Stratford Connections

Drawing wings on the elephant

Evidence Abuse

Camden knew Will

“It seems likely therefore that William Camden made no connection between William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon and the famous author he admired”
So let's be clear. This is not a mistake or an exaggeration. This is a deception.
Camden’s Britannia, first published in Latin in 1584, was an antiquarian work, in which the only people he mentioned were important people who had built houses, bridges, etc., long in the past. Camden’s Remaines, first published in 1605 in English, was meant as a supplement to Britannia with more current material, and it is there that he mentions Shakespeare. See the post “Stratford-upon-Avon and William Camden”. As for Greene, his “diary” was actually a series of notes about the controversy over enclosing common lands that was a big deal in Stratford in 1613-1616. It primarily recorded Greene’s conversations with various townsmen (including Shakespeare) about that controversy, and the comings and goings of various people interested in it, again including Shakespeare. He didn’t record his inner thoughts about things unrelated to the enclosure controversy, and certainly not “discussions about poetry”, as Ros Barber imagines. And why would he mention that Shakespeare was a writer in a document like this? Do you think George Clooney’s friends always refer to him as “George Clooney, the movie star” whenever they’re talking about him to somebody else, or writing about him in their diary? No, I’m sure he’s just “George» to his friends.

Time to get down to business and start jumping to some conclusions. Anti-stratfordians delight in the long distance conclusion leap and their logic-leaping skills are everywhere in evidence in Week 3. Things are looking down. For the learners, anyway

Beginning of course, with the by now ceremonial casting of aspersions on Shakespeare's education. Aspersions and insinuations on Stratford, on Grammar Schools, on Latin teaching all follow hard upon and lead to the utterly inexcusable suggestion, loved by all contrarians, that Will and his daughters were illiterate. Two sections of the MOOC deal with literacy although they contain precisely nothing of relevance to any authorship issues.

Anti-Stratfordians base half their case on the idea that William of Stratford was a poor uneducated, country bumpkin who didn't go to university.

This follows from a lack of knowledge of the Elizabethan educational system.

Shakespeare's plays show much more indication of a grammar-school education than of a university one. There is no factual evidence that Shakespeare attended the Grammar School in Stratford because, as for almost every grammar school of the period, there are no surviving rolls of pupils - but why would he not have done? The schools were open and free to all able pupils from the town. Will's father was an ambitious man, who rose to be Beadle, equivalent of the Mayor of Stratford Corporation, why would he not have taken advantage of the opportunity to give his son a good education?
The Grammar School curriculum was a national one laid down by royal decree and, as shown on the link below, for boys of 10 to 14, heavily based on the Latin classics, such as Plutarch and Ovid, widely used by Shakespeare as sources. The boys also were taught oratory and the Latin dramatists, Seneca and Plautus, on one of whose plays Shakespeare closely based The Comedy of Errors.

<

One of the striking features of Shakespeare's writing is ambiguity. He learned rhetoric at school and that involved arguing both sides of a case; he made very good use of that skill in the plays. Without getting in discussion of his possible Republicanism, I think Shakespeare was much too clever to write anything with even a hint that his politics 'were enough to make any author fear for his or her life'. That is how he kept out of trouble.

 

Joan GreenleafCourse participant

Mythical narratives can arise out of actual history. Shakespeare did a bit of that himself: his Henry V is not the historical figure but an icon. That doesn't mean that some other king won at Agincourt and married Catherine of Valois. Likewise, just because the Romantics made the Stratford boy into a cultural icon does not mean that he didn't write the plays. The evidence stands.

 

Nat WhilkOxfraud

How does an authorship debate work when scholars, historians, theatre professionals and mathematicians all agree that 27 elephants are 27 elephants and not a menagerie of ornamental bipeds? How do you make a case for saying "that elephant isn't grey, four-legged and 12 feet tall, it's actually white, with wings, it used to fly but now it lives in a shoebox"? You have to draw on wings, you have to argue the possibility that 3-ton round objects can once have flown and can now be fitted into a shoebox by some method of collapse that some scholars agree is theoretically possible.

MikeOxfraud

Wings

Overlaying doubt on issues where there is none is like drawing wings on elephants to enable them to fly.

