There really is no doubt about Hand D. And there really was none created in the MOOC. This section (and its discussion forum) made smoke, weaved and bobbed, ducked and dived but could make no impression on the prima facie case, now accepted by The British Library.
Evidence Abuse
An impassioned whine
In a late addition, Barber begs that Hays' 2016 essay be allowed to wipe the Hand D slate clean and eliminate all the other evidence strands which are not, she insists, "additive". Of course they are additive. That's how evidence works. This is like saying that if the hood ornament has fallen off, you have no way of distinguishing between an Alfa Romeo and a fire truck.
She promises that although readers can't read the essay because of copyright reasons, they must take her word that it's really, really bad for the Hand D case. One hopes that most of her readers will know better by now.
Even if we grant Barber's very special pleading and accept Hays at face value, it still makes little difference to the overall case. We now have 5 palaeographic analyses. Four positively authenticate Hand D from the signatures and one which doesn't. Where there was once 100% agreement we now only have 80%. Taken in context, especially in the light of Hays' refusal to suggest who else might have written it (there's only ever been one candidate), it still offers no more protection to the ideas of anti-Stratfordians than a supermarket plastic bag offers to skiers in the path of an avalanche.
Doubters, eh? What ARE they like?
Real Evidence
The Goldsmiths MOOC ignored any real evidence that might have enabled learners to compare Hand D to the signatures or the handwriting of other Bankside playwrights. It was almost as if none existed—the prayer (and sometimes the claim) of every doubter.The latest article of faith, the insufficiency of control samples (for what are they insufficient?—not for attribution), was recited many times with great enthusiasm. It's the only counter claim the doubters have left. But no discussion took place of the important things that anyone can see just by looking at the exhibits. There were no exhibits in Barber's coverage. Check them out below.
Doubters addressing Hand D, (only a small handful have tried), limit themselves to reproducing high contrast PMTs of an early 19thC engraving of Shakespeare's signatures, making them look as illegible as possible. Nor will you see high resolution images of any of the manuscript hands, nor any of the analysis carried out by Maunde Thompson. Maunde Thompson's work first appeared in full in Pollard's book in 1923 but was carried out, for the most part, for the OUP's work on the tercentenary in 1916. NOT, as Barber insinuates and others claim, in response to pressure created by the ‘Authorship Question’ and certainly not in response to Oxford's pretensions, which began in 1920, four years after Maunde Thompson published..
Ros flirted with orthography, sneered at Professor Mac Jackson's analytical math but left that discussion without producing anything that could be called an objection, arbitrarily reduced the numbers of similarities in the handwriting analysis, refused to engage in a discussion of the quality of the additions, forbade the subject of who else might have produced them (she's simply TOO busy for forums), and ignored all the most recent stylometric work completely. She leaned entirely on Professors May and Werstine who don't like some of the palaeography but have nothing else helpful to say and certainly have no alternative candidates to suggest. She insinuated that Hand C and Hand D were written by the same person, (check for yourself below) then partially withdrew. And so on.
It's not her favourite subject. It isn't any doubter's favourite subject.
She did, however, link to our site but then lost all those Brownie points by linking to Diana Price's execrable essay on the subject for the counter arguments. Course item B:16 is a perfect example of all-your-eggs-in-one-basket special pleading as Barber begs her course participants to take her word for the fact that May and Werstine trump all of the other evidence. They don't. Not a bit. Their essay is tied by copyright for another two years. “Oh, trust me, if only you can wait” Dr Barber cries “you'll see there's someone who's a bit on my side in this”. They aren't. There isn't.
And even without the palaeography, once Hand D is proved canonical, it's connected to Shakespeare by all the other evidence Barber ignores. The nutty parlour game ambiance of the quizzes was amplified by complete failure to engage with the text itself. Learners learnt nothing of Hand D.
0/10. See us.
So here, in our Anti-MOOC, is some of what she withheld. Start the slideshow by clicking on one of the images and you'll see clear and obvious differences between 'C' and 'D'. You'll see clear and obvious authorial tweaking as 'D' struggles to get something just right. You'll see the enormous variety of Bankside secretary hand. Barber can see all this too. She's hiding it because it demolishes one of the cornerstones of her premise. The rest of what she is hiding can be found here on this site.
Click thumbnails to the different hands in high resolution
The signatures can be seen in much greater detail on Shakespeare Documented, a website that, all by itself, should silence any rational doubt about the authorship. The sixth slide sees the signature preceded by the words "By me". Doubters obsessed with the mistaken idea that there are too few "control samples" have spent hundreds of hours trying to prove that these two words are not written by the same hand as the signature. Why on earth? And do you need to be a handwriting expert to doubt the doubters? Or do you just need to look at decent reproductions instead of the awful PMTs they reproduce on their websites?
