BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?

Subject: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 25 Oct 05 - 12:13 AM

Fascinating new theory. Henry Neville as Shakespeare--including a 1602 notebook which belonged to Neville while imprisoned in the Tower. The notebook, according to Brenda James and William Rubenstein (Rubenstein a professor of the University of Wales) "includes background notes for the procession in Henry VIII," 11 years before the play was produced.

Also, as a director of the London Virginia Company, Neville had access to a 20,000 word letter on the 1609 Bermuda shipwreck, a letter which likely formed a major source for The Tempest.

Neville lived c1562-1615.

Other evidence--no time to detail it now.

Anybody heard anything, positive or negative, on this theory?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Rapparee
Date: 25 Oct 05 - 09:07 AM

I agree with Mark Twain -- Shakespeare's works weren't written by William Shakespeare, but by someone else with the same name.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Le Scaramouche
Date: 25 Oct 05 - 09:42 AM

Performed, don't you mean? Weren't published during his lifetime.
Other possibilites are either Shakespeare nicked it from Neville, or more likely, someone attached Shakespeare's name to it to attract the pundits.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: robomatic
Date: 25 Oct 05 - 10:57 AM

Sounds like a campaign to take Shakespeare from the people and give some justification for shabby nobs.

Who would credit a couple of bicycle mechanics with inventing the airplane? Sure it musta been Samuel Langley who ran the Smithsonian Institution.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 25 Oct 05 - 11:26 PM

Well, what's in a name?, as somebody said.


It's certainly a very American attitude to be against aristocracy.   But the fact remains that an aristocracy of talent does exist. And that particularly in previous centuries, education was not universal by a long shot. There is no proof that Shakespeare even attended school--scholars just assume that since there was a school where he was growing up, that he was a student.

He bequeathed no plays--(perhaps writing plays was considered downscale at that time)------but also not even any books.

Whoever wrote the Shakespeare canon shows a detailed knowledge of, among other things, goings on in European courts. It's never been established that Shakespeare ever travelled outside England. Neville was ambassador to France, and travelled widely.

It's not, to use the favorite vernacular of the current US leadership, a "slam-dunk" that Neville was Shakespeare. But it sure is an intriguing theory. I will definitely be buying the book when it comes out--next month I think.

Still waiting for actual evidence against the theory.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 26 Oct 05 - 10:06 AM

Bright people couldn't possibly exist outside the aristocracy, eh?

Here is the The Last Will and Testament of
William Shakspere.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Paco Rabanne
Date: 26 Oct 05 - 11:30 AM

This sort of obfuscation is exactly how Bob Dylan got away with recording loads of Donovan songs, but giving himself the writing credit!

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Rapparee
Date: 26 Oct 05 - 09:45 PM

"Venus and Adonis" was dedicated, in the original, to "Henrie Wriothesley, Earle of Shouthampton" by "William Shakespeare" on April 18, 1593. On May 9, 1594, "The Rape of Lucerce" was dedicated to the same person by "William Shakespeare." (Dates were established "as entered for printing.")

On August 29, 1597, "The Tragedie of King Richard the second. As it hath beene publikely acted by the righ Honourable the Lorde Chamberlaine his Seruants" was entered for publication by Andrew Wise. No author was given to the first edition, but in 1598 the work was twice reprinted with the author listed as "William Shake-speare." On October 20, Wise entered "The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. Containing, His treacherous Plots...." Again, there was no author listed for the first edition, but in the second edition, appearing the following year, the author is listed as "By William Shake-speare."

On February 25, 1598, Wise entered for publication "The historye of Henry the iiij..."; no author given in the 1598 edition, the second edition of 1599 includes "Newly corrected by W. Shake-speare."

On September 7, 1598, Francis Meres entered for publication his "Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury." In it, he writes

...As Plautus and Seneca are acounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Loue Labors lost, his Loues labours wonne, his Midsummers night derame, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4. King Iohn, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.

At various times, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Merchant of Venice," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" and others were entered for publication with in inclusion of a phrase such as "by William Shake-speare".

I think that the contemporary evidence is quite good, actually, that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays he's generally credited with writing.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: robomatic
Date: 26 Oct 05 - 09:57 PM

Samuel Johnson was not of the aristocracy, and was to a large extent self taught, yet in one of his earliest jobs he was given the 'gist' of Parliamentary debates and then 'reconstituted' the dialogue for publication. Many men of high social standing were only too happy to let it be understood that they had really spoken so well for their causes.

And I am 'minded of an elderly Englishman I met many years ago, who'd received a turn of the century 'gentleman's' education prior to the First World War. He was of the opinion that it was rot and had spoiled him from useful pursuits.

So I come to my 'American' attitude from good English sources.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Rapparee
Date: 26 Oct 05 - 10:04 PM

Oh, and Billy Shakespeare was a true gentleman as he was able to claim the arms granted to his father, John Shakespeare, as his own by inheritance.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 26 Oct 05 - 10:48 PM

Why no plays or even books bequeathed?

He could be bright and very successful as an impresario and possibly an actor, and still not be author of those plays.

It seems to me likely that a spectacular command of the language was necessary in order to write them--and that presupposes an excellent education. The parallel with innate mechanical ability (as in the Wrights) does not hold.

I'm very curious to know what evidence is in the book by Brenda James and William Rubenstein (which I understand has a Forward by the artistic director of the Globe Theater-- (presumably the one in London).

Is your mind closed?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Peace
Date: 26 Oct 05 - 10:50 PM

My mind ain't closed but the book ain't open yet.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 26 Oct 05 - 11:05 PM

Fair enough.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST,Scaramouche
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 09:31 AM

Haven't seen any evidence for Neville being Shakespeare, just supposition.
It's the usual snobbery. Shakespeare was an actor, he put together plays from various sources, the most important thing was to get something on stage. Could always have had them polished up, you know.
Intimate information? What do you think friends and contacts are for.
Books do disappear, or Shakespeare might have sold them.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 09:38 AM

No, my mind isn't closed, but it will take a lot to convince me -- as it should. The man's contemporaries said he wrote the plays, sonnets, and poems and I suspect that they should know. It would be quite a remarkable conspiracy to keep something like that secret among so many for so long.

And yes, it does strike me as a bit snobbish to assume that Shakespeare (whose early life is pretty much unaccounted for) was uneducated and untravelled.

But I will read the book and see what evidence there is.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 10:11 AM

I read that in the late 1500's, the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote exquisite sonnets up until his 21st birthday and never, apparently, wrote another word after that event.

In his day, members of the aristocracy simply did not write poems, plays or other forms of non-fiction.    (I don't know if it was actually illegal, but those Brits would know the code and never disobey it).

And it would seem from details in the plays, that Bill Shakespear knew an awful lot about the history of the Earl of Oxford and his family, but very little indeed about his own life.

Now, if the good Earl was writing lots of stuff which he couldn't himself publish, he would need a front man to act as some sort of surrogate.

Which would explain why an ill-educated ingrate got the credit and the real author was happy to continue writing without upsetting the establishment.

This link gateway to MASSES of shakespeare stuff explains it far better than I ever could.

Here's just one example of many, many tantalising hints:

" ... every word doth almost tell my name ..." Sonnet 76

This line much more sense if the writer of the line was deVere (17th Earl of Oxford), for then the word EVERy and the name dEVERe have sufficient matching letters to be close enough to almost tell the name.

