Straw man right off the bat. The Oxfordians do NOT argue that a person called Shake-speare did not exist, they do not view that person as the author and claim Shakespeare was a pseudonym for a nobleman, namely the Earl of Oxford. They make a stunningly strong case.
If you're claiming that "William Shakespeare" was a pseudonym, then you are in fact claiming he didn't exist because when you use a real person's identity for your pen name it's no longer a pseudonym but an allonym. And it's an important distinction because there are no examples of allonyms being used in the early modern era, least of all for more than twenty years among a group as small and interlinked as the Bankside theatre community. The deception would have been punctured as soon as Richard Burbage (or the Master of the Revels) demanded a rewrite. What was Shakespeare supposed to do in that case? Say he needed to go out for a cigarette break and ride hell-for-leather to Hedingham Castle? And seven days later, when the company decided that this cigarette break was starting to draw on a bit too long, he reappears with fresh manuscript papers that are obviously not in his handwriting, since Shakespeare wrote in a secretary hand and de Vere wrote in Italic script? The idea is absurd.
@@Nullifidian Elizabeth and the Master of revels knew Oxford was writing the plays because up to until 1583 the Master of Revels received 1000 pounds per year but that payment was halted and afterward Oxford was given 1000 pounds per year.
@@foofighter5509 "Elizabeth and the Master of revels knew Oxford was writing the plays because up to until 1583 the Master of Revels received 1000 pounds per year but that payment was halted and afterward Oxford was given 1000 pounds per year." This is pure fantasy. The £1,000 annuity to Oxford was a welfare check to prevent him from being in utter penury since he'd blown through all of his revenue-generating properties (the warrant speaks of him being "relieved" from his financial embarrassments). The annuity wasn't granted until 26 June 1586 (though it was made retroactive to the previous Annunciation Day, 25 March 1586), so what do you imagine happened to the money for the three years between the alleged cessation of payments to the Master of the Revels and Oxford's annuity being approved by Elizabeth? There's no connection to these two facts-if one of them is indeed a fact, though I can't find any confirmation of it independently of Shakespeare denalist sites-other than the coincidental figure. And it might not even a be as little as a coincidence; it might well be just a lie that gets endlessly recycled because nobody bothers to verify anything in the Shakespeare denialist community as long as it supports their narrative. And if everyone knew that he was already the author, even though he didn't have either the talent or the motivation to write Shakespeare's works and he died a decade before Shakespeare stopped writing, why didn't anyone bother to say so at the time, or why wasn't Oxford's name put on the published works? Regardless of whether William Shakespeare is assumed to be a pen name and the identity with the actor just a coincidence-even though multiple contemporaries who knew the actor also called him a writer-or if William Shakespeare was supposed to be a front man, there's the insurmountable problem of the fact that William Shakespeare's name was first appended to two narrative poems, not plays. Poetry was a perfectly acceptable pastime for courtiers, recommended as one of the skills of the ideal courtier in Baldessare Castiglione's _The Book of the Courtier_ , and Oxford had already published his own poetry, even shoving it into Thomas Bedingfield's translation of _Cardanus Comforte_ as a means of getting published. He clearly had no problem being known as a poet. But now all of a sudden he becomes reticent, even though a poem as a good as _Venus and Adonis_ prefaced with a fulsome and humble dedication to Her Majesty could have been the means to advancement at court and monetary rewards that he was spending the 1590s pursuing by other means, chiefly by begging for concessions on Devonshire and Cornish tin, a monopoly on sweet wine, etc., etc., etc. Moreover, the plays didn't start to be published under Shakespeare's name until 1598, even though they were published anonymously from 1594. So what happened? Did Edward de Vere slip on spilled type on his way out the print shop door, having just dropped of _Lucrece_ for publication, and then hit his head and suffered an amnesic fit during which he forgot all about his pen name or front man scheme for the next four years? And then when coming to himself, he didn't immediately make sure that *ALL* of the anonymously published plays had Shakespeare's name on them. He allowed _Titus Andronicus_ to remain uncredited until the 1623 First Folio, _Romeo and Juliet_ to remain uncredited until a 1622 quarto, and _2 & 3 Henry VI_ to remain uncredited until the 1619 False Folio (when they were published in a conflated form as _The Whole of the Contention_ ). Plus, he didn't make sure that *ALL* of his works were published in authoritative quarto editions, which were the accepted format for publication of plays and poems when he was alive. Instead, he allowed 18 of his plays to go unpublished until the 1623 First Folio, and his sonnet sequence to also be published posthumously (from an Oxfordian perspective) in 1609. Moreover, many of the quartos that were published were in various stages of corruption. Having gone through the trouble of either inventing a pen name or coming up with a front man _expressly_ for the purpose of publishing his works, why wasn't he more careful about how they were published? None of this makes any sense. And it makes less sense when you add in the theatrical context. Shakespeare's turn to romance and tragicomedy at the end of his career was motivated by the King's Men's taking over the Blackfriars Theatre, which had an established audience with defined preferences for what kind of plays they liked. Moreover, the later plays show act divisions that are organic and not imposed on an act-free structure, because they needed time in between acts to trim the wicks and replace burnt-out candles. All fight scenes disappear from the later plays, even when they're the most important events, like at the climax of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ (a figure keeps on popping up like a jack-in-the-box to report on how the joust between Palamon and Arcite is going-an absurd solution that only highlights how constrained the authors were) because people paid extra to sit on stools on the stage in this indoor theatres, so a misplaced thrust of a sword might spear a peer. More spectacular scenic effects were possible, like Jupiter descending in his chariot in _Cymbeline_ . And all of the cues for loud music (like when Richard III calls for drums and trumpets to drown out the scolding Duchess of York) disappear because the theatre was in the liberties inside the city, and they'd already had trouble in the 1590s when they wanted to buy the property and the neighbors objected. So they couldn't have loud music without antagonizing people, so all the music cues changed to "soft music". And I also mentioned the "authors"-plural-of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ . John Fletcher co-authored that play, but he had no experience as a writer prior to _The Woman-Hater_ (1607) co-authored with Francis Beaumont. Another of Shakespeare's co-authors was George Wilkins, a man whom Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon knew personally because he was the landlord of Stephen Bellot and Marie Mountjoy and was called to testify in _Bellot v. Mountjoy_ along with Shakespeare. Wilkins' literary career was very short-lived, only covering the three years between 1606-1608. I don't think either of them were much interesting in collaborating with a dead man. Another thing about the Fletcher-Shakespeare collaborations is that they can *ALL* be dated to after de Vere's death. The lost play of _Cardenio_ , which survives in the adaptation of Lewis Theobald titled _Double Falsehood_ , and which was attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare in the 1653 Stationers' Register entry by Humphrey Mosley, is based on an episode in the First Part of _Don Quixote_ by Miguel de Cervantes, which wasn't published *ANYWHERE* before 1605 and not before 1612 in the English translation by Thomas Shelton. _Henry VIII_ was described as a new play when a squib from a cannon burned down the Globe Theatre, and Archbishop Cranmer's prophecy not only predicts their reign of James I and VI but the origin of English colonialism at Jamestown ("Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, | His honour and the greatness of his name | Shall be, and make new nations"), which wasn't founded until 1607. And _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ contains an anti-masque of rustics adapted from Francis Beaumont's _The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn_ , which was written for the wedding celebrations of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V, Elector-Palatine of the Rhine in February 1613 and published later the same year. Consequently, the play can't date earlier than its source material.
It's frustrating to me that Stratfordians spend so little time on the evidence that their man wrote the plays, and so much time explaining why there is so little evidence. This lecture is quintessential example.
That is annoying, because there really is a lot of evidence. Heaps of it. Of course, Anti-Strats don't want to hear about all of that. They only care about the parts that are missing.
OK. But why post lectures that contain sentences like "So, we don't have evidence that Shakespeare was involved with the company, but I rather think he was." ? Why waste time with statements like that? Why not get to the heaps of, you know, the evidence they DO have?
Jim O'Sullivan I'll need some context on that statement. Can you give me a time stamp? I'm sure she's not referring to The Lord Chamberlain's/King's Men, because he's very well connected to them. Was she talking about some of the companies that performed his plays early on?
Yes..she was referring to the Queen's Men, when they visited Stratford at a time when Shakespeare was young. Not the King's, or Lord Chamberlain's, Men.
What evidence? What evidence do you have that the Shakspere of Straford wrote the plays and poems. Heaps, I imagine. Heaps and gobbledy-tonnes. @@Jeffhowardmeade
So the reaction to 'Shakspere did not write Shakespeare' is to prove firstly Shakspere existed? That is not in contention. Proceeding with how expensive paper was and that he learned his craft in school (of which there is no attendance record). All the while ignoring the sound arguments of the anti-Stratfordians. Not very convincing. Oh, did she really argue that Shakespeare was not as good as people think to explain that the grammar school education was enough?
Conflating the birth name "Guilielmus Shakspere" with the obvious pen name "Will Shake-speare" is not proof of anything. It's like if we didn't know that Sam Clemens wrote as "Mark Twain" and then started saying that Shania Twain must be related to the author of "Huckleberry Finn". And when challenged on that random leap of logic, we point to the name "Mark Twain" being printed on early 2nd or 3rd printings and declare victory -- "The case is overwhelming" (?)
@@PanchoChiekrie "What, would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton-heath, by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not." Burton on the Heath is a village about 15 miles south of Stratford Upon Avon. Wilmcot is 4 miles northwest. Shakespeare's mother came from there. There was a Hackett family living there during Shakespeare's youth. There are other examples. In Henry V the are two opposing characters named Bardolph and Flluelen. On a list of men of Stratford who were believed to not come to church for fear of being arrested for debt, we find William Flluelen and George Bardolph. Oh, and John Shakespeare, Will's father. shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/file/details/529 One that is by no means definitive but I like it, is the Merry Wives of Windsor, where a Welsh schoolmaster quizzes a dull young pupil on his Latin. The boy's name is Will. When Shakespeare was that age, the schoolmaster in Stratford was a Welshman named Thomas Jenkins. Probably the most obvious connection to Stratford (aside from all the people who said Shakespeare was from Stratford) was a character he named Ophelia. In 1579, a Stratford woman drowned in the Avon. The coroner held an inquest to determine whether or not the woman killed herself, precisely as happened to Ophelia. The verdict was "accident" and she was buried on holy ground. Her name was Katherine Hamlett.
@@PanchoChiekrie Oh, and Bacon became Viscount St. Alban in 1621, five years after Shakespeare died, and was later buried there. What association did Bacon have with St. Alban during Shakespeare's lifetime?
@@Jeffhowardmeade Thanks for that but Wilmcote is On-Avon not Upon-Avon so your comment doesn't invalidate my initial statement. Yes, you could argue that is quite contrary but no more than some if not many of the suppositions within the Stratfordian case and infact quite less if you look into it. In terms of literally statistical analysis it does strike me as some what queer that's all. I wasn't really alluding to Bacon in my "Claim" but I don't discount completly Stratfordians or Baconist' I just believe there is a question of authorship. I'm curious, are you aware of Is Shakespear Dead? by Mark Twain? I think you may find it interesting.
The first folio is the best evidence (unless you study in depth) because their is no actual written evidence that the man/player from Stratford wrote anything. Unique in this respect. Plays were published under the name but that doesn't provide evidence of the actual writer or writers. This ladies arguement as to why this doesn't matter would not hold up in a court of law. No writer (of value) refers to the writer of the plays as the man from Stratford. Many documents of writers of the time survive. The reference to 'Avon' is vague to say the least and this word has many meanings.
Contemporaries throughout Shakespeare's career and after his death identified him as the man from Stratford. Don't know how you missed it, if you've studied the matter at all.
BACON=33. 33 will enlighten the brother. Since I've started reading Shakespeare and looking into the authorship question all I read is people arguing about Stratford and oxford. Maybe because I came to Shakespeare in such an unconventional way it makes me not care about the oxford and Stratford debate. To me, it is quite clear that these are not the works of one person. And great literature is not the reason for creating them. The endgame is SOOOOOOOOOO much bigger than that. This was clearly a collaborative effort of the best minds of Europe. People that were not free to practice science and did not have free speech. Anytime I hear an argument for a new author I get excited. I know who the mastermind of the works was but the people who took care of the little details, they left their mark in the works too. Even William Shakespeare made his mark. Whoever he really was and whatever his name really was. Because it was not William Shakespeare. WILL I AM PALLAS ATHENA. The name itself created the same way Father RC's name was. Christain Rosenkreuz. The most laudable Rosy Cross. The Rosicrucian order. To conceal it from fools the philosophers have shrouded this precious treasure. From which Adam and the other patriarchs have derived their longevity. In strange and obscure words and flowery rhetoric. Very few people in this world therefor know about it. For if such secrets were made public and if godless actions happen as a result of them. Then he would have to answer for them in their first course. And would be severely punished by God for placing holy things before dogs and casting pearls before swine. Truely attaining it is better than all the gold and silver in the world. For what man covets in the temporal world can not compare to it in the slightest. The treasure of all treasures the secret of all secrets.
Starting at 14:31 she cites 4 things, only one of which ties the Globe shareholder Shakspere of Stratford to the plays printed in 1623. She refutes an argument that no one has made -- plays were printed with the name "William Shakespeare" and "W. Shake-speare" during the life of the Stratford man. The best evidence she cites are Ben Jonson's ghost written letters naming Heminges and Condell as friends of the author. Stratford is involved, clearly, in the printing of the 1623 folio, albeit posthumously. But while he was alive he was never paid to write plays, and never referred to as the author of the plays. However, during Stratford's lifetime other authors were known to have written works printed under the name William Shakespeare. Many false attributions were quickly labeled "apocrypha".The printings of "Passionate Pilgrim" and "Taming of A Shrew" are two prime examples. The idea that "no one in his time doubted his authorship of the plays" is completely at odds with this evidence! This lecture oddly pretends that such controversies did not exist while claiming that the ambiguous insult "upstart crow" can only refer to Shakspere of Stratford. Nothing in the actual evidence proves that Stratford Shakspere was more than a front man. A real person - yes. A 12% shareholder in the Globe whose share was reduced to 7% - yes. An actor - maybe but an author of great narrative poems, sonnets and plays - no. Given six attempts to write his own name, Stratford Shakspere failed on all of them yet the idea that this clearly illiterate man HAS to be the greatest playwright in English history lives on. Connecting the works to their most likely author unlocks the meaning and personal references they contain -- this likely is why a front man with a name similar to the pseudonym was used.
Unless you can provide evidence of a pseudonym, then you can't claim it's a pseudonym. It was the name of one of the actors and shareholders of the company, who was identified as the poet on many occasions. The existence of two likely misattributions doesn't change that.
🤣 She completely glossed over one of the strongest arguments that Oxfordians have in that WHERE did Shakespeare learn Latin, Greek, Italian, French? When did Shakespeare travel to Europe and spend time in Italy? How did Shakespeare gain knowledge on astronomy, medicine, law, falconry, history, classic literature, art, naval and military terminology, royal court life? This lady is grasping at straws.
Grammar schools taught Latin and often Greek. That was their purpose as they were literally _grammar_ schools: schools in which students were given a foundation in the Classical languages because all university instruction was delivered in Latin. The King's New School in Stratford-upon-Avon was a free school open to all male children of the town. Shakespeare's plays show a schoolboy's familiarity with grammar school instruction. Most compellingly, he misquotes Terence's _Eunuchus_ in the same way it was misquoted in the edition of William Lily's grammar that was current when he would have been attending school, he also uses Lily's discussion of number in and Lily's own illustration - _lapis_ , stone - in another play, and in a third he has the barbarian son of the empress of Rome anachronistically recognize a quote from Horace as one he read in the grammar long ago. And from a foundation in Latin, which the grammar school provided, it's easier to read any Romance language, especially when these languages were four hundred years' closer to their common Latin roots. But even today, a background in Latin will give you a boost in reading other Romance languages. I can testify to that personally as an ex-Classics major. As for the question when did Shakespeare spend time in Europe and Italy, why should he have done? Did John Fletcher need to travel to Moscow to write _The Loyal Subject_ and all the way to the Moluccas to write _The Island Princess_ ? In modern times, does _The Martian_ by Andy Weir entitle us to infer that its author visited the surface of Mars? Italian settings were commonplace in early modern drama, and if Oxfordians would bother to read Shakespeare's contemporaries they would see how standard they were. Unfortunately, it's like pulling teeth to even get them to read Shakespeare-most of them operate on no greater familiarity with the works than they got from high school. However, Shakespeare might well have traveled to Italy or to Europe in general without leaving any record behind. It's not as if they had customs enforcement and passport controls in this era. Actors often traveled in noblemen's retinues or toured the Continent as performers, and it was even possible to have your travel partly subsidized by speculators-a scheme Puntarvolo in Ben Jonson's _Every Man out of His Humour_ plans to work as a way of "not going entirely upon expense". Unless you were a nobleman, a notable hellraiser, or both, your movements didn't leave a mark on the historical record in this era. As for Shakespeare's alleged 'knowledge', it needs to be placed in the context of the time and other writers' works examined for their erudition. When you do that, you find that Shakespeare's knowledge was usually nothing special. For example. George W. Keeton, a practicing lawyer and an expert in the history of Chancery courts, examined Shakespeare's alleged knowledge of law and found that he was in the middle of the pack in terms of legal knowledge, neither being the most nor least prolific of those who deployed legal analogies. Keeton did credit Shakespeare with being a keener observer, but since the law is essentially a highly formalized language, it's not surprising that a superb wordsmith would be able to grasp nuances. Also, the areas of law Shakespeare makes most use of for his analogies are the very areas where Shakespeare shows up most in the legal record: as a property owner and someone concerned with the law of wills and inheritance. However, he was still ignorant enough to invent the word "jointress" because he didn't know the legal term "jointrix". Shakespeare's knowledge of classical literature is actually quite slight. As Caroline Spurgeon showed in _Shakespeare's Imagery_ , 90% of his classical allusions trace back to a single work, Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ , and they're usually the most conventional analogies around. It's only in our ignorant present when people look at you like a savant if you know the difference between Hyperion and Apollo and have ever studied the Classical languages that Shakespeare's 'knowledge' of the classics has come to be overrated. In his own day, he was regarded as being a natural wit. In the words of Francis Beaumont, he asked "from all Learninge keepe these lines as cleare | as Shakespeares best are" and added that Shakespeare's example showed "how farr somtimes a mortall man may goe | by ye dimme light of Nature". Beaumont was the third son of a baronet, went to university (though he left without taking a degree), and entered the Inner Temple. Another indication of how Shakespeare's knowledge was held by his contemporaries comes from _The Return from Parnassus_ , an anonymous comedy written for performance at university, where William Kempe and Richard Burbage, leading actors in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, are presented as characters and Kempe says, "Few of the university [men] pen plays well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, aye and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit." Horace giving the poets a pill is a reference to a scene in Ben Jonson's _Poetaster_ , so this author shows his familiarity with the public theatres of the time, plus he knows - as indicated by the familiar "our fellow" - that William Shakespeare the playwright was a theatrical colleague of Richard Burbage and William Kempe in the Lord Chamberlain's Men. This message is getting pretty long, so I'll just deal with three more points: medicine, falconry, and royal court life. First, with medicine, the Oxfordians purport to be astonished that Shakespeare knew the stages of syphilis, but the public outdoor theatres stood in the liberties outside the city along with the taverns, bear-baiting pits, _and_ brothels. Shakespeare only had to look around to become an 'expert' on medicine as the Oxfordians would have it. With falconry, again a look at Shakespeare's contemporaries will show them using the same kind of analogies that Shakespeare uses to "jesses" and "haggards" and so on. Indeed, Act I, sc. 3 of _A Woman Killed with Kindness_ by Thomas Heywood shows more detailed knowledge of falconry in just this one scene than exists in the entire Shakespeare canon. If Heywood could do it, why not Shakespeare? Moreover, even if Shakespeare's knowledge were demonstrably greater than it is, the language of hawking in general and the language of falconry is identical. Plenty of country people hunted with less pretentious birds than peregrine falcons, such as kestrels. Furthermore, the aristocrats didn't _train_ their own falcons. They left that in the hands of commoners. Oxfordians like to pretend that the class structures of early modern England were so rigid that the aristocracy and the commoners existed in completely separate and isolated bubbles, which is absurd. Finally, there are numerous references in the plays to the low-class poachers' trick of liming: spreading birdlime on twigs to catch hedge-dwelling birds. So this would seem to indicate an author who was a commoner hailing from the country. Now, on to royal court life. One major feature of royal court life is the antechamber, where people waited to be admitted to the presence chamber. There is only _one_ play that makes dramatic use of the antechamber, and it occurs in a scene that was _not_ written by Shakespeare. In Act V, sc. 2 of _Henry VIII_ , Archbishop Cranmer is snubbed by the Privy Council and forced to wait in an antechamber, but this scene was not written by Shakespeare but by his collaborator John Fletcher. (Incidentally, John Fletcher only got his start in writing _after_ 1604, when Edward de Vere died, and Oxfordians have never explained why Fletcher was interested in collaborating on three plays with a dead man, let alone on one play - _Cardenio_ - that was based on a source not published _anywhere_ until 1605 and not published in English translation until 1612.) In every other Shakespeare play, people just barge in and start speaking to the king. Indeed, in one scene in _3 Henry VI_ , the Yorkists invade the parliamentary presence chamber without opposition and the Duke of York even sits on Henry's throne! Nor have they won the war at this point: Henry VI is still in power, but still Shakespeare thought it not inconsistent with reality to depict the Duke of York entering the parliamentary presence chamber without waiting and sitting on Henry's throne in his absence. That is not the sign of someone who knew much if anything about court life. Another clear indication about Shakespeare's lack of experience with the nobility comes from the next play in the first tetralogy: _Richard III_ . In it, he has Richard (still Duke of Gloucester at this point) greet one man as three people. Anthony Woodville was the 2nd Earl Rivers, and the subsidiary style of the Earl Rivers was Lord Scales. So what does Shakespeare do? He has Richard greet, in turn, Lord Woodville, Lord Rivers, and Lord Scales. Shakespeare didn't know that the family name could differ from the noble title, nor was he aware of the existence of subsidiary styles. By contrast, the Earl of Oxford's family name was de Vere and his subsidiary styles included Viscount Bulbec, Lord Escales, and Lord Badlesmere. The chance of _him_ getting this wrong is nil. Therefore, _Richard III_ cannot have been written by a member of the nobility.
