Ros Barber: A Thousand Questions Reduced to One: How to Win the Authorship Argument
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- Опубліковано 28 гру 2023
- The Shakespeare authorship question is a large and complex area of study, which is further complicated by its association with entrenched belief systems and thus, high emotion. The psychological phenomena of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance mean that those deeply committed to their beliefs as being ‘true’ (both Stratfordians and non-Stratfordians) are not only unable to process conflicting data, but get angry if challenged to do so, thus reducing clarity of thinking further. Arguing with any stripe of ‘true believer’ is unproductive, so I do not use ‘argument’ in that sense, but in the academic sense of presenting a logical, reasoned and evidence-based case that might persuade the persuadable.
After compiling (so far) 600+ pages of the e-book compendium Shakespeare the Evidence, and creating the University of London’s MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, which has attracted nearly 15,000 participants to date, Ros has become clear about the strengths and the weaknesses of the arguments on both sides. There are a thousand questions we might ask or be asked by opponents, but she suggests we first begin by asking ourselves, and perhaps our opponents, just five. These five questions, devised by someone who escaped a religious cult, effectively level the playing field for a fair game. From a thousand questions to five; but can we simplify further?
Ros believes there is only one question non-Stratfordians need to be able the answer, which is currently beyond us. This question was planted in the First Folio, so never more relevant than in this 400th anniversary year. What is the key question? And is there any way we might, convincingly, answer it?
Bio: Dr Ros Barber is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Director of Research at the Shakespearean Authorship Trust. She is the author and presenter of the world’s first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the Shakespeare authorship question (coursera.org/learn/Shakespeare). Shakespeare: The Evidence, her ongoing online compendium of the evidence, arguments and counter-arguments used in contesting the orthodox case, can be found at leanpub.com/shakespeare. She is editor and co-author of 30-Second Shakespeare (2015), Know-it-all Shakespeare (2017) in the US. Her articles on early modern literary biography have been published in Rethinking History, Journal of Early Modern Studies, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Critical Survey, Notes & Queries and American Notes & Queries. Barber is three times winner (2011, 2014, 2018) of the Hoffman Prize for a distinguished work on Christopher Marlowe.
Learn more at shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org
All authorship skeptics are fortunate that this brilliant scholar is one of us!
👍🏼
Imagine if the Oxfordians were able to produce a film directly in the style of (and as good as) "12 Angry Men".
Just about spot on, yet again, Ros. It's a breath of fresh air listening to a voice of reason, and sanity, in this arena. Brava!
No matter what, we wish you the very best in the new year! Joy, gentle friends!
I find Ros Barber appealing on many levels and appreciate her intelligence, logic, lucidity, and innate good naturedness. She entertains as she teaches. Like her, I hope I'm not dead before witnessing a definitive paradigm shift regarding the SAQ. But let the cracks continue; the foundation is crumbling bit by shaky bit.
As always great presentation, clear and convincing.
Love Ros 💥💥 brilliant stuff 🇬🇧🇺🇸
Great stuff from Ros Barber as usual. My headline points in discussions on the authorship are (1) the illiterate daughters (I mean seriously did any other Renaissance polymath have illiterate daughters?) - that is the visceral objection.
(2) the 70+ personal documents demonstrating that whilst we know lots about WS’s life, there is no literary trail - that is the logical objection.
The calm and reasoned approach here is the right one. Subscribe to Shakespeare the evidence, well worth it.
I appreciate Ros' courage at confronting weaknesses in doubters' arsenals as well as the Stratfordian redoubts...even though I disagree with her on some points as an Oxfordian. I had to(reluctantly!) drop the "Romeo's sycamores" argument after reading what I consider to be a definitive rebuttal of it in The Oxfordian...so at least I have throttled ONE of my darlings! LOL!
