Posted By Roger Stritmatter on February 1, 2012

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: (more…)

Category: Forensics, History of Ideas, News | 2 Comments »
Tags: forensic handwriting analysis, Herman Melville, Herman Melville and Shakespeare, Herman Melville's handwriting, historical handwriting analysis, Hydrachos manuscript, Hydrarchos

Posted By Leda Zakarison on December 6, 2011

Guest post by Leda Zakarison*

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. (more…)

Category: News | 5 Comments »
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Posted By Roger Stritmatter on November 22, 2011

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. (more…)

Category: News | No Comments »
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Posted By Roger Stritmatter on November 21, 2011

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. (more…)

Category: News, State of the debate | 3 Comments »
Tags: 60 Minutes With Shakespeare, 60 Minutes with Shakespeare rebuttal, 60 minutes with Shakespeare response, Have you no shame and Paul Edmondson, Have You No Shame and Professor Stanley Wells, Michael York and Authorship question, Richard Roe and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Italy, Shakespeare Trust, Shakespeare Trust and Michael York

Posted By Mike on November 20, 2011

Guest Post by Michael Dudley*

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.” (more…)

Category: Authorship, News, State of the debate | 3 Comments »
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