Where do today’s New Yorkers learn Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese? In New York!! That one was easy. And I agree, that is one of the strongest arguments!! 😂
She repeats the incredibly stupid argument that Greene's "Groatsworth of Wit" is about Shakespeare. There is overwhelming evidence that the passage she cites is about the actor, Edward Alleyn, not Shakespeare. Only someone who has not read Greene's pamphlet could believe otherwise.
daver8521 I've heard it all, and it's a load of hogwash that hasn't convinced a single person who wasn't already desperate to eliminate an obvious reference to William Shakespeare the actor and writer.
All one needs to do is read "A Groats-Worth of Wit" and evaluate it in light of what is known of it and the time it was written in. We know that Robert Greene wrote the pamphlet in 1592, and that he wrote it to appeal to a general audience. In 1592, Shakespeare was an unknown; his name had never appeared in print, and he had gained no fame as an actor. There is no evidence that he had accumulated any wealth by that date, and he was not a theatre owner. Yet the pamphlet makes it clear that the man Greene is addressing is a wealthy man. In context, it is clear that he is a famous actor and theatre owner. Alleyn fits all these criteria, and the man Shakespeare, none of them. Why would Greene warn the three young men (assumed to be Marlowe, Nashe, and Peele) about Shakespeare? As far as we know, Greene had never met Shakespeare, and at this time Shakespeare was certainly in no position to do any harm to these three men. But Greene had extensive connections with Alleyn, who had grown wealthy acting in and producing Greene's plays. Alleyn was well-known to the public and would be readily recognized by Greene's readers. And it makes perfect sense for Greene to warn them to have no dealings with Alleyn, whom he blamed for his ruin.
Shakespeare could not have written any of those plays, because I wrote them all. It was very difficult and took me a long time. But it was worth it, and I'm glad I did it!
in spite of living in the wrong historical period, you are almost as good a candidate as the stratford dude, tbh. thats how bad a candidate the stratford dude is, and how much magical thinking is required to believe he wrote shakespeare
@@dirremoire No, it's "We don't have any record that any students went to the King's New School until 1800, therefore there is no reason to assume that Shakespeare _didn't_ attend the school, but the facts that Shakespeare, as an alderman's son, would have been entitled to free education at the school and that numerous references to grammar school staples occur throughout the plays tells us that he likely did." In _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ , young Will is quizzed on his Latin by the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans using elements drawn from William Lily's grammar, including the same discussion of number in Latin and the same illustrative example, _lapis_ (stone), that Lily uses. In _Titus Andronicus_ , Titus sends weapons to Chiron and Demetrius wrapped around with lines in Latin. Chiron recognizes them at once: "O, 'tis a verse in Horace; I know it well: | I read it in the grammar long ago." In fact, the "grammar" is once again William Lily's. It's also an anachronism that an author more thoroughly grounded in the Latin classics would have almost certainly spotted. But the most telling example is the moment in _The Taming of the Shrew_ where Shakespeare _misquotes_ Terence's _Eunuchus_ in exactly the same way it's misquoted in the edition of Lily's grammar that would have been current when Shakespeare was in school. The shared misquote indicates that the grammar book is the source, rather than the original play.
@@dirremoire LOL. The argument is that 'Shakspere wrote the plays therefore he got an education SOMEWHERE' and he just happened to live in a tiny village that had the best grammar school in England. The school taught Greek, Latin, Law, medicine and iambic pentameter to 8-year old boys but only Shakspere made any use of all that. In their humility the school never acknowledged that they had educated the greatest writer in English history.
@@apollocobain8363 Perhaps you should actually listen to the lecture rather than leaving snide comments in the replies, because your sarcastic response about the school's "humility" was already preempted by Tribble pointing out that Shakespeare's level of posthumous fame wasn't established until centuries later. At the time, theatre was not taken seriously and plays were not regarded as great literature. Indeed, theatre had such a poor reputation that it was abolished in 1642 by order of Parliament and didn't come back until the Restoration twenty years later. As for what was taught at the King's New School, they did indeed teach Latin, and probably some Greek. Nobody argues that they taught law (and it's unclear why you capitalized that word), medicine, or iambic pentameter. Speaking of things that are unclear, it's unclear why you Shakespeare authorship-deniers are so fixated on the idea that playwrights can't write about anything without being formally educated in the subject while still a child. Presumably that means that Tom Stoppard couldn't have possibly written _Arcadia_ , since chaos theory didn't even *EXIST* as a field when he dropped out of school at 17. Also, Stratford-upon-Avon was not a "tiny village"; it was a bustling market town that was one of the largest in Warwickshire. It might not have been as populous as London, but no place in early modern England was as populous as London.
A remarkable lot of "could have" where solid proof is missing. The so aled questions afterwards does more or less prolonge the row of asumptions. Nobody asked why why he, after writing many plays, did not write is own will, just signing it twice with a signature showing illiteracy. Why didn't anyone ask this? And why is his works not mentioned in his will, nor books?
A: nobody wrote their own wills in that era. Then, as now, you hired a lawyer to do it. B: the signatures are in a script known as Secretary Hand, which you can't read. They are perfectly legible, and quickly scrawled out, indicating experience at writing, not the contrary. Oh, and they were signed on his deathbed. C: None of the wills written by poets of the era mention books or manuscripts. Reference Honigmann's Playhouse Wills 1558-1642. A will was for making special bequests, not for mashing an inventory of everything one owned. And there's a lot of speculation about Shakespeare, but it's all built upon a foundation of solid documentary evidence, much of which the professor references.
Would have been great if she spent less time on the red herring of Elizabethian paper usage and had actually addressed important topics like illiteracy in Shakespeare's family, the Earl of Oxford's acclaim as a playwright, or even how Shakespeare could have acquired a perfect working knowledge of legality and both latin and greek. Geez
Please explain why these are "important topics". If nobody could be literate except for people who were born to literate families, then literacy itself could have never developed because there would have had to have come a point where one person was literate and another was not. In any case, there's absolutely no evidence of illiteracy in Shakespeare's family, and positive evidence of literacy in many cases. Shakespeare himself left six signatures and Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ , his brother Gilbert left an extant signature, his eldest daughter Susanna left an extant signature, his mother Mary was named executrix of her father's will, which would be a strange thing to do if she couldn't read its provisions, his younger brothers Edmund and Richard followed him into the theatre as actors and they would have had to read cue scripts, etc. There is no evidence that the Earl of Oxford was acclaimed as a playwright. Even if he had been, there's no reason why 'his' works (if they were indeed his) should have survived, given the fact that court entertainments were ephemeral things. The Oxfordians base their case on George Puttenham's _The Art of English Poesy_ (and Francis Meres, who simply copied Puttenham's statements in this section). But Puttenham's praise was grouped in with Richard Edwards for "comedy and interlude". Edwards is not known to have written _any_ interludes, and he's only known to have written one comedy, _Damon and Pithias_ . So if Oxford is being mentioned for anything, the overwhelming probability is that he's being mentioned for having written an interlude-possibly just one-or at least having his name attached to something that John Lyly or Anthony Munday wrote for him. Why else would he have needed to employ _two_ playwrights as his ostensible secretaries? And it may be that we know of what interlude it was, because there's an extant account of Edward de Vere performing in a device where he emerged from a shipwreck to present the queen with a jewel. That may well be the sum total of Edward de Vere's theatrical writing, which he possibly didn't even do himself. Anyway, _if_ Oxford were acclaimed as a playwright, then there would have been no reason not to take credit for the plays of Shakespeare except for one: he didn't actually write them. Nor would there be any reason for him not to claim the poetry that Shakespeare had written since poetry was one of the skills of the courtier recommended in Baldessare Castiglione's _Book of the Courtier_ , the English translation of which had set the fashion in Elizabeth's court. If he had published _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_ with fawning dedications to the queen herself (rather than, compared to de Vere, a junior, lower-ranked member of the nobility), it could have been the ticket to money, favor, and advancement at court that he was seeking by other means, chiefly by trying to wangle tin concessions in Devon and Cornwall. Once again, this is only explicable if de Vere and Shakespeare weren't the same person. If Shakespeare had a "perfect working knowledge of legality" (normally we just say "the law" rather than "legality"), then he'd be better off than de Vere, who never won a lawsuit in his life and committed comical, Dogberry-esque solecisms in his legal Latin (e.g., instead of "summa totalis" ["the sum of all"], he wrote "summum totale"). This also reflects on your claim that the author of the works needed a "perfect working knowledge... of latin and greek", since de Vere's Latin was poor and his Greek was, to all evidence, nonexistent. He certainly was never tutored in any Greek, which we know because we have the schedule for his tutoring. He got two hours a day of Latin and a further two of French, and that was it. A grammar school boy would be working for twelve hours a day translating Latin into English and English into Latin, focusing not only on technical proficiency but also on style and the emotional content of the writing. Unintentionally, it was basically a way of turning out a crop of brilliant playwrights, of whom Shakespeare was but one of many. The grammar school education in classical languages was far more rigorous, on average, than the education doled out to the children of the nobility. However, and I hate to help you here, there is not more legal content in Shakespeare's plays than there are in the plays of his contemporaries. Shakespeare is about the middle of the field. He is generally accurate in his use of terms, but there's nothing in the works to suggest extraordinary legal erudition. Some of his knowledge he probably picked up from the fact that his father was a magistrate in Stratford and some he would have picked up from the lawsuits he was engaged in. It was a litigious era. And if he ever needed to know anything in more detail, he could have gotten it from one of the aspiring lawyers who loved theatre, as many of the Inns of Court students did. Shakespeare even wrote _The Comedy of Errors_ for the Christmas Revels at Gray's Inn. But perhaps you're right. Only one of the hereditary nobility would be able to ask another person a question. As for the author's supposed knowledge of Latin and Greek, the fact is that there are fewer Latin tags, fewer proper nouns, and fewer references to mythology and Classical history in Shakespeare's plays than in almost any of the plays of his contemporaries. 90% of Shakespeare's classical allusions derive from the _Metamorphoses_ by Ovid and they're utterly conventional poetic images. Comments like these make me wonder if any of you authorship deniers actually understand or appreciate Shakespeare. Shakespeare isn't admired for coming up with the most recondite classical allusions and the most complex legal analogies, and for peppering his plays with Latin quotations. Those are the affectations that make the plays of many of his contemporaries, especially the University Wits, almost unreadable today. Shakespeare is admired for his poetic skill _in English_ and for his ability to delineate character in startlingly realistic ways. Nothing he did required education beyond his grammar school background, and it's a good thing because the ones with that education liked to show off about it and their plays generally suffer by the comparison.
00:47:36 shows the Thomas More Hand D transcribed text, and it is read verbatim by Professor Tribble. However, her recitation alters the wording so that, "And that you sit as kings in your desire" becomes, "And that you sit as kings in your own desire." Later on the passage, "With self same hand, self reasons, and self right" becomes "With the self same hand, the self reasons, and the self right." Why the modifications? They break with iambic pentameter - arguably a tell tale sign of Shakespeare. The professor seems a bit at sea in reading aloud. But More to the point, the claim that the handwriting has been demonstrated to "virtually" match those famous six signatures fails to cite ample dissent to the contrary. A debate presents both sides, again a Shakespearean trait, as the professor does rightly remark. Anti-Stratfordians are not anti-Shakespeareans. We are very much pro-Shakespeare but balk at the Stratford dogma. This is not a settled question, in part, for the very reasons cited. The soul of the age is reflected in these plays. Where Will of Stratford provides no traction, others do.
How can it match something that doesn't exist? There are no specimens of Shakespeare's handwriting with which to compare Hand D. Six very dissimilar signatures are not an adequate sample.
@@joshuapray The lines ARE iambic pentameter which would be a hallmark of Shakespeare. My criticism was with Dr. Tribble who cannot speak the words "trippingly on the tongue" [Hamlet Act 3 Scene 2] which casts doubt on how well she is versed in the fundamentals. To my ear it's like your music instructor hitting wrong notes when illustrating how to play things right. Who the hell is she to deride my opinion on the authorship question? I'd rather take instruction from Derek Jacobi. Shakespeare's plays and poems are overwhelming written in iambic pentameter. (Rhyme schemes vary.) Prose lines are reserved for men and women of lower rank which reveals a prejudice against those born beneath the aristocracy. If you're looking for the authorship, what does that imply?
@@tomditto3972 The use of iambic pentameter would not be a hallmark of Shakespeare more than any other English poet of the past several hundred years. It's neither evidence for or against Shakespeare's authorship. So my point was that it's a silly thing to say, not to engage you in a debate.
@@joshuapray Again, my point was that Dr. Tribble dribbled, be she reading Shakespeare or another of the other English poets who wrote in iambic pentameter. I was casting shade on her expertise. Who is she to dismiss the authorship question out of hand, if she is inept in the fundamentals? Even more so, how did she obtain the expertise to covert six shaky semi completed signatures from a Stratford merchant, probably illiterate, into Hand D? These were the points I sought to make, not to debate the prevalence of iambic pentameter.
It wasn't Edmund Malone, it was John Warbuton whose cook destroyed a number of play manuscripts. In any case Shakespeare's manuscripts must have been preserved until 1623.
Yes, and then somehow all of the manuscripts were destroyed becasue Shakespeare was famous by then and the thing to do with the manuscript of a famous playwright would be to destroy them.
After it was printed, yes. Were they going to hand out the manuscripts to people, probably with markings, crossed out lines, hard to read passages etc.? Almost every play Aeschylus wrote is gone and there is not one handwritten manuscript - CONSPIRACY?!?!?
The manuscripts are still preserved to this day. All of them. They will be found in the next few years. They are 30 feet below a triangle-shaped man-made swamp on a man-made island. They will be found with the corpse of father RC and also the golden menorah of king Solomon. The sonnet manuscripts and the corpse were both plunged into quicksilver. Thus making them airproof and waterproof. Preserving them almost indefinitely. I understand how wild this sounds. And I can't wait for excavations to start so the truth can be set free. This will remain a mystery until God's mercy has been pierced. The mercy point which is a location in this swamp. The true purpose of the works was to tell the story of Francis Bacons life and to hide religious artifacts that he inherited when he became the leader of the freemasons. To conceal it from fools the philosophers have shrouded this precious treasure. From which Adam and the other patriarchs have derived their longevity. In strange and obscure words and flowery rhetoric. Very few people in this world therefor know about it. For if such secrets were made public and if godless actions happen as a result of them. Then he would have to answer for them in their first course. And would be severely punished by God for placing holy things before dogs and casting pearls before swine. Truely attaining it is better than all the gold and silver in the world. For what man covets in the temporal world can not compare to it in the slightest. The treasure of all treasures the secret of all secrets.
Utter ballocks...just because the name "Shake-speare" appears on the play doesn't mean Shakspere of Stratford WROTE it! It was widely recognized as a pseudonym even in 1600. Read Ogburn's "Mysterious William Shakespeare " for the real story.
Caius Martius Coriolanus Wrong again...you clearly haven't read Ogburn's book. Refutes your hidebound beliefs, so you fear it, naturally. But all the argument is there...no space here to cover it.
@@willshaw6405 Translation: "Damn! I have no way to refute the solid evidence presented here, so I'll just say 'Read someone else's book' as if that answers it." John Stow, the ultimate London insider and chronicler of his age, said he had personal knowledge that William Shakespeare, gentleman (of which there was only one) was a great poet. You can claim he was lying (to what purpose?) or that he was deluded (though he seemed to know everything else that was going on in London), but you can't deny that he was doing anything besides identifying Shakespeare of Stratford as a poet.
Caius Martius Coriolanus Not that at all...just don't like to wasre time pecking at this tiny keyboard when smarter folks have already done the homework!
@@willshaw6405 I have yet to have anyone explain how Stow could claim to have personal knowledge that Shakespeare was a poet. Since you've read all of Ogburn, I figured you could tell me if he has addressed that issue. Otherwise, there's direct evidence for you. He's not taking about a pen name, because he mentions Shakespeare by rank. It isn't postmortem testimony, because Stow predeceased Shakespeare. To cap it all off, it's John Frikken Stow. He knew everything and everyone in London.
It's not the quantity that matters when discussing historical claims ( and the idea that the Stratford man wrote the plays is a historical claim) it's the method. Her analysis is superficial because she ignores proper historical method, apparently ignorant of how historians and biographers go about their work (for a start they understand what the word evidence actually means).
Well she is a professor of English, and not a professor of history. I don't know if historians have a different definition, but the definition the rest of the English-speaking world works with is "That which tends to prove or disprove something". I don't see where she violated that. She provided documents which tend to prove the claim that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
I understand you might mistake what she presented as documents that prove the claim, but they do nothing of the kind. It's pretty clear she has not read the scholarship on the authorship issue, fails to address any of the issues that have caused serious historians to question the orthodox view for over 150 years. I'm not going to go into detail if you haven't read any of this material yourself Caius, but if you are curious about why I say these things then you might read Diana Price's 'Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography'. None of the 'true believers' in the Stratfordian camp have had the courage to acknowledge this fine academic work exists, let alone address the avalanche of evidence presented therein. If you don't like reading so much, you will find video of Diana Price presenting some of the contents of her book on youtube. I suspect you'd actually enjoy it. As for the issue of evidence, yes I agree with the definition but I don't believe this professor has a grip on the subject material, and hasn't done her research. Understandable, it's not her field, but to be presenting yourself in public as though it is your field is not a good look.
