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

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

Here’s the News that’s fit to print:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the abstract:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is this document, you ask?

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

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

Pullman Senior High school student Leda Zakarison has "O-philia."

I’m one of those people who should love Shakespeare. I fit the bill perfectly for a teenage Shakespeare fanatic – I read books, speak French, and participate in class discussions.

I’ve always bought into this notion, too. I liked the idea of sitting in a corner of the library, sipping fancy tea and pondering Hamlet.

And yet, try as I might, I could never really get into Shakespeare the way I was “supposed” to.

I tried every angle of Shakespeare study – I read the plays in class, watched the movies, got myself those read-along guides, even played Juliet in a class production. I could understand the plots, the things you write about in 9th grade book reports, but Shakespeare didn’t come alive for me the way I thought it should. I never identified with his characters, never had an insight about humanity while reading his plays.

I felt like there was an impenetrable glass wall between Will and me – I could see the depth in his words, but I couldn’t figure out how to get to it, to really understand. I blamed my problems mostly on the oldness of the plays; I told myself I just didn’t “get it” because the language was so archaic, the contexts were too ancient for me to understand. The plays were just big, dusty, out-dated books to me.

Yet I continued to be obsessed with trying to adore the Bard. So fall semester of my senior year, I found myself in English 205: Intro to Shakespeare. Reading our first play, Twelfth Night, I found I could indeed understand the words; I was even getting some of the word play and hidden meanings by myself. But there was still something very two-dimensional about it all. I honestly couldn’t imagine the words to be stemming from anything greater than some character’s mouth. There was no context behind them for me.

But then I met the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.

He was, in my mind, everything I expected Shakespeare to be – well-educated, interested in poetry and art, connected to the court, a bit rash, and somewhat mysterious. Okay, so my vision of de Vere sounds more like the perfect 16th century boyfriend. But you have to understand how much this guy changed my life (or at least my Shakespeare studies).

The concept that Shakespeare was, as the movie Anonymous bills him, “a fraud” opened up an infinite number of doors for me. Suddenly, it was acceptable to question Shakespeare, to look critically at his works, to do my own reading about him. Being allowed to question Shakespeare’s authorship allowed me to question other elements of the work. It freed me from the need to sheepishly copy down and parrot back whatever my teachers told me “the point” of a play was.

It was like the first time your parents are wrong about something, the first time you realize that hey! maybe the planets don’t really revolve around the Earth. It opened up myriad possibilities for my further studies.

But my love of Oxfordian studies (or O-philia, as you might call it) wasn’t fully cemented until I read Hamlet.

I figured that Hamlet, being the most most alluded to and most revered of Shakespeare’s works, would prove the especially frustrating for me since in the past I couldn’t seem to grasp any of Shakespeare’s larger meanings. I tried to read the play before but always stopped frustratedly somewhere in the middle, unable to figure out what Shakespeare was getting at. I just couldn’t understand the character’s motives or mindsets at all. The essential problem, I realized, was not the Bard’s but my own.

I have been raised thinking that empathy was everything. I was taught that there are always two sides to every story, and that it was my job to learn both. At my church, context is always contemplated – we constantly discuss the time in which Jesus was living, the mindset of early Christians, and the other cultures the Israelites were surrounded by. It’s hard for me to understand people fully unless I know where they’re coming from.

Needless to say, trying to analyze Shakespeare with only the scantest bit of knowledge of his life was nearly impossible for me. I mean, you’re talking to a girl who reads that little inside back flap of books so she learn about the author before she starts reading. And before this year, I had no inside book flap whatsoever for the Bard.

Approaching Hamlet with my new Oxfordian mindset was a whole different story. Now I had context. I had back story. I knew about the author’s childhood, his wife, his relations with the Crown, his areas of expertise. I could understand a little bit more about how Oxford’s mind might have worked, what internal conflict he might have been struggling with as he wrote, his struggles with questions of identity and reputation.

In turn, I gained insight into Oxford’s mind by reading his works. Being able to place Hamlet in time transformed his story from a random, tedious contemplation of mortality into a journey into the multifaceted world of a troubled, brilliant mind.

Knowing that the ideas of the play were stemming from a tangible person’s experience, that the pain and joy expressed were someone’s real, deep-felt emotions brought the play to life for me. All those things I had been searching for in my Shakespeare studies finally fell into place.

Hamlet’s last words, entreating Horatio to “draw thy breath in pain/to tell my story” (V.ii.344-345), are perplexing and a bit troubling when taken at face value – why would someone who exerts a great deal of effort to convince people that he’s crazy have last words that are so focused on reputation?

