The Parallel Universe of Dr Stritmatter PhD.

The Republic of Stritmatter: Population 1.

In a field crowded with appalling work, this is a contender for the bottom of the pile.

Edward de Vere is a poet of modest achievement. An early Elizabethan courtier poet with a reputation based on a slender volume of work that stands comparison with other courtier poets of his day but comes nowhere close to the quality of the competition amongst the Bankside poets and playwrights who made their living with the pen.

The Doctor (Professor) is, sadly not on Shakespeare's wavelength and his attempt to reduce the distance between The Earl and The Bard is hopelessly misguided.

The parallels he 'discovers' turn out to be orthogonals. On Page 19 he correctly identifies a figure of speech in Oxford's work and produces another example from Shakespeare. The sample of Oxford's work is the usual, self-pitying, plodding, mediocre complaint, asking in every line "What plague is greater than grief of mind". Though it follows the pattern for anadiplosis, each line expresses the same thought. Shakespeare's anadiplosis leads the reader up a staircase, step by step, to a conclusion. Oxford just repeats himself.

But Let's forget the qualitative differences that even a high school senior could describe. Forget that Oxford's 'grief of mind' is personal rather than a plague. Forget that all The Earl means (and says) is "I'm really pissed off at the moment", just look at where Stritmatter goes next.

"These two passages are so dynamically similar as to defy credible explanation outside the hypothesis of shared authorship…"

Eh????

Having identified the form as a literary construct (and therefore used by writers generically), Stritmatter leaps to the conclusion that because both writers have used the same device, they must be the same writer. It's like saying that because Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes S coupe and a Merryweather fire truck are both red, they must have been painted by the same person.

And if that leap isn't long enough, look at the next one.

"If Oxford's poetry typically expresses a tragic vision, we should not forget that he was primarily known during his own lifetime as a writer of stage comedy".

Sorry, Oxford was known as an ineffective dabbler in politics and the tin trade, a misogynist, an Italianate foppish dabbler in forbidden arts and proscribed pleasures. a dilettante who squandered his fortune, welched on his debts and had to be bailed out by the Queen. No one ever suggested he was a Bankside Playwright. A producer of the odd dainty device for the court, maybe. Professional playwright, never.

Think of the self-contradiction! Stritmatter is selling Oxford as the hidden hand behind Shakespeare, yet everyone knew him as a comic playwright??

And calling his poetry "tragic" is…well…just tragic.

I note that Stritmatter is promising more of this stuff. Another volume.

If it turns out to be popular I might finish my own book listing the parallels between TS Eliot's work and the 1926 timetable of the Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. Railway enthusiasts love parallels. Shouldn't take more than an afternoon.

There are implications in all this.

I'd say that the book reveals the Oxfordian mind in an entirely new light.

But there isn't any light. If anyone has a copy, perhaps they could help me to find a page, any page, which shows Stritmatter's personal response to the poetry he's writing about. Any sign that he appreciates Oxford (never mind Shakespeare) as a poet. Any sign that he appreciates poetry as an art form. Or connects to an artist in a way that demonstrates an empathetic understanding of the work.

Or even an understanding of why we read poetry.

Maybe he'd be better suited to writing about the merits of railway timetables. I might suggest it to him. But as with his attempt to portray himself as a man of Cold Fusion science, he should study the basics of Data Science before posing as a data scientist. As David Kathman, Tom Veal, Oxfraud and others who have written about his thesis can affirm, most of the work goes into cleaning the dataset and defining its boundaries. Stritmatter does not trouble himself with this effort. He never draws any benefit from his excavations because he doesn't know what he is excavating or what lies either side of his flimsy seams. From the reviews of this book on Amazon.com, it's becoming apparent that he isn't aware that different versions of EEBO exist and he has been working with the smaller version.

He mistakes subsets for sets, confuses occurrences of similar words with similar writing styles and worst of all, bends the data he can see to suit his conclusions. In the absence of accurate data definitions, these can all be dismissed.

This book is unworthy of serious criticism.

Almost all his numbers are wrong because he hasn't established the boundaries of his base data. In many places (all the ones in which I've looked), it's like watching a novice trying to fake The Marriage of the Arnolfini with kitchen paper, a 3" brush, and paint left over from a bedroom extension.

Anyone waiting for the Shakespearean qualities that Stritmatter claimed to discover in Dyer's poetry (and subsequently failed to identify) will only find the self-same answer we suspected the last time we challenged The Professor to produce a list. The subject cropped up in a Guardian discussion from which he made an inelegant retreat after being asked. ten times over, for a demonstration of the Shakespearean qualities he claimed "anyone widely read in the canon" could distinguish.