I think you will be amazed at the number of distinguished members of the literary and academic world who now accept that deVere did indeed write most of the plays and sonnets attributed to Bill.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST,litchick
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 10:13 AM

Mark Rylance, former (by the way) artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, putting his name to such a publication by no means adds to it's credence since he is not a scholar of literature or history.

Books such as this can be interesting, if well written, often as background to the period in which the plays were written and produced, but since it would be all but impossible to conclusively prove the authorship one way or another, the argument seems to be rather pointless. The majority of academics agree that the most convincing evidence suggests that William Shakespeare did write most of the work attributed to him, and unfortunately these alternative theories, even the entertaining ones, often turn out to be nothing more than flimsy hypotheses written by academics in order to generate media attention and sales.

Assertions that a person of Shakespeare's social position would be incapable of the "spectacular command of the language" the works demonstrate, are similarly difficult to prove. If Shakespeare was educated, and it is perfectly possible that he was, he would have studied a great deal of classical literature featuring complicated poetic structures and imagery as a matter of course. One must remember that Shakespeare (or whoever) did not write 'highbrow' or 'difficult' texts, he wrote populist material that was enjoyed by many facets of the population at the time, if he were alive today he would probably be writing for Hollywood!

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 10:52 AM

But, GUEST,litchick, an increasing number of people think that it has been conclusively proven who wrote (a least the majority of) the plays and sonnets.

Do you think that Shakespeare's "retirement" as an author, but not as a producer or actor, occured by sheer coincidence shortly after deVere's death?

Do you accept the view of those scholars who say that Sonnet 6 is clearly addressed to the Earl of Southhampton?   If so, why was Bill writing a sonnet to one of deVere's closest friends, a person who Bill had never met?   

And so on.

(There is masses and masses of stuff like this - no one single piece is conclusive in itself, but the sheer weight of all of them makes, to me, a compelling case).

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST,Le Scaramouche
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 03:40 PM

Plenty of Elizabethan gentlemen poets. Davies is an example.
Oxford might have grown OUT of writing poems.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 04:14 PM

Good point, GUEST,Le Scaramouche

Then how about these?

Every Italian town visited by DeVere became the setting of a Shakespearean play, and every Shakespearean play set in an Italian town was one that DeVere had visited.   That is an extraordinary coincidence, isn't it.   Shakespeare never left England in his life.   

OK.   Well, how about the fact that not one single contemporary of Shakespeare ever gave him credit for writing anything.   Not one.   (God, talk about tough audiences).   Even his last will and testament is so badly worded, for a while it was thought that IT had been written by someone else.   But lesser playwrights and poets of the time were lauded and honored - who on earth did our Bill tick off, to get treated so badly?   He got a lot of attention as a producer and as an actor, but never as a writer.   Rather odd, that.

I think the case that Bill didn't write a great deal is just about as solid as it could be. And of all the candidates for those who did write them, DeVere has by far the most compelling "proof".

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 05:07 PM

BE2, please read what I wrote above (26 Oct 05 - 09:45 PM). Shakespeare's contemporaries most certainly DID credit him with the authorship of both the plays and the poems.

      Romeo and Juliet
      All's Wells That Ends Well
   RaPe of Lucrece
    HAmlet
    MIdsummer Night's Dream
HenRy IV
    TEmpest

Ergo, I wrote Shakespeare's stuff, even though I wasn't born yet. Word games can be played with forever and prove nothing.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: beardedbruce
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 05:14 PM

"In his day, members of the aristocracy simply did not write poems,"

Huh? Where did you come up with that????

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 05:37 PM

Ah yes - I stand corrected - the aristocracy, per se, did not necessarily use pen-names, and many were noted authors of non-fiction.

But of de Vere:

"A playwright and author of sonnets, he ceased publishing under his own name in 1593–the same year that the name William Shake-speare appeared on a manuscript."

"During the Elizabethan era, writers were imprisoned and mutilated for committing literary excesses or violating political correctness, and many wrote anonymously."

"The 1623 First Folio of collected works is dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton, de Vere's son-in-law, with whom he is reputed to have had a homosexual affair."

and of Shakespeare:

"Shakspere died in obscurity and was buried anonymously. Six years after his death in 1616, the first edition of Henry Peacham's The Compleat Gentleman was published, listing the Elizabethan era's greatest poets. Heading the list: Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. In this and three succeeding editions, there is no mention of Shakespeare by any spelling. Eighteen years after Shakspere's death, an engraved monument in a Stratford church shows him holding what appears to be a sack of grain. A century later, the sack became pen and paper."

Er ... I haven't gone and broken our cut and paste rule have I.   :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 06:07 PM

Ah...what are your sources?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 06:52 PM

I took the quotes from this newsarticle which summarizes the main arguments of the Oxfordian posse.

This source, overview , gives more grist to the mill.

And this one gives the full monty on the topic.

Enjoy.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: John O'L
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 07:04 PM

I thought it was pretty well accepted by most sceptics that all Shakepeare's stuff was written by Christopher Marlowe

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: John O'L
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 10:38 PM

My mistake, it was Francis Bacon after all.

There are three certainties in life:
- Death
- Taxes
- Shakespeare's fraudulence.

In 400 years it will be equally certain that the works of Dylan were all written by a descendant of Shakespeare called Manfred Mann.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 27 Oct 05 - 11:30 PM

Scaramouche--

"Might have sold" ALL the books?

If he was an entrepreneur,-- impresario in this case,--and possibly an actor, this takes a lot of time. So does writing plays. In fact writing plays would be an great occupation for somebody with a lot of leisure time and with an excellent education, including a vast amount of cultural references to draw upon. I've read in fact that that was the general feeling at the time as to the status of being a playwright.

Interesting to know it's the former artistic director of the Globe, not the current one, who wrote the Forward. I knew my information was quite sketchy.

By the way, who is this Davies to whom you refer?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 11:29 AM

I dunno I think you are the sort of people that that would have given Christopher Robin a strict talking to, and made him understand in no uncertain terms that his Teddy Bear does not talk, or go off and have adventures with Piglet, when he's not looking.

Take it from from me. There was this guy Shakespeare. he wrote plays and poetry. And to this day we have a thatched MacDonalds in Stratford to prove it. American tourists come and video the peole going in and out of Marks and Spencers, cos that's where Anne Hathaway got her knickers from.

Just get into the spirit of the thing!

all the best

al

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST,Le Scaramouche
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 11:31 AM

I must add, that as a writer of historical fiction, I don't know where people get the silly notion from, that in order to write about a place, you have to visit it.
Writing plays did not take that long, all you really need is a story, which you can cobble together from many sources, a bit of dialogue, a dramatic flair, and hey presto. If an improvisation goes well, you incorporate it.
Shakespeare, to me, at any rate, always felt as if written by an actor.
Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre would have been like cinema in the 1930s.
Selling his books wouldn't have taken that long either!!
Another possibility is that Shakespeare borrowed books from his friends and acquaintances.
The Davies I reffered to, is Sir John Davies, a poet much neglected by scholars.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 11:44 AM

BaldEagle2: how do you know Shakespeare never left England in his life? It is perfectly possible that he visited Italy when he was in Europe picking up the Grail and documentary proof of Christ's femaleness, which he then transported to a Scottish chapel; where, incidentally, he stole the script of Macbeth from James VI.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 12:21 PM

I think the big difference between the authorship of Shakespeare's works and those of Dylan, is that in 400 years no one will give a toss about who wrote Bob's ditties.   I could be wrong, but I am willing to take bets on this one.