Geoff Williamson I've read her tripe, and it's Three-Card-Monty with cover art. Unlike you, I have read both sides of the issue, and so I see that she: 1) Reverse-engineered her list of types of evidence in order to try to fit it to the known lacunae in Shakespeare's historic record, 2) Fails in that regard (Shakespeare should have scored somewhere between six and eight) and so ignores evidence for him by calling it "disputed", 3) Subdivides the categories unnecessarily in order to give other poets higher scores, often by ticking more than one box with the same piece of evidence, 4) Uses one primary source (Philip Henslowe's account book) for most of it, and 5) Applies none of the "academic rigor" to any of that evidence that she applies to the mountains of evidence there is that Shakespeare wrote his own works. Were she to apply the same standards to those on her list that she applies to Shakespeare's evidence, all 24 of them would score a zero. In addition, she claims her work has been "peer reviewed", when it's only been reviewed by fellow Anti-Strats, who are not inclined to test her results vigorously, which is what "peer review" actually means in an academic setting. A true academic would recognize and laugh at her sleight-of-hand, and many have. Also, she has touted the fact that hers was the first Anti-Strat book to be published by an academic press, implying there was a stamp of academic approval to the process, when in reality it was printed by a textbook mill which prints anything they can make a buck from. They don't edit the product in any way. It's now available only in print-on-demand. Rather than referring you to someone else's book to answer your challenges, I'll answer them myself and provide evidence. I don't shill the work of another to prove my case. Be warned that any mention of Secret Cyphers, Bacon the Immortal Rosecrucian, Prince Tudor, The Priory of Scion, or Oxford Secretly Wrote Everyone's Works will get you written off as a crackpot.
The suggestion that William Shakespeare was financially poor during his early years as a married Stratfordian requires some justification which is not given. His father, John, was a fairly wealthy landowner and a member of a number of high-status political/businesses associations in the town - he was the Mayor for example - moreover, there is confusion between him experiencing "financial" difficulties in later life and "religious affiliation" difficulties (he was a catholic) which may have driven him (John) to scale down his business activities. There is no strong evidence that the Shakespeares - father or son - were financially embarrassed. Even Shakespeare's daughter (Suzanna) married the financially secure Stratford doctor John Hall. There is numerous supporting documentary evidence in respect of all of this.
John Shakespeare never lost everything, but he did lose quite a lot, resulting in him mortgaging and then defaulting on his wife's inherited farmland, being excused from paying relatively small taxes, and avoid church for fear of debt. This trouble started when Shakespeare was a teenager, and continued at least into his early adulthood. It is theorized that it was Shakespeare's success that righted the family boat in the mid-1590s, but we can't know for certain. Just an aside, there's no evidence that John Shakespeare was a practicing Catholic. He had all of his children baptized in the CofE, removed Catholic symbols from the Guild chapel, and raised a son who quoted extensively from the Geneva Bible.
and we will all,as we wait in the one queue that no one likes to be at the front of,one day "shuffle of this mortal coil ",where the answer shall be revealed,that is if one should believe in the place "that we know not of ",and ,after the reunion with our beloved deceased,now being the same ,seek out the truth ,in the only one place where the answer lies...patience,patience.....
9:10 here is a 30 minute talk by a lawyer with several pieces of evidence to the contrary . ua-cam.com/video/oefmNJ6_suc/v-deo.html . I'd love for this SAQ to go to the courts.
Hall was referring to Marston, who had just published a pornographic poem on Narcissus under a pen name, not to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. V&A was not considered vulgar. Marston's book was ordered burned, while Shakespeare's got reprinted. And the SAQ has gone to court, in 1988. Three Supreme Court justices, one of whom was an Oxfordian, all voted for Shakespeare. Courts are places for evidence. Only Shakespeare has any.
Wow. Just a minute in to this talk, and she is lying. When the name Shakespeare was mentioned during the time the man from Stratford was alive, there is in fact no evidence the reference was to that individual. The reference was to “the author”. Where is there any evidence this man was a writer, or even literate?
No chance of these Anti-Stratford types cutting themselves on Occam's Razor is there. In the end though we know the real reasons "I refuse to believe a mere commoner can write such works" or "He must've been from some fancy town like Oxford. I'm from Oxford." Oh and Derek Jacobi is a bloody disgrace, he should be ashamed of himself.
I'm from Baltimore, and you're full of yourself. You don't have a clue. Please learn something before you project your prejudices in public again. Occam's razor refers to the simplest explanation that explains ALL the facts, not just those you've cherry picked to consider because you don't even know that the other facts exist, because you are merely operating on a general cultural prejudice, the origins of which you've never been asked to consider. Not any more.
@@rstritmatter Maybe make a point? I'd also be very interested to learn why apparently being from Baltimore makes you somehow an added authority to speak on me being 'full of myself'. Cretin.
@@williamarthurfenton1496 I made my point. You are speaking on a subject you don't know anything about. You haven't investigated it, you haven't read any of the books and articles of the people you presume to criticize: you are, in fact, just blowing your mouth off on the internet. Now's your chance to prove me wrong. What specific objections do you make against Looney, Ogburn, Anderson, et alia. pick your example from one of the ten thousand books and articles in James' Warren's 4th edition Index to Oxfordian Publications (2017). Let's talk details here. What is wrong with those books? Prove to us you've read even one of them enough to understand the argument. If you can, we have something to talk about; otherwise, I rest my case.
@@rstritmatter .. and you are just a faceless nobody on UA-cam just as I am to you. What, you think I'm going to have a full debate with someone in the comments section? Fringe movement loon-groups are obvious, and they're not always inarticulate baseball wearing yobs who think the moon is a hologram. That's my answer. People who make evidence fit a previously made conclusion. Now, if you would've started with one actual argument of substance instead of 'clever me I've read some books that support my beliefs' you might have done better. You can't prove it either smart arse.
This woman seems to be completely ignorant of the subject about which she is speaking. Her ignorance whether deliberate or innocent only adds weight to those who suggest an alternate author.
Considering that she did her doctoral research on early modern printing and has published extensively on early modern plays, especially focusing on performance, I'm kind of doubting that she's ignorant of her subject matter. And if you're suggesting that she's ignorant of arguments of the caliber of "Edward de Vere must have written _Hamlet_ because he was captured by pirates and there are pirates in _Hamlet_ ", I don't think she's ignorant of those either, much as she might wish she were. Anti-Shakespearians are the Jehovah's Witnesses of early modernism and extremely annoying in their willingness to proselytize. Could you suggest any _specifics_ of things she might not know, and why they're _relevant_ to the issue? Also, even if she were as ignorant as you claim, why on earth should that "only add weight to those who suggest an alternate author"? Her ignorance isn't evidence. The world doesn't work like that. If someone supporting a round earth makes a bad argument for it, the earth doesn't immediately become flat pending the presentation of a better case. Likewise, if William Shakespeare wrote the canonical plays and poems, then he still wrote them regardless of the quality of this presentation. All of the documentary evidence that supported his authorship still supported his authorship during Dr. Tribble's talk. All of the contemporaries who spoke on the subject still universally affirmed he was an author during her talk. And the _complete absence_ of any contemporary documentary evidence or testimony for any other authorship candidate didn't suddenly blossom into a cache of newly discovered documents while she was speaking either.
Well, she spends almost all her time talking about the works (because, clearly that's her field of expertise and I don't doubt that) and pointing out how often the name William Shakespeare is attributed to the works. Everyone knows that William Shakespeare wrote the works, he must have his name is all over them, that's agreed. The question is, who was William Shakespeare and that is something she scarcely touches on given the extraordinary amount of questions that are unanswered on this exact subject. There is so much written and talked about on this subject that it would be absurdly redundant for me to write it out here in a UA-cam comment. What I will say is that I am 60 and I've liked the works of Shakespeare for as long as I can remember. I still have my Rex Library copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare that lives next to my bed, as it has since I was a child, and I read from it regularly. I'm looking at it right now. And I have, for all but the last couple of years of my life, always dismissed questions of authorship out of hand as a silly question to even ask. But then a couple of years ago I had a chat with a person who I acknowledge as being much smarter than me and he pointed out why he thinks there is a question as to who William Shakespeare might have been. Things I had never heard, so that started me looking for myself. What I found is that there is no more evidence that the works where penned by the man from Stratford upon Avon as there is that they were penned by a number of other people. So, to use the vernacular, I have no dog in this fight. I watched this video, as I have been looking at whatever I can find, hoping to hear some piece of evidence that conclusively proves who William Shakespeare was and put an end to the whole thing. Instead she doesn't address any of the vast lines of questions that are out there and that's what I mean by her not knowing the subject, she doesn't go through all, or for that matter any, of the questions and address why they are false. She skims across a few things but doesn't get into any of the nitty gritty facts of what can and can't be proved. And I would suggest that she avoids that as do all people in her position because if she did she would have to admit that we simply don't know the answer. The title of her video "Why Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.....", I guess give her an out because no one questions that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, like I said, his name is on the book, what I was hoping she would get into was, who was William Shakespeare? What I would suggest to you is to look into the subject with a fresh, open mind. Let go of any emotional attachment to one side or the other and just look at the facts. Don't just read one or two articles, or five or ten for that matter, really get your teeth into anything and everything you can find and apply to it an unbiased mind. Toss it around in your head for a while, as I have and I wouldn't mind betting we will both end up at the same place. In closing I'll just say that, life being as it is, my revels are nearly ended and soon I will have my sleep so if you reply to this and I don't respond it's not through a lack of interest it will be because my brief candle is out.
@@Hansca Okay, so you assert that there is no more evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works than there is for any alternative authorship candidate. Well, let's examine if that's actually true. We can start at the First Folio. You accept that the works are attributed to William Shakespeare. You could hardly do less given that the official title of the First Folio is _Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies_ . But that's not the only thing that the First Folio tells us. It also tells us that William Shakespeare was an actor. His name heads the list of "The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes". He's put in pride of place over the leading actor, Richard Burbage, thus implying that Shakespeare's role was something pretty substantial. What other thing could it be than that the actor was also the author of the plays? Incidentally, Shakespeare is also mentioned in two cast lists in the 1616 folio edition of Ben Jonson's _Workes_ as having performed in _Every Man in His Humour_ and _Sejanus His Fall_ . Elsewhere in the dedicatory epistle to the Herbert brothers, John Heminges and Henry Condell wrote that their purpose in publishing the works was "onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our S H A K E S P E A R E, by humble offer of his playes". So here we have the affirmation that John Heminges and Henry Condell were "fellows" (i.e. fellow actors) of Shakespeare, who was also the author of the plays in the First Folio, and likewise their names appear in the list of actors as well as in the plays performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men in Ben Jonson's _Works_ . We can also tell that William Shakespeare of Stratford knew Heminges, Condell, and Richard Burbage because they're all mentioned in his will, and they and Shakespeare are all mentioned in the will of Augustine Phillips, a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men who predeceased William Shakespeare. John Heminges was also named as the trustee in the deal to acquire the Blackfriars gatehouse, and after Shakespeare's death he transferred the property to the Stratford Shakespeare's eldest daughter, Susanna Hall. Nor do we have to go outside of the First Folio for evidence about Shakespeare's home town. Ben Jonson (who knew Shakespeare personally, as we've seen by the fact that Shakespeare performed in the premiere productions of two of his plays, aside from the relationship they must have had as two playwrights in the relatively small Bankside theatre community) called William Shakespeare the "Sweet Swan of Avon". Leonard Digges was even more specific by referring to "thy Stratford Moniment [monument]" in his poem dedicated to "the deceased Authour Maister W. Shakespeare". Digges was a fellow Stratfordian and a family friend, being the step-son of Thomas Russell, who was named in Shakespeare's will as one of his two "overseers" (executors). We also have Digges' comments on the flyleaf of James Mabbe's copy of Lope de Vega's _Rimas_ asserting that Lope de Vega had a reputation for Spain for his sonnets that was equivalent to Shakespeare's reputation in England for his. Therefore, Digges knew the Stratford Shakespeare personally and knew him to be an author. Digges also contributed a very lengthy commendatory poem in the edition of Shakespeare's collected poems that was published in 1640. It mentions several of Shakespeare's plays by their characters, mentions the theatres the King's Men played in as well as the name of the troupe, and in general links all the elements of Shakespeare's life that anti-Shakespearians attempt so desperately to keep apart. The monument to which Digges referred is still in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. It depicts Shakespeare as holding a quill pen with a piece of paper in front of him, and in the regulation subfusc of a scholar. It also likens him in a Latin passage to a "Virgil for art" ("arte Maronem"-Maro was Virgil's cognomen, Publius Vergilius Maro) and saying in an English inscription that "all that he hath writ | Leaves living art but page to serve his wit". Here, too, the evidence is clear that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was a writer. In addition to Leonard Digges, at least three other people saw Shakespeare's monument in the 17th century and left extant accounts of it: John Weever by 1619, Lieutenant Hammond in 1634, and William Dugdale by 1649. Weever was researching a book called _Ancient Funeral Monuments_ and therefore, in addition to writing down that the memorial honored "William Shakespeare the famous poet", he copied down the inscription on the monument and the one on his gravestone. So we can see in his copy that the stuff about Shakespeare being a Virgil for art and "all that he hath writ" was there from the beginning. Lieutenant Hammond wrote that he had seen "[a] neat Monument of that famous English Poet, Mr Wm Shakespeere; who was borne heere." So the famous English Poet was born in Stratford-upon-Avon. Dugdale also copied the inscription on the monument exactly and in his _Antiquities of Warwickshire_ wrote "One thing more, in reference to this antient Town, is observable, that it gave birth and sepulture [burial] to our late famous Poet Will. Shakespere, whose Monument I have inserted in my discourse of the Church." So William Shakespeare, the famous poet, was born and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, and his burial place is in Holy Trinity Church where his monument refers to "all that he hath writ" and likens him to Virgil. Nor have we exhausted the evidentiary possibilities of the First Folio. There's one more piece of evidence that shows Shakespeare was born in Stratford: the title. Remember it's _Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies_ . But "Mr." wasn't used at the time in the same indiscriminate way it is now. It was a signifier of gentlemanly status. William Shakespeare was a gentleman by the grant of a coat of arms in 1596 to his father, John, for his civic duties in Stratford-upon-Avon. During his father's lifetime, he was the only William Shakespeare and then the only Shakespeare entitled to the appellation of gentleman or to be addressed as "M.", "Mr.", "Master", or "Maister". The Folio addresses Shakespeare at various points in all of these ways. Every time you see a mention of M. or Mr. William Shakespeare or William Shakespeare, gentleman, it's a direct indication that the man being talked about was the one from Stratford with a coat of arms. So, for example, when John Stow's _Annals_ includes a passage about ""Our moderne, and present excellent Poets which worthely florish in their owne workes, and all of them in my owne knowledge liued togeather in this Queenes raigne, according to their priorities [i.e., according to their social rank] as neere as I could, I haue orderly set downe" and then places in the middle of this list "M. Willi. Shakespeare, gentleman" (below the knights and esquires, but above the men of no rank), we can be certain that it is the Stratford William Shakespeare who was referred to as one of the "excellent Poets". Incidentally, strengthening this identification is the controversy that blew up when the York Herald, Ralph Brooke, complained that unworthy persons were being raised to distinction by being given coats of arms. Among them, he sketched the Shakespeare coat of arms and appended the rather snide note "Shakespeare the player [actor] by Garter". So Shakespeare the actor was the man with the coat of arms, and the man with the coat of arms and therefore entitled to the appellation of "gentleman" and who is listed as an actor in the First Folio was the one who wrote the plays. Moreover, that's not the end of it. Because the objections of Peter Brooke didn't carry the day. They were opposed by William Dethick at the College of Arms and by the Clarenceux King of Arms, William Camden. Shakespeare's grant of arms was defended in particular with reference to John Shakespeare's work as a magistrate and because John Shakespeare married into the noble Arden family. Mary Arden was William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon's mother. And, by a neat coincidence, William Camden also wrote _Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine_ in which he named "William Shakespeare" as one of the "most pregnant witts of these our times, whom succeeding ages my iustly admire." So Camden knew all about Shakespeare's antecedents, knew that he was from Stratford, knew his father was a magistrate and local political figure, knew his mother was an Arden, because all these things were mentioned in the defense of the grant of arms, and he praised him as a literary figure along with names like Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, George Chapman (of Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" fame), etc.
Part 2: I've gone on at length, but I could have made this comment five times longer. I haven't even mentioned the first contemporary testimony I ever saw, which was when I read the epistle to the reader prefacing John Webster's _The White Devil_ in _Elizabethan Plays_ edited by Hazelton Spencer, first read at the age of 13. Webster also almost certainly knew Shakespeare because he'd been working in the theatre since at least 1602 and, after a disappointing run of _The White Devil_ at the Red Bull Theatre performed by the Queen Anne's Men, he entrusted his second solo-authored tragedy (and my favorite non-Shakespearian play of the early modern era) _The Duchess of Malfi_ to the King's Men while Shakespeare was still writing plays for them. Shakespeare's last was _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ written in 1613 at the earliest because it contains a masque borrowed from Francis Beaumont's _The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn_ , which was first performed in February 1613 at the marriage celebrations of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V, Elector-Palatine of the Rhine. By the way, the title page of the first quarto of _Kinsmen_ styles Shakespeare as "Mr. William Shakspeare, gent." Webster certainly would, after the first fiasco, have at least gone to theatre and made sure the King's Men were a good fit for his play. The fact that I can't cover it all in a single message is a metric of how much evidence there is that Shakespeare was an author. Is there even _anything_ close to this level of contemporary documentary evidence for any other authorship candidate? I think if you're frank, you'll have to admit that the answer is "no". In fact, there is no documentary evidence that says that anybody else wrote the works, with the exception of one co-authorship credit on the aforementioned _Two Noble Kinsmen_ , which also attributes it to John Fletcher. But co-authorship doesn't deny Shakespeare having any hand in his own works. Rather, you can only be a co-author if you are, in fact, an author. So if there are no title pages, no Stationers' Register entries, no Master of the Revels' Accounts entries, then did anyone say someone else had written Shakespeare's works instead of him? No, not that either. Instead, _every_ contemporary who commented on the subject affirmed that William Shakespeare was an author. And this is the evidence you'd like me to dismiss out of hand. Sorry, not until you can come up with a very good and substantial reason for disregarding it. Also, I don't have an "emotional attachment". What I have is contemporary documentary evidence. Gobs and gobs of it. And until the Shakespeare-deniers come up with evidence that is _just as good_ , then there is truly nothing to consider. This is not my first rodeo. I cut my teeth on Shakespeare authorship denial back when I was in my teens and twenties, participating on humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare on Usenet. I didn't want to, but the group was overrun with authorship debates, so even those of us who just wanted to talk about Shakespeare and other early modern literary figures couldn't get away from reading about authorship. In my time there, I saw every denialist point raised and then razed to the nth degree. So I won't be reading anything else because I know I've already heard it. It is incredibly unlikely that anything you've read presents anything other than arguments that I've long since seen demolished. Unless you personally have made the literary discovery of the millennium and found contemporary documentary evidence overturning Shakespeare's authorship, then I already know what they have to say. Yes, _Hamlet_ has pirates in it and Edward de Vere was robbed by pirates, but that doesn't mean that only he could have written _Hamlet_ . Arguments of that quality aren't evidence, and they aren't even good speculation.
It is strange that the defenders of the Stratford man always convince me more that he was not the author than all those heretics arguing for somebody else.
We have evidence that Shakespeare wrote the plays,we have evidence that Shakespeare didn't write the plays. What we don't have is proof for either case.
