I have a confession to make. William Ray is my favorite mail carrier. On the days when my usual mailman is off, and William substitutes for him, we have the greatest seminars.
I know, I know.
Mr. Ray’s mail carrying style has been criticized, on some distant internet islands far from the beaten track of the civilized world, as being too abstruse and learned for the average reader.
Internet Stratfordians have even voiced a suspicion that Mr. Ray is actually not a mailman, but is in fact instead a College Professor, wearing the mask of a mailman for fear of retribution from Columbia.
He doesn’t really live in Willits, California, a place that nobody’s ever heard of before. He must be from the Upper West Side, or Brooklyn at least.
In this they may well be correct.
Consider, for example, the following excerpt from a manuscript in my possession. Bear in mind that this purports to be the work of a mailman:
Monographs on why people believe what they do ordinarily come out of the sociology or psychology departments, not from a Columbia University English department lecturer. Right at the start, Shapiro abandons the commitment of his professional field, i.e., to contribute unbiased knowledge of Shakespeare through solitary study and reflection, tested by peer review.
He has embarked on writing biographical criticism on biographical critics, the analysis of whose inner motivations for which he was not credentialed. The personalities involved in Oxfordian scholarship have found cause to challenge on factual grounds who wrote Shakespeare, which threatens his guild, his world-view, and his personal reputation.
Does that sound like your mailman? We thought not. Or, what about this?
[Shapiro’s] assertion about Shakespeare’s all-achieving imagination, an expansion of which idea would make biographical study since the Enlightenment irrelevant, follows a familiar pattern in historical Shakespeare criticism. The initial Bard idolatry was the Divine Shakespeare, next to God in his omniscient insight, since no one knew anything of him. Then it was Shakespeare the Genius, the demi-god standing all alone, sui generis, the Colossus.
T.S. Eliot, one of the Western tradition’s most astute critics, intoned, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third.” He said of the Sonnets: “This autobiography is written by a foreign man in a foreign tongue, which can never be translated.” He was honest enough to say we knew nothing of his life.
Now, come on! These earnest and hardworking sleuths want to know, when was the last time your mailman used the words “enlightenment,” “omniscient,” “T.S. Eliot,” and “Dante,” all in one paragraph?
It sounds very logical, doesn’t it?
But I’m here to tell you, it ain’t so.
Take it from me.
William Ray is a mailman.
No mere University scholar that I know of reads even half as many books as he does. And what University professor have you ever heard conclude a baker’s shop discussion of whether or not Magellan actually claimed to have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon (apparently he did not) with the plebeian remark:
I maintain support for the old lady who posited to William James that the earth was supported in space by a large turtle, and when he asked what supported the turtle, she answered, “Sorry Mr. James, it’s turtles all the way down.”
How Ray delivers the mail at the same time as he does enough research to sound like someone who should be from Columbia University seems to consist of a technology so advanced as to appear to us pure magic.
But, trust me, William Ray is a mailman. Who but a mailman would write this:–
Another dreamer will follow
The living imprint of your feet
You yourself have no right
To name the trees you planted
Yes, William Ray is a mailman after all. He’s just not my mailman. Not my regular mailman, anyway.
Originally posted By Roger Stritmatter on October 8, 2011. For some actual letters of Mr. Ray, see his forthcoming October 27, 2011 blog post, “Rowing in a Sea of Disinformation.”
May 11, 2022 at 2:05 am
Someone purporting to be a University professor writing in his blog [short for web log and become a term on its own] has identified me as a mailman. There was a “Bill the Mailman” who walked from New York to Alabama to deliver a copy of the Constitution to Governor Ross Barnett. He was killed on the road. No, mistaken identity, so prevalent in the Elizabethan era, has landed again, in the modern age of Reason.
I was a “rural carrier”, Anglicized term for the original “rural courier”, but anti-French bias in the hinterlands changed this epithet to “carrier”, protecting the patriotic soul of the Republic. That was from 1979 to 2001, when I retired on my own say-so, after besting the USPS law offices in several states about federal law protecting whistleblowers in the Civil Rights Act, eventually endorsed by the USSC, 9-0, including some of the most stunted intellects ever to sit on the dias.
After retiring with a monetary award and letter of praise for my decades of civil service, I became a Shakespeare scholar. Among the estimable academics who exalted my prose style was an authentic hero of the time, discoverer of unimpeachable bibliographical proof of the Shakespeare author and himself author of the factually exaggerated parody above.
Roger Stritmatter had the nerve to call one of my studies prophetic in one of his monographs. I would have to leave the final word to third parties, but I will say this, nothing I wrote about the Shakespeare authorship question was profitic. It waits for future minds to judge whether I saw into the past and encountered minds there with a single purpose and concern, to tell truths, necessarily protected and hidden as in a cocoon for Posterity.
May 11, 2022 at 1:11 pm
Thank you, William Ray. Your generosity of spirit, cultivated intellect, and steady defense of the dignity of labor and the value of independent inquiry are all gifts to the world.
May 11, 2022 at 2:19 pm
It is difficult to keep on lying and fantasizing in your life. It tends to distance you more and more from yourself – even if it provides you with supposed status and money.
May 11, 2022 at 3:16 pm
Greetings, Dr. Scheffer. Thank you for your comment. I agree that the largest impediment to a better understanding of Shakespeare at this point in our history is misplaced professional pride, sometimes even arrogance, that is rewarded with “supposed status and money.”