But even in those distant future days, there will be some, no doubt, who continue to chant words to the effect of "Of Course Bill Shakespeare Wrote Them Plays - Every Schoolboy Knows That".   This allows them to dismiss any further discussion as being unnecessary.   Furthmore, anyone who disagrees with the chanter is just a stupid conspiracy theory fanatic, right?

And possiby 800 years of denial by the uneducated and the ill-informed will settle the matter once and for all.   :-)

Meanwhile, anyone want to comment on the sonnet to Queen Elizabeth I that de Vere published in his own name in 1570? It is reputed to be the first 14-liner ever written in the ababcdcdefefgg rhyme schema.   (Bill must, at least, owe the Earl a debt of gratitude - for all of the sonnets he wrote later follow this format).

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 12:25 PM

Call Geraldo in to check this one out.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 12:29 PM

So de Vere was a bit of an innovator in sonnet writing. Fine, well done de Vere. But how does that affect the question of who wrote Shakespeare's stuff? Nobody is suggesting that Shakespeare invented sonnets, or plays for that matter. A lot of people believe he was good at it, though.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: M.Ted
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 12:33 PM

"Shakespeare" has never been much more than a name that was attached to a very diverse group of plays--the information about him is scarce, and, over the years, since we needed him to be much more than we had, speculation filled in all the gaps--Plays, for that matter, are not novels or poetry--they are entertainment, and often, they are an agglomeration of material from a variety of sources--dialog, sketches, and routines, then, as now, were often   created by the performers themselves and interpolated into the plays--

Manuscripts come from all manner of places, and have to be reworked considerably (often without the blessing, or even the knowledge, of the original writer) in order to work on the stage--so who wrote it? Compare it with the question of authorship of hollywood films--in many cases, several teams of writers have reworked the material, and the writing credit is given as per contract, rather than based on who wrote the words finally used--why would it have been different then than now? I doubt that it was--

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 02:11 PM

Greg is quite right.   No single piece of the jigsaw will ever give a complete picture, and the fact that de Vere was an accomplished poet does not mean he continued writing after 1570.

But there are lots and lots of pieces that seem to fit a certain pattern.

For example, the Geneva Bible is not in itself conclusive.   (the margins of the bible, owned by the de Vere family, were annotated in its margins prior to 1560 with several dozen phrases that later turned up in Shakespeare's plays).   If nothing else, it does seem that our Bill had the opportunity to read it, otherwise the phrases that do match came from another remarkable set of coincidences.   

Another f'rinstance. As a very young man, De Vere adopted a coat of arms in which a lion is shaking a spear.   Sheer happenchance that the second editions of the early plays are attributed to "Shake-Spear" (goddamit - our Bill couldn't even spell his own name correctly the first time round).   The first editions were not signed by anybody.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

(That's the problem with us stupid conspiracy-theory fanatics - there is so much stuff around to encourage us, that we keep making these wild speculations.)

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Donuel
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 02:50 PM

I consider it possible that Shakespear was Neville's beard, particularly after Neville was charged and jailed for trying to overthrow the monarchy. In other words, some of the tradjedies could be Neville. As for the Merchant of Venice, just because Neville was there and William wasn't, doesn't give Neville authorship.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 03:42 PM

Couldn't agree with you more, Donuel.

But let's get these out of the way, as well:

Upon Oxford's death in 1604 King James had eight Shakespeare plays produced at court as a final tribute.    When Oxford's widow died nine years later a group of Shakespeare plays (fourteen in this case) were produced in tribute.   When Bill died in 1616, they didn't even publish a notice of his death, possibly because he had retired from writing well before his death.   In fact, it was 10 or more years later that people started to realise that they had lost a great author.   

In the first folio, authorship of the plays was attributed by Ben Johnson to "the Bard of Avon."   This is assumed to clearly mean it was our Bill, and only our Bill, what writ them.   However, De Vere's estate at Bilston Hall (at the time he resided there) was bounded by the Avon on one side and the Forest of Arden on the other.

The only "evidence" that Shakespeare was other than a near illiterate ingrate, is that after the Puritans gave up their rule of England, it was then made official that our Bill was the true author of the plays and sonnets.   

(Honest, I am not making any of this up).

Incidentally, on the eight times he actually signed anything, our Bill used a different variation of the spelling of his name: the only consistent thing about them is that the first syllable is always "Shak" and never "Shake".

and so on, and so on, and so on .....

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST,Le Scaramouche
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 04:25 PM

Why the repeated use of ingrate?
The fact that Shakespeare spelled his name inconsistently, doesn't mean much. Spelling was somewhat cavalier, and would also change according to region and such. Besides which, since when do you need perfect spelling to write plays?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Donuel
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 04:45 PM

Sure, I use 3 different spellings myself.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 05:10 PM

Hey, GUEST.Le Scaramouche, I am a SC-TF and am therefore entitled to use facetious insults on those on whom I which to cast aspersions.   :-)

But, I do think your spelling argument has a bit of circularity about it.

Chaucer was fairly inconsistent with his spelling, and it is generally accepted that before 1400 text could be spelt pretty much how you wanted to. (See, we do have some common ground).

But by 1500, spelling (although not in its modern form) had become pretty consistent.   Take Bill's own last will and testament.   In it, the word "give" is spelt "gyve" throughout - it might be different from today's format, but it is always the same in that document.

(Admittedly, there are many people who think Bill didn't actually write the will, but simply dictated it to a lawyer, but that is bye the bye).

However, back to the cirularity: Shakespeare often mis-spelt his name.   Since he was the greatest literary genius of his age, this proves that it was ok to mis-spell your name in those days.   (Can you cite anyone else at all in Elizabethan England who mis-spelled their names?)

Well, ok - may be it was.   May be it was ok to mispell your own name, because you were punching out the phonetics of it.

So why did our Bill always call himself "Shack"-spear - or variations of it, and never ever "Shake" spear?

Perhaps it was the result of some sort of cute lisp.   :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST,Le Scaramouche (who is cookiless)
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 05:27 PM

Because, perhaps, that might have been how he pronounced it?
I just failed to see why the fact that he was careless about spelling his name is proof of anything.
I think it was rather the last thing on his mind when preparing scenarios.
What a cheap shot ingrate is. Why, because (assuming the Oxford theory is right) de Vere wasn't credited? Seems to beat the purpose of the excersize.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST,Scaramouche
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 05:29 PM

I mean it rather defeat the purpose.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 05:34 PM

I shall be away for the next couple of days, and when I return, if this thread is still alive, perhaps we can debate some more.

Have a great weekend.

:-)

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST,Le Scaramouche
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 06:30 PM

You too.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 07:05 PM

It seems pretty obvious that the plays were written by someone up to his neck in working in the theatre, and written extremely rapidly at that. Not the kind of stuff some amateur aristo hobbyist would be likely to be able to knock out.

An academic education at that period, which probably wouldn't have involved opening a single book in English, just wouldn't have been too relevant, one way or another.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 07:33 PM

maybe but you get the recurrence of episodes from holinshed in the plays, and as I remember from classical texts. And aren't there supposed to be echoes of Seneca in Clarence's and Hasting's speeches before execution in Richard 3.

Why does Shakespeare have to be one thing or the other though.

Take some phenomena like the Beatles. Its very hard to work out where the precise magic was located. Perhaps from a good working class second generation muso like Macca. Perhaps from the poetic urges within the breast of an alienated misfit like Lennon. A truly gifted and divergent thinker on lead guitar like George. Perhaps we are too close historically to work out exactly what happened - certainly nobody has been able to duplicate it since.