Bravo, Ros. This is the BEST yotube video produced on this subject I have seen. United, all skeptics need to focus on removing William of Stratford from his pedestal FIRST then use critical thinking and actual evidence to present the best of the alternative arguments. Hopefully, more real evidence will appear over time. Regarding that, I would become a Stratfordian overnight if a genuine manuscript in William of Stratford's hand was discovered. Similarly, if compelling evidence that Christopher Marlowe survived 1593 or a play script in DeVere's hand were to surface I would be immediately in either of those camps. My opinion - Thomas Nashe and Emilia Lanier are critical parts of this puzzle and much more focus needs to be placed on researching their lives and works. Keep up the great work!
This is a great presentation. Dr. Barber is always eloquent and provides insightful comments on the SAQ.
I think the front matter of the First Folio establishes the authorship question for us in sentence six of the Epistle Dedicatory. The line: "We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphans, Guardians; without ambition either of self-profit, or fame: only to keep the memory of so worthy a Friend and Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare, by humble offer of his plays, to your most noble patronage." explicitly calls some plays "Orphans" and some "Guardians".
The only way plays could be "Orphans" is if they have no parent, in other words, they are anonymous. The only thing plays could guard back then was the author's identity, therefore "Shakespeare", seems to be a guardian. I have a standing challenge to doubters of the de Vere theory to explain why "Shakespeare" is the 17th word after the only colon in this sentence, and why the line with the name is on, is the 17th line from the bottom of the paragraph.
That is the evidence, what is the most logical explanation?
What better way to legitimize the SAQ than to go back to the source: the First Folio, and examine the hidden clues and not so hidden hints that the name on the title page is not the real author of the plays?
I believe Heminges and Condell merely allowed the publishers to use their names in the front matter. A doubters' reply to the Stratfordian case would be to make note of the fact that in the 1647 folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher's works, no less than 14 actors leant their names to the preface. You would not see anyone argue that they collectively authored that piece of front matter. Given that the 14 actors were lending their names to the folio, it would seem logical that Heminges and Condell did the same thing in 1623 as a way to endorse the work. It's the Elizabethan/Jacobean equivalent of any modern celebrity endorsing a product.
By the way, the names Heminges and Condell were the only two names which could be used from the list of principal actors to create simple little authorship clues that do not require codes, only a good sharp look at the arrangement of the names in the sign-off to the epistle dedicatory.
Just my two bits.
I was at the Moot court trial. It was such a joke. Ros and Alexander were the only people who knew anything about the subject..
And yet they still lost. You can be the biggest expert in the world and you will still need evidence to win in court.
Strong stuff.
Love your perspective Prof
Very well done. Seems like we should point out the obvious that a claim is just a claim. Shall I wax poetic and call it a lie by another name? Certain claims and associations are made in the first folio. That a claim is made does not make it true because a claim alone is not evidence. Claims made by Ben Jonson makes their veracity questionable enough and Jonson is free to tell lies about his "author" in order to hide an identity, which he does. Any claim is just a claim that is neither true nor false until it is evidenced. Stratford apologists seem to think everyone should believe their unevidenced claims simply because they say they are true.
I think the Dugdale should be dropped as evidence that proves the monument was alterned. But I think it is solid evidence that it is plausible that it was alterned. Big difference. But don't just forget about it completely. The guy clearly spent time trying to get intricate details into the image.
This was just great - and really needed! Thank you!
As a Stratfordian and a player (but definitely not a 'scholar') there is one overriding argument that is always overlooked.
The language of the plays. The way that the words are exactly what a player needs to create character.
In the same way that only a musician could have composed the works of Mozart, only an experienced player could have had such an experiential understanding of what it takes to build a character out of the words alone - especially if one takes into account the working practices whereby the player was working in isolation and from a cuescript. Anything which pertains to source material can be acquired by research. Nothing can replace that talent.
Another great talk by Barber
Well, me, I've never worried the bones of (the who of) Shakespeare, but this Ros Barber talk and the bulk of material (I'll have to go through now - leisurely, not hurriedly) behind and beyond it sure seems like a framework and sketch. And good set design makes for good performance.