There are certainly no answers in this book. There are no reasoned arguments. No detailed appreciation of what makes a Shakespearean quality. None. The answer, as I think we knew all along, is that Stritmatter is unequipped to point out Shakespearean qualities anywhere.

Even in Shakespeare.

Oh dear. Another futile assault on Shakespeare’s authorship by Dr. Stritmatter, Ph.D.

He keeps trying to shift the paradigm—Mount Everest—with spades of wet tissue paper. A self-driven Sisyphus, he’s labored mightily to roll his Big Rock up the hill, to drop it on the Orthodoxy. It’s his dream to squash us flat. He is joined in his futile labours by a crew of fellow cultists—“an hundred Sisiphi at once, rowling so many restlesse stones”—but chiefly here by Gary Goldstein, Robert Prechter, and Bryan Wildenthal. The volume as whole is marked by that peculiar Stritmatterly blend of pomposity, credulity, and arithmetical incompetence.

Dr. Stritmatter has long insisted (against all evidence) that the markings, by a series of unknown hands, in a Geneva Bible once owned by the Earl of Oxford, mirror Shakespeare’s scriptural allusions. Not so. They are almost an anti-match. Whole swathes of Shakespeare’s most alluded-to verses, chapters, even books, go unmarked, while huge tracts of the Apochrypha, which the poet-playwright barely noted, are a thicket of Xs and underlinings.

In this new rock—er, book, Stritmatter’s arithmetic remains shaky, but here at least he's more or less comparing text to text. He has discovered Early English Books Online, “the definitive online collection of early printed works in English, and works printed in England” from 1473 to 1700. It includes over 132,000 titles, which is virtually everything. What he hasn’t discovered is how to use it. He hasn’t a clue what to look for, or how to structure a search—and that ignorance (as we shall see) proves fatal to his work.

His methods are naive and impressionistic, merely what MacDonald Jackson has called the “uncontrolled accumulation of parallels between a disputed work and an authorial candidate whom the scholar favours.” True stylometic studies go much deeper, into pause patterns and word adjacency networks. By comparison, this stuff is childish dot-to-dottery. For all his pseudo-scholarly posturing, Stritmatter hasn’t a clue how stylometric analysis is done: he appears like a stargazer trying to refute astrophysics, armed only with a cardboard mailing tube for a telescope. It’s no wonder he’s ignored. Nothing daunted, he sets out to show that “there is Salmons in both” Oxford and Shakespeare. And of course, he finds what he’s looking for. He’s assembled a sad little list of banalities that appear both in Shakespeare’s work and in Oxford’s tiny oeuvre (which is plumped out by larceny from other poets), calling these bitlets “unusual common phrases” Unusual and common? “That is, hot ice, and wondrous strange snow.”

And to this reader, very tragicall mirth.

Stritmatter’s conceit of what a ”parallel” might be beggars belief. To take just one: he matches “I have little and seek no more” with Shakespeare’s “Little joy I have / To breathe this news ... I speak no more than every one doth know.” That modest ellipsis conceals a cut of eight-and-a-half lines [!] of blank verse. This goes beyond mere wishful thinking into the realm of the delusional.

And as for his statistics—Seriously, what the good doctor needs is a freshman tutorial on using EEBO. He has no idea how it works. I have been through his tables, tested dozens of his figures. All of them are undercounted, some drastically. Some of his results are obvious oversights (or flat-out cheats); others, perplexing.

To begin with, he’s bad at searching. Sometimes he appears to be ignoring variant spellings; nearly always, variant forms. For example, Stritmatter tells us that “EEBO returns only ten hits in ten records (1473-1623) for the search ‘world afford,’” and 34 in 29 records for “world affords.” Hey, what happened to “affordeth”? Did he deliberately ignore it, to suppress the numbers? Or is he absolutely ignorant of Early Modern English verb forms? Counting all variant spellings and grammatical forms of “world afford,” there are 151 instances in 128 books. But wait! What about forms like “will afford”? Or “can scarcely afford”? Since Strimatter counts Shakespeare’s “The spacious world cannot again afford” among his “strongest parallels” with Oxford’s “That world affords,” we must look at “world NEAR afford.” The score leaps to 475/347. I wouldn’t call that rare.

