Discoveries: A Book of Words and Pictures
Click on the “enlarge” icon to page through the Discoveries book.
Over twenty years in preparation, the book is now published here for the first time in April 2022.
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April 18, 2022 at 1:59 am
I have been eagerly awaiting this publication, and look forward to delving into this in great detail. Please allow me to extend my sincere and heartfelt thanks to you for your dedication to this project over such a long period of time.
April 18, 2022 at 2:44 am
Pleased to have readers with the long view. Look forward to discussing more with you or whoever you represent. But you didn’t say anything at all about what you’ve been eagerly awaiting for so long. That makes me wonder what you’re doing. Time will tell.
April 18, 2022 at 4:01 am
Fascinating. Your ‘Landing Page’ is stellar, Professor Stritmatter. Gorgeous presentation. Congratulations on this work of a lifetime. I have this book in my library but this visual presentation will be such a treat — I look forward to a different kind of ‘leaf-through.’
April 18, 2022 at 11:58 am
Thanks, Robin! Its getting there.
April 23, 2022 at 8:56 pm
Dr. Stritmatter,
On p. 19 of your presentation, you assert that “Only the insiders – the Elizabethan court – would easily recognize the court gossip displayed through the gossamer veil of allegory.” Then you claim that the gossip pertained to a “private affaire d’amour between the Queen and Oxford.”
Who were those “insiders,” and what documentary evidence did they leave behind that suggest they would have thought this to be true? Other than Talbot’s 11 May 1573 letter (mentioned on p.53 of your presentation), though its telling comment about Oxford’s “fyckl hed” suggests that the flirtation was not going anywhere. And I’d hesitate to even call it a “flirtation,” as Nelson does (MA, p.95), since QE admired a number of courtiers over the years, yet we have no evidence that any went beyond “flirtation.” And recall that Lily’s play is some 15 years later, 1588, which itself is some seven years after Oxford was in the Tower with Anne Vavasor and their newborn child. So how could Lily possibly be suggesting in 1588 a QE/Cynthia Oxford/Endymion parallel when Oxford had long ago fallen so far out of Q’s favor?
Furthermore, your proposed “insider” perspective seems based on a rather substantial misreading of the play, one that sees what isn’t there while ignoring what is. To wit, Cynthia is usually seen as a symbol for QE, with Endymion symbolic of her subject(s). However, the relationship between Cynthia and Endymion is platonic (aside from the kiss that breaks him from his sleep). Endymion shows no signs of lusting after Cynthia, rather, he worships her. Which means there’s not even a whisper of what you claim is there, i.e., a clue, a hint, an inference, that only “insiders” then, and now, can see, of a “private affaire d’amour” between Oxford and QE.
Instead, their platonic “affaire” rings just the opposite, by solidifying the symbolism of the relationship between QE and her subjects, a relationship that Lily was trying to preserve in writing a play honoring the Queen—not trafficking in gossip. Unless you honestly think Lily was trying to poke a stick her eye, in a play that was performed for her at court. A snarky play that, according to you, would have the audience of “insiders” winking knowingly at each other in the presence of the Queen herself? Do you really thin Lily would deliberately risk such an insult?
Rather, the more reasoned judgment of E.K. Chambers seems the appropriate antidote to this Oxfordian flight of self-fulfilling fantasy. In The Elizabethan Stage, III, p. 415, he wrote, “I find no conviction in the attempts of Halpin, Baker, Bond, and Feuillerat to trace Elizabeth’s politics and amours in the play. If Lyly had meant half of what they suggest, he would have ruined his career in her service at the outset.”
So, again, if I may ask, what is the basis for claiming that Lily’s play hints at a secret love affair between Oxford and QE?
And a related question. By making this claim, does this mean you are one of the few remaining Oxfordians who still persist in peddling PT, whether I or II?
BTW, I gone through the entire presentation and have many more question, but think it best to tee then up one at a time.
Thank you.
April 25, 2022 at 7:00 pm
Dear Mr. Hackman,
Almost all of your questions were answered in this 2004 article, “A Law Case in Verse: Venus and Adonis and the Authorship Question,” published in the University of Tennessee Law Review and later in Vol. 7 of Dr. Paul Altrocchi’s series of reprints of major articles on the authorship question Avalanche of Falsity.
Given the evident fixation of your “Oxfraud” Facebook group on trolling authorship skeptics, I am somewhat surprised that should need to ask these questions since the 2004 article has been widely available and remains one of the most read articles (on Academia.edu and other scholarly sites) that I’ve ever written.
If you forgo your usual habit of “reviewing” books or articles you haven’t yet read, you may learn from this article that Chamber’s opinion, now approaching a hundred years in age, has long ago been superseded by better informed scholarship by Josephine Waters Bennett (1944), Richard Dutton (1991), and others. Lyly’s allegorical intent in the play is not in doubt by serious scholars, however much your “Oxfraud” gang members may have missed the point while falling over themselves to be insulting and petty in public.
I remain surprised that the Oxfrauds have been so inactive on Youtube lately, where as you are surely aware Alexander Waugh has over 100,000 views on some of his videos and several of my own lectures are now approaching 10,000 while the most recent is averaging nearly a hundred new views per day. Surely it is a waste of your valuable time to be concerned with what is published on a website with a fraction of that amount of traffic. But perhaps your failure to perform on Youtube is a result of the moderators of those channels feeling that you have little to contribute to the discussion and that your presence is derogatory to the ideas and ideals of spirited debate.
I tend to agree. Even when all of you put all of your brains together, the result all too often looks a lot like the presumptuous, badly informed, pseudo-scholarly claptrap you have printed here and which has already so often been removed on Amazon and elsewhere. Perhaps you missed your way in the fog of the internet, and intended to make a comment here.
Since I believe in keeping a historical record, I won’t delete your comment, but as for continuing a conversation with you — no thanks.