Even I was a bit upset that a character who spends as much time in self-reflection as Hamlet, who seems to understand life so well, would have such a superficial last request. But if you look at Hamlet as essentially Oxford’s autobiography, pair this perspective with the preoccupation with reputation seen in Othello, and add a bit of an idea about Oxford’s mindset (he was hiding the secret that could have cemented his deserved place in history), suddenly Hamlet’s words make perfect sense – they are, perhaps, Oxford’s own personal entreaty to make his story, his secrets known.

The Oxfordian context makes these lines even more heartbreaking than they are when taken at face value. With my Oxfordian knowledge in mind and my Hamlet text in hand, I was finally able to break down the barrier of understanding that lay between Will and me.

In everything we do, there’s that “ah-ha” moment – the moment we finally stay up on our bike, that e=mc2 finally make sense, that we figure out what really happened in the War of Roses. For a very long time, I was looking for that “ah-ha” moment to occur for Shakespeare and me. It wasn’t until I learned about the Earl of Oxford that that happened.

Though I’m nowhere near the most prolific Shakespeare scholar out there, I’m finally able to come to some conclusions on my own, to divine those long-sought hidden meanings without having to rely on a professor or Sparknotes. I can now empathize with Shakespeare’s characters, feel their sorrow and joy with them. And, most importantly, I’m finally beginning to love Shakespeare the way I always aspired. And for that, I will always be grateful to Edward de Vere.

***********************

*Leda Zakarison is a Senior at Pullman High in Pullman, Washington. In fall 2011 she enrolled in Dr. Michael Delahoyde’s popular ENGL 205, Introduction to Shakespeare course at Washington State University. Warning: Don’t take this class. You might actually start to understand Shakespeare.

The bag is optional, but recommended for Mr. Marche.

The Montreal Gazette needs to hire some fact checkers. Or maybe it’s Harper publishers, one of the largest book manufacturers  in the world. You tell me who screwed up worse here.  It certainly wasn’t Michael York.

This new missive by MG staffer Pat Donnelly, suggests that the “Anonymous writer should put a bag over his head.”  Donnelley supports this display of public prejudice by quoting Stephen Marche in his book How Shakespeare Changed Everything (2011, Harper): “Not a single PhD dissertation has ever been accepted from an anti-Stratfordian, just as no astronomy department grants PhDs to people who believe in the Ptolemaic system of heavenly spheres.”

As usual with the Montreal Gazette, ever since it apparently got browbeaten by the Shakespearean aristocracy over Kier Cutler’s magnificent critique of the off-key rhetoric of the Shakespeare Birthplace, what we’re getting  is a cliched bit of “intellectual history” coupled with wishful thinking, because neither Marche nor Donnelly can apparently be bothered to run their stories by fact checkers, or else think the public is too uninformed to notice how far off the mark they are when they peddle such erroneous opinions without even bothering to consider whether or not they are correct.

As usual, also, with the Montreal Gazette comments are not activated.

As far as I can tell, unless I’ve missed something, this has been the pattern at least since Cutler’s piece, which was the last of several MG  authorship related stories to run comments.

What does this pattern suggest about the way the MG feels compelled to control the discussion and use its corporate influence as an internet bullhorn to continue projecting the same tired disinformation?  Does the MG have an ombudsperson?  Apparently not. But it obviously needs one.

But, as one reader of an earlier version of this blog posting pointed out, its Harper, an affiliate of the world famous Harper-Collins, that really has egg on its face here.  Pat Donnelly trusted Harper’s fact checkers and they let her down. Were they sleeping? Or just hungover? Wait a minute, I’ll bet that Harper saved money by not even hiring any!

Such realities  just might attract the interest of Project Censored - not because of the pettiness of the MG policy but from the possible realization that this sort of intellectual laziness is the norm for the mainstream media’s treatment of the topic, whether they are in the business of publishing “news” or “books.”

Ergo, this post.

Pat, please wake up and smell the coffee. I’m sure you’re a perfectly nice, intelligent person who just happens not to be very intellectually curious and to have an exaggerated opinion of the reliability of corporate shills like Mr. Marche. But the sad truth is that there’s no use repeating Mr. Marche’s, um, creative appropriations of truth in public. It just makes you look bad.

We’ll tell Mr. Marche when he can remove the bag.  Maybe you can help by asking him (and Harper fact checkers) to repeat after us 17x: “Every Word Doth Almost Tell My Name” (Sonnet 76.7) and then

I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the centre.

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 Ramelli Book Machine: A Renaissance Device for Comparing Passages from Multiple Books.

Understanding Shakespeare’s Bible allusions is not a spectator sport. Test your ability against the experts. Can you pass the Shakespeare Bible  Allusion Quiz?

It doesn’t bite, promise….and will not affect your semester grade unless, of course you pass….:)

More on the de Vere Bible annotations.