Evidence Abuse

Spelling argument

"The spelling argument, in other words, counts against itself"

Barber's argument here certainly counts against itself. In the first half of this unit she wants Hand D to be that of the KM's professional scribe while the second half wishes to discredit the author for his terrible spelling. A scribe who degraded texts in transcription wouldn't have lasted long in what was, by then, the most successful theatre group in history.

There are distinctive spellings in Hand D which reoccur in Shakespeare's undisputed work and very few other places in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. "Sci" in the first syllable of a character's name, when the pronunciation is intended to rhyme with "sigh", occurs only in three places, Hand D, Henry IVii and Coriolanus.If Hand D is authorial, these features are most likely to be explained by Shakespeare's authorship of the manuscript. The idiosyncrasies are real.

They can't be shrugged off with unsupported, imaginary alternative scenarios, like a phantom scribe.

Nevertheless, shrugging off continued to be the Course Tutor's approach to inconvenientr counter evidence.

Evidence Abuse

The dedication to the First Folio

More deception.Nobody except anti-Stratfordians thinks that the Pembroke (I.e. Herbert) family “sponsored” the First Folio. The colophon, on the last page, says that the book was “Printed at the charges of W.[illiam] Iaggard, Ed.[ward] Blount, I.[ohn] Smithweeke [i.e. Smethwick], and W.[illiam] Aspley, 1623”. That means that those four stationers put up the money to pay for printing the book, and shared any eventual profits. The Herbert brothers were the dedicatees; Heminges and Condell wrote the dedication hoping for a financial reward, and while virtually no records of such things have survived, I’m guessing that the Herberts did pay some sort of reward, since the dedication appeared unaltered in the Second Folio nine years later. But that money would have gone to Heminges and Condell and the rest of the King’s Men, not to the stationers who had invested in the project.

Other on point comments about Stratford

This module is a master course in how speculation becomes hardened into fact (as well as displaying a deliberate mischaracterization of copyright laws of the time). According to Ros, George Buck didn't know whether Shakespeare (his spelling) was an actor or a playwright, but apparently thought of him as a "play broker", a profession that did not exist at the time. > But in fact, we have no idea whether Buck knew Shakespeare as an actor or a playwright. What seems much more likely is that he approached Shakespeare for this information because he knew that he bought, and sold plays. "What seems much more likely"? Really? By 1599, the earliest Buck could have asked Shakespeare about the authorship of George a Green though the date of the inscription is probably poat-1610, Shakespeare had been named as a playwright by Meres and his name had appeared on several plays and two best-selling poems. I suppose all those plays with Shakespeare's name on them that Buck licensed for publication never tickled his curiosity.

Tom Reedy

Oxfraud

"Juby was the documented play broker of the Admiral's Men" This seems a stretch beyond what the evidence suggests, leading an unsuspecting beginner to assume that each company had their own "play broker". It seems like more than a stretch to me. It appears to be the product of motivated reasoning. Juby bought plays for his acting company -- he didn't broker them. He also is recorded as having purchased apparel for his company. That didn't make him a broker of clothes. So why is it that Juby has to be called a "broker of plays"? So that Shakespeare may also be identified as a "broker of plays" [by way of a somewhat lacking-in-logic employment of the fact that Buc asked both of them about the authorship of a play -- why couldn't Buc have known that both Juby and Shakespeare were both playwrights and actors?]. And why does Shakespeare have to be identified as a "broker of plays"? The answer is obvious, of course -- so that Shakespeare can be identified as the target of Jonson's poem, On Poet-Ape.

Mark Johnson

Oxfraud

The issue is not whether there was a profession of “play broker.” It’s whether it was a viable role economically. A broker role is economically viable if it fills an economic need. Brokers serve to bring buyers and sellers together. A broker is paid a fee to arrange a transaction; some brokers are principals if they are buying and selling in their own right rather than as an agent of another. But the role of broker is not always economically viable in all markets. In a market with a small number of buyers and a small number of sellers, there may not be any room for a broker middle-man. Why would a buyer pay an extra payment to a broker if he or she had a direct relationship with the seller?.

Philip Buchan

Oxfraud

Disqus
Play Tags
Coriolanus
Tags
Education
Online Courses on Shakespeare