Reporters and editors, under the rubric of objectivity, depend upon expert commentary to inform their customers, rather than taking and defending positions themselves. But as Herman and Chomsky point out, these are, by and large, establishment actors representing a very narrow range of orthodox opinion, as opposed to alternative social actors challenging dominant narratives. Accordingly, media outlets have been quick to call in conventional Shakespeare experts to criticize the film and affirm the traditional view.

Championing unorthodox views in the mass media – whatever those may be — carries with it the threat of flak, which is the fourth filter. Flak is the negative response to news stories or opinion pieces on the part of mass media’s constituencies, be they citizens groups, “watchdog” agencies, institutions, or individuals. Letter-writing campaigns or boycotts can result from hostile consumer reaction. In the case of so beloved and foundational a figure as Shakespeare, there would be a much greater probability of a negative response from adherents to the established view, than from those arguing for Oxford.

The prospect of backlash from readers and institutions such as universities might be a factor in a media outlet choosing to marginalize Oxfordian theorizing. Journalists and critics are also likely leery of being ridiculed by their peers, so steer clear of advocating for beliefs marginalized by others.

The fifth filter explicitly identifies ideological marginalization. Manufacturing Consent examined how anti-Communism was a control mechanism that readily helped media categorize acceptable and deplorable views, which in turn rendered official policies and foreign regimes palatable to the American public, while vilifying those associated with the Soviet Union.

In the post-Cold War era this filter has morphed into an “anti-terror” ideology, and, more generally, an “anti-ideology” filter that conveniently allows pundits to equate the views of their opponents with other belief systems deemed to be beyond the pale. For example, J. Kelly Nestruck – theatre critic for Canada’s newspaper of record the Globe and Mail, responded to the film this way:

It has become clear to me that contemporary Shakespeare denial is part and parcel of a dangerous, anti-rational mode of thinking that is on the rise in our society. Such thinking is a gateway drug for Truthers, Birthers (who deny that Barack Obama was born on U.S. soil) and believing in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion…we must insult and belittle the Shakespeare deniers until they get embarrassed and shut the hell up.

Curiously, the LA Times’ Charles McNulty frames the SAQ  in remarkably similar terms:

like those who deny global warming, President Obama’s birth certificate and the basic tenets of Darwinian evolution, the Oxfordians prefer shadowy doubts to irrefutable data. That De Vere died in 1604, years before a few of Shakespeare’s prodigious masterpieces were completed, is of little consequence to their conspiratorial parlor game.

This conflation of what is seen as unacceptable dissent with other belief systems held to be abhorrent (like anti-Semitism) is a form of intellectual laziness, of course, in that it allows the author to avoid actually addressing the contentions of their opponents in a constructive way. More significantly however the anti-ideology filter is a form of fallacious rhetoric that condemns through association. The term “denial” here is particularly potent, as it immediately conjures up in the mind of the reader Holocaust denial, a connection made more explicit by Nestruck’s reference to the Protocols.

What is curious however is that these authors essentially treat Stratfordian skepticism as if it were some kind of recent phenomenon, a symptom of post-modern relativism perhaps, when it is a literary and historical problem that has occupied researchers for over a century and a half.

Such efforts to cast issues as either black-or-white is part of another powerful filter: that rendering complex issues into simple ones. In their book Exploring Mass Media for a Changing World, authors Ray Hiebert and Sheila Gibbons  describe the pronounced tendency of mass media to drastically simplify information for its audiences’ presumed reading and comprehension level, with the effect that specialized information is rarely conveyed adequately.

This makes it easier for media to repeat expert opinion ruling out Oxford’s candidacy because he died in 1604 – years before standard chronologies date the performance and publishing of Shakespeare’s plays – rather than to explain the conjectural, conflicting and controversial nature of those chronologies, and the extent to which they were shoehorned to adhere to the life of William Shaksper of Stratford.

While it is true that the media environment has been dramatically transformed by the World Wide Web since the end of the Cold War, the imperatives of the filter are still present, and even within the bold new world of social media: Wikipedia editors are also vigilant gatekeepers of established views on controversial subjects, ensuring that certain information is confined only to pages specifically about those controversies, rather than allowing them to be “mainstreamed.”

As Herman and Chomsky demonstrated, the exercise of media filters has very real socio-political consequences, as it contributes to an environment in which certain lines of inquiry are considered forbidden, thereby undermining democracy. In the case of the authorship debate, we should see that the marginalization of the Oxfordian view is just one example of a larger structural problem. Social, cultural and intellectual transformations of all kinds have been long frustrated and delayed as a result of such narrow ideological “framing” on the part of the mass media; as such, media reform aimed at diminishing the influence of these filters would benefit not just Oxfordians but any new and emerging paradigm challenging the status quo.

*Michael Dudley is the Senior Research Associate and Librarian at the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg. He has degrees in Theatre, Library Science and City Planning. His review of James Shapiro’s Contested Will for the Winnipeg Free Press may be read here.

The Vatican Decrees Shakespeare a Catholic? Really?

My blog post about the Vatican’s coming out for the Catholic Bard thesis and Peter Dickson’s flamboyant response is now available.

Dickson comments:

“Given the report concerning the bombshell announcement and apparent claim by the Vatican’s official newspaper (L’Osservatore Romano), anti-Stratfordians and Oxfordians can never say I did not warn them since 1998 of the importance of the issue of whether the Stratford man was a secret Catholic as many Stratfordians believe.  And many of them devoutly hope this ”truth” would help explain why the traditional Bard from Stratford-on-Avon is so mysterious, so elusive when it comes to proving that he really was the great literary figure.  The secret Catholic theory which actually goes back to the mid-1800s was in part a response to the anti-Stratfordians.”   More.

Dickson’s analysis of the Catholic-Protestant split in Shakespearean studies from the Oxfordian (2003) is available here.

Harvard's Marjorie Garber: "I have remained in dialogue with Oxfordians and others, not because I concur with their opinions but because I do not dismiss them out of hand.”

Many readers will already have heard something about the authorship wiki-wars.

One of the fictions effectively perpetrated on unwitting newbies in these edit battles by the usual gang of diehard orthodoxists is that anything dealing in an intelligent way with the authorship question does not constitute a “reliable source” (is not RS) — apparently because so many academicians are agreed that intelligent discussion of the topic is by definition unreliable.