Shakespeare is just bloody good fun in the theatre. if it weren't - it would have been forgotten - how ever marvelous the component parts.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: John O'L
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 07:37 PM

What about the inadequacy of the tone-deaf Ringo? Could the magic have been there?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 Oct 05 - 08:44 PM

A lot to be said for having tone-deaf drummers, who don't try to play tunes on their drums.
.................................

The important thing for Shakespeare, I'm sure, was having to work in with a bunch of hungry actors and a rowdy crowd of spectators who'd be sure to let him know what worked and what didn't. And pushing him to come up with the goods in a hurry. (That's where the images running through particular plays and driving them along come from, speed and pressure.)

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 29 Oct 05 - 04:26 AM

absolutely!

we agree on something McGrath!

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 29 Oct 05 - 06:04 AM

But Neville would have been in a better position to write Tudor propaganda (which is basically what Richard III and the Henry plays are). Personally, I've never either liked nor believed in Shakespeare.... I reckon it was an infinite number of monkeys.

LTS

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 29 Oct 05 - 04:16 PM

I'm perfectly willing to get into the spirit of the thing, visit Stratford on Avon, etc.-( which I've heard is actually dishearteningly commercialized--is this true?----but check pretty carefully how many of the statements presented as fact there are actually supported by evidence. And I sure intend to buy the Neville book when it comes out, and find out if the authors' approach has a tighter case.

At this point, I'm definitely not convinced by either case.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 29 Oct 05 - 07:45 PM

But Neville would have been in a better position to write Tudor propaganda

Why? All the necessary facts and rumours were in readily accessible printed books in any case. Nobody would suggest that in order to write a play about Churchill, for example, a contemporary playwright would have to be a member of some high-powered political family.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Lady Hillary
Date: 29 Oct 05 - 07:56 PM

I find it curious that in many threads [tho not this one], there seem to be problems with spelling...even here in the ultracorrect cat. How can we hold an earlier generation, when paper was dear bought, to a higher standard than we follow, when electrons are essentially free?

Spelling may be an indication but it is not a definite answer.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 29 Oct 05 - 09:32 PM

the thing is your ladyship, we're all getting on a bit on this site and we've realised we don't give a stuff about spelling.

when I was a young man, a young lady wrote me a love poem and she spelled separate wrongly - she spelled it seperate. and me being an arrant snob and hoping for preferrment from hoity toity folks like yourself, I dismissed her declaration of love out of hand.

this proved to be a mistake. and anyway I ended up as lowly folksinger, singing songs by buggers most of whom probably couldn't spell for toffee.

let this be a lesson. do not blight your own life by concentrating on how stuff is spelled rather than the message itself, and its sincerity.

all the best

al

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 30 Oct 05 - 05:09 PM

Tudor propaganda - Actually the facts about Richard III were already well known, but it didn't do to broadcast them or it resulted in a permanent cure for headaches. Once the Tudors were gone, it was safe to publish the truth.

LTS

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 30 Oct 05 - 05:21 PM

there seem to be problems with spelling.

You mean, people who see it a problem when there's a mispelling in someone else's post?

"The truth about Richard III"? No one knows that or ever will, or ever can. Rather like "the truth about Shakespeare", however he spelt his name, in that respect.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST,Art Thieme
Date: 31 Oct 05 - 01:43 AM

Good folks, we can't even agree on the relatively recent facts around the assassination of John Kennedy. How the hell will this ever be decided one way or the other--.

Henry Neville has about as much chance of being unequivcally proven to be the author of things gnerally called Shakespearean as do ideas about Intelligent Design being worthy of respectability and included on the same level as the many scientifically proven aspects of Evolution.   Indeed, lets put the theory that storks bring babies right into every Sex Education class.

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST,Janine
Date: 31 Oct 05 - 03:50 AM

Brenda James's reasoning is a bit shaky to say the least; you can prove anything by such methods. Neville, apparently, was a relative of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, 'The Kingmaker'. In S's Henry V, the King speaks to the Earl of Warwick, addressing him as Neville although at that time the Earl was Richard Beauchamp (lots of spellings!) the Neville earl's father-in-law. Surely his decendent would not have made such an elementary mistake. QED? Of course not but just about as strong as Brenda James's reasoning.

Janine

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 31 Oct 05 - 09:22 AM

The obsession with "correct" spelling has been around for only 150 years or so. Before that, writers spelt as they pleased, many not even bothering to be consistent. (And maybe the obsession has run its course - texting etc will lead us back to anarchy.)

BE2, you've clutched at a host of vestigial theories as someone would who was making a case for ghosts or poltergeists. They amount to nothing individually, and adding them all together still leaves you with nothing. And some of your assertions just don't stack up. For instance it is ridiculous to say Shakespeare was not credited with authorship by his peers. He is mentioned often, by fellow troupers such as Ben Johnson on the one hand, by the Cambridge set on the other. Johnson in fact was quite a close friend and made numerous references to Shakespeare as player and author. And Beaumont discussed Shakespeare's writing in correspondence with Johnson.

Of course, there was no controversy whatsoever about Shakespeare's authorship for 200 years or so. In other words all those who had been around at the time, and their descendents, accepted without question that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. And just to enlarge on a point someone made about stagecraft, it is noteworthy that no actor of any worth has ever doubted Shakespeare wrote the plays. Plots, court intrigue and locations Shakespeare could cull from the acknowledged sources - and whoever wrote the plays plainly did so, whether an intellectual, a country gentleman as Shakespeare was, or an unschooled peasant. But the understanding of stagecraft was not in any of the sources. That depended on an intimate working knowledge of the theatre.

The fact that in the past 200 years the conspiracy theorists have had to advance one candidate after another is surely a measure of how feeble their case is. Face it - the idea that someone else wrote Shakespeare is an urban legend that got out of hand.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 31 Oct 05 - 09:54 AM

I ahve worked in theatre for 40 years. When you read Shakespeare, it is difficult to credit the amount of genius that can make someone write so much so beautifully. But in these theories that someone else wrote them, we are generally being asked to believe that someone with no knowledge of theatre caould have come up with this prodigious output of stunning plays. And that, as McGrath and others have pointed out, stretches the imaginaton just a bit too far. I can believe someone who knew theatre could have been wonderfully talentd enough to write these plays; I think it is beyond the realms of possibility that some aristocratic amateur could have been both that practical and that poetic.
    So for me, it's got to be either Shakespeare, or another contemporary theatre practitioner, in London, also called William Shakespeare(sp?).

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 31 Oct 05 - 06:28 PM

Well, it may shed some light on the issue if we take into account that Edward (de Vere) actually ran two theater companies and, after various adventures in the military and touring Europe, was (it is recorded) very involved in managing a theatrical troupe ("The London Boys") on a day to day basis.   

It has been observed by many that the gentry in Elizabethan England often published non-fiction works in their own name. But (according to many), not if you were a courtier to the Monach (de Vere was) and not if your plays and verses were politically incorrect (Shakespeare's works were often very much so).    And when Edward became a courtier, his writing abruptly stopped.   By coincidence, this was when Bill picked up his pen, and started writing for the very first time in his late 20's.

So, on the one hand we have a guy who got a law degree shortly after his 15th birthday, had extemely intimate knowledge of latin, the science of the day including Astronomy and the Natural Sciences, had extensive details of the workings of the court and with first hand knowledge of the aristocracy.   It is also reported that he had first hand experience on the battlefield.   And to boot, not your sitting-idly-in-manor-day-dreaming of stuff and things sort of Earl, but a guy who earned his bread as a working theatrical manager.   (After he left court, he went bankrupt and Queen Elizabeth granted him a $1000 a year grant to keep his estate intact).