As a rule, his searches are designed to gerrymander, to draw a tight little box around the earl and the playwright, excluding all others. “An EEBO search ... (1473-1600) returns only four hits in three sources for the term ‘haggard hawk,’” he crows, proving to himself the rarity and exclusivity of the motif. The actual count is 21 hits in 16 records. He smugly claims that none but Oxford and his alter ego “Shakespeare” ever “associate ... the behavior of the ‘haggard hawk’ with human emotions or situations.”

Oh, really? A search for “haggard” on its own, unlimited by “hawk,” from its first appearance in 1566 to 1580, turns up 176 hits in 26 books. Turberville’s 1575 book on falconry accounts for 128 of those. There’s one in a glossary. All the rest— 47 hits in 24 books—refer to human bad behavior. Indeed, the earliest use in English that I found described a human, not a hawk. As noun and adjective, the word caught on at once, and remained a commonplace for “wild, strange; froward, contrarie, crosse” people, especially women: “the haggarde disposition of his mistres”; “the straunge and haggarde nature of loue”; “she is not of haggards kind, Nor hart so hard”; “those which are so coyishe & wilde, or so haggarde like”; “Yee haggards straunge, therefore adiew / Goe seeke some other for thy mate”; “For Haggard like, she will not stoope.” Oxford’s imagery is unexceptional.

But there’s something more than willful blindness going on here. Stritmatter finds only 14/14 hits for “When I am alone.” In fact, there are 24/24 from Chaucer onward, including one each in Oxford and Shakespeare, and one in his precious Geneva Bible. Esther xiv.16, speaking of her crown: “I hate this token of my preeminence, which I beare vpon mine head, ... I abhorre it as a menstruous cloth, and that I weare it not when I am alone by my self.” Unmarked, of course: the entire chapter is as virgin snow.

But I digress. Alternate spelling accounts for only one of those ten missing hits. What is happening to his results?

The key to the riddle is found in one ridiculous set of parallels, foregrounded proudly. In a 1602 letter, Oxford uses the Latin proverb “Finis coronat opus” (“The end crowns the work”). I’ll bet his secretary thought of that, and spelled it for him. Stritmatter is thrilled that Shakespeare uses three different versions of that proverb in his work, even though not one of them is Latin. In the Folio version of 2 Henry VI, there's a typographically mangled version of the French, “La fin Corrone les eumenes [les oeuvres].” The Anglo-French “the fines the Crowne” appears in All’s Well That Ends Well; and “the end crownes all," in Troilus and Cressida (1609 & 1623). The English and French appear nowhere in Oxford’s poetry or letters; the Latin, nowhere in Shakespeare.

Indeed, until the later 17th century, as far as I can tell, the French proverb appears in print only in Shakespeare (1623) and in G. D. L. M. N.’s The French alphabeth (1592), where it comes with a handy translation: “La fin couronne l'oeuure. The end doth crowne the worke.” That book, whose pseudonymous author is G. Delamothe, was published by Shakespeare’s Stratford contemporary Richard Field, and may have given the playwright that proverb (and perhaps a name in Love’s Labours Lost?).

Shakespeare’s use of "the end crownes all” is the very first recorded in EEBO, though a translator of The Ship of Fooles (1509) simply and succinctly writes “For the ende crowneth.” Shakespeare’s “The fines the Crowne" is unique.

Nonetheless, Strit's absolutely thrilled by the coincidence.

“By any measure this proverb is rare before 1623. In the Latin version, [only] Henri Estienne (1607), Edmund Bolton (1610), and Gerard Malynes (1622), use ‘finis coronat opus’ before the publication of All’s Well in 1623.” Wait, what? What happened to the anonymous author of A dialogue or speaking together of two personages (1582), William Watson (1602), Otto van Veen (1608), Thomas Milles (1608), Sir Edward Hoby (1615), and Crispijn van de Passe (1615)?

Three out of nine.

You will note that Shakespeare nowhere uses “work.” Nevertheless, it's “The end crowns the work" that Stritmatter looks for, not the "The end crowns all” “In English,” says Dr. Stritmatter, “only Sébastien Michaelis (1613) and George Hakewell {Hakewill, actually] (1621) are known to do so [include that proverb}.”