I don't get the importance of Heminges and Condell. Their references to WS connect the Stratford man to the theater (we already knew that) through their friendship, but writing about him as if he was also the playwright is no more than hearsay, part of the bluff that was the First Folio. What am I missing?
The first folio was funded/published by Susan De Vere and they were "published according to the True Original Copies" it says on the title page.
True.
Vere.
She had them of course. The originals.
It's in plain sight.
You do know that you're just making that up, don't you?
Superb.
To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author...
👍 Thumbs up !
Please tell me why no one will even discuss or rebut my argument that WS of Stratford was the Lovely Boy? This silence is almost worthy of the esteemed Sir Stanley Welles.
35:06 Barber's strong arguments
Great great points on just the right note if any popular scholarly legitimacy will come to the SAQ.
Historicity, not literary biography, is the issue.
The folio “fellows” are a great target. I look forward to their complete deconstruction.
So far, we know Ben Jonson wrote their letters. We know they later referred to Shaksper as if he wasn’t the author. We know they never actually talk about Stratford upon Avon.
But what was their role? They seem to exist only to connect the works to Shaksper.
Interesting
Can someone please point me to information about the 'Florence triangulation'? I don't know what this is and can't find it by searching. Thanks.
I’ll post something about it on my Substack ‘Adventures in the Authorship Question’ in the next day or two and drop a link here.
See Richard Paul Roe's book Shakespeares Guide to Italy. Its in there and is powerful evidence that the author had been there.
The authorship question is an argument from absence, never one from evidence. It began with Malone’s insistence that the sonnets (and then the plays) must have been written from experience rather than imagination, and it continues to this day hanging on the single thread that we simply do not have much to go by on Shakespeare’s life.
Every candidate put forth exists solely in the vacuum of evidence of Shakespeare’s life. Oxford was traveled, Marlowe educated, Bacon intelligent and ambitious; nevermind the fact that the former two were dead before some of the best of Shakespeare’s plays were written, and the latter has extant examples of how poor a playwright he actually was.
And then the irony of using that absence of evidence in the affirmative - “we have no record of Shakespeare traveling abroad” is an oft-uttered dismissal of the possibility that he may very well have visited Italy and France for all we know, which is almost nothing.
The authorship question is a nothingburger.
Solid
the man from stratford was involved
Wouldn't hundreds, even thousands, of contemporaries have known the 'truth'? Why, when Shakespeare died, did the next generation of publishers, editors and readers go along with it?
Because of why playwrights used pseudonyms in the first place? Because the Star Chamber was still in operation? Because why stir up troubles, and also because your initial premise - that "hundreds even thousands knew" who the author was, is utterly tendentious and also cuts both ways, as there was no immediate rush to Stratford-on Avon to celebrate that man's life and fame?
Ros Barber's presentation is superb, you might take a look at Keir Cutler's You Tube presentation as well - "Is Shakespeare Dead" - to see his brief account of why Elizabethan and Jacobean / Caroline dramatists and writers in general might hide their real identities. The short answer is: write the wrong thing, get imprisoned, fined, even executed, life ruined, etc.
I now see that "MrAbzu" covers some of the same territory as to why one might strive to remain anonymous. Hell, it still applies around the world today! Salman Rushdie and numerous Russian and Iranian writers ring a bell? Even in somewhat more enlightened nations with free speech and free expression legal protections, the consequences for writers, film makers, journalists and others can be dire.
I really like Ros, and this speech. Full of common sense and good practices. I am afraid to say she is completely wrong about the drawings of the funerary monument of Shakespeare. Just look the frontispiece engraving for The Civil Wars of Samuel Daniel (1609) by Thomas Cockson, and you will see how Samuel Daniel arm positions are as awkward as the one of the man drawn in the Stratford church. Being Samuel Daniel one of the hidden poets of the Shakespeare project, like Ben Jonson, Florio, Mary Sidney (etc) and Bacon. I have studied well the Hollar picture and I have many many more evidence that this was the real appearance of the monument for the first decades. In fact the Hollar drawing and the inscription in Latin and English form together a riddle in the Shakespeare funerary monument: Why do you go so fast, passenger, the inscription urges, read if you can who is placed in this monument Shakespeare. So Hollar description is not only accurate. It is key to the authorship riddle we, passengers, are challenged with.