These wiki-pundits also believe that the issue itself and any alternative theories of authorship, including the Oxfordian one,  belong to the venerated Wikipedia category of “fringe theory” — along with the idea that an alien ate your mother and the earth was created in 4004 BC.

Exactly what does constitute a reliable source, according to these arbiters of public morality, and what distinguishes a minority viewpoint from a “fringe theory” remains, of course, usefully ambiguous. The point is not to develop a systematic classification based on principle, but to have handy at one’s side a usable stick to make sure that only sources that represent one viewpoint are allowed, and that anything that might endanger the sanctity of smug orthodoxy  or make the debate more complex by acknowledging that more than one rational point of view exists, is immediately labelled “not RS” and kept out of the footnotes.

If one is dedicated to the principle that the authorship question is a bad idea, this makes sense. As soon as one levels the playing field by outlawing argument by prejudicial a priori definition, the Oxfordians start winning points on the merits of their case.  This cannot be allowed if we want to keep the world safe for the ideal that Shakespeare is a cliché.

And, ironically, it appears to this reader at least that Archbishop Usher’s Bible-centered geo-chronology is treated more respectfully on Wikipedia than the Oxfordians are — but of course this makes sense, since Usher’s views are in fact so marginal that they constitute no threat to geological orthodoxy, while the case for Oxford’s authorship of Shakespeare is sufficiently persuasive to have gained the endorsement of several supreme court judges and some of the leading Shakespearean actors of the 20th and 21st centuries. The heat, in other words,  is in inverse proportion to the actual legitimacy of those fighting against the idea.

Recently Richard Whalen, author of Shakespeare — Who Was He: The Oxford Challenge to the Bard of Avon?, a book continuously in print since its publication in 1994, sent us some notes documenting the extent of Oxfordian influence on ostensibly orthodox academicians. These are grouped by analysis of public comments by each of several leading Shakespearean scholars, starting with Harvard’s Marjorie Garber, author of Shakespeare’s Ghostwriters (1987) and Shakespeare After All (2004, 2010) -Ed

Guest post by Richard Whalen begins here

In Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers (1987 from Methuen, 2^nd ed. 2010 from Routledge), Garber  devotes most of her first chapter, “Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers,” to the authorship question, which informs the rest of her book. Her first sentence in the 27-page chapter is a question, “Who is the author of Shakespeare’s plays?” She then asks why doubts about his authorship have been so “tenaciously dismissed?” (a deliberate oxymoron?) She notes that Jonson’s praise in the First Folio “may not identify him with the prosperous citizen of rural Warwickshire” (1). She goes on to discuss the arguments for both sides, citing Looney, Ogburn, Freud, Twain, Chaplin, and others.

Significantly, in a second, expanded edition this year, from Routledge, she confirms her continuing interest in the SAQ: “When I first wrote about the Shakespeare authorship controversy . . .the topic seemed both fascinating and off-limits” (2^nd edition Preface, xiii). On the next page: “I take it seriously and am less interested in any “answer” or “solution” than I am in the enduring nature of the controversy. Thus, I have remained in dialogue with Oxfordians and others, not because I concur with their opinions but because I do not dismiss them out of hand” (xiv). You can read her Preface to the Routledge edition on Amazon’s LookInside.

Later Garber asks, “Why does the question persist? . . .That is the question I would like to address. I would like, in other words, to take the authorship controversy seriously . . . to explore the significance of the debate itself, to consider the on-going existence of the polemic between pro-Stratford-lifers and pro-choice advocates as an exemplary literary event in its own right” (3)

On page 26, she says the plays raise questions like “Who wrote this? . . the apparent author or the real author. . .is the official version to be trusted? . . As will become clear in the chapters that follow, the plays not only thematize these issues, they also theorize them, a critique of the concept of authorship.” It’s the 1980s and it’s typical academic jargon, probably knowingly.

Garber has written six books about Shakespeare. She is a chaired professor of English at Harvard and chair of the department of visual and environmental studies.

Her 945-page book from Pantheon, Shakespeare After All (2004) confirms her interest in SAQ quite dramatically. She has a chapter on each play (probably from her lecture notes), and although she gives only a half dozen sentences to the controversy in her Introduction, she concludes that “despite the persistence of the Authorship Controversy [her caps], there seems no significant reason to doubt that Shakespeare of Stratford was the author of the plays” (22). A rather half-hearted defense of Stratman.

Significantly, despite only a few sentences on SAQ in the Introduction, her “Suggestions for Further Reading” (940) has a major section on “Shakespeare and Authorship” with seventeen books. Nine of them–a majority–are by Oxfordians, including Looney, E. T. Clark, Ogburn (twice), Sobran and myself. But only three anti-Oxfordians: Dobson, McManaway and Schoenbaum. She also includes her Ghost book.

Stanley Wells

Stanley Wells, perhaps the dean of Shakespeare scholars, devotes 18 of 174 pages in Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare (n.d. c. 2008) to SAQ. Notably, the cartoon cover depicts the SAQ; it shows a dumbfounded Shakspere being pulled in one direction by Marlowe and the other direction by Bacon or Oxford.

In the 18 pages he covers six candidates in a very sketchy, informal challenge/response mode and of course dismisses all of them. The publisher is a tiny, home-based company, but this is the eminent Stanley Wells, and it’s the first time he has addressed SAQ at any length. Testimony perhaps to the gathering momentum for the SAQ. I emailed him noting errors; he ignored them and said he “believes that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.” That’s their default mantra.

David Bevington

David Bevington, has a difficult time with the SAQ in his Shakespeare and Biography (Oxford UP 2010.) His opening chapter, “The Biographical Problem,” is full of unanswered questions about the presumed literary life of Stratman. His 7-page last chapter, “L’envoi,” has four pages on SAQ. He cites Matus, Shapiro and my book and makes the usual arguments but not dismissively. He doesn’t address the significance of the SAQ as such. At various points, he discusses attempts “to look for connections” between the plays and Stratman’s biography (138.)

Bevington, whom I know quite well, is one of the top five Shakespeare establishment professors. He is editor of the HarperCollins (now Longmans) collected works and is the only president of the SAA to hold that office twice.