What!? I find 27 titles that do so. The first is by Daniel Tossanus (1583): “the end crowneth ye worke.” Among other items, the list includes G. Delamothe’s The French alphabeth (1592), as noted; that terribly obscure play The Spanish tragedie by Thomas Kyd (1592: “The end is crowne of euery worke”); John Bodenham’s, Bel-vedére, or, The Garden of the muses, which is a commonplace book, for heaven’s sake, a list of popular sententiae (1600); George Chapman’s inconspicuous Homer (1611); Constantia Munda, in the gloriously titled The vvorming of a mad dogge: or, A soppe for Cerberus the iaylor of Hell (1617); the great jurist Sir Edward Coke (1618); and Charles Fitz-Geffry (1620): “But the end is the Crowne of the whole work; and the last Act (if any) carrieth away the Applause.”

Oblivious to the end, Stritmatter writes, “Evaluating this evidence honestly requires assessment of prior probabilities.” No. Evaluating this evidence honestly requires the ability to reason and to count.

Three out of nine. Two out of twenty-seven.

What the devil is going on here?

Only part of this grievous deficiency comes down to Stritmatter’s unintelligent search tactics, though a badly stated search will miss variants like “end doth crowne “ and “crowne of euery worke.”

The truly devastating error lies elsewhere, at the very foundations of his research. From the screen shot on p. 11, and by exactly which authors’ names he didn’t find, I could tell that he’s been using an incomplete, perhaps antiquated version of EEBO, EEBO lite. As he should have known—he supposedly studied for his doctorate—EEBO comprises two collections. EEBO-TCP Phase I is freely available to everyone who searches, on any device, from anywhere. It is not tied to any provider. But EEBO-TCP Phase II is “available only to EEBO-TCP partners.” Buried deep in the Help pages is the quiet bombshell: “Your institution may not be subscribed to all EEBO subsets.”

It appears that Coppin State is not.

EEBO-TCP Phase II accounts for three-fifths of all the titles in their database. So Dr. Stritmatter has been merrily searching away, without realizing that his corpus is missing more than half its texts. He’s been calling the winners of an election, in which three-fifths of the ballots have been randomly destroyed. He’s not playing with a full deck.

That noise you hear is the thunk-thunk-thunking of the Big Rock, bounding down and down and down the hill to the very bottom, and into the swamp.

This study is hopelessly, irrevocably, fatally flawed.

The honorable thing would be to withdraw the book, with refunds and apologies.

The rational thing to do would be to stop rolling that stone.

Being Sisyphus, there’s no hope.

My Mind to me a nutshell is

Ben Jonson despised “My mind to me a kingdom is,” artistically and morally.

Steven May, Oxford’s scholarly editor, is less vehement, but notes “the poem's tendency towards doggerel” and its “smug point of view.”

Roger Stritmatter is ecstatic: “‘My mind to me a Kingdom Is’ has echoed across the generations of the English lyric tradition. ... Readers of all kinds have found in it a masterpiece of lyric consolation embodying a zen-like message of stoic self-reliance.”

What nonsense! The only poor souls who find consolation in this high-end Hallmark card are Oxfordian cultists like Roger, who can seize upon the one much-reprinted poem that might be by his darling earl. As for beauty? It’s the zircon jewel in the crown.

No one’s reading this at funerals.

Strit has a spiritual naugahyde palate, to go with his aesthetic tin ear. He really takes this Kool-Aid for Cabernet. Does he admire Polonius as Shakespeare’s great philosopher?

Right. There are two attribution questions here.

To begin with, did Oxford write the thing? Did Sir Edward Dyer? Steven May calls de Vere’s authorship no more than “entirely possible.” Looking at the rival claims of two manuscripts—“A sonet, said to bee fyrst written by the L. Ver.” and “Finis. E. Dier”— he writes: “Inasmuch as nothing in the lyric’s content or style necessarily connects it with one poet more than other, their claims must be judged in the light of the external evidence surrounding both ascriptions.”

In other words, this is a bit of nondescript Drab Age verse, with nothing dazzlingly fabulous about it.

On weighing the evidence, May rules for Oxford, by a hair:

“The evidence found in these two manuscripts does not conclusively establish either Oxford’s or Dyer’s claim to the verse, although the balance can be tipped slightly in Oxford’s favour, I believe.”

Let’s call the author Oxendyer.

Next question. Are the lyrics beginning “I Ioy not in no earthly blisse” actually a continuation of “My minde to me a kingdome is”? Did Oxendyer write what Stritmatter calls the “extra stanza” [four stanzas, actually]? Steven May rejects both their unity and Oxford’s authorship of “E.O.18b.” He writes, “There seems to be no candidate for the authorship of this sequel. No Elizabethan text combines them in whole or part. ... Parts 1 and 2 must be separate poems which were no doubt combined to fill out the sheet when ‘My mind to me’ was prepared for broadside publication. Just how early this occurred is impossible to say, but there is no evidence for such a merger before the seventeenth century.”