All of the above are relevant when looking at the depth and breadth of knowledge of our mystery author - who had all this knowledge to wrap his literary genius around.   

On the other, we have our Bill, who has no history or provenance of any of the above.   Just sheer brain power to fill in all the gaps with exactly the right amount of invention.   Including, amazingly, a slew of knowledge about Edward's very private affairs.

Edward De Vere had a personal coat of arms which had as its main motiv a lion shaking a spear.   When he died, the court marked his passing by presenting several of the works ascribed to "Shake-Spear" in the second folio.

When Bill died, no one took a jot of notice.   Nothing was said nor done.   Nothing!   Even though King Jim had made it clear that the plays were so good, they would be performed to mark the passing of Edward.   But only Edward, mind you.   They didn't go putting on plays to mark the passing of aristocrats who had no connection with the theater. Possibly, people had forgotten our Bill - after all, he wrote nothing after Edward died.

It was a couple of decades later that the works ascribed to "Shake-spear" were accredited to Guilliam Shackspeare.   To make it easier for the connection to stick, Guilliam's name was reworked to "Shakespeare", a name that he had never used himself in his life, and was not even the way he pronounced his own name.   

After the Puritans were removed from power, the move began in earnest to link Bill, Bard of Avon, to the plays and sonnets.   Four generations of Stratford upon Avon people had ignored that they lived in the hometown to a literary genius.   Thereafter, they prided themselves constantly on their historic connection to young Bill.   They even changed a sack of corn on his memorial to one of paper and quill - he would have wanted it that way.

A number of historians say that the reason no one really took note of the authorship issue prior to the Puritan period of rule, was because everybody knew "Shake-Spear" referred to de Vere.   Many sonnets were dedicated to members of his family (if it was Bill what wrote them, what on earth was he thinking of?).   Some clearly advise Southampton on how to deal with a marriage arranged for him by his widowed mother so as to deal with the penury they faced.   And everyone knew why Edward hadn't signed his name on them - his stuff was very incorrect for the day.   

Much is made of Edward's rather unpleasant personality - he almost certainly was guilty of the murder of a manservant, was reputed to have affairs with men and women outside of his marriage (one consort was said to be Southampton), and so on.   Bill's many failings are considered by his supporters to be mere trifles - but Edward's as categorical proof that he could not, indeed should not, be treated as a great author.

Shortly after he died, Edward was declared to be England's greatest ever poet and author, even though the works bearing his name (that exist today) are largely infantile doodlings.   To have got this accolade, one must assume that he had written some other works - works that people of the day thought were of the very highest order.

If they existed (and surely those works must have existed for Edward to have attracted so much praise) I wonder what happened to them?   Perhaps they have been accidently ascribed to someone who never penned a word in his life.   

That would explain where they had all gone...

There exists an ever decreasing band of "Shakespearean Academics" who hold that Bill was the true author, and to think otherwise is heresy.   However, the evidence keeps mounting that it wasn't him - it was someone else called Shake-Spear.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 31 Oct 05 - 08:22 PM

Of course this circular argument goes both ways.

One way you start with the assumption that Shakespeare didn't have whatever expertise was involved to enable him to write the plays, and therefore he couldn't have written the plays.

Going the other way you start with the assumption - consistent with contemporary testimony - that he wrote the plays, from which follows the conclusion that he must have had whatever expertise was involved to enable him to write them.

In fact, even it it were demonstrated that a high degree of formal academic education would have been required, which is questionable, there is no particular difficulty in putting together scenarios in which he could well have acquired this, and which also suggest why he might have wished to keep a low profile in some respects. "viz)

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 31 Oct 05 - 09:36 PM

Yeah, I see that.

Our Bill got himself a secret education, kept his writings secret, and wrote like a proper toff too boot.   In which case, he must be very vexed that we saw through it all and gave him credit anyway.   :-)

(er ... an awful lot of people, including most Shakespearean Academics, concede that the author had a high degree of formal education.   There's masses and masses of theories which explain how our Bill got educated, and why he and his educators kept it very hush hush).

I still have a raised eye-brow over why our Bill dedicated some of his sonnets to de Vere's boyfriend.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 04:32 AM

It is a very common assumption, particularly among educated but stupid people, that formal education is required to make people know things. I agree that in certain specialist areas this may be true(you're unlikely to become a quantum physicist by getting books out of the local libarary), but in most branches of learning a clever person can easily educate themselves. Oxford, Cambridge, and Catholic hotbeds of insurrectionary learning in France, did not have any monopoly of learning.
    McGrath seems totally rigth(as usual), you need to look at the arguments backwards sometimes. It is suggested that no ignorant person could possibly have written those plays, therefore the author must have had a proper rigorous formal classical education. But you can take a different angle on the facts. The author of these plays is obviously an intellectual giant; therefore he didn't need to have had a formal education, he could have learnt it all for himself. Two precisely opposite conclusions from the same piece of data...a rather simple piece of data at that: that there's a lot of clever stuff in the plays of William Shakespeare( or whoever).

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 10:13 AM

If it is possible to become an intellectual giant without any formal education, shouldn't we have more than one instance of it happening?

As far as I can ascertain, of the 100,000 or so of intellectual giants that have lived, all but one had lots and lots and lots of education to help them get where they got.   The one exception is our Bill. If you can cite a second one, that would be useful

Otherwise, I have to rely on the proverb "It is the exception that proves the rule".   That would fix it.

Oh, wait, wait.   That proverb is based on the original meaning of "prove", that is "to test".    Dragnaggit - back to the drawing board.

But, just for the sake of discussion, let us assume that a giant brain can gain all the knowledge it ever needs by reading.   And to make it simpler, when a person has never spelt is name in a particular way, nor pronounced it in that way, this has no relevance whatsoever to our debate.   

Now all we have to do is eliminate all the other elements to eliminate Edward.

Anyone want to discuss why our Bill, at the age of 40,, packed the whole lot in and went back to Stratford to spend the last year's of his life as a grain merchant?   His original memorial depicted a grain sack - it was what he was famed for.   (A 60 years later the grain sack was changed to look like paper and quill pen - that is what he had become famed for).   

Despite more than two centuries of research, there isn't a scrap of documentation that Shakspere, the Warwickshire merchant, ever wrote anything in his life. There are no manuscripts, poems, letters, diaries, or records in his own hand. His will, dictated to a lawyer, makes no mention of a literary legacy and who should inherit it.

Consider the chronology: a gifted and prolific writer (Edward) stops writing when he is appointed to be a courtier, and Bill springs out of left field and immediately begins writing like a champion.   The previously gifted and prolific writer dies, and shortly thereafter Bill is hit with a total and permanent writer's block.   

I think we really need to get rid of these two coincidences to be able to put Bill safely back on his pedestal.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 12:00 PM

Well, it's perfectly true that we havent got a Shakespeare manuscript of Hamlet or Othello or whatever. But then, it's equally true we havent got anybody else's manuscripts of them either. So that particular absence of evidence doesnt seem to count against Shakespeare, as far as I can see.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 12:04 PM

I think the reason he went back to Stratford and stopped writing was someone shouting "Judas" during the first night of "A Winter's Tale", followed by a (possibly faked) motorbike accident.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 02:39 PM

I think I get the point, Greg.