Norrie Epstein

In her racy, colorful Friendly Shakespeare (Viking 1993) Norrie Epstein devotes twenty-eight pages to the SAQ. Although she does not take a position, she contrasts Stratfordian and Oxfordian arguments and says the arguments for an alternative candidate are “extremely persuasive” (277). She concludes, “In short, there is no solid evidence for attributing the works to the man whose name they now bear.” And she notes that most academics dismiss SAQ.

Epstein has been a lecturer on Shakespeare at the universities of California, Rochester and Stevenson and at Goucher. Her book is still in print. Maybe you can use it. Epstein addressed the Boston conference of the Shakespeare Oxford Society in  1993.

James Shapiro

From my online SOS review of Contested Will:

“For the first time, a leading Shakespeare establishment professor, James Shapiro of Columbia University, has given serious consideration to the controversy over Shakespeare’s identity in a book-length analysis—a precedent that may help make the authorship issue a legitimate subject for more research and discussion in academia, even though Shapiro remains a Stratfordian.

His book is a history of the authorship controversy, from Delia Bacon in the 1850s to DoubtAboutWill.org in 2007. He recognizes that the seventeenth Earl of Oxford is by far the most impressive challenger and that his backers have achieved considerable success in recent decades. His final word is that a choice must be made, which he calls a “stark and consequential” choice.

“The book’s cover will dismay committed Stratfordians. It’s the Stratford monument depicting a writer with pen, paper and a pillow, but his head is cut off by the author’s name and the book’s title, including Who Wrote Shakespeare?  And indeed that is the question.

“Shapiro, however, states at the outset that he aims to answer a different question: Why have so many eminent people doubted that Will Shakspere of Stratford was the author and argued for someone else, such as Oxford? In so doing, he declines to enter the debate over the evidence for Shakspere or for Oxford in any depth of detail. As a result, the general reader is left with the impression that the question of Shakespeare’s identity may well be legitimate, despite efforts by many Stratfordians to dismiss it. That a scholar of Shapiro’s standing in the Shakespeare establishment should take this approach bodes well for Oxfordians.”

Die-hard Stratfordians, of course, will be able to find what they need to defend Will Shakspere and reject Oxford. Shapiro cleverly provides quotable snippets. Still, the discerning general reader, for whom this book is intended, should be able to see through this stratagem. . . .

. . . Granted, there is much for Oxfordians to critique and rebut, including material omissions, unbalanced emphases, unsupported opinions, faulty judgments, the usual straw-man arguments, contradictory stances and some other clever rhetorical tactics. At times, his handling of evidence is so devious as to deftly conceal his errors of interpretation. Oxfordians would have preferred a book by a Shakespeare establishment professor that would open the door even wider to scholarly discussion of the evidence for Oxford as Shakespeare, but Shapiro’s is a big step in that direction.

“On balance, Shapiro’s book might be considered good news for Oxfordians, who could have expected much harsher treatment by an Ivy League professor and scholar in the Shakespeare establishment. He shows a fair measure of appreciation for the Oxfordian proposition, and he freely acknowledges Oxfordian successes. That alone is reason enough to welcome his book. In addition, the book’s title and cover deliver a strong message of legitimacy for the authorship question.”

The Man of Many Voices: Ferdinand Pessoa wrote under more than 70 "heteronyms."

Roland Emmerich’s new film, Anonymous, is inspired by the same theory that gripped Freud during the last dozen years of his life—that “William Shakespeare” was the pseudonym and front man of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). The film has generated much debate, some of it acrimonious.

Why should this be?

A film is just a film, after all. But this one challenges widely accepted “truths.” And those ostensible truths are intertwined with an idealizing transference to the bard. Freud observed that we know so little about the traditional author that we can imagine he was every bit as great as his works are.

The acting in the film has won praise from many critics. Vanessa Redgrave portrays the older Queen Elizabeth most convincingly, while her daughter Joely Richardson is the younger Elizabeth. Rhys Ifans departs from his past film roles to become the older Edward de Vere. He brings to life de Vere’s passion for writing, his awareness that “All art is political,” his reckless impulsivity, and resigned awareness that he would not receive credit for his politically polemical works.

Anonymous chooses one among many possible narratives as to the how and why of de Vere’s choice of Shakespeare of Stratford to serve as his front man.  It depicts the theory that the offspring of de Vere’s affair with Queen Elizabeth was the Earl of Southampton.

This was the earl to whom Shakespeare’s two long poems of 1593 and 1594 were dedicated. Further, many of us believe that Sonnets 1-126, the so-called “Fair Youth” sonnets, address Southampton. But this is where any consensus disintegrates. Some of us believe the bisexual de Vere had an affair with Southampton.

Others—possibly because of their discomfort with de Vere having been bisexual—instead claim that Southampton was de Vere’s son by Queen Elizabeth. They can then explain the unusual warmth of these sonnets as reflecting paternal love.

Incest is another  theme in the film. The allusions to incest in the plays might reflect de Vere’s quasi-incestuous relationship with his first wife—they grew up as virtual step-siblings.

Confused?

I’m not surprised. Don’t you have to be a snob and a conspiracy theorist to doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?

Actually, Elizabethan authorship was a bit more complicated than it is today. Most plays were published without the author’s name. Literary anonymity and pseudonymity were common before the 20^th century.

We often study paradigm changes retrospectively. But we are in the midst of such a paradigm change now when it comes to Shakespeare’s identity.

A recent poll found that only 70% of people still accept the traditional Shakespeare as author of the canon. We now have a chance to study the individual and group psychology of asking people to reconsider their assumptions about the identity of the greatest author in English literature.

Ben Jonson plays an intriguing if invented role in the film. He was ostensibly de Vere’s first choice to serve as his front man, but he declined. His admiration for de Vere’s literary genius stirs deep envy in him. Here, the screenwriter John Orloff was making his homage to Amadeus, which was a major inspiration for him.

In fact, the soundtrack includes a brief snippet of Mozart’s Requiem during de Vere’s wedding to Anne Cecil. This wedding follows on the heels of the adolescent de Vere murdering a servant who was spying on him, in the home of his guardian William Cecil (yes, Anne’s father).

De Vere did kill a servant with his fencing rapier when he was 17 and, as in the film, Cecil assisted in de Vere’s legal defense. However, I doubt that his marriage to Cecil’s daughter four years later was any sort of quid pro quo. This is one of many moments in the film where poetic license trumps a strict (if less dramatic) hewing to the documented historical record.