Nonetheless, Stritmatter has patched together his own Frankenlyric from these two distinct poems.

I note that in Byrd’s Psalmes, sonets (1588), “I Ioy not in no earthly blisse” appears as song XI. and “My minde to me a kingdome is” as song XIIII. If the numbers mean anything, “Part 2” would appear to be a prequel. They are set to quite different tunes, in (as far as I can tell) different time signatures. Byrd evidently didn’t see them as a single poem, but as independent lyrics. Oxendyer was lucky to be set by so brilliant a composer. If anyone made his lyrics memorable, it was William Byrd.

With that out of the way, let’s look at its merits as a poem.

Intellectually, May sees it as “contributing to an established but not yet hackneyed motif of courtly poetry.” No innovation here: Oxfordyer does nothing to distinguish himself from the Drab Age pack.

Stritmatter lauds it as “a testament to the author’s striking capacity to refocus philosophical questions with originality and poetic fluency.” (Pain, 122)

Refocus? What questions, in what way? How is this poem remotely original? I will grant, though, that it’s glib.

Aesthetically, May sees it as disposable, a kind of early modern Hallmark card:

“Despite its courtly origins, its smug point of view easily spans both 'court and cart', so that it was quite susceptible to being copied into elite anthologies of courtly verse, added to manuscript songbooks, or sold in broadside form to apprentice, page, or oyster wife, to be sung, savoured, and in most cases discarded. This general appeal seems capable of overriding the poem's tendency towards doggerel, and must account in some degree for the fact that its popularity even today is not wholly academic.” (May, 1975, 394)

So Roger’s jewel in the crown is middlebrow at best: polite, unchallenging, sententious, smug.

Ben Jonson thought it was trash.

In his early comedy of humours, The Case is Alterd (ca. 1597, published 1609), Onion is fool enough to take it for an anthem :

Onion.

For mine owne part I am no Gentleman borne I must confesse, but my mind to me a kingdome is truly.

Anto.

Truly a very good saying.

Onion.

T'is somewhat stale, but that's no matter.

Anto.

O t'is the better, such things euer are like bread, which the staler it is, the more holesome.

For Onion, Oxendyer’s manchet may be stale, but it’s white bread: the true courtly diet. He too can feel rich by pretending he wants nothing more.

Jonson returned to the thing just a few years later, with redoubled loathing.

In Every Man Out of His Humour (1600), Macilente fiercely rejects stoicism.

I am no such pild Cinique, to beleeue

That beggerie is the only happinesse;

Or (with a number of these patient fooles)

To sing: My mind to me a kingdome is,

VVhen the lanke hungrie belly barkes for food:

“Pilled/piled” is polysemous: it can mean “threadbare” or “furred” or both. A Cynic is a radical Stoic, ostentatiously contemptuous of ease, wealth, and pleasure. “Threadbare” alludes to his rejection of material comforts; “furred” to the derivation of “cynic” from the Greek word for “dog”: Cynics saw themselves as watchdogs of public morals, barkers and biters. Jonson saw them as Puritans.

If William Shakespeare had written this poem (no chance of that), Jonson would have rubbed his nose in it. None of his criticisms of Shakespeare—his facility, his fantasy, his errors in geography—includes a charge of pharisaism.

Even worse than the folly of the sentiment is its hypocrisy. Oxendyer’s beggary is (of course) a privileged pose: “I wish no more than may suffice.”

Reminds me of the trust-fund idler in an old S. J.Perelman story, ”Nesselrode to Jeopardy”:

“Given fair seats at the ballet, half a dozen friends with country houses from whom I can scrounge weekends, a few custom-tailored suits, some decent hand-lasted shoes ... and three months a year at Montreux or Bordighera, and I can live in a hole in the wall at the Crillon and rub along on a gigot and a crisp salad.”

This is the same smug complacency as Oxendyer’s, stripped of its pretense of piety. Easy enough with moneyed leisure (destitution for an earl is still obscenely rich) to play at philosophy. Not that Oxford himself was content to hole up in Hackney with a few pairs of scented gloves and servants to abuse. No, he spent a lifetime whining and wheedling, banging his spoon on the highchair for more more more. Oxendyer, whichever he was, was a persona. All this poem says can be boiled down to four words: “I’m all right, Jack”

Even Stritmatter feels he has to excuse “would all did so as well as I,” and urges that “Those troubled by the apparent arrogance of the final line of the E.O. 18 version should continue reading the additional twenty-four lines of E.O. 18b from Byrd (1588).” Which, of course, are probably not Oxfordyer’s but a variation on a sanctimonious motif.