It's a variation of the "Everyone knows Elvis is dead, and anyone who says he is still alive is a raving nut-case" argument, isn't it?

The refined version becomes:

"Everyone knows Bill wrote all those plays and sonnets.   Anyone who says otherwise must by a raving nut-case."

Got it.

Against such powerful and overwhelming rhetoric, I am forced to concede defeat.    Ah well, such is life.   It must have been Bill after all.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 02:41 PM

Don't you dare give in, Mr Eagle. This is all very interesting indeed.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 03:15 PM

I just took a straw poll at our local high school.

57 schoolboys all said our Bill was obviously the author of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets.

2 said words to the effect of "Who is he?"

Not very scientific, I admit, but I think that we can safely assume that every schoolboy who knows who Bill Shakespear is, also knows that it was him who wrote the plays.   

So - there you have it.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 03:25 PM

I'm not sure what Bald Eagle actually means by "intellectual giant".

When it comes to great playwrights, great novelists or great artists, who didn't go to university, there's no shortage. Sean O'Casey, Charles Dickens, William Blake, just for a start. Or of course all those women from the days before formal education was open to them - Jane Austin, the Brontes and many more.

And it's worth noting that Shakespeare's contemporary and friend, who was very much under the impression that William wrote all those plays, never went to university, but worked at the same trade as his stepfather, bricklaying, until he got the acting and playwriting bug, after a spell in the army.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 03:27 PM

That was Ben Jonson I was referring to in that last paragraph.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 03:55 PM

People get very obsessed with the importance of formal education. Mozart managed to compose music without a degree in composition. I dont think Tolstoy ever went near a creative writing course. i really couldn't care less about formal qualifications, except possibly in a surgeon about to operate on me.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 04:27 PM

Yes, i admit I have fallen into the circularity of the pro-Bill faction who say, among many things, just because the author had an amazing range of knowledge, it does not prove that the author could not be Bill.

By being an intellectual giant, Bill could have picked up all his knowledge of everything by reading.

I did not confer the title "intellectual giant" upon the author, but fell into the trap of lazy thinking, letting myself believe that if the pro-Bill faction were defending him as an intellectual giant, it must be something worth defending.

Having said that, I am willing to concede that the plays could have been written by anybody without a shred of knowledge about anything, if it will move the debate forward.

Now, didn't Jonson ascribe the works to Bill following the line taken by Sir William Cecil (aka Lord Burghley, a guy who had many, many reasons to hate De Vere)?   I have no exemplar proof that Johson had no personal contact himself with our Bill - it is others who say they never met and Ben simply passed on what he had heard from that source.   

Could it be that the importance of Sir William's words may have been given too much weight, by the sheer repetition of them by lots of people who also had also never met our Bill?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 04:50 PM

Einstein's academic career was limited to a diploma for teaching physics and mathematics.

Here's a link to a Wikipedia index of "autodidacts". Including such intellectual pigmies as Leonardo da Vinci, Abraham Lincoln and George Bernard Shaw.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 05:06 PM

All Einstein's work was in physics and mathematics.   If he had conceived of a definitive method of translating Greek into Hottentot, for example, then I would have been staggered.   Absolutely gob smacked.

But I have already conceded that the works attributed to our Bill could have been written by a person who did not have a shred of knowledge about anything.

Can we move on?

Did you know that the room that Shakespeare was born in was not identified until the mid-18th Century, in the booming infancy of the Stratford tourist industry?   Is the provenance of that room good enough to convince you that it was the actual room he was born in?   If not, why not?   And yet it would seem that the provenance for our Bill himself, equally shaky, is good enough to be accepted by every schoolboy in the land.   Come on - do explain the difference between the two.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 06:14 PM

Can we move on?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 06:40 PM

Assuming that Shakespeare went to school (a reasonable assumption given his father's status) then he would have learnt to read and would also have learnt Latin. Add to that the fact that outstanding source material was available, and the logical assumption that whoever wrote the plays was a genius of Mozart's stature (with an exceptional ear for idiom etc), and it becomes perfectly reasonable that Shakespeare actually wrote his own plays, as was so widely assumed at the time.

Bald Eagle 2 keeps implying that Shakespeare's name was barely known to his contemporaries. He was in fact a close friend of Ben Johnson's as is plainly evident from the many references in Johnson's writings. Beaumont referred to Shakespeare as writing "by the dim light of nature" - ie writing without th benefit of university education, and "Venus and Adnnis" published in 1593 carried a dedication from "William Shakespeare" as did the Rape of Lucrece published soon afterwards. Robert Greene, one of the Cambridge writers, in his parody A Groat'sworth of Wit complained about the player Shakespeare trespassing on to the territory of the writers.

Even many of those who are desperate to believe in conspiracy theories have had to reject de Vere's candidacy on account of the irksome detail that he died in 1604, before some of the plays had been written. Of course, those who really cannot let go of the Oxfordian theory come up with all kinds of contrived explanations to for how the plays could in fact have been written sooner. But the plain fact is that Macbeth is a Gunpowder Plot play. It is not a play which has had plot references bolted on later; the plot (uncovered in 1605 in case anyone has not noticed the looming 400th anniversary) runs through it like "Blackpool" through a stick of rock.

Another point. Plays like Cymbeline were written and constructed for an indoor theatre. But then maybe de Vere wrote Cymbeline anticipating that four years after his death the King's Players would move to the indoor theatre at Blackfriars? I am tempted to think that those who want to believe are capable of believing just about anything.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 06:51 PM

Sure.

Where to?

Some different aspect of this discussion, a topic on which you feel less uncertain of your ground, perhaps?

Be my guest, lead on ....

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Cluin
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 07:13 PM

And damned be him...

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 07:26 PM

Let us consolidate our common ground.   Shakespeare went to school until he was 12, and returned home to be his father's apprentice.

We enter the age of "the lost years".   One common theme of those days has him poaching venison and being chased off to London by an irate Lord.   Whatever. I think everyone agrees that he didn't go to sea, didn't travel around Europe and had no contact with Queen's court.

Whether the works of Shakespeare actually needed legal, medical and fine arts education is a moot point and is conceded as not being at the heart of our discussion.   Likewise, that his given name was Shagspere is deemed irrelevant (even though it was the name he used to get married).

He arrives in London, immediately and without fanfare writes stunning work, and packs it all in at the age of 40 to do more important stuff like trading corn.   His epithet (the only piece every given full credit to him, is such doggerel, it is dismissed as being some sort of joke).

When he dies, not one person notices that England has lost such a great author.   

Now on to the discourse!

Pete has given us another fine example of carefully picking the points to support a particular view point. For example, MacBeth is surely Guy Fawkes for heaven's sake.   And then quietly ignore that Hamlet is a biography of De Vere (Perhaps you just have to keep saying "It isn't, it isn't" until it stops bothering the thought processes.)

And he seems to accept the big one: hook, line and sinker.   

You see, the theory that William Shakespear wrote the plays and sonnets is, in itself, no more than a conspiracy theory.   A very special type, I grant you, but this theory does have almost nothing but circumstance to support it.   However, it was the first theory on the scene, was able to grab the center ground, is able to dismiss all challengers as being mere SCTF's and never has to actually prove a thing.   

You would be amazed at the mental contortions the Stratfordians get into to protect their boy Bill.   Well, they have to, don't they?   They are the ones who have got it right.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: GUEST
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 07:30 PM

frickin hell !!!

wheres all this iconoclasm gonna end up ??

next

some of you blasphemers will even go as far as claiming

The Archies

never wrote, or played on, any of their greatest hits !!!!???