When his wife Anne pleads with de Vere to stop writing plays, he replies, “The voices! I can’t stop them. They come to me. I would go mad if I didn’t write down what the voices say.” This is an intriguing surmise about de Vere’s creative process, as though his Muse speaks to him aloud.

In fact, I suspect that some form of unusual awareness and tolerance of multiple self states plays a crucial role for some literary geniuses such as de Vere. Part of Shakespeare’s magic is that he evokes specific self states in us. Great authors tap into several of their own respective self states when they write. Writing under pseudonyms may loosen the grip of the author’s central self state, and activate a wider range of ego states.

Psychoanalysts are in a unique position to elucidate the psychology of literary anonymity and pseudonymity. The evidence suggests that keeping one’s authorship secret helps promote what Keats called Shakespeare’s “negative capability”—keeping his own identity in the background as he created hundreds of utterly convincing characters.

For another example, the Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote to a friend that the 70 “heteronyms” who did his writing were real characters to him. In a sense, Edward de Vere’s most magical character of all was his pseudonym and front man, “William Shakespeare.” With some likely assistance from the man from Stratford, this character lives on for most people more vividly than does de Vere himself.

Why did de Vere have to conceal his authorship?

For many reasons. Nobility did not write for the common theater. They rarely published poems under their own name during their lifetime. And the plays of Shakespeare spoof many powerful court figures, and comment on various court intrigues.

The film has de Vere tell Ben Jonson, “All art is political.” Attributing the plays’ authorship to a commoner helped conceal some of their provocative critiques. Even so, the Elizabethan theater audience as depicted in the film recognized the character Richard III as a spoof of de Vere’s hunch-backed brother-in-law, Robert Cecil.

And they also recognized Polonius in Hamlet as a disguised portrayal of de Vere’s father-in-law. Some Shakespeare scholars still admit the latter is correct, though others have backed off from this identification, since it strengthens the case for de Vere’s authorship.

Anonymous is introduced by Derek Jacobi, who also provides the epilogue. This was an inspired choice, since Jacobi is a highly respected Shakespearean actor who happens to believe de Vere wrote the canon. He is thus an apt intermediary to introduce the film’s audience to its controversial and theatrical subject. Other great Shakespearean actors who have rejected the traditional author include Mark Rylance, Michael York, and Sir John Gielgud.

In 2007, Jacobi and Rylance announced their support for the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt,” that acknowledges room for honest disagreement about Shakespeare’s identity. Stanley Wells, Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, reacted venomously.

Wells  said “the time for tolerance is over.” He cited the fact that one 19^th century authorship skeptic died in a mental hospital, then added, “So beware, Mark [Rylance] and Sir Derek [Jacobi]!”

Rylance replied, “I think [Wells] is blinded by an attachment to the Stratford actor… more worrying to me is his tendency to simply ignore evidence if it contradicts his argument… When we meet as friends, I wouldn’t dare bring this subject up for fear of his anger… We shouldn’t let ourselves be bullied out of a natural curiousity” about the authorship question.

You have no doubt read some of the vitriolic attacks on Anonymous by Columbia University’s James Shapiro and others.

This fierce backlash intrigues me. The academic Shakespeare establishment usually treats the authorship question as taboo. In other words, many Shakespeare organizations and publications will not even discuss it.

One English professor told me it would be “academic suicide”  to research de Vere’s possible authorship. One Shakespearean publication invited me to write a book review, then changed their mind once they read it, explaining that they had “blundered,” and would never publish anything by an Oxfordian.

So it’s my hunch that if these bright scholars are going to enforce their taboo, they have to convince themselves that it is justified—that all challenges to the traditional author are, as they claim, based on ignorance or mental aberrations, ranging from snobbism all the way to psychosis. This makes it unlikely they can evaluate contradictory evidence objectively.

Both Emmerich and Orloff admit their film takes poetic license in order to provoke and entertain. But the Stratfordians are not amused. Their over-reaction to the film is Inquisitional in its tone. We instinctively sympathize with the underdog, all things being equal. The Shakespeare establishment may have made things worse for itself by forgetting this is just a film.

Although Anonymous is bringing fresh attention to the issue, the authorship debate is longstanding. In my view, Oxfordians try repeatedly to introduce new evidence into the discussion. Traditional Shakespeareans don’t even admit their theory is a hypothesis—they claim absolute certainty. So, instead of arguing ad rem, about the issue itself, they keep reverting to arguing ad hominem, with personal attacks on us authorship “heretics.”

We’re accused of being like Holocaust deniers; being anti-semitic; being like the birthers who deny that Obama is a U.S. citizen; being like people who claim we never landed on the moon, or who claim the U.S. organized the 9/11 attacks. Seriously. Do you detect a whiff of desperation in such despicable accusations?

If we want a strictly accurate film about de Vere, Emmerich has failed us. But if the goal is to introduce the general public to the Shakespeare authorship theory that so seized Freud’s imagination, then Emmerich has succeeded admirably. After all, even Shakespeare’s own history plays sometimes play loose with the historical facts.

Many of the reviews of Anonymous have panned the film because its premise is so controversial. A common theme in these critical reviews is the assumption that the Shakespeare scholars must be correct, and there is “no evidence whatsoever” that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. Certain premises are repeatedly asserted to be incontrovertible refutations that de Vere could be the author.

You’ve  heard that many plays of Shakespeare are known with certainty to have been written after 1604, the year that de Vere died.

Unfortunately, the facts are a bit more complicated. As some Shakespeare scholars admit, we simply do not know with certainty when any of the plays were written. The conventional dating of the plays is based on Shakespeare of Stratford having died in 1616. So it was assumed he wrote roughly two plays per year, and these assumptions played a crucial role in the conjectured dating of when the plays were written.

What about the possibility that de Vere left some unfinished manuscripts at his death, and playwrights such as Fletcher finished them? Since the late plays do show evidence of collaboration, I find this narrative more plausible than the orthodox speculation that Shakespeare “apprenticed himself” to other playwrights when he began writing Romances such as The Tempest.

I have noticed an intriguing pattern in orthodox attacks on de Vere and his supporters. Again and again, they launch attacks about issues where they are actually themselves most vulnerable. They thus seem desperate to distract us from the weakness of their own case.