The absurdities and minutiae of Stratfordian theology is amusing. You worship a fake Jesus. Shakespeare had a lucrative career as a theater gangster along with some menial theater work. His money trail with no known lucrative employment is just too obvious. Most theater work was done more as a hobby, some had regular jobs others ran criminal activities out back. Henslowe ran two brothels and a theater, a likely start where Will may have found his first best bed. And then there is the rap sheet with threats and restraining orders and tax evasion. It is amazing how people have made hay from the butt of a Vicars joke, from a catchall pseudonym. Only one play ever performed got people locked up for sedition and only the first act survives. So why not use the name of a petty crook who could not write a lick as the source of the plays? It kept everyone involved safe in the prison state that was Elizabethan England. And that is why the Puritans could not wait to close the theaters down once King Charles l got his head chopped off. Stratfordian theology is a vain attempt to impose modern sensibilities on the past.
Florio had the final edit, his unique words are well represented in the First Folio. The single author theory is highly unlikely, too many rewrites to insert the latest lampoon. Multiple scriptoriums is a more likely author. Lords were managers or hired managers to get their point of view represented. Florio is the genius who pulled it altogether at the end with a unifying voice.
Everybody who was anyone who sought to influence popular opinions of the day had a scriptorium. Plays were the newspapers of the day and scriptoriums were how the Lordly class had their propaganda inserted into the plays. Some characters in the plays were used to lampoon public figures in sly and subtle ways by borrowing lines and actions from real life. With new innovations constantly being inserted, the plays were in a constant state of flux. The plays of that time were intended to be a fluid manner of communication to the public which no single author could possibly keep up with. This form of public discourse was slowly replaced by newspapers and other printed material as literacy and wages improved. The First Folio is a beautiful homage to a unique moment in time. Good show.
Hear, hear!
Outstanding! Thank you. But, one must not make the assumption that British society is actually looking for the truth about Shakespeare. At some high level, the truth may be known, but this truth may be too painful, too embarrassing for hard-core British Protestants to accept. Two analogues: (1) Galileo: many Catholic cardinals knew Galileo's evidence had merit, but it didn't matter. Church dogma and Church interpretation of reality must be maintained. (2) Katyn Massacre in WW2: The Soviet Union claimed the Nazis did it, even though the Soviets had the proof that it was really done by Soviet soldiers. No Soviet scholar could challenge this twisting of history without the risk of being sent to a gulag or worse. So, the truth about Shakespeare being an impostor may be known at some high level, but it does not matter. Lies and steadfast coverup are better than the ugly truth of a Catholic Bard. Truth be damned! History often works that way, doesn't it?
Not sure anyone much cares if a "Shakespearean Catholicism" is valorized, the fact is he's as likely to be investigated for various heresies as anything else.
While there are a few good ideas sprinkled into this presentation, it misses a broader truth. As Edward Teller put it, it's 'the pursuit of simplicity'. I.e., good science. Here's a perfect example of what Oxfordians need to do: ua-cam.com/video/5EsBiC9HjyQ/v-deo.html
Just watched Ros Barber.Very good. Imagine that barrister using their dinner to destroy their case.
Curious though that she only raised the difficult areas and ignored the 1000 pieces of evidence anti WS and maybe pro DV. And that the 1000th question, far from being the killer blow, was the weakest link.
(“Why did Hemings and Condell refer toWS as their friend?” Why indeed.)
As always she determinedly missed the identification of WS as the Will of the Sonnets, the guy whose name DV adopted and adapted and whom he loved so much. I think DV began to regret that, and came to mistrust WS, finally falling out of love with him. The Sonnets mention his grief at his treachery.