The arrogance is there, and was plainly visible to later commentators.

John Taylor (1630) seized on both the folly and the self-conceit:

He (in his owne Conceite) may haue this blisse,

And sing, My minde to me a Kingdome is.

But 'tis a Kingdome wanting forme or matter,

Or substance, like the Mooneshine in the water.

John Clarke, in his collection of proverbs Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina (1639), classed the opening line, “My mind to me a Kingdome is,” with a long list of smug sayings, including:

That suit is best that best fits me.

One mans meat is another mans poyson.

The crow thinkes her owne fairest.

Al his geese are swannes.

Asinus asino, sus sui pulcher. {A donkey is beautiful to donkey, and a pig to a pig]

Popular is not the same as brilliant. Stritmatter and Wildenthal praise “Professor May’s careful and important study” of these verses (Pain, 12); yet they fail to notice that May calls them smug doggerel, at best “not yet hackneyed.” His work, they think, “greatly enhances Oxford’s poetic reputation and supplies readers with opportunity for profound insight into the mind that would eventually create”—my god, what a sentence—“a character who could be a ‘king of infinite space’ but who finds his mind ‘bounded by a nutshell’” (Pain, 12).

That gassy prose tells you everything you need to know about admirers of Oxford’s style. As for that misquoted Shakespeare—Is it too much to hope that this clown has never taught Hamlet? In his mangled misinterpretation, he appears to think that the Prince “could be a ‘king of infinite space’” (in what sense?) if only his mind weren’t “bounded by a nutshell.”

What?

No.

Rosencrantz is a Hallmark philosopher, one of those consolatory patient fools despised by Jonson. Of Denmark he says, “’tis too narrow for your minde.” Have, have some nice stale manchet.

Hamlet refuses. His reply, you will notice, is conditional: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count my selfe a King of infinite space; were it not that I haue bad dreames.” Could be. Were it not. On the simplest level, he’s saying he could be imprisoned in the smallest possible space—a nutshell, metaphorically—and yet (with his mind at liberty) he could count himself “a King of infinite space.” Yes, he could do that mind to me = kingdom thing, transcendently—“were it not that I haue bad dreames.” Nix to Oxendyer. Shakespeare eclipses and explodes him in a single sentence.

If Oxendyer had written Hamlet, the Prince would be preening himself on his contentment. A nutshell’s all I need.

Thank goodness for the “look inside” feature!

It saves me from purchasing this dreadful mess. What can we learn from Dr Roger PhD’s book just using the "look inside" feature?

Another reviewer -- whose review is based on "look inside" views -- has convincingly shown that Professor Stritmatter used the wrong version of Early English Books Online (EEBO) that omits as much as sixty percent of the material; and that Professor Stritmatter used limited search strings that failed to turn up sometimes dozens of phrases.

What version of EEBO did you use?

We can also learn new definitions of familiar words. Gary Goldstein, on page 157, tells us that “prima facie proof” is “mathematical.” But a prima facie case actually refers to one in which the evidence before trial is sufficient to prove it, unless there is substantial contradictory evidence presented at trial. Mathematical? Where does that come from? Why didn’t Professor Wildenthal catch that?

Maybe this misunderstanding of what a prima facie case is explains why Oxfordians continue to neglect addressing the overwhelming prima facie case for William Shakespeare of Stratford – the only man by that name involved in the London theater community, a member of the playing company that for two decades exclusively performed Shakespeare’s works, a fellow of Heminges and Condell, the compilers of the First Folio. The case for Shakespeare is well-documented by centuries of researchers, and by the contemporary evidence of his colleagues.

So far, there's been no "substantial contradictory evidence" to dispute it. Oxfordians imagine that all they need to do is come up with SOME alternative explanation for the evidence, no matter how far-fetched. They imagine they can tell when a primary source is referring to the man from Stratford named "Shakespeare" (spelled this way in the text of three of the four extant documents he signed) rather than the author "Shakespeare." They imagine that they can prove that Heminges and Condell did not identify Shakespeare as the author of the works in a book named "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies."

This current effort (as poorly executed as it is) seems like they skipped the hard issue of disproving a well-documented and supported attribution of Shakespeare’s works to the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, in favor of picking out images shared between de Vere’s brief writing career up to his twenties, and Shakespeare’s.