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: EBarnacle
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 08:03 PM

Gee, and here I thought that Hamlet was a rework of an earlier play.

As to his being a cryptoCatholic, why not a cryptoJew whose family had fled the Spanish Inquisition? It was dangerous to be Jewish and out in that period also, especially if one was not in the community or, as we now call it an MOT [member of the tribe].

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 01 Nov 05 - 08:24 PM

You are quite correct, EB, Hamlet was based on a much earlier play that was stripped to its bones, rewritten to a 4000 liner, and then re-edited to the standard 2,500 or so lines of the day.   It is contended (by others, not I) that the rework added in all the salient features of De Vere's life.

And what is this about a cryptoCatholic - you haven't got Henry Neville back into this discussion, have you?

Drabnaggit! All the effort I went to, to get him put to one side, and you bring him up again.   What are you doing?   (Some sorts of Stupid Conspiracy Theory Fanatic thingy-wotsit, I'll be bound ...)

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 02 Nov 05 - 12:10 AM

Greg Stevens--

"Educated but stupid" (1 Nov 2005 4:32 AM) is a bit harsh.

Skeptics of whether Shakespeare wrote the "Shakespeare canon" include Freud, Justice Harry Blackmun, Mark Twain-- (yes, Rapaire, I know you've already "claimed" him. But on this, it looks like he played both sides of the street)---, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Dickens, and David McCullough.

Do all qualify?

Take care around glass houses.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: EBarnacle
Date: 02 Nov 05 - 12:17 AM

re: Catholicism, see McGrath's link on his 8:22 PM entry on 10/31.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 02 Nov 05 - 10:06 AM

Ron Davies: I absolutely did not use the phrase "educated but stupid" to refer to people who thought that Shakespeare was not the author. I am well aware that many educated and very clever people have doubts about the authorship, and make a very telling case. I only used the phrase to describe people who, because they are educated themselves, fondly believe that formal education is required before you can achieve any intellectual accomplishment. That is a kind of totally unjustified arrogance which I would certainly call "stupid": most of us know that many immensely clever and talented achievers educated themselves.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 02 Nov 05 - 08:43 PM

So, Bald Eagle 2, are you seriously trying to argue that all the plays were written before de Vere died in 1604, or do you perhaps prefer the theory that de Vere wrote some of them posthumously?

Re Hamlet you said "[...] Hamlet is a biography of De Vere (Perhaps you just have to keep saying "It isn't, it isn't" until it stops bothering the thought processes.)"

A post or two later you said: "It is contended (by others, not I) that the rework [of Hamlet] added in all the salient features of De Vere's life.

Just exactly where do you yourself stand on this?

Ron Davies, presumably all those great minds thought alike, notwithstanding that it was a subject on which one or two of them could have known very little. But I'd be a bit surprised if their agreed candidate was Henry Neville.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 02 Nov 05 - 11:43 PM

Peter--you recall perhaps that I said I do not believe the assertion Neville was Shakespeare is a "slam dunk". I said in fact that at this point I am convinced neither by the Stratfordian argument nor the Neville one--but I'm interested to read the Neville book. I'm fascinated to read the Oxfordian evidence also--and there's a lot.

It's interesting that some are already condemning the Neville book--has anybody here read it? I didn't know it was even available yet.

What's clear to me at this point is that the comfortable assumption that the Stratford man wrote the Shakespeare canon is itself shaky.

Greg--

Thanks for clarifying what you meant by your "educated but stupid" remark.   It was, however, a reasonable interpretation that the phrase was aimed at Shakespeare skeptics, since was in this context that it was made. Thanks also for your characterization of such skeptics' views as "a very telling case".

Now we can go on.

I would point out that Mozart is not a good pro-Shakespeare example. His genius was evident at a very early age. All sides in our discussion, I believe, agree that the writer of the "Shakespeare canon" was also a genius. Yet there is absolutely no evidence before he was-- what, 28?--, of that colossal talent, which, it is asserted, needed little schooling.   Autodidacticism is all well and good but in a genius it seems reasonable to see some results before age 28.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 03 Nov 05 - 10:46 AM

MacBeth is Guy Fawkes.   Wow.

How is the connection made?    (Bear with me, it is a little convoluted)

For our American and other colleagues: It is alleged that Guy Fawkes and his Catholic co-conspirators attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament (at a time the King's supporters were desperate for the Catholics to do something like this, in order to shore up the waning support for the Episcopalian church).   But let us assume current doubts about the validity of the plot actually happening had no bearing on Bill, because he wouldn't know about our current doubts.

When one of the co-conspirators (Francis Tesham) was captured, we was in possession of a book called "A Treatise of Equivocation".    This treatise was a primer which was used to teach Catholics how to avoid prosecution under English Law.

Evocation can be described using deliberately misleading statements based on true events and accepted definitions.   (cf Bill Clinton explaining his relationships with lady friends).

Now, in Act two, scene three, of Macbeth, after the discovery of Duncan's death, the porter says:

PORTER: "Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator"
               
Translation: This is a direct reference to Father Garnet, one of the conspirators involved in the Gunpowder Plot.   The Porter is saying (in easily broken code) that Garnet equivocated by saying that the Gunpowder Plot was justified because it would have liberated the Catholics living in England.   

And there you have it.

Furthermore, there are several other direct references to equivocation in this play!   Several!

Case proven, you will no doubt agree.

Once you see that, it then becomes clear that the three witches are really closet Jesuits reveling in the coming destruction of King James and his court (which would also explain why the author may have been a tad nervous of sticking his name on the work until the heat died down).

Every schoolboy knows, there could never, ever be a reason that the author would have used evocation several times in a play, unless it was because he wanted to refer the Gunpowder Plot.

And since DeVere died before the Gunpowder Plot took place .... well, you get the drift.   Against such superb rhetoric, I am once again reduced to being just another Stupid Conspiracy-Theory Fanatic.

Oh - wait a minute.   I might have a loop-hole.   The use of evocation to justify bad deeds was known to Aristotle and others of his day ... perhaps ... perhaps ....    No.   No - that's just clutching at straws.   I am hosed. Pure toast.

(exits stage left, head bowed, a broken man)

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: EBarnacle
Date: 03 Nov 05 - 11:09 AM

Ron, it's a matter of context. If you arrive in a situation which allows you to flower at age X, then you will flower at age X. It's all a matter of fertilizer. Until the manure is applied and the seed is water'd t'won't grow.

Part of our reality is that unless we come up with contemporary documentation or invent a time machine we will never know the truth.

As a middle class youth, WS almost certainly went to school. A recent email reinforced for me that the nature of basic education has changed. If a country boy went to school, he would have had a good grounding for learning more. If he went to one of the colleges, he would have been exposed to much of the material he would have needed as background for his work.

Consider that, as an artifact, we have a lot of material from the reign of "Good Queen Bess" and others of that era. If we had the same level of retention from the classical Greek period, there would be a similar thread going about whether or not Plate or Euclid wrote their philosophical treatises...or did someone else do it in their names.

What we do know is that someone of genius wrote S's plays, etc. Are we all on the same page about that?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 03 Nov 05 - 11:47 AM

Dear Conspiracy-Theory Fanatics

I shall be absent from this forum for a week or more.

The ensuing (possibly welcome) silence from my quarter is not really an admission of total defeat in this discussion: I shall be away because of circumstance beyond my control.   I would hate you to think that I had thrown in the towel and was hiding in disgrace.   :-)

And for those of you who celebrate the event, do have a safe Guy Fawke's bonfire on November 5th.