Depends on your definition of "proof". Oh, and please present a single contemporaneous document which states that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays.
@@dirremoire Watch me. John Stow, the man who literally wrote the book on London, wrote: "Our moderne, and present excellent Poets which worthely flourish in their owne workes, and all of them in my owne knowledge lived togeather in this Queenes raigne, according to their priorities as neere as I could, I have orderly set downe (viz) George Gascoigne Esquire, Thomas Church-yard Esquire, sir Edward Dyer Knight, Edmond Spenser Esquire, sir Philip Sidney Knight, Sir Iohn Harrington Knight, Sir Thomas Challoner Knight, Sir Francis Bacon Knight, Sir Iohn Dauie Knight, Master Iohn Lillie gentleman, Maister George Chapman gentleman, M. W. Warner gentleman, M. Willi. Shakespeare gentleman, Samuell Daniell Esquire..." There was only one William Shakespeare who was entitled to be styled a gentleman. That was the the one from Stratford. Now go ahead and try to heap caveats on the evidence so you can pretend it doesn't exist.
@@Jeffhowardmeade Ah, you play the game of all those whose income depends on Mr Shakspare. You know, the guy who never signed his name "Shakespeare". And, if Shakespeare was by far the greatest, why would his name be next to last on that list?
@@dirremoire I'm a retired police officer from California. The only financial interest I have in Shakespeare is paying for books and theater tickets. And Shakespeare wasn't considered "the greatest" in his own time. He was a bankside poet. He didn't become the "God of our idolatry" until 150 years after he died. And when he applied for that coat of arms so he could call himself a gentleman, he spelled the name "Shakespeare".
Jan 17,2021 I have recently watched and listened to the arguments advanced by the Baconists and the Oxfordians. W while I think the oxfords have the stronger case given that oxfords life experiences connect to the content of the plays etc, the baconians have much to support their position . What is in my opinion as a 74 year old practicing lawyer and student of history and this era in particular , is that based on any view of the evidence , the plays were not written by Shakespeare . The argument presented in this lecture reminds me of my partner who stood before the jury with a similarly hopeless argument . He flatly repeated his clients fantastical story and then whipped out Ripleys Believe it or Not . The jury said “Not” Had the lecture done the same, she may have had the basis for a few yeses . It is very late so forgive my grammatical errors etc . Was the argument that the grammar schools and sermons were so improved that this is how he learned the skills he honed to write the plays . Best I think to say one choose to believe it was Shakespeare than make arguments that should best be made by a lawyer . But then , Shakespeare could piick up legal and medical knowledge from hearsay and just put it in the plays . If he could read , he could easily do all that it is late
@@unclesham5507 They weren't all illiterate. Susanna Hall signed her name. We have the document she signed along with her daughter (Shakespeare's granddaughter). But even if they were illiterate, what's that do with Shakespeare? He lived in London most of the year and barely ever saw his children back in Stratford. Besides which, his surviving children were both women and female literacy-though it was improving-still wasn't deemed as important. At worst, it would simply make Shakespeare a man of his times. It doesn't provide sufficient evidence to overturn all the documentary evidence showing that Shakespeare wrote his works.
@@Nullifidian I think it's fairly a safe assumption that any father would love their children and only want the absolute best for them which at that time would certainly include literacy, and certainly more so for women. especially say if your father was a noted author. Distance being a factor as you stated (which is correct) well, I don't know about you but I'd be writing back to the family regularly. Wouldn't you?
@@unclesham5507 I think that making arguments that are purely assumptive, particularly when about the distant past, is a terrible way of approaching the subject. It's not for us to tell the past what it was; it's for us to accept the past as it was. As for writing back to the family often, no I wouldn't, given the difficulties with maintaining a frequent correspondence. Once again, you're letting anachronistic assumptions based on contemporary experience mislead you about the early modern era. In this case, you're tacitly assuming a postal service. The only postal service then in operation was solely for government use. Anyone who was ordinary middle-class and had a letter to deliver either had to use a messenger, which was expensive, or give it to someone they knew was going where the letter was to be sent, which was chancy. We have a surviving letter from Richard Quiney to William Shakespeare but we have no idea if it was ever delivered. And even if a frequent correspondence is granted, it doesn't follow that letters would survive over 400 years, particularly since the family line died out and New Place, the family home, was demolished in the mid-18th century. That in itself shows how little anybody at the time bought into the Cult of the Author. These notions of authorship and singular genius wouldn't be current until the Romantics, which is why it took until the mid-19th century for anyone to express doubts about Shakespeare's authorship.
I don’t believe Shakespeare wrote the plays - but then again I don’t believe Charlie Chaplin produced and acted in those movies either. Neither was high born enough, right?
The case for authorship is open to all those with open minds. Let us rejoice in the mystery that surrounds these great works and assume that we may never have proof positive for any case. This lady has no idea what she is talking about which is evident in the terror in her eyes. She knows she is treading on dangerous ground with little to protect her from truth. There is little evidence that Will from Stratford did not have the beautiful mind that penned these works nor the education to have covered so many subjects with expertise.
Thanks to the double-negative in your last sentence, which states the converse of what you intended, you're the first Shakespeare authorship denier I've ever seen who has said something wholly accurate. The authorship deniers do indeed strive to prove that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon didn't have the mind that penned the works nor the education to do so, but they've failed all down the line, chiefly because no amount of purely assumptive arguments on their part can erase the fact of his name on quartos and the folio editions of his plays, testimony from all his contemporaries who bothered to speak on the subject saying he was an author, and his name as the author in official records like the Revels Accounts and the Stationers' Register. What they need to do is prove that these attributions are wholly false and present clear documentary evidence justifying assigning them to a wholly different author. Merely speculating about Shakespeare's level of education-especially when none of them appear to know anything about the content of an Elizabethan grammar school education, and when they can't possibly know how much he learned on his own as an adult-won't cut it.
@@Nullifidian I always felt that Shakespeare was a kind of literary Jesus about whom we have absolutely no data except the myths that were fabricated on his behalf. Those whose beliefs are rock solid on either side of the question are own a fool's errand.
@@stephenjablonsky1941 Okay, but unless what you feel comes after and is the result of a considered exploration of all of the available documentary evidence, then it really isn't worth much. I'm by no means inflexible on my position, but my view is that when all the documentary evidence tells us that William Shakespeare wrote the plays, and that all of his contemporaries who wrote on the subject tell us he was an author, and they often identify him by his profession (actor), his social status (gentleman - which itself is a clue to the home town, since the only William Shakespeare entitled to style himself as a gentleman at the time was the one whose father, John, got a coat of arms for his civic duties in Stratford-upon-Avon), and his home town (Stratford), that's more than specific enough to come to a conclusion pending further demonstrations based on _better_ evidence that Shakespeare was _not_ the author. What else do you want? A DNA profile, fingerprints, and an exact Ordnance Survey reference for New Place? Because I don't think you're going to get them.
@@Nullifidian What I do know for sure is that his home town is a kind of literary DisneyWorld and that nothing in the town is real except maybe the ice cream.
@@stephenjablonsky1941 What does that have to do with anything? Plenty of places that have had a famous person who was born or lived there make money off the tourist trade, particularly when they're small enough not to have much else to attract public interest. Are you insinuating that the entirety of _worldwide_ early modern scholarship is being devoted solely to the purpose of keeping up sales of Cornettos to Stratford tourists?
You were one before, let's be honest. Only Shakespeare deniers refer to themselves as "anti-Stratfordian". If you use the terminology, you are obviously _not_ just a previously impartial spectator. And, frankly, if your idea is that the strength of a case rests entirely in _one presentation_ of it rather than in the evidence supporting it, then you've shown that you already reason like a Shakespeare denier, so congratulations on finding your natural level.
He Vorg Nothing whatever to do with "class" distinctions...it's a matter of overwhelming circumstantial evidence for Oxford. Go read Ogburn's Mysterious William Shakespeare for the evidence, circumstantial though it may be, simply "fitting" this nobleman better than the commoner from Stratford. Not snobbery--logic, as in Occam's Razor.
@@willshaw6405 If the evidence is so "overwhelming", why do Oxfordian gatherings book the smallest rooms at the Holiday Inn and still have empty seats? Your "overwhelming" evidence only convinces those few who know nothing else about history or logic, and have no desire to learn more.
I'm working class. I'm probably in the poorest 5% of people in England. My family are all working class, and only a few - from a _very_ large family; my mother has 13 siblings - have even had a university education... I don't believe this guy, from the midlands, wrote these plays.
I thought I could watch her talk but she lied 3 times in the first 60-seconds of her talk that I don't think I can stand to listen to her talk. Maybe "lied" is the wrong word, but her statements go against history and are factually WRONG. #1 Nobody noticed Shakespeare died for SEVEN-years; there never was a funeral celebration such as the one Ben Jonson got or any memoriams celebrating his life. #2 The man she is calling Shakespeare, the Stratford man, had a family of two daughters. Both daughters said their father was not a poet/writer. The Stratford man's parents and children were illiterate. #3 There is no contemporaneous evidence that Stratford man was a writer. Even Sir Stanley Wells, chair of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, admits this fact is true. This is a simple case of mis-attribution. #4 Stratford man bought and sold plays. In this case, he let the real SHAKES-PEARE use his name as an allonym. The Stratford man spelled his name SHAKSPERE. IT MUST OF SEEMED LIKE A SIGN FROM APOLLO that these two men met w/similar last names. In the 18th century, someone nominated Stratford man as the real Shakespeare and the rest is history. Instead of Avon (Hampton Court is where royals watched performances) we ended up w/Stratford-upon-Avon. Simple case of misidentity. #5 Lastly, there is a 1,200 page book of all the people who doubted the authorship question/made reference to it, etc. since the 1500's. It was an open secret among other writers that the man from Stratford WAS NOT THE AUTHOR. That's her BIGGEST LIE! There was doubt immediately.
If nobody noticed that Shakespeare was dead for seven years, why did William Basse and William Davenant write memorial poems about him soon after? Why did they erect a monument comparing him to Virgil soon after he died? Strange way of not noticing him! 2. Neither daughter ever said anything about Shakespeare like what you claim. I don't know where you got that one from, but it's a total lie. 3. There as a huge amount of contemporary evidence that William Shakespeare, the gentleman and actor from Stratford, was a writer. Again, not sure who told you that whopper. Neither has Stanley Wells said anything like what you claim. 4. There is no evidence at all that Shakespeare ever bought plays, though he certainly sold the ones he wrote. You must keep pulling stuff out of your butt. The College of Heralds spelled his name Shakespeare, and a lot of people spelled it many different ways. Nothing in English was spelled consistently in that era. Hampton Court was not the preferred venue for watching plays, Whitehall was. Hampton Court is where the Royal Family retreated during plague. There isn't a single contemporary reference to Hampton Court being called Avon. There wasn't a single person who ever doubted Shakespeare's authorship before 1847. As with all the other things above, feel free to prove me wrong.
Americans love conspiracy theories; it makes them feel clever. The so-called "Shakespeare Authorship Question" is largely an American phenomenon. The English almost universally think it's stupid.
Andrew B I wish that were true. Alexander Waugh, Ros Barber, and a few others whose names escape me are Brits. They are the shining lights of the "movement" at the moment. We do have a fair number of them over here, but there are far more of us as well, so even a rare mental mutation is going to show up more often here than it will in a smaller country.
Nicholas Ennos If that were true, then nobody in Britain would be teaching Shakespeare as the true author. When all the educated people agree with you, then yours is the dominant paradigm. Q.E.D.
Caius Martius Coriolanus Prior to Copernicus, flat-earth theory was the prevailing "dominant paradigm". Same for plate-techtonic shifting continent theory.. Ditto Newtonian physics. Dominant paradigms are often wrong. Q.E.Nihil.
@@willshaw6405 Dominant paradigms are only overturned by superior evidence. Copernicus offered that. What do you have to offer besides bad Latin translations, mangled history, and whackadoodle codes?
Caius Martius Coriolanus Too much to offer to go into here. Go read Ogburn's magnum opus Mysterious William Shakespeare, and watch Tom Regnier's lectures right here on UA-cam. One bit of indisputable circumstantial evidence beyond a reasonable doubt is the major influence of Ovid in the Midsummer Nights Dream..a connection even Stratfordians agree upon. The only translation Shakespeare would have had would have been Goldings, who was not only Oxford"s uncle, but living under the same roof with him as he wrote it! If you think that's coincidence....well, you probably believe that someone whose DNA was other than OJ's murdered the two folks at Bundy.
Kudos to Prof. Tribble. I have seen many, but hers is the finest presentation yet stating the Stratfordian case. The other side ( whomever they believe the "true" author to be ), it seems to me, can boast no such solid evidence, and their arguments are not only pathetically weak but ultimately delusional.
Aryeh Finklestein You're wrong. There is a mountain of circumstantial evidence for Oxford. Read Ogburn's "Mysterious William Shakespeare" before you shoot off your mouth out of ignorance. Also, search UA-cam for lecture by Tom Regnier.
Caius Martius Coriolanus fact, William Shakspeare had illiterate parents, children and grandchildren. There are six signatures from legal papers written by William. His will never bequeathed a single book. William Shakspeare has no record of attending school at all. No record he ever left England. Francis Bacon on the other hand wrote 'Promus' a catalogue containing many phrases used in the plays of William Shake-speare.
David Russell You don't know whether or not his parents were illiterate. His father, who was a justice of the peace, used a symbol of his trade and his mother used a seal. Both were common methods of signing a document in their generation, even by people who could write. Adrian Quiney, father of Richard Quiney (who wrote a letter TO the supposedly illiterate Shakespeare) wrote a letter to his son and signed it with such a symbol. Shakespeare's son died at age 11. You have no knowledge whatsoever as to his level of education. His older daughter was demonstrably literate, both from her signature and from an anecdote related by a physician who published her late husband's medical casebook. Shakespeare's younger daughter was probably illiterate, though she also didn't marry until 32 and that was to a gold digger who Shakespeare cut out of his will. She may have been simple. His granddaughter was LADY Barnard. She was demonstrably literate as well. Were she not, as the daughter of the Oxford-educated Dr. John Hall, it would say something about her father rather than about her grandfather. So tell me, did university-educated physicians marry illiterate women and raise illiterate daughters? Would Elizabeth Nash Barnard's first husband, Lincoln's Inn-educated barrister Thomas Nash, have married an illiterate? Would her second husband, MP and knight John Barnard, have done so? Shakespeare's will, as wills always do, only mentions special bequests. They are not an inventory of property, which would have been conducted after Shakespeare's death. One does not mention things in a will because they are "special". One mentions them because one wishes them to go to someone besides the residuary legetee, in this case, Dr. John Hall. There ARE six surviving signatures by Shakespeare, which seems a silly thing if he was illiterate. They are in a script known as "secretary hand", which was used by scribes. Even if he were faking it, why would he use THAT script? We have two letters and one masque written by Ben Jonson, who was much better known in his day than Shakespeare. The letters exist only because he wrote them to government officials to beg his way out of jail. No personal letters from him survive. Nobody from Stratford prior to 1800 has a documented education. Not Adrian Quiney, not his son Richard who in 1598 wrote Shakespeare a letter, not his grandson who, at age 11, wrote his father a letter in LATIN. Not Richard Field, a Stratford tanner's son who became a successful London printer and who printed everything Shakespeare ever wrote specifically for publication. There's also no evidence that bricklayer's son Ben Jonson attended school, by the way. The question you should be asking is whether or not the wealthy mayor of Stratford would send his sons to the school for which he, as an alderman, was already paying. Also, Shakespeare was an actor. It would be impossible for him to be an actor were he illiterate. You Anti-Strats have this weird idea that the English Rennaissance was like the Middle Ages, where everyone who wasn't a knight ran around behind their masters' horses banging coconut haves together. One of the results of the Protestant Reformation was widespread literacy. Not only would it have been impossible for Shakespeare to have passed himself off as a poet, were he illiterate, his whole life as an English gentleman would have been impossible. So to sum up, your facts are bullshit.
David Russell And Bacon's Promus of Formularies is undated, as a member of the court, he would have been on hand to see Shakespeare's plays, and most of the aphorisms found in both Promus and in Shakespeare's plays were lifted by both of them from earlier writers.
They are different, because Shakespeare abbreviated his name differently using recognized scrivener's conventions like a macron (horizontal line) in the final written e in his last name to indicate an abbreviation (a method that is often used in printed texts of the era to indicate omitted letters) and by writing his name as "Willm." or "Wm." Indeed, the latter as an abbreviation for "William" is still with us. And what would you know of what an illiterate person's signatures would look like? If you want to see an illiterate's handwriting, go look up the signature left by Sojourner Truth dated 23 April 1880 (coincidentally the traditional month and day of Shakespeare's birth) in a book owned by Hattie Johnson. *THAT* is what someone who has never learned how to form letters makes a signature. Shakespeare's signatures, on the other hand, are perfectly fluid and readable signatures in the secretary hand script. It is that fact and only that fact that makes them difficult to read today-because we don't use secretary hand anymore. Italic script took over from secretary hand and eventually became our modern cursive. However, for anyone who has studied the script itself-or, like me, is used to reading German black letter script, which is the root from whence secretary hand derives-the signatures are entirely legible. The converse requires believing that an illiterate man, instead of forming his signatures one way-by rote according to the way he was taught-would incorporate commonplace abbreviations and abbreviation markers and use a script that one had to be trained to write in, and that this illiterate man managed to fool people for more than twenty years that he was the author of the plays and poems credited to him and that he somehow managed to become a fellow sharer and householder in a London theatre company despite being unable to read his own scripts or anyone else's, when the only way actors learned their lines was through cue scripts (also known as "sides" in theatrical parlance). Yeah. Sure.
Straw man right off the bat. The Oxfordians do NOT argue that a person called Shake-speare did not exist, they do not view that person as the author and claim Shakespeare was a pseudonym for a nobleman, namely the Earl of Oxford. They make a stunningly strong case.
If you're claiming that "William Shakespeare" was a pseudonym, then you are in fact claiming he didn't exist because when you use a real person's identity for your pen name it's no longer a pseudonym but an allonym. And it's an important distinction because there are no examples of allonyms being used in the early modern era, least of all for more than twenty years among a group as small and interlinked as the Bankside theatre community.
The deception would have been punctured as soon as Richard Burbage (or the Master of the Revels) demanded a rewrite. What was Shakespeare supposed to do in that case? Say he needed to go out for a cigarette break and ride hell-for-leather to Hedingham Castle? And seven days later, when the company decided that this cigarette break was starting to draw on a bit too long, he reappears with fresh manuscript papers that are obviously not in his handwriting, since Shakespeare wrote in a secretary hand and de Vere wrote in Italic script? The idea is absurd.
exactly.
Exactly
@@Nullifidian Elizabeth and the Master of revels knew Oxford was writing the plays because up to until 1583 the Master of Revels received 1000 pounds per year but that payment was halted and afterward Oxford was given 1000 pounds per year.
@@foofighter5509 "Elizabeth and the Master of revels knew Oxford was writing the plays because up to until 1583 the Master of Revels received 1000 pounds per year but that payment was halted and afterward Oxford was given 1000 pounds per year."
This is pure fantasy. The £1,000 annuity to Oxford was a welfare check to prevent him from being in utter penury since he'd blown through all of his revenue-generating properties (the warrant speaks of him being "relieved" from his financial embarrassments). The annuity wasn't granted until 26 June 1586 (though it was made retroactive to the previous Annunciation Day, 25 March 1586), so what do you imagine happened to the money for the three years between the alleged cessation of payments to the Master of the Revels and Oxford's annuity being approved by Elizabeth?