Without a convincing explanation for the evidence in the First Folio, from Stratford, and from Shakespeare’s documented career in the theater in London, exercises like this one (apparently vol II is on its way? Or will that just be the errata sheet for this one?) don’t advance the Oxfordian Ox cart.

In the opening chapter, Dr. Strimatter claims that Gervase Markham’s "Honour in His Perfection" (1624) "comes about as close as one could imagine to a contemporary witness crediting Oxford with some great but unacknowledged ‘alms’ for the world." Unfortunately, Dr. Stritmatter’s claim to have discovered the Oxfordian Smoking Gun derives entirely from a misreading of Markham’s short work, a collection of encomiums that address, among others, the Earls of Oxford. DrS focuses on a single line where Markham appears to be praising Earl Edward: "the bounty which Religion and Learning daily took from him, are trumpets so loud, that all ears know them." Taking the apparent praise at face value, DrS points out that Markham’s work appeared "within months of the publication of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio. Is DrS suggesting a connection between Markham and the First Folio? Perhaps that the timing of Markham’s work was intentional? Or even that an Oxfordian reading of Markham might reveal new evidence that Oxford was the secret Shakespeare?

Of course that’s what DrS is up to. It's what he does. Because for DrS, every mention of Oxford’s name doth tell a clue for his secret authorship of Shakespeare.

Having insinuated a connection to the First Folio, DrS claims that Markham was citing Matthew 6. 1-4. Except that Markman’s trumpets blare for Oxford’s "bounty . . . so loud, that all ears hear them," which is precisely the opposite of what Matt. 6. 1-4 teaches: "When thou givest thine alms, though shalt not make a trumpet." DrS seems to have missed this inversion, and with it the irony implicit in what Markham was saying about Oxford. (More on this later.) Unaware of his misstep, DrS presses on, opining that Markham’s ironic play upon Matt. 6.1-4 "becomes more interesting when we realize that these verse numbers are underlined by hand in red-orange ink in de Vere’s Folger Library copy of the Geneva Bible."

How so? What does DrS find “more interesting”? Is he suggesting some veiled connection between Markham and the underlined verse numbers in Oxford’s Bible? Perhaps Markham had access to de Vere’s Bible and knew which verses Earl Edward was fond of? DrS does not, however, elaborate. He merely insinuates. Because the underlining is coincidence, nothing more. But DrS wants to believe, and wants us to believe, there’s something probative lurking there. Next DrS reaches back 100 years and brings us another dead mouse, Tyndale’s defense of his 1525 English translation of the New Testament, upon which DrS offers this hyperbolic speculation: "This seemingly random fact [the supposed Markham-Oxford Bible connection via Matt. 6. 1-4] turns out to have an enhanced significance when we realize the potent implications for any 16th [he means 17th] century reader who remembered the story of William Tyndall’s anonymous and banned 1525 English translation of the New Testament because "Tyndale’s published confession cited Matt 6:1-4 in his defense."

Enhanced significance? Potent implications? How so?

Never mind that Dr S cannot peer into the minds of Markham’s 17th (not 16th) century readers. Straining all credulity, he imagines they would have associated Markman’s ironic reversal of Matt 6: 1-4 with Tyndale’s confession 100 years earlier, a confession that spoke of “secret alms”, not “loudly trumpeted bounty”. And somehow transferred the "secret alms" to Oxford, then understood the "alms" to represent the recent First Folio and the "secret" to be Oxford’s authorship. How Markham’s readers would make such leaps is left for us to figure out. And never mind how Oxford’s Bible fits in.

On the other hand, both Markham and Tyndale do have trumpets. And both have alms. So maybe they do mean the same thing. After all, a witch and a duck are both made of wood. To get back on point, we’re now left with four unconnected dots: (1) the First Folio, (2) Markham’s "Honours",(3) the underlined verses in Oxford’s Bible, and (4) Tyndale’s secret alms. At least DrS rightly calls his dots "seemingly random facts." Because they have no "enhanced significance", and certainly no "potent implications”, at least not until Dr S explains why they do.

Instead, he insinuates. Call it "Proof by Insinuation". The perfect bookend to the "Proof by Proximity", where merely being near Uncle Golding enabled young Oxford, great Latinist that he was, to be the secret translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Just like DrS seems to think that since Markham appeared only a few months after the First Folio, they’re proximate, and, therefore, connected.