WS was a shrewd businessman who realised he was sitting on a fortune. He had DV in the palm of his hand. Stung him for the price of New House, and kept his hand on the manuscripts of the plays. There is a mention somewhere of him “supplying” the plays to London from Stratford, not writing them.
Finally BJ and Draycott had to make the arduous journey to Stratford and bump him off in 1616, procuring the MSS. BJ fed them to H and C to form the 1st Folio in 1623. They may never even have known the true identity of the writer, but thought it actually was WS.
This whole mystery will never be resolved until the glaringly obvious identification of WS as The Lovely Boy (13 mentions of Will in Sonnet 135!) (“E'en as when first I hallowed thy fair name” Sonnet 108)
is recognised.
Richard Vaughan Davies
author “In the Shadow of Shakespeare."
If you see Heminges and Condell as merely lending their names to the front matter, then Jonson is referring to WS as a "Friend and Fellow" - note the use of upper-case letters - in the epistle dedicatory in terms of the early Rosicrucian group (later to be renamed Freemasons) of whom William and Philip Herbert were two members. That's at least one theory to contemplate.
"WRIOTHESELEY" can be found in at least (but usually not more than) one line of almost all the sonnets.
e'en as when first I hallowed thy fair name = E'En aS WHEN fIRst I haLlOwed THY faRI namE
Henrie Wriothesley = Thy Fair Name
"When forty winters shall besiege thy brow" = wHEN foRtY WinteRs shalL bESIEge THY brOw
Whose brow? Henry Wriothesely.
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will = WhoEvER hath her wIsh, thOu haSt THY will
Who hast Will? Wriothesley
Sweare to thy blind soul that I was thy “Will,” = sWEaRE to THY blind SOul that I was thy “wilL,”
Whose "Will?" Wriothesley's Will.
A pox on the adverts.
Very interesting to someone who has minimal acquaintance with Shakespeare and was unaware of this controversy. I can't believe I watched the whole thing.
A question: Assume that the person who wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare was not named Shakespeare, why didn't that person use his (or her) own name. Sounds like a scam to me.
Also, how do we know that all the works attributed to Shakespeare are written by the same person?
Two answers: Police state treatment for troublesome dissenters of all stripes was de rigeur; secondly, watch the Keir Cutler You Tube presentation "Is Shakespeare Dead," there were all sorts of complications for anyone willing to publicize his or her role in writing those plays and sonnets.
I think the second stage of an anti-Stratfordian argument (who was the true author) also must address why the First Folio inserted the man from Stratford in place of the true author. Why was it still necessary to conceal the true author. If there was indeed a conspiracy, this only occurred in 1623 given that there is nothing conspiratorial about writing under a pen name.
LOL, you should study the consequences of "heresy" and "unpopular political views about the monarchy" in that era!
Yes. Needs to be an end to all the intriguing but kooky literary codes and ciphers stuff. Far too conspiratorial.
Ros, Westboro was a psyop. IMO. (IMO played by the Simons.)
Get serious, there's no need to line up bogus, fraudulent "fringe wackos" to embrace any number of fanatical cult religious teachings, they are created out of ignorance and a history of dumbed-down dogmatism reaching back thousands of years!
That's akin to the Alex Jones ravings about the Sandy Hook school massacre, with his "crisis actors" and "fake police investigations."
How to win the authorship debate:
Step 1: find some evidence.
Step 2: there is no Step 2. Just find some evidence and it's a done deal.
How can you take this person seriouslg when she uses bare faced lies. In one slide she says illiterate daughters several times while showing judith shakespeare's mark. However she doesnt show either of his other daughter, susannah hall's two surviving signatures neatly written years apart but still similar. There is no way ros is unaware of these signatures. Utterly deceitful and lacking all credibility, creepy
Jeez Looeez, so Susannah eked out some basic writing and literacy skills over the years, so what? And you come on here shrieking in faux outrage, get a grip, you have nothing remotely close to a substantive rebuttal - just some creepy claims of your own.