In this course Barber rejects not one, not two, not three, but four professional palaeographic analyses of the signatures (Maunde Thompson, Chambers, Dawson and Jackson), all of which conclude that the handwriting is that of the man who signed Shakespeare's will—not on the basis of any serious analysis of her own but on the mistaken belief that six exemplars are insufficient for meaningful analysis of a sample of three pages of manuscript. This is wrong. Meaningful analysis exists aplenty. While this does not add up to 100% certainty (even DNA evidence can't do that), the case for attribution to Shakespeare on the basis of handwriting alone is very strong and when placed in a chain with the other evidence. It's certainly enough to attribute the work to Shakespeare beyond reasonable doubt.
The course makes nothing of the most important fact about the handwriting analysis, namely that there are no disqualifying discrepancies. The relic thought to be in Marlowe's handwriting, for example, would rule him out at a glance, as does the handwriting of The Earl of Oxford. And Francis Bacon clearly spent a lot more time trimming his quills than our Bankside playwright. Analysis of similarities isn't necessary if there are discrepant features or letter forms. How many discrepancies are there in the signatures which might rule out the manuscript? None.
You reduce the number of trademark handwriting features identified by the palaeographers from seven to four yet you reproduce none of them, nor the tables in Pollard's book which place every instance of each character in the signatures next to every instance of those characters in the manuscript. These reveal some idiosyncratic similarities observable even to the untrained eye.
In a MOOC bearing the branding of a front rank academic institution's Comparative Literature Department, you pronounce recycled lines (No no no no no) and adapted material as useless for the purpose of detailed comparison and casually throw out all the orthographic evidence apart from a few carefully picked cherries.
You reject the spelling evidence while failing to point out that the play which contains the re-used line (Coriolanus) and adapted material also contains another instance of a proper noun spelt "Sci" in the character of Scicinius yet there are no other instances of this in the writing of any of Shakespeare's contemporaries.
You make no mention of stylometric analysis of the work, which has been extensive and conclusive in its own right. That done by Craig & Kinney provides very strong evidence of Shakespeare's authorship and strong evidence of the proximity of its vocabulary to Othello. "The Hand-D and Addition III portions share many rare words with Shakespeare and avoid many of the same common words. On these measures the More passages are not on a Shakespeare borderline but in a Shakespeare heartland. These results can be added to the many indications already in existence, from parallel passages, image clusters, rare words, idiosyncratic spellings, and indeed from handwriting..."
And given all of that, the biggest failure is the failure to acknowledge the strength of the chain of evidence as a whole, a chain which links all of these strong indicators together into what the British Library, along with almost all scholars and historians, now consider to be adequate proof. You call it "confirmation bias" (somewhat unwisely in the circumstances).
You should give up addressing this question by nitpicking the utility of parallel references and forget spurred "a"s.
Someone wrote it. You can't argue that no one did. So who was it? Come up with a plausible alternative.
This line of enquiry will take you straight into the realm of extreme probability (it may feel familiar). There are no possible Bankside candidates who can't be ruled out, even without resorting to expert palaeography. I would start with a visiting space alien were I you.
At least you'll have Shakespeare's singularity working for you.
Stylometry was entirely and inexcusably ignored on the course. This post attempted to set things right.
Here is an extract from the stylometry in question. Learners wishing to find more details can find them in Timothy Irish Watt's contribution to Craig & Kinney's book on PCA-based techniques of analysing early texts Shakespeare, Computers and the Mystery of Authorship: 2009, revised in 2012. There is a detailed review on Oxfraud. All other authorship sites ignore it, though Ros, to be fair, has attempted to address it in one of her authorship talks wearing her Marlovian hat.
The first and most important thing to understand is that, unlike early stylometric tests, the norms here are derived algorithmically not from banks of subjectively designed tests. This limits the type of question the technique can address to questions that have simple "yes" or "no" answers, but because the whole process is a computerised process, it is easy to vary and repeat the questions and home in on solutions. Secondly they run not on test banks, but on the available digitised data from the Early professional theatre. 3, 250, 000 words of dialogue from 165 plays.
This test simply separates Shakespeare from the rest by calculating values for words most likely to be used by Shakespeare and words most likely to be used by all other dramatists. This type of mathematical stylometry can get much more complicated than this (and achieve higher rates of accuracy) but all its results on Hand D are consistent.
It's 98% accurate. 98% of Shakespeare's segment appear below a dividing mean and only 2% stray into the territory of "all the rest". And vice versa. The 2% error doesn't mean that those segments were written bey other dramatists, it just means that this test suggests they might repay further investigation.