Thus Dr S confidently mounts the high pulpit of Oxfordoxy to make a stunning claim: "Markham’s accolade for Oxford comes about as close as one could imagine to a contemporary witness crediting Oxford with some great but unacknowledged ‘alms’ for the world."

Except that it doesn’t. Because there’s nothing "unacknowledged" about Oxford’s "loudly trumpeted bounty." And because "Markham’s accolade" is anything but. Quite the opposite, as Markham was actually ripping Oxford to shreds in a masterful paradoxical encomium.

Markham's paradoxical encomium—a rhetorical form that any Elizabethan schoolboy would recognize—is no more than a longish paragraph and an easy read. More important, it's consistent throughout, zinger after zinger. Here a link. Earl Edward starts on p. 16.

Link to quod.lib.umich.edu

So let's parse this sterquilinium of hot steaming praise.

Eddie, unlike his warrior ancestors, never warred because he lived during the “Blessed armes of Peace in the blessed daies of the euer blessed Elizabeth.” Uh, Big Fat One, unless Markham forgot about the endless wars in the Low Countries and the Armada (which, of course, he didn't). Rather, Oxford miserably failed to do his duty on both occasions. And since he made such a botch of soldiering, we'll just pretend he lived during a time of peace. Wink, wink.

Or that Oxford “In Italie, France, and other Nations, did more Honour to this Kingdome then all that haue trauelled since.” Another Big Fat One, recalling how roundly Oxford was mocked in Harvey's Speculum Toscana for having brought back little more from Italy than perfumed gloves and choir boys.

And this wonderful bit of snarkery, “It were infinite to speake of his infinite expence, the infinite number of his attendants, or the infinite house he kept to feede all people.” A perfect recounting of Oxford's 'infinite' excess.

Then another Big Fat One, unless anyone--except Oxfordians--has ever believed that Eddie was “vpright and honest in all his dealings the few debts he left behinde him to clog his suruiuours, were safe pledges.” Eddie was a first class profligate who effectively left his daughters penniless wards of Grandfather Burghley.

And the topper which we are already familiar with, “the almes he gaue (which at this day would not only feede the poore, but the great mans family also) and the bountie which Religion and Learning daily tooke from him, are Trumpets so loude, that all eares know them”. Nope. Eddie was a beggar, not a giver. And everybody knew it, so loudly was it trumpeted.

FWIW, in the rest of this brief work, Markham is generally complimentary to the other Earls. From which we must conclude Markham's change in mode for Earl Edward was deliberate and his target appropriately chosen. So we must conclude that at least for Earl Edward, Markham slyly slipped into paradoxical encomium, reminiscent of Harvey's “Gratulationes Valdinensium” where he brilliantly skewered Oxenford:

O great-hearted one, strong in thy mind and thy fiery will, thou wilt conquer thyself, thou wilt conquer others; thy glory will spread out in all directions beyond the Arctic Ocean. Oxford could barely control himself, and NEVER conquered anyone, except the poor cook. As for his fame extending far beyond the Arctic Ocean, you can imagine the readers chuckling to themselves. Indeed, Markham wields a nasty scalpel, and how Dr. Strimtatter missed this is puzzling. As a scholar, DrS would have read at least the full section on the Earls of Oxford. So he must have picked up on Markham’s irony, even though it would have posed a problem for his ”literary reasoning” that led to this “providential discovery” of such “historical consequence.”

The explanation might, however, be quite simple. Oxfordians just don't do irony very well. They see it when it isn't there (e.g., Jonson's tribute in the First Folio) and miss it when it is, whether subtle like Golding, Nowell, and Chapman, or smack-you-in-the-face, like Markham's. Besides, to an Oxfordian hammer like DrS, everything, including Markham, looks like an authorship nail, which goes a long way to explain why his predicate is fatally flawed, and the deductive process therefrom Pythonesque. And just for the record, what's actually “more interesting” about Matt. 6. 1-4 being underlined in Oxford's Bible is that Shaheen (the gold standard on Shakespeare's Biblical references) does not list Matt. 6. 1-4 among the many verses Shakespeare referenced. So maybe Oxford liked this passage, but the real Shakespeare, not so much. Likewise, Genesis, Proverbs, and Acts, which Shakespeare drew on extensively, have over 300 verses identified by Shaheen. But the annotator(s) marked only one verse in each book, and none of the three are listed by Shaheen. So instead of showing that Oxford was Shakespeare, the marks show that whoever made the annotations had very different interests than Shakespeare's. In fact, Oxfordians should be doing everything possible to show that the marks were NOT Oxford's.