I would suggest that William Shak[e]spe[a]re of Stratford was born 14 years too late to have been the author, since many plays of “Shakespeare” rewrote earlier plays that were written when Stratford was only a boy. Because of circular reasoning, many scholars assume these anonymous earlier plays had to be written by playwrights other than Shakespeare. They accuse Oxfordians of being too wedded to their theory. We all need to be cautious to avoid cherry-picking evidence that confirms our preconceptions.

When I am told that Oxfordians are simply unable to admit they’re wrong, I point out that every Oxfordian I know started as a Stratfordian, until they looked into the matter more deeply. So it doesn’t look as though we’re the ones incapable of admitting we’re wrong. Oxfordians are told we do not know how to evaluate the historical evidence. In reality, all the recent evidence about the ubiquity of anonymity and pseudonymity in Elizabethan authorship is mostly getting ignored by the Shakespeare specialists.

Finally, please indulge me for a moment. We Oxfordians know how empty and dishonest is the accusation that we haven’t produced “a shred of evidence” the de Vere wrote the canon.

Roger Stritmatter’s discovery of the evidentiary value of de Vere’s Bible is the gift that keeps on giving. In October 2011, the most read online article in Notes & Queries  of the past 150 years was a 2009 article that showed the psalms de Vere marked with pointing hands in his copy of the musical Whole Book of Psalms are a huge but  previously unknown literary source for Shakespeare’s works.

Dear Ms. Gardner:

Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger, co-founders of Wikipedia. Sanger has now gone on to establish Citizendium. You may contribute money or expertise the latter at www.citizendium.org

Naturally, you are very welcome for the gift, even if it is no more than a widow’s mite.

However, at the risk of sounding like one who is attaching strings, I’m not really the one you need to thank.

Indeed, I’d like to let you know that this may be both the first and the last donation I’m able to give to Wikipedia.

Let me explain why. Your note refers to the value of “providing free, easy access to unbiased information” (emphasis mine).

That would be nice if it were true.

[Addendum: and, no doubt it is true for the vast majority of Wikipedia articles - just not the ones I'm concerned with].

I don’t know if you are the one who processes the comment forms from the donations or not. If so, I apologize for repeating myself, but here’s my “story” — in a little more detail than what I gave on the comment form.

I am a tenured University Professor with a PhD on a controversial topic from a tier one research institution.

Currently I am banned from even posting comments to talk pages on subjects that I have studied for almost twenty years, and on which I have published widely, both in mainstream peer-reviewed journals and in what one might call “alternative revolutionary” publications that are not peer reviewed but which contain a great deal of highly competent scholarship both by established University scholars and by writers from the broader community of readership that takes an interest in such things (teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) — many of whom, in my own opinion, have contributed more to the understanding of this topic than all but a few of those with better credentials.

Sue, I’m not going to say that I didn’t do some things to invite this ban.

By nature not being a person who deals well with Kafkaesque bureaucracies well peopled with graduates from Peter Principle‘s Institute for Advanced Studies, I made many mistakes and no doubt incurred the wrath of some who might have become allies had I been more accommodating to the dubious practices that were gradually brought to bear in a concerted effort to marginalize me from the wider community of Wikipedia editors and administrators.

But in my own defense I must add that the context of my perhaps overly defensive responses was one of standing up to Wikipedians of the sort quite prophetically described by Larry Sanger in his well-known Kuroshin analysis:

I thought that the project would never have the amount of credibility it could have if it were not somehow more open and welcoming to experts….The other problem was the community had essentially been taken over by trolls to a great extent.

A few days ago, on the verge of a permanent ban about to be imposed on me by administrators of the sort Sanger describes, I received a surprising post to my talk page.

Here’s what it said:

Hello, Wikid77 (talk) here. I am thinking that Wikipedia needs to create a group of graduate-level admins (“gradmins”), who can be considered to have a graduate degree from a major university, as a group of credentialed admins who help decide major issues. I suspect that Wikipedia will continue to support unneeded topic bans unless a more-scholarly approach is used to determine if a “clear and present danger” is really caused by a user writing on some article-talk or user-talk pages. Of course, in history, we have the Athens tribunal of 587(?)* and the condemnation of Socrates for asking too many “uncomfortable questions” at the wrong times; enter Plato meets Archimedes re/ education.

The test to promote gradmins would likely be transparent, in most cases: just ask a candidate some graduate-level questions about their specialty and whichever university granted their degree(s), and the answers should reveal whether the claim is true. I would also consider graduate students to become gradmins, but that might cause some conflicts, so perhaps limit to those who have already finished an advanced degree.

Meanwhile, there is no guarantee that an admin has yet to finish a primary-school education, so I wonder what level of thinking to expect in that case. I am reminded, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”. Imagine being an average 18-year-old person and trying to judge the impact of talk-page comments. Meanwhile, there are 500 other major topics, not banned, which need work to improve the quality of articles. -Wikid77 (talk) 03:30, 10

For the first time in six years a Wikipedia administrator seemed to have understood the real values at stake in my efforts, and those of many others, similarly harassed and browbeaten for their labors, to inject a degree of impartial honesty into the discussions in which [we] had been participating.

I take the liberty of repeating what seems to me to be the essential message of Wikid77′s remarkable and refreshing sign of the continued vitality of the idea of principlewithin your organization:

Meanwhile, there is no guarantee that an admin has yet to finish a primary-school education, so I wonder what level of thinking to expect in that case. I am reminded, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Imagine being an average 18-year-old person and trying to judge the impact of talk-page comments.

Had I not received that communication, from at least one Wikipedia editor who “gets” it, you wouldn’t be reading this.

Perhaps your day would be easier, and your reading load lighter, but you also wouldn’t have this rare opportunity to consider the significance of the widow’s mite of decency that Wikid77 has just donated to the future of your organization, to which his commitment could not be more obvious and for which his vision could not be more apt.

Imho, Wikipedia has a real opportunity here to make a long-overdue change.

If you don’t, I am confident in predicting that your project will only continue to attract such unwanted attention as that found in Adam Gopnik’s February 2011 New Yorker article: Wikipedia can’t deal effectively with topics “on which one side is wrong but doesn’t know it.”

I don’t know if this chance will come again. Good luck.

Carpe diem.