There's no connection to these two facts-if one of them is indeed a fact, though I can't find any confirmation of it independently of Shakespeare denalist sites-other than the coincidental figure. And it might not even a be as little as a coincidence; it might well be just a lie that gets endlessly recycled because nobody bothers to verify anything in the Shakespeare denialist community as long as it supports their narrative.
And if everyone knew that he was already the author, even though he didn't have either the talent or the motivation to write Shakespeare's works and he died a decade before Shakespeare stopped writing, why didn't anyone bother to say so at the time, or why wasn't Oxford's name put on the published works? Regardless of whether William Shakespeare is assumed to be a pen name and the identity with the actor just a coincidence-even though multiple contemporaries who knew the actor also called him a writer-or if William Shakespeare was supposed to be a front man, there's the insurmountable problem of the fact that William Shakespeare's name was first appended to two narrative poems, not plays. Poetry was a perfectly acceptable pastime for courtiers, recommended as one of the skills of the ideal courtier in Baldessare Castiglione's _The Book of the Courtier_ , and Oxford had already published his own poetry, even shoving it into Thomas Bedingfield's translation of _Cardanus Comforte_ as a means of getting published. He clearly had no problem being known as a poet. But now all of a sudden he becomes reticent, even though a poem as a good as _Venus and Adonis_ prefaced with a fulsome and humble dedication to Her Majesty could have been the means to advancement at court and monetary rewards that he was spending the 1590s pursuing by other means, chiefly by begging for concessions on Devonshire and Cornish tin, a monopoly on sweet wine, etc., etc., etc.
Moreover, the plays didn't start to be published under Shakespeare's name until 1598, even though they were published anonymously from 1594. So what happened? Did Edward de Vere slip on spilled type on his way out the print shop door, having just dropped of _Lucrece_ for publication, and then hit his head and suffered an amnesic fit during which he forgot all about his pen name or front man scheme for the next four years?
And then when coming to himself, he didn't immediately make sure that *ALL* of the anonymously published plays had Shakespeare's name on them. He allowed _Titus Andronicus_ to remain uncredited until the 1623 First Folio, _Romeo and Juliet_ to remain uncredited until a 1622 quarto, and _2 & 3 Henry VI_ to remain uncredited until the 1619 False Folio (when they were published in a conflated form as _The Whole of the Contention_ ).
Plus, he didn't make sure that *ALL* of his works were published in authoritative quarto editions, which were the accepted format for publication of plays and poems when he was alive. Instead, he allowed 18 of his plays to go unpublished until the 1623 First Folio, and his sonnet sequence to also be published posthumously (from an Oxfordian perspective) in 1609. Moreover, many of the quartos that were published were in various stages of corruption. Having gone through the trouble of either inventing a pen name or coming up with a front man _expressly_ for the purpose of publishing his works, why wasn't he more careful about how they were published?
None of this makes any sense. And it makes less sense when you add in the theatrical context. Shakespeare's turn to romance and tragicomedy at the end of his career was motivated by the King's Men's taking over the Blackfriars Theatre, which had an established audience with defined preferences for what kind of plays they liked. Moreover, the later plays show act divisions that are organic and not imposed on an act-free structure, because they needed time in between acts to trim the wicks and replace burnt-out candles. All fight scenes disappear from the later plays, even when they're the most important events, like at the climax of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ (a figure keeps on popping up like a jack-in-the-box to report on how the joust between Palamon and Arcite is going-an absurd solution that only highlights how constrained the authors were) because people paid extra to sit on stools on the stage in this indoor theatres, so a misplaced thrust of a sword might spear a peer. More spectacular scenic effects were possible, like Jupiter descending in his chariot in _Cymbeline_ . And all of the cues for loud music (like when Richard III calls for drums and trumpets to drown out the scolding Duchess of York) disappear because the theatre was in the liberties inside the city, and they'd already had trouble in the 1590s when they wanted to buy the property and the neighbors objected. So they couldn't have loud music without antagonizing people, so all the music cues changed to "soft music".
And I also mentioned the "authors"-plural-of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ . John Fletcher co-authored that play, but he had no experience as a writer prior to _The Woman-Hater_ (1607) co-authored with Francis Beaumont. Another of Shakespeare's co-authors was George Wilkins, a man whom Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon knew personally because he was the landlord of Stephen Bellot and Marie Mountjoy and was called to testify in _Bellot v. Mountjoy_ along with Shakespeare. Wilkins' literary career was very short-lived, only covering the three years between 1606-1608. I don't think either of them were much interesting in collaborating with a dead man.
Another thing about the Fletcher-Shakespeare collaborations is that they can *ALL* be dated to after de Vere's death. The lost play of _Cardenio_ , which survives in the adaptation of Lewis Theobald titled _Double Falsehood_ , and which was attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare in the 1653 Stationers' Register entry by Humphrey Mosley, is based on an episode in the First Part of _Don Quixote_ by Miguel de Cervantes, which wasn't published *ANYWHERE* before 1605 and not before 1612 in the English translation by Thomas Shelton. _Henry VIII_ was described as a new play when a squib from a cannon burned down the Globe Theatre, and Archbishop Cranmer's prophecy not only predicts their reign of James I and VI but the origin of English colonialism at Jamestown ("Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, | His honour and the greatness of his name | Shall be, and make new nations"), which wasn't founded until 1607. And _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ contains an anti-masque of rustics adapted from Francis Beaumont's _The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn_ , which was written for the wedding celebrations of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V, Elector-Palatine of the Rhine in February 1613 and published later the same year. Consequently, the play can't date earlier than its source material.
It's frustrating to me that Stratfordians spend so little time on the evidence that their man wrote the plays, and so much time explaining why there is so little evidence. This lecture is quintessential example.
That is annoying, because there really is a lot of evidence. Heaps of it. Of course, Anti-Strats don't want to hear about all of that. They only care about the parts that are missing.
OK. But why post lectures that contain sentences like "So, we don't have evidence that Shakespeare was involved with the company, but I rather think he was." ? Why waste time with statements like that? Why not get to the heaps of, you know, the evidence they DO have?
Jim O'Sullivan I'll need some context on that statement. Can you give me a time stamp? I'm sure she's not referring to The Lord Chamberlain's/King's Men, because he's very well connected to them. Was she talking about some of the companies that performed his plays early on?
Yes..she was referring to the Queen's Men, when they visited Stratford at a time when Shakespeare was young. Not the King's, or Lord Chamberlain's, Men.
What evidence? What evidence do you have that the Shakspere of Straford wrote the plays and poems. Heaps, I imagine. Heaps and gobbledy-tonnes. @@Jeffhowardmeade
So the reaction to 'Shakspere did not write Shakespeare' is to prove firstly Shakspere existed? That is not in contention. Proceeding with how expensive paper was and that he learned his craft in school (of which there is no attendance record). All the while ignoring the sound arguments of the anti-Stratfordians. Not very convincing.
Oh, did she really argue that Shakespeare was not as good as people think to explain that the grammar school education was enough?
What "sound arguments of the Anti-Stratfordians"?
Conflating the birth name "Guilielmus Shakspere" with the obvious pen name "Will Shake-speare" is not proof of anything.
It's like if we didn't know that Sam Clemens wrote as "Mark Twain" and then started saying that Shania Twain must be related to the author of "Huckleberry Finn". And when challenged on that random leap of logic, we point to the name "Mark Twain" being printed on early 2nd or 3rd printings and declare victory -- "The case is overwhelming" (?)
Yes, the case IS overwhelming, and it looks nothing like your third grade example.
St Albans is mentioned 15 times in Shakespeare's plays. Stratford-upon-Avon
is mentioned not once.
I guess you haven't read The Taming of the Shrew.
@@Jeffhowardmeade Can you give me an example of where "Stratford" is mentioned.
@@PanchoChiekrie "What, would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton-heath, by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not."
Burton on the Heath is a village about 15 miles south of Stratford Upon Avon. Wilmcot is 4 miles northwest. Shakespeare's mother came from there. There was a Hackett family living there during Shakespeare's youth.
There are other examples. In Henry V the are two opposing characters named Bardolph and Flluelen. On a list of men of Stratford who were believed to not come to church for fear of being arrested for debt, we find William Flluelen and George Bardolph. Oh, and John Shakespeare, Will's father.
shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/file/details/529
One that is by no means definitive but I like it, is the Merry Wives of Windsor, where a Welsh schoolmaster quizzes a dull young pupil on his Latin. The boy's name is Will. When Shakespeare was that age, the schoolmaster in Stratford was a Welshman named Thomas Jenkins.
Probably the most obvious connection to Stratford (aside from all the people who said Shakespeare was from Stratford) was a character he named Ophelia. In 1579, a Stratford woman drowned in the Avon. The coroner held an inquest to determine whether or not the woman killed herself, precisely as happened to Ophelia. The verdict was "accident" and she was buried on holy ground. Her name was Katherine Hamlett.
@@PanchoChiekrie Oh, and Bacon became Viscount St. Alban in 1621, five years after Shakespeare died, and was later buried there. What association did Bacon have with St. Alban during Shakespeare's lifetime?
@@Jeffhowardmeade Thanks for that but Wilmcote is On-Avon not Upon-Avon so your comment doesn't invalidate my initial statement. Yes, you could argue that is quite contrary but no more than some if not many of the suppositions within the Stratfordian case and infact quite less if you look into it. In terms of literally statistical analysis it does strike me as some what queer that's all. I wasn't really alluding to Bacon in my "Claim" but I don't discount completly Stratfordians or Baconist' I just believe there is a question of authorship. I'm curious, are you aware of Is Shakespear Dead? by Mark Twain? I think you may find it interesting.
I think that the real author of the plays was Lee Harvey Oswald.
No, Hinckley wrote them.
@zeerust2000 About ten minutes before finding your comment, I was wondering if there was another writer hidden behind a grassy knoll...
The first folio is the best evidence (unless you study in depth) because their is no actual written evidence that the man/player from Stratford wrote anything. Unique in this respect. Plays were published under the name but that doesn't provide evidence of the actual writer or writers. This ladies arguement as to why this doesn't matter would not hold up in a court of law. No writer (of value) refers to the writer of the plays as the man from Stratford. Many documents of writers of the time survive. The reference to 'Avon' is vague to say the least and this word has many meanings.
Contemporaries throughout Shakespeare's career and after his death identified him as the man from Stratford. Don't know how you missed it, if you've studied the matter at all.
can someone clear up what she pronounced when she said "ability to argue both side"? urtu play partum?
The plays were written by Lord Flasheart of Blackadder.
BACON=33. 33 will enlighten the brother.
Since I've started reading Shakespeare and looking into the authorship question all I read is people arguing about Stratford and oxford. Maybe because I came to Shakespeare in such an unconventional way it makes me not care about the oxford and Stratford debate. To me, it is quite clear that these are not the works of one person. And great literature is not the reason for creating them. The endgame is SOOOOOOOOOO much bigger than that. This was clearly a collaborative effort of the best minds of Europe. People that were not free to practice science and did not have free speech. Anytime I hear an argument for a new author I get excited. I know who the mastermind of the works was but the people who took care of the little details, they left their mark in the works too. Even William Shakespeare made his mark. Whoever he really was and whatever his name really was. Because it was not William Shakespeare. WILL I AM PALLAS ATHENA. The name itself created the same way Father RC's name was. Christain Rosenkreuz. The most laudable Rosy Cross. The Rosicrucian order.
To conceal it from fools the philosophers have shrouded this precious treasure. From which Adam and the other patriarchs have derived their longevity. In strange and obscure words and flowery rhetoric. Very few people in this world therefor know about it. For if such secrets were made public and if godless actions happen as a result of them. Then he would have to answer for them in their first course. And would be severely punished by God for placing holy things before dogs and casting pearls before swine. Truely attaining it is better than all the gold and silver in the world. For what man covets in the temporal world can not compare to it in the slightest. The treasure of all treasures the secret of all secrets.
Starting at 14:31 she cites 4 things, only one of which ties the Globe shareholder Shakspere of Stratford to the plays printed in 1623. She refutes an argument that no one has made -- plays were printed with the name "William Shakespeare" and "W. Shake-speare" during the life of the Stratford man. The best evidence she cites are Ben Jonson's ghost written letters naming Heminges and Condell as friends of the author. Stratford is involved, clearly, in the printing of the 1623 folio, albeit posthumously. But while he was alive he was never paid to write plays, and never referred to as the author of the plays.
However, during Stratford's lifetime other authors were known to have written works printed under the name William Shakespeare. Many false attributions were quickly labeled "apocrypha".The printings of "Passionate Pilgrim" and "Taming of A Shrew" are two prime examples. The idea that "no one in his time doubted his authorship of the plays" is completely at odds with this evidence! This lecture oddly pretends that such controversies did not exist while claiming that the ambiguous insult "upstart crow" can only refer to Shakspere of Stratford.
Nothing in the actual evidence proves that Stratford Shakspere was more than a front man. A real person - yes. A 12% shareholder in the Globe whose share was reduced to 7% - yes. An actor - maybe but an author of great narrative poems, sonnets and plays - no. Given six attempts to write his own name, Stratford Shakspere failed on all of them yet the idea that this clearly illiterate man HAS to be the greatest playwright in English history lives on.
Connecting the works to their most likely author unlocks the meaning and personal references they contain -- this likely is why a front man with a name similar to the pseudonym was used.
Unless you can provide evidence of a pseudonym, then you can't claim it's a pseudonym. It was the name of one of the actors and shareholders of the company, who was identified as the poet on many occasions. The existence of two likely misattributions doesn't change that.
🤣 She completely glossed over one of the strongest arguments that Oxfordians have in that WHERE did Shakespeare learn Latin, Greek, Italian, French? When did Shakespeare travel to Europe and spend time in Italy? How did Shakespeare gain knowledge on astronomy, medicine, law, falconry, history, classic literature, art, naval and military terminology, royal court life? This lady is grasping at straws.
Grammar schools taught Latin and often Greek. That was their purpose as they were literally _grammar_ schools: schools in which students were given a foundation in the Classical languages because all university instruction was delivered in Latin. The King's New School in Stratford-upon-Avon was a free school open to all male children of the town.
Shakespeare's plays show a schoolboy's familiarity with grammar school instruction. Most compellingly, he misquotes Terence's _Eunuchus_ in the same way it was misquoted in the edition of William Lily's grammar that was current when he would have been attending school, he also uses Lily's discussion of number in and Lily's own illustration - _lapis_ , stone - in another play, and in a third he has the barbarian son of the empress of Rome anachronistically recognize a quote from Horace as one he read in the grammar long ago. And from a foundation in Latin, which the grammar school provided, it's easier to read any Romance language, especially when these languages were four hundred years' closer to their common Latin roots. But even today, a background in Latin will give you a boost in reading other Romance languages. I can testify to that personally as an ex-Classics major.
As for the question when did Shakespeare spend time in Europe and Italy, why should he have done? Did John Fletcher need to travel to Moscow to write _The Loyal Subject_ and all the way to the Moluccas to write _The Island Princess_ ? In modern times, does _The Martian_ by Andy Weir entitle us to infer that its author visited the surface of Mars? Italian settings were commonplace in early modern drama, and if Oxfordians would bother to read Shakespeare's contemporaries they would see how standard they were. Unfortunately, it's like pulling teeth to even get them to read Shakespeare-most of them operate on no greater familiarity with the works than they got from high school.
However, Shakespeare might well have traveled to Italy or to Europe in general without leaving any record behind. It's not as if they had customs enforcement and passport controls in this era. Actors often traveled in noblemen's retinues or toured the Continent as performers, and it was even possible to have your travel partly subsidized by speculators-a scheme Puntarvolo in Ben Jonson's _Every Man out of His Humour_ plans to work as a way of "not going entirely upon expense". Unless you were a nobleman, a notable hellraiser, or both, your movements didn't leave a mark on the historical record in this era.
As for Shakespeare's alleged 'knowledge', it needs to be placed in the context of the time and other writers' works examined for their erudition. When you do that, you find that Shakespeare's knowledge was usually nothing special. For example. George W. Keeton, a practicing lawyer and an expert in the history of Chancery courts, examined Shakespeare's alleged knowledge of law and found that he was in the middle of the pack in terms of legal knowledge, neither being the most nor least prolific of those who deployed legal analogies. Keeton did credit Shakespeare with being a keener observer, but since the law is essentially a highly formalized language, it's not surprising that a superb wordsmith would be able to grasp nuances. Also, the areas of law Shakespeare makes most use of for his analogies are the very areas where Shakespeare shows up most in the legal record: as a property owner and someone concerned with the law of wills and inheritance. However, he was still ignorant enough to invent the word "jointress" because he didn't know the legal term "jointrix".
Shakespeare's knowledge of classical literature is actually quite slight. As Caroline Spurgeon showed in _Shakespeare's Imagery_ , 90% of his classical allusions trace back to a single work, Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ , and they're usually the most conventional analogies around. It's only in our ignorant present when people look at you like a savant if you know the difference between Hyperion and Apollo and have ever studied the Classical languages that Shakespeare's 'knowledge' of the classics has come to be overrated. In his own day, he was regarded as being a natural wit. In the words of Francis Beaumont, he asked "from all Learninge keepe these lines as cleare | as Shakespeares best are" and added that Shakespeare's example showed "how farr somtimes a mortall man may goe | by ye dimme light of Nature". Beaumont was the third son of a baronet, went to university (though he left without taking a degree), and entered the Inner Temple. Another indication of how Shakespeare's knowledge was held by his contemporaries comes from _The Return from Parnassus_ , an anonymous comedy written for performance at university, where William Kempe and Richard Burbage, leading actors in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, are presented as characters and Kempe says, "Few of the university [men] pen plays well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, aye and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit." Horace giving the poets a pill is a reference to a scene in Ben Jonson's _Poetaster_ , so this author shows his familiarity with the public theatres of the time, plus he knows - as indicated by the familiar "our fellow" - that William Shakespeare the playwright was a theatrical colleague of Richard Burbage and William Kempe in the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
This message is getting pretty long, so I'll just deal with three more points: medicine, falconry, and royal court life.
First, with medicine, the Oxfordians purport to be astonished that Shakespeare knew the stages of syphilis, but the public outdoor theatres stood in the liberties outside the city along with the taverns, bear-baiting pits, _and_ brothels. Shakespeare only had to look around to become an 'expert' on medicine as the Oxfordians would have it.
With falconry, again a look at Shakespeare's contemporaries will show them using the same kind of analogies that Shakespeare uses to "jesses" and "haggards" and so on. Indeed, Act I, sc. 3 of _A Woman Killed with Kindness_ by Thomas Heywood shows more detailed knowledge of falconry in just this one scene than exists in the entire Shakespeare canon. If Heywood could do it, why not Shakespeare? Moreover, even if Shakespeare's knowledge were demonstrably greater than it is, the language of hawking in general and the language of falconry is identical. Plenty of country people hunted with less pretentious birds than peregrine falcons, such as kestrels. Furthermore, the aristocrats didn't _train_ their own falcons. They left that in the hands of commoners. Oxfordians like to pretend that the class structures of early modern England were so rigid that the aristocracy and the commoners existed in completely separate and isolated bubbles, which is absurd. Finally, there are numerous references in the plays to the low-class poachers' trick of liming: spreading birdlime on twigs to catch hedge-dwelling birds. So this would seem to indicate an author who was a commoner hailing from the country.