The Sir Thomas More segments represented by a triangle, are nowhere near the boundary, however. The are close to the centre. They don't just sound like Shakespeare, they come from Shakespeare's heartland. It's Shakespeare on a good day.
There are further tests and analysis in the chapter I have cited which make even stronger claims for Shakespeare's authorship, The chapter on Hand D in this seminal work on big data stylometry has this to say in conclusion about Hand D.
"The identification of Hand-D with Shakespeare now seems one of the better established facts about his canon, and among the surest facts of his biography."
Bluster cannot rebut evidence like this.
Even a finding of "beyond a reasonable doubt" does not equal absolute certainty in establishing a fact. The evidence surrounding Hand "D" currently justifies a finding that it is Shakespeare's beyond a reasonable doubt. If someone can come up with evidence in rebuttal of that finding then it may be adjusted or even refuted. That probably isn't going to happen.
Mark JohnsonLifetime trial lawyer
You know calligraphy only as an art form, a display. Writing for Shakespeare was a means, not an end. All of his surviving signatures come from the last four years of his life. A working hand that had written a million words might be expected to show some fatigue (in the scientific sense of the word): some structural damage, perhaps arthritis. This is very far from inexperience.
Nat WhilkOxfraud
Tannenbaum is a proven charlatan. He famously authenticated a forged Shakespeare signature on a volume of Montaigne, wisely refused to call himself a palaeographer and invented the discipline of "bibliotics", a discipline with only one disciple.
Tannenbaum is the only person claiming to be a document examiner who rejects the signatures. The mods simply deleted this comment.
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MikeOxfraud
This is a double page spread from Maunde Thompson's essay in Pollard's 1923 book. The original work was commissioned by the Oxford University Press for the tercentenary, had nothing whatsoever to do with the authorship debate which was languishing under the weight of new candidates at the time, and Maunde Thompson published his first results in 1916.
Even the untrained eye can see that the letters extracted from the signatures are compatible and that some pairs are a close match for the characters from the manuscript.
Does anyone here actually like Shakespeare?
The course ploughed a straight furrow, creating doubt about Will's authorship, looking neither right, nor left. A four week Shakespeare course with hardly a single line of Shakespeare discussed in it. Doubters can't really afford to flirt with the idea of of a unique genius. They prefer to think that the real Shakespeare is mixed up with other dramatists whose writing is indistinguishable from his. The idea that there was only one Shakespeare is much too dangerous. So when a poster questioned the word "mountainish" and invited a discussion of what Hand D actually wrote (rather than how it looked on the page), there wasn't a doubter to be seen in the discussion that followed.
The second best bed
The preamble of the will and the itemization of bequests are very formulaic. Shakespeare left the bulk of his property to his two daughters: Susanna Hall, his first child, and Judith Quiney. He left money and clothes to his sister Joan Hart and her three sons (the name of the third son, Thomas, is left blank), and plate to his grand-daughter Elizabeth Hall, whom he refers to as his niece. The will also makes bequests of his various properties: New Place; the house on Henley Street in which he was born; the tithes purchased in 1605; the Combe property; the cottage near New Place; and the Blackfriars gatehouse in London. His monetary bequests add up to roughly £350. The only specific objects he bequeaths are a large silver gilt bowl to his daughter Judith; a sword to Thomas Combe, the nephew of his friend John; his clothing to his sister Joan; and his second best bed to his wife. Shakespeare left a gift of £10 to the poor of Stratford, as well as bequests to his overseer, Thomas Russell, and his lawyer, Francis Collins. He left 26 shillings and 8 pence each to his theatrical fellows Richard Burbage, John Heminges, and Henry Condell, as well as to Hamnet Sadler, William Reynolds, and Anthony and John Nash, to buy mourning rings. Scholars have tended to focus on five main issues in the will. It has often been noted that Shakespeare's only mention of his wife Anne Hathaway reads as an afterthought: an interlineal insertion on the last leaf, where he bequeaths her the "second best bed with the furniture" (valance, hangings, linen, etc.) While this has been read as a slight to Anne, the language was not entirely unusual. As Lena Cowen Orlin demonstrates in forthcoming work, "best," "second-best," and "worst" were all common descriptors in contemporary wills, used to identify objects rather than to signify sentiment. The second best bed bequest should not be seen as a window into William and Anne’s marriage, but as a way to distinguish one bed from another so that his wife received the right bed. (On the other hand, it is noteworthy if not downright odd that Shakespeare’s wife is mentioned nowhere else in his will than in this interlineation.)