Sincerely Yours,
Roger Stritmatter, MA, PhD
Associate Professor of Humanities
Coppin State University
General Editor, Brief Chronicles

*399 BC is the correct date.

There’s a paper trail – always (well, almost always….), a continuous sequence of the revision process, one to which historians of ideas may refer in their never-ending quest to ascertain the dynamics of the evolution of knowledge – or, as in this case, its devolution at the hands of partisan demagogues.

So sit back, dear reader and tighten your seat belt, ‘cause we’re going to take some hairpin turns down the slalom of intellectual history, and make some surprising discoveries about just how much, um, creative iconoclasm,  is going on to keep “Shakespeare” safe for the Professoriate.

The story begins with a 2009 article published in a journal, Brief Chronicles, of which I’m proud to be an editor. That article, by German scholar Robert Detobel and the late K.C. Ligon, challenged the longstanding Stratfordian belief that Francis Meres was a reliable witness for the orthodox view of Shakespeare.

I won’t go into any detail enumerating the basis of their argument, beyond saying that, in my opinion, the article had aimed a devastating blow to the orthodox view of Shakespeare. In one fell swoop, Detobel and Ligon had wiped out the traditional belief that Meres was a safe citation for the Stratfordians. Read it for yourself and see if you agree.

If anyone wants to discuss the article, I’d be happy to do so – just so long as you’ve read it first and show me that you understand the argument well enough to offer a credible rejoinder. I won’t be approving the sort of comments, which seem to be rather popular on this  topic (perhaps for understandable reasons, given the implications of what Detobel and Ligon have done),  that substitute insult for argument.

Figure One: The Wikipedia "Francis Meres" page in February 2010. Click on the image for a readable pop-up.

Our story begins with a Wikipedia revision that I undertook on March 14, 2010 to the Wikipedia page on Francis Meres.  Figure One shows the state of the page when I began my edits.

Figure Two: Francis Meres Wikipedia entry following my edits on March 14, 2010.

At that time there was a also note on the talk page asking why there was no list of the Shakespeare plays mentioned in Palladis Tamia.

This did indeed seem like a surprising oversight. So I supplied such a list. I also wrote what was, to me at least, a reasonably fair and balanced treatment of the highly charged role that Francis Meres has played in the history of the authorship debate, including a reference to the most current research by Detobel and Ligon:

Meres has been an important source for both sides in the Shakespearean authorship controversy. In addition to being often cited as evidence for the chronology of the Shakespearean plays, his Palladis Tamia is regarded by orthodox Shakespearean scholars as an important witness to the traditional view of Shakespearean authorship.

However, Meres also mentions Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as among several who are “the best for comedy amongst us.” This fact has been cited by both sides in the authorship question; to the Oxfordians it has signified that Oxford was known as a prominent comic writer, and they wonder, if this is so, why none of his comedies survive, at least under his own name.

To orthodox scholars, on the other hand, it has seemed that Meres’ double reference to both Shakespeare and Oxford means that he knew that Oxford could not have been the author of the Shakespearean works. A possible solution to this enigma was proposed by Robert Detobel and K.C. Ligon in a 2009 Brief Chronicles article which employs a detailed numerical analysis of the structure of Meres’ “comparative discourse” to argue that while Meres pays lip service to the distinction, on a closer view he actually suggests the identity of Shakespeare and Oxford.

But Stratfordians – at least those active in Wikipedia – are not exactly fond of “fair” or “objective.”

They don’t like de Vere’s name mentioned on any but necessary pages, and they’ll take as much time as needed from their day jobs to make sure that Wikipedia readers never get a hint that there’s a real controversy about anything they don’t like.

They are defending the citadel against the infidel — and that both requires and justifies extraordinary measures, above and beyond the usual call of duty.

Their outlook and modus operandi are perhaps best summarized by Adam Gopnik in his February 2011 New Yorker article:

[one] sees the limits of the so-called extended mind clearly in the mob- made Wikipedia the perfect product of that new vast super-sized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there is widespread disagreement on values or facts as with, say, the origins of capitalism it’s fine too; you get both sides.

The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict, and are packed with unreliable information.

Lest one imagine that Gopnik is talking about the “unreliable information” of the Oxfordians, it should be noted for the record that his article was published long after those beacons of Wikipedian enlightenment – Tom Reedy, “Nishidani,” and Paul Barlow (to mention only the most obvious suspects)  – had seized control of the Shakespeare authorship page, partly by throwing Richard Waugaman, MD, and Heward Wilkinson, PhD, off of Wikipedia on various trumped-up accusations of the sort on which certain Wikipedia editors seem to be, a little like 17th century Jesuits,  experts.

When Gopnik refers to one side being right, and another wrong without knowing it, he’s referring to the logical consequences of the sort of delusional censorship which is our story today.

Along with listing the “Shakespeare” plays to which Meres alludes (which, in retrospect, might well have been more suitably listed, as they now are, but without any real analysis of the central role that Meres has played in the authorship question, here, and certainly with no reference to any “alternative” perspectives about what Meres was actually doing), I committed the greatest sin, apparently, that a Wikipedia editor can commit.

Figure Three: The page as edited 66 minutes later by Tom Reedy. Note that not only the content, but the citation, has been removed.

I listed a source that is not approved by the Denton County Sherriff’s Department.

Within 66 minutes, Tom Reedy (Figure Three), Public Relations specialist for the Department, was on the job. He eliminated not only the list of Shakespeare plays and my analysis, but the footnote to Detobel and Ligon. Reedy added, it is true, several other sources on Francis Meres.

I have no objection to that.

That after all, is what collaborative editing is all about, isn’t it?

But what is the possible justification for eliminating a source to an alternative viewpoint published in a peer reviewed journal – one which, incidentally, has had in its first three years of operation, no less than two articles reprinted by well established academic publishers?

Clearly, as far as Tom Reedy is concerned, the ends justify the means.

He’ll decide what sources Wikipedia readers get to read, and which they don’t.

Reedy did attempt to justify the removal of the citation by saying that the material was not “RS” – “reliable source.”

This is how Wikipedia works when it comes to controversial topics about which, to quote the New Yorker, “one side is wrong and doesn’t know it.”