Now, on to royal court life. One major feature of royal court life is the antechamber, where people waited to be admitted to the presence chamber. There is only _one_ play that makes dramatic use of the antechamber, and it occurs in a scene that was _not_ written by Shakespeare. In Act V, sc. 2 of _Henry VIII_ , Archbishop Cranmer is snubbed by the Privy Council and forced to wait in an antechamber, but this scene was not written by Shakespeare but by his collaborator John Fletcher. (Incidentally, John Fletcher only got his start in writing _after_ 1604, when Edward de Vere died, and Oxfordians have never explained why Fletcher was interested in collaborating on three plays with a dead man, let alone on one play - _Cardenio_ - that was based on a source not published _anywhere_ until 1605 and not published in English translation until 1612.) In every other Shakespeare play, people just barge in and start speaking to the king. Indeed, in one scene in _3 Henry VI_ , the Yorkists invade the parliamentary presence chamber without opposition and the Duke of York even sits on Henry's throne! Nor have they won the war at this point: Henry VI is still in power, but still Shakespeare thought it not inconsistent with reality to depict the Duke of York entering the parliamentary presence chamber without waiting and sitting on Henry's throne in his absence. That is not the sign of someone who knew much if anything about court life.
Another clear indication about Shakespeare's lack of experience with the nobility comes from the next play in the first tetralogy: _Richard III_ . In it, he has Richard (still Duke of Gloucester at this point) greet one man as three people. Anthony Woodville was the 2nd Earl Rivers, and the subsidiary style of the Earl Rivers was Lord Scales. So what does Shakespeare do? He has Richard greet, in turn, Lord Woodville, Lord Rivers, and Lord Scales. Shakespeare didn't know that the family name could differ from the noble title, nor was he aware of the existence of subsidiary styles. By contrast, the Earl of Oxford's family name was de Vere and his subsidiary styles included Viscount Bulbec, Lord Escales, and Lord Badlesmere. The chance of _him_ getting this wrong is nil. Therefore, _Richard III_ cannot have been written by a member of the nobility.
Where do today’s New Yorkers learn Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese? In New York!! That one was easy. And I agree, that is one of the strongest arguments!! 😂
And one of his early theaters in London was literally in court.
She repeats the incredibly stupid argument that Greene's "Groatsworth of Wit" is about Shakespeare. There is overwhelming evidence that the passage she cites is about the actor, Edward Alleyn, not Shakespeare. Only someone who has not read Greene's pamphlet could believe otherwise.
There's no evidence whatsoever that it's about Alleyn.
There is overwhelming and conclusive evidence that is about Alleyn.
daver8521 I've heard it all, and it's a load of hogwash that hasn't convinced a single person who wasn't already desperate to eliminate an obvious reference to William Shakespeare the actor and writer.
All one needs to do is read "A Groats-Worth of Wit" and evaluate it in light of what is known of it and the time it was written in. We know that Robert Greene wrote the pamphlet in 1592, and that he wrote it to appeal to a general audience. In 1592, Shakespeare was an unknown; his name had never appeared in print, and he had gained no fame as an actor. There is no evidence that he had accumulated any wealth by that date, and he was not a theatre owner. Yet the pamphlet makes it clear that the man Greene is addressing is a wealthy man. In context, it is clear that he is a famous actor and theatre owner. Alleyn fits all these criteria, and the man Shakespeare, none of them. Why would Greene warn the three young men (assumed to be Marlowe, Nashe, and Peele) about Shakespeare? As far as we know, Greene had never met Shakespeare, and at this time Shakespeare was certainly in no position to do any harm to these three men. But Greene had extensive connections with Alleyn, who had grown wealthy acting in and producing Greene's plays. Alleyn was well-known to the public and would be readily recognized by Greene's readers. And it makes perfect sense for Greene to warn them to have no dealings with Alleyn, whom he blamed for his ruin.
daver8521 There is nothing in Groat's Worth to suggest that the Upstart Crow was a wealthy man. Go ahead and prove me wrong.
Shakespeare could not have written any of those plays, because I wrote them all. It was very difficult and took me a long time. But it was worth it, and I'm glad I did it!
in spite of living in the wrong historical period, you are almost as good a candidate as the stratford dude, tbh. thats how bad a candidate the stratford dude is, and how much magical thinking is required to believe he wrote shakespeare
@@andy-the-gardener don't waste our time with your jive...
@@jesuisravi love the irony of your complaint being far more of a content free waste of time than what you were complaining about. toooo perfect! lol
Her argument is to me quite unconvincing.......
"We don't have records of any student that went to the Stratford grammar School", ergo Shakespeare went to grammar school 😂
@@dirremoire No, it's "We don't have any record that any students went to the King's New School until 1800, therefore there is no reason to assume that Shakespeare _didn't_ attend the school, but the facts that Shakespeare, as an alderman's son, would have been entitled to free education at the school and that numerous references to grammar school staples occur throughout the plays tells us that he likely did." In _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ , young Will is quizzed on his Latin by the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans using elements drawn from William Lily's grammar, including the same discussion of number in Latin and the same illustrative example, _lapis_ (stone), that Lily uses.
In _Titus Andronicus_ , Titus sends weapons to Chiron and Demetrius wrapped around with lines in Latin. Chiron recognizes them at once: "O, 'tis a verse in Horace; I know it well: | I read it in the grammar long ago." In fact, the "grammar" is once again William Lily's. It's also an anachronism that an author more thoroughly grounded in the Latin classics would have almost certainly spotted.
But the most telling example is the moment in _The Taming of the Shrew_ where Shakespeare _misquotes_ Terence's _Eunuchus_ in exactly the same way it's misquoted in the edition of Lily's grammar that would have been current when Shakespeare was in school. The shared misquote indicates that the grammar book is the source, rather than the original play.
@@dirremoire LOL. The argument is that 'Shakspere wrote the plays therefore he got an education SOMEWHERE' and he just happened to live in a tiny village that had the best grammar school in England. The school taught Greek, Latin, Law, medicine and iambic pentameter to 8-year old boys but only Shakspere made any use of all that. In their humility the school never acknowledged that they had educated the greatest writer in English history.
@@apollocobain8363 Perhaps you should actually listen to the lecture rather than leaving snide comments in the replies, because your sarcastic response about the school's "humility" was already preempted by Tribble pointing out that Shakespeare's level of posthumous fame wasn't established until centuries later. At the time, theatre was not taken seriously and plays were not regarded as great literature. Indeed, theatre had such a poor reputation that it was abolished in 1642 by order of Parliament and didn't come back until the Restoration twenty years later.
As for what was taught at the King's New School, they did indeed teach Latin, and probably some Greek. Nobody argues that they taught law (and it's unclear why you capitalized that word), medicine, or iambic pentameter. Speaking of things that are unclear, it's unclear why you Shakespeare authorship-deniers are so fixated on the idea that playwrights can't write about anything without being formally educated in the subject while still a child. Presumably that means that Tom Stoppard couldn't have possibly written _Arcadia_ , since chaos theory didn't even *EXIST* as a field when he dropped out of school at 17.
Also, Stratford-upon-Avon was not a "tiny village"; it was a bustling market town that was one of the largest in Warwickshire. It might not have been as populous as London, but no place in early modern England was as populous as London.
A remarkable lot of "could have" where solid proof is missing. The so aled questions afterwards does more or less prolonge the row of asumptions. Nobody asked why why he, after writing many plays, did not write is own will, just signing it twice with a signature showing illiteracy. Why didn't anyone ask this? And why is his works not mentioned in his will, nor books?
A: nobody wrote their own wills in that era. Then, as now, you hired a lawyer to do it.
B: the signatures are in a script known as Secretary Hand, which you can't read. They are perfectly legible, and quickly scrawled out, indicating experience at writing, not the contrary. Oh, and they were signed on his deathbed.
C: None of the wills written by poets of the era mention books or manuscripts. Reference Honigmann's Playhouse Wills 1558-1642. A will was for making special bequests, not for mashing an inventory of everything one owned.
And there's a lot of speculation about Shakespeare, but it's all built upon a foundation of solid documentary evidence, much of which the professor references.
Would have been great if she spent less time on the red herring of Elizabethian paper usage and had actually addressed important topics like illiteracy in Shakespeare's family, the Earl of Oxford's acclaim as a playwright, or even how Shakespeare could have acquired a perfect working knowledge of legality and both latin and greek. Geez
Please explain why these are "important topics".
If nobody could be literate except for people who were born to literate families, then literacy itself could have never developed because there would have had to have come a point where one person was literate and another was not. In any case, there's absolutely no evidence of illiteracy in Shakespeare's family, and positive evidence of literacy in many cases. Shakespeare himself left six signatures and Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ , his brother Gilbert left an extant signature, his eldest daughter Susanna left an extant signature, his mother Mary was named executrix of her father's will, which would be a strange thing to do if she couldn't read its provisions, his younger brothers Edmund and Richard followed him into the theatre as actors and they would have had to read cue scripts, etc.
There is no evidence that the Earl of Oxford was acclaimed as a playwright. Even if he had been, there's no reason why 'his' works (if they were indeed his) should have survived, given the fact that court entertainments were ephemeral things. The Oxfordians base their case on George Puttenham's _The Art of English Poesy_ (and Francis Meres, who simply copied Puttenham's statements in this section). But Puttenham's praise was grouped in with Richard Edwards for "comedy and interlude". Edwards is not known to have written _any_ interludes, and he's only known to have written one comedy, _Damon and Pithias_ . So if Oxford is being mentioned for anything, the overwhelming probability is that he's being mentioned for having written an interlude-possibly just one-or at least having his name attached to something that John Lyly or Anthony Munday wrote for him. Why else would he have needed to employ _two_ playwrights as his ostensible secretaries? And it may be that we know of what interlude it was, because there's an extant account of Edward de Vere performing in a device where he emerged from a shipwreck to present the queen with a jewel. That may well be the sum total of Edward de Vere's theatrical writing, which he possibly didn't even do himself.
Anyway, _if_ Oxford were acclaimed as a playwright, then there would have been no reason not to take credit for the plays of Shakespeare except for one: he didn't actually write them. Nor would there be any reason for him not to claim the poetry that Shakespeare had written since poetry was one of the skills of the courtier recommended in Baldessare Castiglione's _Book of the Courtier_ , the English translation of which had set the fashion in Elizabeth's court. If he had published _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_ with fawning dedications to the queen herself (rather than, compared to de Vere, a junior, lower-ranked member of the nobility), it could have been the ticket to money, favor, and advancement at court that he was seeking by other means, chiefly by trying to wangle tin concessions in Devon and Cornwall. Once again, this is only explicable if de Vere and Shakespeare weren't the same person.
If Shakespeare had a "perfect working knowledge of legality" (normally we just say "the law" rather than "legality"), then he'd be better off than de Vere, who never won a lawsuit in his life and committed comical, Dogberry-esque solecisms in his legal Latin (e.g., instead of "summa totalis" ["the sum of all"], he wrote "summum totale"). This also reflects on your claim that the author of the works needed a "perfect working knowledge... of latin and greek", since de Vere's Latin was poor and his Greek was, to all evidence, nonexistent. He certainly was never tutored in any Greek, which we know because we have the schedule for his tutoring. He got two hours a day of Latin and a further two of French, and that was it. A grammar school boy would be working for twelve hours a day translating Latin into English and English into Latin, focusing not only on technical proficiency but also on style and the emotional content of the writing. Unintentionally, it was basically a way of turning out a crop of brilliant playwrights, of whom Shakespeare was but one of many. The grammar school education in classical languages was far more rigorous, on average, than the education doled out to the children of the nobility.
However, and I hate to help you here, there is not more legal content in Shakespeare's plays than there are in the plays of his contemporaries. Shakespeare is about the middle of the field. He is generally accurate in his use of terms, but there's nothing in the works to suggest extraordinary legal erudition. Some of his knowledge he probably picked up from the fact that his father was a magistrate in Stratford and some he would have picked up from the lawsuits he was engaged in. It was a litigious era. And if he ever needed to know anything in more detail, he could have gotten it from one of the aspiring lawyers who loved theatre, as many of the Inns of Court students did. Shakespeare even wrote _The Comedy of Errors_ for the Christmas Revels at Gray's Inn. But perhaps you're right. Only one of the hereditary nobility would be able to ask another person a question. As for the author's supposed knowledge of Latin and Greek, the fact is that there are fewer Latin tags, fewer proper nouns, and fewer references to mythology and Classical history in Shakespeare's plays than in almost any of the plays of his contemporaries. 90% of Shakespeare's classical allusions derive from the _Metamorphoses_ by Ovid and they're utterly conventional poetic images.
Comments like these make me wonder if any of you authorship deniers actually understand or appreciate Shakespeare. Shakespeare isn't admired for coming up with the most recondite classical allusions and the most complex legal analogies, and for peppering his plays with Latin quotations. Those are the affectations that make the plays of many of his contemporaries, especially the University Wits, almost unreadable today. Shakespeare is admired for his poetic skill _in English_ and for his ability to delineate character in startlingly realistic ways. Nothing he did required education beyond his grammar school background, and it's a good thing because the ones with that education liked to show off about it and their plays generally suffer by the comparison.
00:47:36 shows the Thomas More Hand D transcribed text, and it is read verbatim by Professor Tribble. However, her recitation alters the wording so that,
"And that you sit as kings in your desire"
becomes,
"And that you sit as kings in your own desire."
Later on the passage,
"With self same hand, self reasons, and self right"
becomes
"With the self same hand, the self reasons, and the self right."
Why the modifications? They break with iambic pentameter - arguably a tell tale sign of Shakespeare. The professor seems a bit at sea in reading aloud.
But More to the point, the claim that the handwriting has been demonstrated to "virtually" match those famous six signatures fails to cite ample dissent to the contrary. A debate presents both sides, again a Shakespearean trait, as the professor does rightly remark.
Anti-Stratfordians are not anti-Shakespeareans. We are very much pro-Shakespeare but balk at the Stratford dogma. This is not a settled question, in part, for the very reasons cited. The soul of the age is reflected in these plays. Where Will of Stratford provides no traction, others do.
How can it match something that doesn't exist? There are no specimens of Shakespeare's handwriting with which to compare Hand D. Six very dissimilar signatures are not an adequate sample.
Iambic pentameter is not 'a telltale sign of Shakespeare'. He did not always use this metre.
@@joshuapray The lines ARE iambic pentameter which would be a hallmark of Shakespeare. My criticism was with Dr. Tribble who cannot speak the words "trippingly on the tongue" [Hamlet Act 3 Scene 2] which casts doubt on how well she is versed in the fundamentals. To my ear it's like your music instructor hitting wrong notes when illustrating how to play things right. Who the hell is she to deride my opinion on the authorship question? I'd rather take instruction from Derek Jacobi.
Shakespeare's plays and poems are overwhelming written in iambic pentameter. (Rhyme schemes vary.) Prose lines are reserved for men and women of lower rank which reveals a prejudice against those born beneath the aristocracy. If you're looking for the authorship, what does that imply?
@@tomditto3972 The use of iambic pentameter would not be a hallmark of Shakespeare more than any other English poet of the past several hundred years. It's neither evidence for or against Shakespeare's authorship. So my point was that it's a silly thing to say, not to engage you in a debate.
@@joshuapray Again, my point was that Dr. Tribble dribbled, be she reading Shakespeare or another of the other English poets who wrote in iambic pentameter. I was casting shade on her expertise. Who is she to dismiss the authorship question out of hand, if she is inept in the fundamentals? Even more so, how did she obtain the expertise to covert six shaky semi completed signatures from a Stratford merchant, probably illiterate, into Hand D? These were the points I sought to make, not to debate the prevalence of iambic pentameter.
It wasn't Edmund Malone, it was John Warbuton whose cook destroyed a number of play manuscripts. In any case Shakespeare's manuscripts must have been preserved until 1623.
Yes, and then somehow all of the manuscripts were destroyed becasue Shakespeare was famous by then and the thing to do with the manuscript of a famous playwright would be to destroy them.
After it was printed, yes. Were they going to hand out the manuscripts to people, probably with markings, crossed out lines, hard to read passages etc.? Almost every play Aeschylus wrote is gone and there is not one handwritten manuscript - CONSPIRACY?!?!?
The manuscripts are still preserved to this day. All of them. They will be found in the next few years. They are 30 feet below a triangle-shaped man-made swamp on a man-made island. They will be found with the corpse of father RC and also the golden menorah of king Solomon. The sonnet manuscripts and the corpse were both plunged into quicksilver. Thus making them airproof and waterproof. Preserving them almost indefinitely. I understand how wild this sounds. And I can't wait for excavations to start so the truth can be set free. This will remain a mystery until God's mercy has been pierced. The mercy point which is a location in this swamp. The true purpose of the works was to tell the story of Francis Bacons life and to hide religious artifacts that he inherited when he became the leader of the freemasons.
To conceal it from fools the philosophers have shrouded this precious treasure. From which Adam and the other patriarchs have derived their longevity. In strange and obscure words and flowery rhetoric. Very few people in this world therefor know about it. For if such secrets were made public and if godless actions happen as a result of them. Then he would have to answer for them in their first course. And would be severely punished by God for placing holy things before dogs and casting pearls before swine. Truely attaining it is better than all the gold and silver in the world. For what man covets in the temporal world can not compare to it in the slightest. The treasure of all treasures the secret of all secrets.
Utter ballocks...just because the name "Shake-speare" appears on the play doesn't mean Shakspere of Stratford WROTE it! It was widely recognized as a pseudonym even in 1600. Read Ogburn's "Mysterious William Shakespeare " for the real story.
There isn't a speck of evidence that anyone in Shakespeare's lifetime thought that his name was a pen-name.
Caius Martius Coriolanus
Wrong again...you clearly haven't read Ogburn's book. Refutes your hidebound beliefs, so you fear it, naturally. But all the argument is there...no space here to cover it.
@@willshaw6405 Translation: "Damn! I have no way to refute the solid evidence presented here, so I'll just say 'Read someone else's book' as if that answers it."
John Stow, the ultimate London insider and chronicler of his age, said he had personal knowledge that William Shakespeare, gentleman (of which there was only one) was a great poet. You can claim he was lying (to what purpose?) or that he was deluded (though he seemed to know everything else that was going on in London), but you can't deny that he was doing anything besides identifying Shakespeare of Stratford as a poet.
Caius Martius Coriolanus
Not that at all...just don't like to wasre time pecking at this tiny keyboard when smarter folks have already done the homework!
@@willshaw6405 I have yet to have anyone explain how Stow could claim to have personal knowledge that Shakespeare was a poet. Since you've read all of Ogburn, I figured you could tell me if he has addressed that issue. Otherwise, there's direct evidence for you. He's not taking about a pen name, because he mentions Shakespeare by rank. It isn't postmortem testimony, because Stow predeceased Shakespeare. To cap it all off, it's John Frikken Stow. He knew everything and everyone in London.
thanks. excellent .
IT'S EASY JUST PROVE HE WROTE ANYTHING AT ALL. EVER
A determinedly superficial effort by a non-historian who doesn't dare look at any of her claims in detail. Professor? Pffft.
They gave her an hour to talk. How much do you expect her to communicate in that time?
It's not the quantity that matters when discussing historical claims ( and the idea that the Stratford man wrote the plays is a historical claim) it's the method. Her analysis is superficial because she ignores proper historical method, apparently ignorant of how historians and biographers go about their work (for a start they understand what the word evidence actually means).
Well she is a professor of English, and not a professor of history. I don't know if historians have a different definition, but the definition the rest of the English-speaking world works with is "That which tends to prove or disprove something". I don't see where she violated that. She provided documents which tend to prove the claim that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him.
I understand you might mistake what she presented as documents that prove the claim, but they do nothing of the kind. It's pretty clear she has not read the scholarship on the authorship issue, fails to address any of the issues that have caused serious historians to question the orthodox view for over 150 years. I'm not going to go into detail if you haven't read any of this material yourself Caius, but if you are curious about why I say these things then you might read Diana Price's 'Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography'. None of the 'true believers' in the Stratfordian camp have had the courage to acknowledge this fine academic work exists, let alone address the avalanche of evidence presented therein. If you don't like reading so much, you will find video of Diana Price presenting some of the contents of her book on youtube. I suspect you'd actually enjoy it. As for the issue of evidence, yes I agree with the definition but I don't believe this professor has a grip on the subject material, and hasn't done her research. Understandable, it's not her field, but to be presenting yourself in public as though it is your field is not a good look.