Mountainish inhumanity"—he could have written "hugely indecent inhumanity" he could have written "inhuman inhumanity". He might even have written "mountainous humanity"—he certainly knew what the correct adjective was. He could have written all sorts of things. He could have written "the seas became dark red with blood" he could have written "the wine dark seas deepened to bible black" (how's that for mixing a metaphor?) or he could just have written "the seas got much redder".
But he didn't. He wrote "multitudinous seas incarnadine". And no one who watches Macbeth will ever forget it.
And he wrote "mountainish inhumanity", tripping everyone up and inserting a permanent earworm into the minds of his audience.
I hope you weren't up all night looking for your noun that's exactly the same as my verb. I suppose you didn't read the paper I linked, so you don't yet realise that nouns to verbs is a Shakespeare marker. Transitive verbs usually. If you'd been sharked upon you'd been in no doubt what had happened. "Sharker" is a good find though. Not the same, however. From an audience point of view, it all depends on whether you can feel the sharpness of the teeth.
Here's another one for you:
Was ever king that joy'd an earthly throne,
And could command no more content than I?
You could try arguing that he just left off the first syllable of "enjoy" but this one also features a bit of naughty wordplay. So by turning the noun "joy" into a verb (it's exactly the same as the "shark" trick) he gets to suggest a link with the French verb jouir.
Anyway, you're the one with EEBO access. Find another of those. The course ends in two weeks.
Or, like almost everybody else, you could just sit back and enjoy it as Shakespeare,
On form and speaking about human rights on behalf of all humanity, it's a subject he will return to, reusing some of his unproduced material, in Coriolanus. Hazlitt says of Coriolanus "Any one who studies it may save himself the trouble of reading Burke's Reflections, or Paine's Rights of Man, or the Debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own. The arguments for and against aristocracy or democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher." In Sir Thomas More, Will is warming up to write the best political play of the 17th century.
You do realise your boat is sinking, don't you? Watch out for them sharkers
And the big one
Clicking on this image will produce a very large image file of three pages of Shakespeare's handwriting (6.6 Mb)
Other on point comments about confirmation bias
It is, however, mendacious to claim that "paleography" is inconclusive because it is not. ALL the professional paleographers are happy that the signatures match the manuscript, just as the orthograph does. It's a coherent, integrated overall case with no inconsistencies.
You have to prove it isn't AND you have to find another author.
The proof has been accepted as conclusive by The British Library. Digest that. And by almost everyone teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates—only May and Werstine hold out. Neither has disproved the palaeographic claims, which are very strong (they rely on undermining the analysis technique) and neither can be drawn, even slightly, on the subject of who may have written this if not Shakespeare. Both accept that if not Shakespeare, it's not anyone we know. So out goes Marlowe, The Earl of Oxford, and every other Bankside playwright. In come the visiting space aliens and rank outsiders like Mary Sidney
Sicinius
Oxfraud
I've often wondered what life would be like if there were no rhetorical questions.
A philosophic question. But also rhetorical. Stated for rhetorical purposes, not expecting an answer. Your confusion continues. Stylometry is a metrical form of analysis which creates the ability to make attribution statements based on probability. Because we are not dealing with single words. We can choose the best discriminant value for segments and make accurate measurements. We can say that "Timothy Irish Watt has demonstrated, in a test able to attribute Shakespeare segments of 1200 words with 98% accuracy, that the additions to Sir Thomas More lie comfortably within the boundaries of what is demonstrably attributable to undisputed work by Shakespeare in the test".
You state stylometry can't cope with "one's belief in an author's ability to write in different styles" Not true, see demonstration. "the course of his development " Not true, see demonstration. " and his inclination to do so, " Not true, see demonstration, and "things which we can only speculate on." Not true, see demonstration.
Sicinius
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
You are not proposing a scholarly examination of the issues in your post. You are attempting what salesmen call "the assumptive close". This consists of gathering a few positive indicators together, restating them in rapid sequence, assuming they are sufficient to close the sale, then confidently handing the prospect the pen.
It is an obvious fallacy to say that because a few people argue about Shakespeare's authorship, genuine doubt exists about whether he wrote the work. There is a great deal of authorship research being undertaken in English Faculties everywhere. It stems from new insights into the collaborative nature of the early professional playhouse. It does not entertain any doubt about alternative authors to Shakespeare's undisputed work.
Example. The British Library is happy that the Hand D additions to Sir Thomas are drafted in the hand that signed Shakespeare's will. That chain of evidence allows no space for alternative candidates. The man from Stratford wrote the manuscript which is now almost universally accepted as canonical work. That's where this course should have started its examination of the will. Not with references to the second best bed. Ad hominem references, by the way.