Edits by tenured University Professors citing peer reviewed articles from a publication that is getting excerpted by Gale (Showerman, 2009) and Palgrave MacMillan (Wainright, forthcoming) get dumped by guys who work in Sherriff’s departments.  Senior Wikipedia editors look the other way — after all, someone has to defend Wikipedia from ideas that might make readers actually think.

Who better than the Public Relations wing of the Denton Sherriff’s Department?

To be continued….

Touchstone has read only 70 books and is especially deficient in the Aristotelian syllogism. His knowledge of Italian would fit in the little finger of the average Shakespeare professor.

In the first act of As You Like It — among the most intellectual plays of the Shakespearean canon — Celia remarks on the exile of the fool Touchstone, who has been cast out of the court for his bad manners and taken refuge in the forest of Arden:

Since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolerie that wise men have makes a great show.

In a recent online edition of the Montreal Gazette, wise men are making a great show of something.

Toronto University’s Professor of bardology Holger Syme, an expert in Shakespearean scholarship,  has entered the lists against Keir Cutler.

Oxfordians may not be be “mad,” says  Professor Syme (in one polite word covering  a series of  extenuating insults that would make any sailor blush to acknowledge) — but they are “demonstrably misguided.”

Phew. And we thought they were mad — demonstrably, north by northeast.

Syme’s reasoning?

According to him, Shakespeare really wasn’t as smart or as well educated as Cutler suggests he was.

Why is this important?

Syme  apparently believes that a smart Shakespeare is dangerous. As an expert in Shakespearean scholarship, Syme has dedicated his life  to the proposition that ”Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare” and he doesn’t want you to waste any time on second thoughts about something he wouldn’t think about either.

He’s noticed that those who point out that this is a tautology may be too smart for their own good, and he wants to rescue these misguided fools  from the  unfortunate but understandable slings and arrows of Ron Rosenbaum, Stephen Marche, and the rest of the Occupy Anonymous gang – with his own genteel brand of death by condescension.

Syme is especially anxious to let his readers in on a big secret: whatever we may have thought back in the dark ages when Touchstone and Rosaline were cavorting around in Arden making jokes about fools and wise men, our current generation of bardographers are  quite certain that Shakespeare was a good bit dumber than you or I may once have  imagined.

Gone are the primitive days when Lord Chancellor Campbell could confidently inform us of Shakespeare’s intimate familiarity with “some of the most abstruse principles of English jurisprudence” or editor George Wyndham suggest that the most common mistake in reading or performing the bard is that he usually understands something we don’t, not that he was too badly educated to have anything intelligent  to say to us:

Whenever Shakespeare in an age of technical conceit indulges in one ostentatiously, it will always be found that his apparent obscurity arises from our not crediting him with a technical knowledge which he undoubtedly possessed, be it of heraldry, or law, or of philosophic disputation.

No, Syme is a new breed of Shakespeare scholar, a high-tech-equipped scion of the 21st century age of Facebook, hyperlinks, twittering and tweeting, and computerized vocabulary studies.

He’s arrived to tell us — let’s quote his exact words, since we know from experience that there’s nothing the good professor likes less than to have his ideas paraphrased by people like me who don’t understand them — “the notion that Shakespeare was extraordinarily erudite is a 20th century fiction,” one that results from “historical distance” — whatever that is supposed to mean.

In reaching this conclusion,  Syme may have taken a cue from the inimitably erudite Dr. David Kathman, stockbroker, who had already assured us over a decade ago that anti-Stratfordordians “have greatly overestimated the extent of Shakespeare’s knowledge, in certain areas, or at least the extent to which his knowledge was unusual among his contemporaries.”

This was, to be sure, during the same decade in which Dr. Kathman’s colleagues were displaying their imaginative precocity and advanced training in law and linguistics with creative new ideas like “credit default swap options.”

As it says in the book of Wisdom, “a fall on the pavement is very sudden.”

Fortunately, Dr. Kathman was in those days focused not on the task of taking money from unsuspecting investors by inventing new theories about how to swap things with your buddies in such a way that no one will notice whose pocket they are in when the music stops.  He was hard at work explicating the Bard, so that people like me who teach his works could understand him.  According to Kathman:

Discussion of the knowledge (and ignorance) displayed in Shakespeare’s plays, and how antistratfordians have misrepresented it, could easily fill a book on its own. In this essay, I focus on three areas where antistratfordians have often claimed that the plays exhibit knowledge beyond the ability of William Shakespeare of Stratford: Italy, the classics, and law.

Professor Hyme supplies some teeth to  these remarkable insights from the sage of Morningstar: “Geoffrey Bullough’s eight volume authoritative anthology of all texts the playwright may have used only identifies about 70 books as probable sources.”

Gosh.

Imagine that. He wrote 37 plays, 154 Sonnets, and two narrative poems using only 70 books.

Is it not truly impressive how readily  life experience can compensate for booklearning?

You’d almost be tempted to think that, with so few bookish sources, Shakespeare must have turned to his own life for some sort of inspiration. Based on this example, we might even suggest that all students currently enrolled in Professor Syme’s classes should take a leave of absence from reading Every Man Out of His Humor and start trading on the Chicago commodities markets instead.  I’m probably misunderstanding what Syme is saying, but it sure sounds to me like he could be interpreted as saying that that’s the path to literary greatness according to the experts at the University of Toronto.

In case you were wondering, moreover, logic is not required any more than books. All we need is really good pronouns. These can be substituted for arguments as long as your seat of learning is high enough.

“That he could read those books,” continues Syme, is not only common knowledge, but is also  ”virtually certain.” After all, “he” may have gone to the Stratford grammar school, but “he” most certainly did write Venus and Adonis. He could not have done that without reading at least a few books.

Along with pronouns, in case you couldn’t tell, Professor Syme likes to count things.

Perhaps that explains why he went into the field of Renaissance literary studies — where, as we all know, Pythagoras is important.

Syme gives the lie circumstantial to Cutler’s proposition that Shakespeare added 3,000 words to the English language. Citing the latest unreferenced and unidentified studies (always handy, lest someone inquire into the basis of your authority), the true number is actually closer to…..700.

Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, asserts Syme, probably coined more new words than Shakespeare did, and the bard “had a much smaller [vocabulary] than educated writers of modern English.”

Gosh. 70. 37. 700. Let’s start studying a real writer like Thomas Middleton.