Geoff Williamson I've read her tripe, and it's Three-Card-Monty with cover art. Unlike you, I have read both sides of the issue, and so I see that she: 1) Reverse-engineered her list of types of evidence in order to try to fit it to the known lacunae in Shakespeare's historic record, 2) Fails in that regard (Shakespeare should have scored somewhere between six and eight) and so ignores evidence for him by calling it "disputed", 3) Subdivides the categories unnecessarily in order to give other poets higher scores, often by ticking more than one box with the same piece of evidence, 4) Uses one primary source (Philip Henslowe's account book) for most of it, and 5) Applies none of the "academic rigor" to any of that evidence that she applies to the mountains of evidence there is that Shakespeare wrote his own works. Were she to apply the same standards to those on her list that she applies to Shakespeare's evidence, all 24 of them would score a zero.
In addition, she claims her work has been "peer reviewed", when it's only been reviewed by fellow Anti-Strats, who are not inclined to test her results vigorously, which is what "peer review" actually means in an academic setting. A true academic would recognize and laugh at her sleight-of-hand, and many have.
Also, she has touted the fact that hers was the first Anti-Strat book to be published by an academic press, implying there was a stamp of academic approval to the process, when in reality it was printed by a textbook mill which prints anything they can make a buck from. They don't edit the product in any way. It's now available only in print-on-demand.
Rather than referring you to someone else's book to answer your challenges, I'll answer them myself and provide evidence. I don't shill the work of another to prove my case. Be warned that any mention of Secret Cyphers, Bacon the Immortal Rosecrucian, Prince Tudor, The Priory of Scion, or Oxford Secretly Wrote Everyone's Works will get you written off as a crackpot.
The suggestion that William Shakespeare was financially poor during his early years as a married Stratfordian requires some justification which is not given. His father, John, was a fairly wealthy landowner and a member of a number of high-status political/businesses associations in the town - he was the Mayor for example - moreover, there is confusion between him experiencing "financial" difficulties in later life and "religious affiliation" difficulties (he was a catholic) which may have driven him (John) to scale down his business activities. There is no strong evidence that the Shakespeares - father or son - were financially embarrassed. Even Shakespeare's daughter (Suzanna) married the financially secure Stratford doctor John Hall. There is numerous supporting documentary evidence in respect of all of this.
John Shakespeare never lost everything, but he did lose quite a lot, resulting in him mortgaging and then defaulting on his wife's inherited farmland, being excused from paying relatively small taxes, and avoid church for fear of debt. This trouble started when Shakespeare was a teenager, and continued at least into his early adulthood. It is theorized that it was Shakespeare's success that righted the family boat in the mid-1590s, but we can't know for certain.
Just an aside, there's no evidence that John Shakespeare was a practicing Catholic. He had all of his children baptized in the CofE, removed Catholic symbols from the Guild chapel, and raised a son who quoted extensively from the Geneva Bible.
and we will all,as we wait in the one queue that no one likes to be at the front of,one day "shuffle of this mortal coil ",where the answer shall be revealed,that is if one should believe in the place "that we know not of ",and ,after the reunion with our beloved deceased,now being the same ,seek out the truth ,in the only one place where the answer lies...patience,patience.....
Dave Brown I don't need to wait. I've seeen the evidence and I know now. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
Did Shakespeare ever shake a spear ? That is the question.
9:10 here is a 30 minute talk by a lawyer with several pieces of evidence to the contrary . ua-cam.com/video/oefmNJ6_suc/v-deo.html . I'd love for this SAQ to go to the courts.
Hall was referring to Marston, who had just published a pornographic poem on Narcissus under a pen name, not to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. V&A was not considered vulgar. Marston's book was ordered burned, while Shakespeare's got reprinted.
And the SAQ has gone to court, in 1988. Three Supreme Court justices, one of whom was an Oxfordian, all voted for Shakespeare. Courts are places for evidence. Only Shakespeare has any.
Wow. Just a minute in to this talk, and she is lying.
When the name Shakespeare was mentioned during the time the man from Stratford was alive, there is in fact no evidence the reference was to that individual. The reference was to “the author”.
Where is there any evidence this man was a writer, or even literate?
When they refer to Shakespeare the poet being an actor and/or a gentleman, they are referring to an individual.
She isn't lying. You are.
No chance of these Anti-Stratford types cutting themselves on Occam's Razor is there. In the end though we know the real reasons "I refuse to believe a mere commoner can write such works" or "He must've been from some fancy town like Oxford. I'm from Oxford." Oh and Derek Jacobi is a bloody disgrace, he should be ashamed of himself.
I'm from Baltimore, and you're full of yourself. You don't have a clue. Please learn something before you project your prejudices in public again. Occam's razor refers to the simplest explanation that explains ALL the facts, not just those you've cherry picked to consider because you don't even know that the other facts exist, because you are merely operating on a general cultural prejudice, the origins of which you've never been asked to consider. Not any more.
@@rstritmatter Maybe make a point? I'd also be very interested to learn why apparently being from Baltimore makes you somehow an added authority to speak on me being 'full of myself'.
Cretin.
@@williamarthurfenton1496 I made my point. You are speaking on a subject you don't know anything about. You haven't investigated it, you haven't read any of the books and articles of the people you presume to criticize: you are, in fact, just blowing your mouth off on the internet.
Now's your chance to prove me wrong. What specific objections do you make against Looney, Ogburn, Anderson, et alia. pick your example from one of the ten thousand books and articles in James' Warren's 4th edition Index to Oxfordian Publications (2017). Let's talk details here. What is wrong with those books? Prove to us you've read even one of them enough to understand the argument. If you can, we have something to talk about; otherwise, I rest my case.
@@rstritmatter .. and you are just a faceless nobody on UA-cam just as I am to you. What, you think I'm going to have a full debate with someone in the comments section?
Fringe movement loon-groups are obvious, and they're not always inarticulate baseball wearing yobs who think the moon is a hologram. That's my answer. People who make evidence fit a previously made conclusion. Now, if you would've started with one actual argument of substance instead of 'clever me I've read some books that support my beliefs' you might have done better.
You can't prove it either smart arse.
@@williamarthurfenton1496 Actually I'm a Phd in Comparative Lit. What are your qualifications? (for the record, your deflection is noted).
This woman seems to be completely ignorant of the subject about which she is speaking. Her ignorance whether deliberate or innocent only adds weight to those who suggest an alternate author.
Considering that she did her doctoral research on early modern printing and has published extensively on early modern plays, especially focusing on performance, I'm kind of doubting that she's ignorant of her subject matter. And if you're suggesting that she's ignorant of arguments of the caliber of "Edward de Vere must have written _Hamlet_ because he was captured by pirates and there are pirates in _Hamlet_ ", I don't think she's ignorant of those either, much as she might wish she were. Anti-Shakespearians are the Jehovah's Witnesses of early modernism and extremely annoying in their willingness to proselytize.
Could you suggest any _specifics_ of things she might not know, and why they're _relevant_ to the issue?
Also, even if she were as ignorant as you claim, why on earth should that "only add weight to those who suggest an alternate author"? Her ignorance isn't evidence. The world doesn't work like that. If someone supporting a round earth makes a bad argument for it, the earth doesn't immediately become flat pending the presentation of a better case. Likewise, if William Shakespeare wrote the canonical plays and poems, then he still wrote them regardless of the quality of this presentation. All of the documentary evidence that supported his authorship still supported his authorship during Dr. Tribble's talk. All of the contemporaries who spoke on the subject still universally affirmed he was an author during her talk. And the _complete absence_ of any contemporary documentary evidence or testimony for any other authorship candidate didn't suddenly blossom into a cache of newly discovered documents while she was speaking either.
Well, she spends almost all her time talking about the works (because, clearly that's her field of expertise and I don't doubt that) and pointing out how often the name William Shakespeare is attributed to the works. Everyone knows that William Shakespeare wrote the works, he must have his name is all over them, that's agreed.
The question is, who was William Shakespeare and that is something she scarcely touches on given the extraordinary amount of questions that are unanswered on this exact subject. There is so much written and talked about on this subject that it would be absurdly redundant for me to write it out here in a UA-cam comment. What I will say is that I am 60 and I've liked the works of Shakespeare for as long as I can remember. I still have my Rex Library copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare that lives next to my bed, as it has since I was a child, and I read from it regularly. I'm looking at it right now. And I have, for all but the last couple of years of my life, always dismissed questions of authorship out of hand as a silly question to even ask. But then a couple of years ago I had a chat with a person who I acknowledge as being much smarter than me and he pointed out why he thinks there is a question as to who William Shakespeare might have been. Things I had never heard, so that started me looking for myself. What I found is that there is no more evidence that the works where penned by the man from Stratford upon Avon as there is that they were penned by a number of other people. So, to use the vernacular, I have no dog in this fight. I watched this video, as I have been looking at whatever I can find, hoping to hear some piece of evidence that conclusively proves who William Shakespeare was and put an end to the whole thing. Instead she doesn't address any of the vast lines of questions that are out there and that's what I mean by her not knowing the subject, she doesn't go through all, or for that matter any, of the questions and address why they are false. She skims across a few things but doesn't get into any of the nitty gritty facts of what can and can't be proved. And I would suggest that she avoids that as do all people in her position because if she did she would have to admit that we simply don't know the answer. The title of her video "Why Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.....", I guess give her an out because no one questions that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, like I said, his name is on the book, what I was hoping she would get into was, who was William Shakespeare? What I would suggest to you is to look into the subject with a fresh, open mind. Let go of any emotional attachment to one side or the other and just look at the facts. Don't just read one or two articles, or five or ten for that matter, really get your teeth into anything and everything you can find and apply to it an unbiased mind. Toss it around in your head for a while, as I have and I wouldn't mind betting we will both end up at the same place. In closing I'll just say that, life being as it is, my revels are nearly ended and soon I will have my sleep so if you reply to this and I don't respond it's not through a lack of interest it will be because my brief candle is out.
@@Hansca Okay, so you assert that there is no more evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works than there is for any alternative authorship candidate. Well, let's examine if that's actually true.
We can start at the First Folio. You accept that the works are attributed to William Shakespeare. You could hardly do less given that the official title of the First Folio is _Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies_ . But that's not the only thing that the First Folio tells us. It also tells us that William Shakespeare was an actor. His name heads the list of "The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes". He's put in pride of place over the leading actor, Richard Burbage, thus implying that Shakespeare's role was something pretty substantial. What other thing could it be than that the actor was also the author of the plays? Incidentally, Shakespeare is also mentioned in two cast lists in the 1616 folio edition of Ben Jonson's _Workes_ as having performed in _Every Man in His Humour_ and _Sejanus His Fall_ .
Elsewhere in the dedicatory epistle to the Herbert brothers, John Heminges and Henry Condell wrote that their purpose in publishing the works was "onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our S H A K E S P E A R E, by humble offer of his playes". So here we have the affirmation that John Heminges and Henry Condell were "fellows" (i.e. fellow actors) of Shakespeare, who was also the author of the plays in the First Folio, and likewise their names appear in the list of actors as well as in the plays performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men in Ben Jonson's _Works_ . We can also tell that William Shakespeare of Stratford knew Heminges, Condell, and Richard Burbage because they're all mentioned in his will, and they and Shakespeare are all mentioned in the will of Augustine Phillips, a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men who predeceased William Shakespeare. John Heminges was also named as the trustee in the deal to acquire the Blackfriars gatehouse, and after Shakespeare's death he transferred the property to the Stratford Shakespeare's eldest daughter, Susanna Hall.
Nor do we have to go outside of the First Folio for evidence about Shakespeare's home town. Ben Jonson (who knew Shakespeare personally, as we've seen by the fact that Shakespeare performed in the premiere productions of two of his plays, aside from the relationship they must have had as two playwrights in the relatively small Bankside theatre community) called William Shakespeare the "Sweet Swan of Avon". Leonard Digges was even more specific by referring to "thy Stratford Moniment [monument]" in his poem dedicated to "the deceased Authour Maister W. Shakespeare". Digges was a fellow Stratfordian and a family friend, being the step-son of Thomas Russell, who was named in Shakespeare's will as one of his two "overseers" (executors). We also have Digges' comments on the flyleaf of James Mabbe's copy of Lope de Vega's _Rimas_ asserting that Lope de Vega had a reputation for Spain for his sonnets that was equivalent to Shakespeare's reputation in England for his. Therefore, Digges knew the Stratford Shakespeare personally and knew him to be an author. Digges also contributed a very lengthy commendatory poem in the edition of Shakespeare's collected poems that was published in 1640. It mentions several of Shakespeare's plays by their characters, mentions the theatres the King's Men played in as well as the name of the troupe, and in general links all the elements of Shakespeare's life that anti-Shakespearians attempt so desperately to keep apart.
The monument to which Digges referred is still in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. It depicts Shakespeare as holding a quill pen with a piece of paper in front of him, and in the regulation subfusc of a scholar. It also likens him in a Latin passage to a "Virgil for art" ("arte Maronem"-Maro was Virgil's cognomen, Publius Vergilius Maro) and saying in an English inscription that "all that he hath writ | Leaves living art but page to serve his wit". Here, too, the evidence is clear that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was a writer.
In addition to Leonard Digges, at least three other people saw Shakespeare's monument in the 17th century and left extant accounts of it: John Weever by 1619, Lieutenant Hammond in 1634, and William Dugdale by 1649. Weever was researching a book called _Ancient Funeral Monuments_ and therefore, in addition to writing down that the memorial honored "William Shakespeare the famous poet", he copied down the inscription on the monument and the one on his gravestone. So we can see in his copy that the stuff about Shakespeare being a Virgil for art and "all that he hath writ" was there from the beginning. Lieutenant Hammond wrote that he had seen "[a] neat Monument of that famous English Poet, Mr Wm Shakespeere; who was borne heere." So the famous English Poet was born in Stratford-upon-Avon. Dugdale also copied the inscription on the monument exactly and in his _Antiquities of Warwickshire_ wrote "One thing more, in reference to this antient Town, is observable, that it gave birth and sepulture [burial] to our late famous Poet Will. Shakespere, whose Monument I have inserted in my discourse of the Church." So William Shakespeare, the famous poet, was born and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, and his burial place is in Holy Trinity Church where his monument refers to "all that he hath writ" and likens him to Virgil.
Nor have we exhausted the evidentiary possibilities of the First Folio. There's one more piece of evidence that shows Shakespeare was born in Stratford: the title. Remember it's _Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies_ . But "Mr." wasn't used at the time in the same indiscriminate way it is now. It was a signifier of gentlemanly status. William Shakespeare was a gentleman by the grant of a coat of arms in 1596 to his father, John, for his civic duties in Stratford-upon-Avon. During his father's lifetime, he was the only William Shakespeare and then the only Shakespeare entitled to the appellation of gentleman or to be addressed as "M.", "Mr.", "Master", or "Maister". The Folio addresses Shakespeare at various points in all of these ways. Every time you see a mention of M. or Mr. William Shakespeare or William Shakespeare, gentleman, it's a direct indication that the man being talked about was the one from Stratford with a coat of arms. So, for example, when John Stow's _Annals_ includes a passage about ""Our moderne, and present excellent Poets which worthely florish in their owne workes, and all of them in my owne knowledge liued togeather in this Queenes raigne, according to their priorities [i.e., according to their social rank] as neere as I could, I haue orderly set downe" and then places in the middle of this list "M. Willi. Shakespeare, gentleman" (below the knights and esquires, but above the men of no rank), we can be certain that it is the Stratford William Shakespeare who was referred to as one of the "excellent Poets".
Incidentally, strengthening this identification is the controversy that blew up when the York Herald, Ralph Brooke, complained that unworthy persons were being raised to distinction by being given coats of arms. Among them, he sketched the Shakespeare coat of arms and appended the rather snide note "Shakespeare the player [actor] by Garter". So Shakespeare the actor was the man with the coat of arms, and the man with the coat of arms and therefore entitled to the appellation of "gentleman" and who is listed as an actor in the First Folio was the one who wrote the plays.
Moreover, that's not the end of it. Because the objections of Peter Brooke didn't carry the day. They were opposed by William Dethick at the College of Arms and by the Clarenceux King of Arms, William Camden. Shakespeare's grant of arms was defended in particular with reference to John Shakespeare's work as a magistrate and because John Shakespeare married into the noble Arden family. Mary Arden was William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon's mother. And, by a neat coincidence, William Camden also wrote _Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine_ in which he named "William Shakespeare" as one of the "most pregnant witts of these our times, whom succeeding ages my iustly admire." So Camden knew all about Shakespeare's antecedents, knew that he was from Stratford, knew his father was a magistrate and local political figure, knew his mother was an Arden, because all these things were mentioned in the defense of the grant of arms, and he praised him as a literary figure along with names like Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, George Chapman (of Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" fame), etc.
Part 2:
I've gone on at length, but I could have made this comment five times longer. I haven't even mentioned the first contemporary testimony I ever saw, which was when I read the epistle to the reader prefacing John Webster's _The White Devil_ in _Elizabethan Plays_ edited by Hazelton Spencer, first read at the age of 13. Webster also almost certainly knew Shakespeare because he'd been working in the theatre since at least 1602 and, after a disappointing run of _The White Devil_ at the Red Bull Theatre performed by the Queen Anne's Men, he entrusted his second solo-authored tragedy (and my favorite non-Shakespearian play of the early modern era) _The Duchess of Malfi_ to the King's Men while Shakespeare was still writing plays for them. Shakespeare's last was _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ written in 1613 at the earliest because it contains a masque borrowed from Francis Beaumont's _The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn_ , which was first performed in February 1613 at the marriage celebrations of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V, Elector-Palatine of the Rhine. By the way, the title page of the first quarto of _Kinsmen_ styles Shakespeare as "Mr. William Shakspeare, gent." Webster certainly would, after the first fiasco, have at least gone to theatre and made sure the King's Men were a good fit for his play.
The fact that I can't cover it all in a single message is a metric of how much evidence there is that Shakespeare was an author. Is there even _anything_ close to this level of contemporary documentary evidence for any other authorship candidate? I think if you're frank, you'll have to admit that the answer is "no". In fact, there is no documentary evidence that says that anybody else wrote the works, with the exception of one co-authorship credit on the aforementioned _Two Noble Kinsmen_ , which also attributes it to John Fletcher. But co-authorship doesn't deny Shakespeare having any hand in his own works. Rather, you can only be a co-author if you are, in fact, an author. So if there are no title pages, no Stationers' Register entries, no Master of the Revels' Accounts entries, then did anyone say someone else had written Shakespeare's works instead of him? No, not that either. Instead, _every_ contemporary who commented on the subject affirmed that William Shakespeare was an author. And this is the evidence you'd like me to dismiss out of hand. Sorry, not until you can come up with a very good and substantial reason for disregarding it.
Also, I don't have an "emotional attachment". What I have is contemporary documentary evidence. Gobs and gobs of it. And until the Shakespeare-deniers come up with evidence that is _just as good_ , then there is truly nothing to consider. This is not my first rodeo. I cut my teeth on Shakespeare authorship denial back when I was in my teens and twenties, participating on humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare on Usenet. I didn't want to, but the group was overrun with authorship debates, so even those of us who just wanted to talk about Shakespeare and other early modern literary figures couldn't get away from reading about authorship. In my time there, I saw every denialist point raised and then razed to the nth degree. So I won't be reading anything else because I know I've already heard it. It is incredibly unlikely that anything you've read presents anything other than arguments that I've long since seen demolished. Unless you personally have made the literary discovery of the millennium and found contemporary documentary evidence overturning Shakespeare's authorship, then I already know what they have to say. Yes, _Hamlet_ has pirates in it and Edward de Vere was robbed by pirates, but that doesn't mean that only he could have written _Hamlet_ . Arguments of that quality aren't evidence, and they aren't even good speculation.
Virtue signalling tangents throughout. Don't attack your accuser. Prove them wrong. Should be easy.
It is strange that the defenders of the Stratford man always convince me more that he was not the author than all those heretics arguing for somebody else.
That IS strange. Sane people usually find compelling evidence to be conclusive.
Very weak ... poorly argued case.
Which part?
This comment is so sad, terrible, almost like a loser wrote it.
We have evidence that Shakespeare wrote the plays,we have evidence that Shakespeare didn't write the plays. What we don't have is proof for either case.
Depends on your definition of "proof".
Oh, and please present a single contemporaneous document which states that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays.
@@Jeffhowardmeade Please present a contemporaneous document that says he was. Oh, you can't.
@@dirremoire Watch me.
John Stow, the man who literally wrote the book on London, wrote:
"Our moderne, and present excellent Poets which worthely flourish in their owne workes, and all of them in my owne knowledge lived togeather in this Queenes raigne, according to their priorities as neere as I could, I have orderly set downe (viz) George Gascoigne Esquire, Thomas Church-yard Esquire, sir Edward Dyer Knight, Edmond Spenser Esquire, sir Philip Sidney Knight, Sir Iohn Harrington Knight, Sir Thomas Challoner Knight, Sir Francis Bacon Knight, Sir Iohn Dauie Knight, Master Iohn Lillie gentleman, Maister George Chapman gentleman, M. W. Warner gentleman, M. Willi. Shakespeare gentleman, Samuell Daniell Esquire..."
There was only one William Shakespeare who was entitled to be styled a gentleman. That was the the one from Stratford.
Now go ahead and try to heap caveats on the evidence so you can pretend it doesn't exist.
@@Jeffhowardmeade Ah, you play the game of all those whose income depends on Mr Shakspare. You know, the guy who never signed his name "Shakespeare". And, if Shakespeare was by far the greatest, why would his name be next to last on that list?
@@dirremoire I'm a retired police officer from California. The only financial interest I have in Shakespeare is paying for books and theater tickets.
And Shakespeare wasn't considered "the greatest" in his own time. He was a bankside poet. He didn't become the "God of our idolatry" until 150 years after he died.
And when he applied for that coat of arms so he could call himself a gentleman, he spelled the name "Shakespeare".
" Ever get the feelin' you've been cheated " ? Wooliam could barely write his name. Stop this nonsense. It's demeaning.
Can you read 16th Century secretary script?
Excellent!
Jan 17,2021 I have recently watched and listened to the arguments advanced by the Baconists and the Oxfordians. W while I think the oxfords have the stronger case given that oxfords life experiences connect to the content of the plays etc, the baconians have much to support their position . What is in my opinion as a 74 year old practicing lawyer and student of history and this era in particular , is that based on any view of the evidence , the plays were not written by Shakespeare . The argument presented in this lecture reminds me of my partner who stood before the jury with a similarly hopeless argument . He flatly repeated his clients fantastical story and then whipped out Ripleys Believe it or Not . The jury said “Not” Had the lecture done the same, she may have had the basis for a few yeses . It is very late so forgive my grammatical errors etc . Was the argument that the grammar schools and sermons were so improved that this is how he learned the skills he honed to write the plays . Best I think to say one choose to believe it was Shakespeare than make arguments that should best be made by a lawyer . But then , Shakespeare could piick up legal and medical knowledge from hearsay and just put it in the plays . If he could read , he could easily do all that it is late
Well done !
well argued! i was close to becoming Anti-Stradfordian. now i'm not so sure
Why were his kids all illiterate?
@@unclesham5507 They weren't all illiterate. Susanna Hall signed her name. We have the document she signed along with her daughter (Shakespeare's granddaughter).
But even if they were illiterate, what's that do with Shakespeare? He lived in London most of the year and barely ever saw his children back in Stratford. Besides which, his surviving children were both women and female literacy-though it was improving-still wasn't deemed as important. At worst, it would simply make Shakespeare a man of his times. It doesn't provide sufficient evidence to overturn all the documentary evidence showing that Shakespeare wrote his works.
@@Nullifidian I think it's fairly a safe assumption that any father would love their children and only want the absolute best for them which at that time would certainly include literacy, and certainly more so for women. especially say if your father was a noted author. Distance being a factor as you stated (which is correct) well, I don't know about you but I'd be writing back to the family regularly. Wouldn't you?
@@unclesham5507 I think that making arguments that are purely assumptive, particularly when about the distant past, is a terrible way of approaching the subject. It's not for us to tell the past what it was; it's for us to accept the past as it was.
As for writing back to the family often, no I wouldn't, given the difficulties with maintaining a frequent correspondence. Once again, you're letting anachronistic assumptions based on contemporary experience mislead you about the early modern era. In this case, you're tacitly assuming a postal service. The only postal service then in operation was solely for government use. Anyone who was ordinary middle-class and had a letter to deliver either had to use a messenger, which was expensive, or give it to someone they knew was going where the letter was to be sent, which was chancy. We have a surviving letter from Richard Quiney to William Shakespeare but we have no idea if it was ever delivered.
And even if a frequent correspondence is granted, it doesn't follow that letters would survive over 400 years, particularly since the family line died out and New Place, the family home, was demolished in the mid-18th century. That in itself shows how little anybody at the time bought into the Cult of the Author. These notions of authorship and singular genius wouldn't be current until the Romantics, which is why it took until the mid-19th century for anyone to express doubts about Shakespeare's authorship.
how do you feel now, after 2 more years looking into the subject?
very interesting thanx
It does matter!
(at 53' 0") "thrustling" - wow! thus are great words born. It is simply magnificent. I will use the word henceforth at every opportunity. Fine lecture
Inspiring!
I don’t believe Shakespeare wrote the plays - but then again I don’t believe Charlie Chaplin produced and acted in those movies either. Neither was high born enough, right?
The case for authorship is open to all those with open minds. Let us rejoice in the mystery that surrounds these great works and assume that we may never have proof positive for any case. This lady has no idea what she is talking about which is evident in the terror in her eyes. She knows she is treading on dangerous ground with little to protect her from truth. There is little evidence that Will from Stratford did not have the beautiful mind that penned these works nor the education to have covered so many subjects with expertise.
Thanks to the double-negative in your last sentence, which states the converse of what you intended, you're the first Shakespeare authorship denier I've ever seen who has said something wholly accurate.
The authorship deniers do indeed strive to prove that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon didn't have the mind that penned the works nor the education to do so, but they've failed all down the line, chiefly because no amount of purely assumptive arguments on their part can erase the fact of his name on quartos and the folio editions of his plays, testimony from all his contemporaries who bothered to speak on the subject saying he was an author, and his name as the author in official records like the Revels Accounts and the Stationers' Register. What they need to do is prove that these attributions are wholly false and present clear documentary evidence justifying assigning them to a wholly different author. Merely speculating about Shakespeare's level of education-especially when none of them appear to know anything about the content of an Elizabethan grammar school education, and when they can't possibly know how much he learned on his own as an adult-won't cut it.
@@Nullifidian I always felt that Shakespeare was a kind of literary Jesus about whom we have absolutely no data except the myths that were fabricated on his behalf. Those whose beliefs are rock solid on either side of the question are own a fool's errand.
@@stephenjablonsky1941 Okay, but unless what you feel comes after and is the result of a considered exploration of all of the available documentary evidence, then it really isn't worth much.
I'm by no means inflexible on my position, but my view is that when all the documentary evidence tells us that William Shakespeare wrote the plays, and that all of his contemporaries who wrote on the subject tell us he was an author, and they often identify him by his profession (actor), his social status (gentleman - which itself is a clue to the home town, since the only William Shakespeare entitled to style himself as a gentleman at the time was the one whose father, John, got a coat of arms for his civic duties in Stratford-upon-Avon), and his home town (Stratford), that's more than specific enough to come to a conclusion pending further demonstrations based on _better_ evidence that Shakespeare was _not_ the author. What else do you want? A DNA profile, fingerprints, and an exact Ordnance Survey reference for New Place? Because I don't think you're going to get them.
@@Nullifidian What I do know for sure is that his home town is a kind of literary DisneyWorld and that nothing in the town is real except maybe the ice cream.
@@stephenjablonsky1941 What does that have to do with anything? Plenty of places that have had a famous person who was born or lived there make money off the tourist trade, particularly when they're small enough not to have much else to attract public interest. Are you insinuating that the entirety of _worldwide_ early modern scholarship is being devoted solely to the purpose of keeping up sales of Cornettos to Stratford tourists?
Very weak argument! Just listening to this professor's lecture, made me an Anti-Stratfordian!
You were one before, let's be honest. Only Shakespeare deniers refer to themselves as "anti-Stratfordian". If you use the terminology, you are obviously _not_ just a previously impartial spectator.
And, frankly, if your idea is that the strength of a case rests entirely in _one presentation_ of it rather than in the evidence supporting it, then you've shown that you already reason like a Shakespeare denier, so congratulations on finding your natural level.
Uptight, unconvincing and unimpressive speaker.
Weak.
Excellent lecture. Putting those literary flat-earthers to shame, along with their pathetic and classist obsession.
He Vorg
Nothing whatever to do with "class" distinctions...it's a matter of overwhelming circumstantial evidence for Oxford. Go read Ogburn's Mysterious William Shakespeare for the evidence, circumstantial though it may be, simply "fitting" this nobleman better than the commoner from Stratford. Not snobbery--logic, as in Occam's Razor.
@@willshaw6405 If the evidence is so "overwhelming", why do Oxfordian gatherings book the smallest rooms at the Holiday Inn and still have empty seats? Your "overwhelming" evidence only convinces those few who know nothing else about history or logic, and have no desire to learn more.
I'm working class. I'm probably in the poorest 5% of people in England. My family are all working class, and only a few - from a _very_ large family; my mother has 13 siblings - have even had a university education... I don't believe this guy, from the midlands, wrote these plays.
I thought I could watch her talk but she lied 3 times in the first 60-seconds of her talk that I don't think I can stand to listen to her talk. Maybe "lied" is the wrong word, but her statements go against history and are factually WRONG. #1 Nobody noticed Shakespeare died for SEVEN-years; there never was a funeral celebration such as the one Ben Jonson got or any memoriams celebrating his life. #2 The man she is calling Shakespeare, the Stratford man, had a family of two daughters. Both daughters said their father was not a poet/writer. The Stratford man's parents and children were illiterate. #3 There is no contemporaneous evidence that Stratford man was a writer. Even Sir Stanley Wells, chair of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, admits this fact is true. This is a simple case of mis-attribution. #4 Stratford man bought and sold plays. In this case, he let the real SHAKES-PEARE use his name as an allonym. The Stratford man spelled his name SHAKSPERE. IT MUST OF SEEMED LIKE A SIGN FROM APOLLO that these two men met w/similar last names. In the 18th century, someone nominated Stratford man as the real Shakespeare and the rest is history. Instead of Avon (Hampton Court is where royals watched performances) we ended up w/Stratford-upon-Avon. Simple case of misidentity. #5 Lastly, there is a 1,200 page book of all the people who doubted the authorship question/made reference to it, etc. since the 1500's. It was an open secret among other writers that the man from Stratford WAS NOT THE AUTHOR. That's her BIGGEST LIE! There was doubt immediately.
If nobody noticed that Shakespeare was dead for seven years, why did William Basse and William Davenant write memorial poems about him soon after? Why did they erect a monument comparing him to Virgil soon after he died? Strange way of not noticing him!
2. Neither daughter ever said anything about Shakespeare like what you claim. I don't know where you got that one from, but it's a total lie.
3. There as a huge amount of contemporary evidence that William Shakespeare, the gentleman and actor from Stratford, was a writer. Again, not sure who told you that whopper. Neither has Stanley Wells said anything like what you claim.
4. There is no evidence at all that Shakespeare ever bought plays, though he certainly sold the ones he wrote. You must keep pulling stuff out of your butt. The College of Heralds spelled his name Shakespeare, and a lot of people spelled it many different ways. Nothing in English was spelled consistently in that era. Hampton Court was not the preferred venue for watching plays, Whitehall was. Hampton Court is where the Royal Family retreated during plague. There isn't a single contemporary reference to Hampton Court being called Avon.
There wasn't a single person who ever doubted Shakespeare's authorship before 1847. As with all the other things above, feel free to prove me wrong.
An unusually inept retelling of a moldly myth.
I'm sure she would be much more entertaining if she had just ignored the evidence and told whatever story she wanted, as Anti-Stratfordians do.
Americans love conspiracy theories; it makes them feel clever. The so-called "Shakespeare Authorship Question" is largely an American phenomenon. The English almost universally think it's stupid.
Andrew B I wish that were true. Alexander Waugh, Ros Barber, and a few others whose names escape me are Brits. They are the shining lights of the "movement" at the moment. We do have a fair number of them over here, but there are far more of us as well, so even a rare mental mutation is going to show up more often here than it will in a smaller country.
Nicholas Ennos If that were true, then nobody in Britain would be teaching Shakespeare as the true author. When all the educated people agree with you, then yours is the dominant paradigm. Q.E.D.
Caius Martius Coriolanus
Prior to Copernicus, flat-earth theory was the prevailing "dominant paradigm". Same for plate-techtonic shifting continent theory.. Ditto Newtonian physics.
Dominant paradigms are often wrong. Q.E.Nihil.
@@willshaw6405 Dominant paradigms are only overturned by superior evidence. Copernicus offered that. What do you have to offer besides bad Latin translations, mangled history, and whackadoodle codes?
Caius Martius Coriolanus
Too much to offer to go into here.
Go read Ogburn's magnum opus Mysterious William Shakespeare, and watch Tom Regnier's lectures right here on UA-cam. One bit of indisputable circumstantial evidence beyond a reasonable doubt is the major influence of Ovid in the Midsummer Nights Dream..a connection even Stratfordians agree upon. The only translation Shakespeare would have had would have been Goldings, who was not only Oxford"s uncle, but living under the same roof with him as he wrote it! If you think that's coincidence....well, you probably believe that someone whose DNA was other than OJ's murdered the two folks at Bundy.
A strong argument grounded in 'real world' considerations rather than theoretical flights of fancy. Quite convincing.
Kudos to Prof. Tribble. I have seen many, but hers is the finest presentation yet stating the Stratfordian case. The other side ( whomever they believe the "true" author to be ), it seems to me, can boast no such solid evidence, and their arguments are not only pathetically weak but ultimately delusional.
Aryeh Finklestein
You're wrong. There is a mountain of circumstantial evidence for Oxford. Read Ogburn's "Mysterious William Shakespeare" before you shoot off your mouth out of ignorance.
Also, search UA-cam for lecture by Tom Regnier.
@@willshaw6405 Why don't you summarize the evidence for him. Ogburn's book is such a scattered mess that it's unreadable.
What drivel.
What makes you hate facts so much? What did evidence ever do to you?
Caius Martius Coriolanus fact, William Shakspeare had illiterate parents, children and grandchildren. There are six signatures from legal papers written by William. His will never bequeathed a single book. William Shakspeare has no record of attending school at all. No record he ever left England. Francis Bacon on the other hand wrote 'Promus' a catalogue containing many phrases used in the plays of William Shake-speare.
David Russell You don't know whether or not his parents were illiterate. His father, who was a justice of the peace, used a symbol of his trade and his mother used a seal. Both were common methods of signing a document in their generation, even by people who could write. Adrian Quiney, father of Richard Quiney (who wrote a letter TO the supposedly illiterate Shakespeare) wrote a letter to his son and signed it with such a symbol.
Shakespeare's son died at age 11. You have no knowledge whatsoever as to his level of education. His older daughter was demonstrably literate, both from her signature and from an anecdote related by a physician who published her late husband's medical casebook. Shakespeare's younger daughter was probably illiterate, though she also didn't marry until 32 and that was to a gold digger who Shakespeare cut out of his will. She may have been simple. His granddaughter was LADY Barnard. She was demonstrably literate as well. Were she not, as the daughter of the Oxford-educated Dr. John Hall, it would say something about her father rather than about her grandfather. So tell me, did university-educated physicians marry illiterate women and raise illiterate daughters? Would Elizabeth Nash Barnard's first husband, Lincoln's Inn-educated barrister Thomas Nash, have married an illiterate? Would her second husband, MP and knight John Barnard, have done so?
Shakespeare's will, as wills always do, only mentions special bequests. They are not an inventory of property, which would have been conducted after Shakespeare's death. One does not mention things in a will because they are "special". One mentions them because one wishes them to go to someone besides the residuary legetee, in this case, Dr. John Hall.
There ARE six surviving signatures by Shakespeare, which seems a silly thing if he was illiterate. They are in a script known as "secretary hand", which was used by scribes. Even if he were faking it, why would he use THAT script? We have two letters and one masque written by Ben Jonson, who was much better known in his day than Shakespeare. The letters exist only because he wrote them to government officials to beg his way out of jail. No personal letters from him survive.
Nobody from Stratford prior to 1800 has a documented education. Not Adrian Quiney, not his son Richard who in 1598 wrote Shakespeare a letter, not his grandson who, at age 11, wrote his father a letter in LATIN. Not Richard Field, a Stratford tanner's son who became a successful London printer and who printed everything Shakespeare ever wrote specifically for publication. There's also no evidence that bricklayer's son Ben Jonson attended school, by the way. The question you should be asking is whether or not the wealthy mayor of Stratford would send his sons to the school for which he, as an alderman, was already paying.
Also, Shakespeare was an actor. It would be impossible for him to be an actor were he illiterate.
You Anti-Strats have this weird idea that the English Rennaissance was like the Middle Ages, where everyone who wasn't a knight ran around behind their masters' horses banging coconut haves together. One of the results of the Protestant Reformation was widespread literacy. Not only would it have been impossible for Shakespeare to have passed himself off as a poet, were he illiterate, his whole life as an English gentleman would have been impossible.
So to sum up, your facts are bullshit.
David Russell And Bacon's Promus of Formularies is undated, as a member of the court, he would have been on hand to see Shakespeare's plays, and most of the aphorisms found in both Promus and in Shakespeare's plays were lifted by both of them from earlier writers.
The 6 existing signatures by Shakespeare are all different and seem the signatures of an illiterate person.
They are different, because Shakespeare abbreviated his name differently using recognized scrivener's conventions like a macron (horizontal line) in the final written e in his last name to indicate an abbreviation (a method that is often used in printed texts of the era to indicate omitted letters) and by writing his name as "Willm." or "Wm." Indeed, the latter as an abbreviation for "William" is still with us.
And what would you know of what an illiterate person's signatures would look like? If you want to see an illiterate's handwriting, go look up the signature left by Sojourner Truth dated 23 April 1880 (coincidentally the traditional month and day of Shakespeare's birth) in a book owned by Hattie Johnson. *THAT* is what someone who has never learned how to form letters makes a signature. Shakespeare's signatures, on the other hand, are perfectly fluid and readable signatures in the secretary hand script. It is that fact and only that fact that makes them difficult to read today-because we don't use secretary hand anymore. Italic script took over from secretary hand and eventually became our modern cursive. However, for anyone who has studied the script itself-or, like me, is used to reading German black letter script, which is the root from whence secretary hand derives-the signatures are entirely legible.
The converse requires believing that an illiterate man, instead of forming his signatures one way-by rote according to the way he was taught-would incorporate commonplace abbreviations and abbreviation markers and use a script that one had to be trained to write in, and that this illiterate man managed to fool people for more than twenty years that he was the author of the plays and poems credited to him and that he somehow managed to become a fellow sharer and householder in a London theatre company despite being unable to read his own scripts or anyone else's, when the only way actors learned their lines was through cue scripts (also known as "sides" in theatrical parlance). Yeah. Sure.