All this helps to establish the very important point that at Tier One research institutions, literary genius consists in reading the fewest number of books possible to write the largest number of plays possible with the fewest number of new words possible. Ideas? Optional. But above all, no really new ones that could be mistaken for evidence of higher education. This maximizes your cost-to-benefit ratio. Life’s really full of possibilities when you’re an expert.

Professor Syme is especially fond of negative numbers: “There is no evidence,”  he assures us, that  ”Shakespeare was illiterate.”

As John McCormick replied on the Facebook Truebard discussion:

There’s [also] no evidence that Shakespeare did not go to Italy, that he did not meet Lord Cecil, that he was not a secret space alien, and that he did not do 40 pushups every morning….

McCormick should have known, however, that Syme was way ahead of him on this point. There is evidence that “our Shakespeare” — to us Ben Jonson’s apt phrase — was at least literate.

He signed his name six times, maybe more.* True, admits Syme, these signatures  are ”in a less fashionable hand”  than those of his  ”female descendents or his brother.”

But those who say Shakespeare never owned any books are all wet behind the ears and need to take a seminar from Professor Shapiro or from Syme’s own mentor Dr. Greenblatt, he says.

No, no books of Shakespeare’s have ever been found, and none are mentioned in his will, but that was just an oversight:

Such items would have been catalogued in a separate inventory, and Shakespeare’s, like many others, is lost.**

Unfortunately, as  that demonstrably misguided scoundrel Hank Sanders points out, this is ex cathedra at its most brazen:

Assuming there were books on the inventory list is a great leap and unsupported (and unlikely in my opinion). Manuscripts would have probably been in the will, books often were, and bookshelves. From subsequent evidence, J. Hall’s will and his daughter’s comments to others, plus letters from others during the ECW – the historical record argues strongly against books [being in the inventory]. Stratfordians argue they were confiscated during the infamous 1637 chattel raid on New Place.

Shameless strats like Shapiro just come right out and say it: “there was an inventory list with books. It has been lost.”

That (concludes Sanders) is a lie.

Figure One: Shakspere's six surviving signatures demonstrate that he could write. They are all affixed to legal documents dating from the last four years of his life.

While I’m sure that no one would like to accuse the good Professor Syme of being as fast and loose with the facts as Professor Shapiro has routinely been in recent weeks, one does have to wonder about his remarks about the collected works of the man to whom he attributes the authorship of Lear or Troilus and Cressida.

To Syme Mr. Shakspere’s signatures (figure one) are “less fashionable” than those of his daughters — or, as Syme puts it, using the more fashionably erudite and abstract term apparently preferred at Tier One research institutions, “female descendants.”

This is a question that Diana Price has examined in some detail — and on which, I daresay, her opinion is a good bit more authoritative than Professor Syme’s, who, to give him the benefit of the doubt, can’t seem to distinguish between the plural and the singular.

Signature of Susanna Hall, nee Shakspere -- daughter of the author of Merchant of Venice?

While the claim might be justified with respect to the undoubtedly stylish flourishes of Susanna (Figure Two), who could indeed apparently at least sign her own name in a style remarkably evocative of Olivia, in truth her sister Judith was a “markswoman” (Figure Three).

She couldn’t sign her name, stylishly or otherwise, and almost certainly couldn’t read either.

Figure Three: Judith Shakespere's "more fashionable" signature (quoth Professor Syme) was a mark. The "signature" is the work of a legal clerk. What are they teaching their graduate students at Harvard?

One hates to be pedantic about things like mere facts, but is that what Dr. Syme means by “more fashionable?”

This is, admittedly, a small thing.  And to Professor Syme facts are, naturally, no impediment to a well-cultivated belief.

“It may….not be surprising,” he concludes,  ”to learn that most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries didn’t think of him as a once-in-a-millennium genius. There is even evidence that some of his plays flopped as books.”

Gosh. Even some evidence?

Focusing for the moment on the present, there is also some evidence that someone besides Hank Sanders and John McCormick, and their Oxfordian colleagues, who are having a wonderful and mostly enlightened discussion about the errors of experts, has noticed Dr. Syme’s article.

Three people have tweeted it. Unless I’m mistaken, one  of them offered this synoptic comment:

man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured.

They guy who wrote that could sign his own name, of that we are assured on the very best form of evidence, ocular proof.

But despite the best efforts of the Stratford grammar school, where he may have gone, he wasn’t very well educated, read only a few books, and wrote plays that were unpopular until the anti-Stratfordians got hold of them four hundred years later and suggested that maybe there was something in them worth noticing. Most of the time, we’re assured, he did not know what he was talking about. Gabriel Harvey had a more inventive mind. Take it from the good professor at the University of Toronto.

He’s the expert.

______________________________________________________________

* That is, assuming that these are actually even his signatures, which Robert Detobel, for one, has challenged.

**Italics supplied.

Wright said that the purpose of the colloquium is to    ”. . . discuss approaches to teaching the Shakespeare authorship question with the aid of [Roland Emmerich's film] Anonymous and to develop a curriculum that the SARC will publish for use in schools, colleges and universities across the USA and around the world.”

Wright described the goals of the colloquium to readers of the SARC electronic mailing list:

We are going to use teacher-inspired and student-informed ideas to create options for schools, universities and lay forums to use so they can utilize [Roland Emmerich's film] Anonymous, in whole or in part, in teaching situations that are adaptable not only to audiences but to time, place and perspective as well.

Sony’s corporate product* may be an option for some who want a ready-made product with application to what they assess their particular or limited needs to be, but we think that it’s not the best (or should be the only choice) . . . for presenters who may be restricted by time, scope and audience and who will need alternatives that address varied situations and exigencies.

We want to see supplemental materials used in forums that allow for such variables, including the use of other films such as Shakespeare in Love and perhaps some of the forthcoming films and books that propose to supplement the attention drawn to the [Shakespeare authorship question] by Anonymous, as well as rival theories, theoreticians and candidates that do not include the Earl of Oxford as the most likely candidate for Shake-speare.

(* Note: Wright refers here to the high school and college Shakespeare authorship curricula based on Roland Emmerich’s film, Anonymous, and developed for Sony byYoung Minds Inspired educational resource.)

The cost of “The Anonymous Colloquium is $100; register online at  http://www.authorshipstudies.org/conference/colloquium.cfm

Thanks to the Oberon blog for this news release.