Regards

BE2

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 03 Nov 05 - 12:05 PM

It's the bit like that James Thurber story The Macbeth Murder Mystery. so if Guy Fawkes was the fall guy for Duncan, who was it Inspector?

who do you suspect.....everybody!

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 03 Nov 05 - 04:37 PM

Equivocation just means that in a tight situation you can misdirect a questioner without actually lying, by saying something that is ambiguous. The idea is that the questioner take the obvious meaning rather but that the take one meaning and not the other.

A very useful technique at times.

It would have been something of a vogue word around the time, and as such would have been a word likely to get used a few times by a man writing a play in a hurry. (In the same way that someone writing a political pay in the UK today would be very likely to use an expressoon such as "spin").

Macbeth is a play open to a number of ways of understanding it, and I don't think there's any way you can get much of a clue as to how the author would have seen the Gunpowder Plot.

After all, it ends up with an anointed King being killed by a subject, in the course of a rebellion carried out with the assistance of a foreign country. The same basic plot as Richard III, giving the impression that the author had few problems with the concept of justified rebellion against an unjust ruler.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 03 Nov 05 - 10:12 PM

E Barnacle--

I did say that all sides in our discussion agree, I believe--( I certainly do--) that the person who wrote the Shakespeare canon was a genius. Our only point of dispute is who that person was.

As to whether the successful actor, impresario, and landowner of Stratford was also the person in question, there are many problems.

We're asked to assume:

1) Shakespeare taught himself virtually all he knew on a huge array of subjects.
2) He however had no need for books on a permanent basis--had none to bequeath (nor plays, of course)
3) His genius was totally hidden until he burst on the scene at about age 28.
4) When he died, although he was a genius and had written many popular plays, no literary figure took any notice for several years (7 years?) (including Ben Jonson, alleged to be a good friend.)

etc.

After a while the assumptions just become too great.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 04 Nov 05 - 05:17 AM

Many years ago I hitched a lift with the playwright Terence Frisby. Naturally as I was an English Lit student, we started talking about plays and how someone became successful as a playwright.

He explained to me that if you want to write plays, you've got to act. theres no other way. you tread the boards , you see what actors are capable of, what works, what doesn't work, you do it for years - everything else you can fake. You can write about kings , emperors, miners, gangsters, anything - but you have to have a firm grasp of what keeps the audience from dropping off to sleep.

could be you are underestimating how long Shakespeare had to work at his craft - and overestimating how much he had to know about history, poetry etc

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 04 Nov 05 - 05:42 AM

Wee Little Drummer: that's a very interesting theory, but I'm not sure if it totally stands up. I'm absolutely sure that Shakespeare knew the theatre backwards, from the way his plays work. But I think it's perfectly possible for a playwright to produce a great play, even with no personal acting experience. For a start, any intelligent writer that goes to the theatre as a punter will start getting some ideas of how it ticks. Take "The Importance of Being Ernest", for example. That is an unbelievably well-made play that acts perfectly on the stage. Oscar Wilde wasn't an actor, though, as far as I know(except all the time, in his life!).

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: alanabit
Date: 04 Nov 05 - 05:50 AM

A telling last line there Greg, which actually leads to the opposite conclusion, to the one I believe you wanted to make when you began your post. It may be that formal theatre - or at least just being an actor - was not the only way to acquire that knowledge and skill.
I am thinking back to what I read of Brecht's early career. He had already gathered some experience of singing his (offensive) ballads in pubs (and getting slung out for his pains) before he produced his first play, "Baal". He certainly knew a bit about theatre and he had plenty of in yer face performing experience.
Would you agree that busking, for instance, is a good cure for wimpy, introvert songwriters?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 04 Nov 05 - 06:02 AM

Alanabit:I have argued elsewhere in this thread that formal education is no prerequisite to be a genius. I certainly dont see anything in Shakespeare's plays that lead me to suppose he must have been to Ozbridge or whatever. But I do see technical things in the plays that make me believe that he knew the acting trade, bu that is quite a separate thing. There are plenty of crap plays written by actors who know the theatre backwards, too!
    No: busking is not a cure for being a wimpy introvert songwriter: there are loads of wimpy introvert songwriters polluting our streets. Busking does teach you a lot about projection and performance, though. If you are wimpy and introverted, when you've busked a bit you are going to look really really really wimpy and introverted.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: alanabit
Date: 04 Nov 05 - 06:45 AM

Ah, some wires crossed here, Greg. I did indeed read your comments about formal education not being the only source of knowledge for an aspiring writer. The point I was trying to make, is that not all acting is done in theatres (which you hinted at yourself) and that not all music is presented in concert halls. Following on from that, I believe that just about any form of performing should wise up a potential writer about what should go in front of an audience.
With regard to the wimpy buskers, I will raise my hands and confess that I have seen them too - in the subways and at the soup kitchens. I guess we will always have slow learners among us. The experience certainly sharpened me up a bit though. I think those performing hours were irreplaceable in my case.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 04 Nov 05 - 07:59 AM

Yes at the time, I pointed out the flaw in Frisby's theory -not mine - I'm not that clever or original.

he mentioned Shaw as a non actor himself - the exception I thought of was Beckett

Ah yes! he said, but he writes shit plays.....

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: HawkBill Hunter
Date: 05 Nov 05 - 09:23 AM

Many of the relevant arguments pro and con have already been recited here quite well -- in particular, by BaldEagle2 (BE2), Rapaire, and GUEST:Le Scaramouche. I join the discussion only to add two particular points, both of which tend to support the Oxfordian view that BE2 has already summarized and defended, and provided some useful links to:


(1) For whatever one thinks the point about spelling inconsistency is worth, Stratford Will's spelling of his own last name varied even more than BE2 has indicated. For one thing, he more often spelled the second syllable "spere" rather than "speare". (This fact becomes more significant -- perhaps -- in light of point #2, below.)

Moreover, while he usually began his last name with "Shak" or "Shack" -- without any e before the last syllable -- he also appears on occasion to have spelled the name with a g ("Shagspere") (I see now that BE2 mentioned this one in a later post I did not see before), or even with an x and no second s ("Shaxpere")!

For a concise listing of the many spellings encountered, see, e.g.:

               Shakspere Documentary Evidence: Brief.

For a version that includes photographs of Shakspere's many, varying hand-spellings, see:

               William Shakspere Documentary Evidence.


(2) It is far from clear that the evidence cited by Rapaire actually points to the conclusion he thinks. Note that the majority (though admittedly not all) of the attributions he cites hyphenate the author's last name, whereas the fellow from Stratford never appears to have spelled his name that way in anything that he wrote by hand, and only once (that I know of) had it spelt with a hyphen by someone else (the author of a playbill from 1603).

(See previous URLs. The playbill appears to have been typeset.)

Moreover, all of the attributions cited by Rapaire spell the second syllable of the author's last name with an a -- Shakespeare -- whereas, as noted in point 1 above, Stratford Will almost always -- or at least usually -- spelled his last name without the second a: Sha[c]kspere. And a quick bit of Googling + recourse to a number of on-line dictionaries (esp. YourDictionary.com and OneLook.com) confirm that "spere" is not an alternative spelling of "spear". It can mean (among other things) sphere, ankle, or spoor, or to search, to pry, or to inquire, but it does not appear ever to have been an alternative English spelling of the name of that long pointed device used for thrusting, stabbing or throwing.

(YourDictionary.com provides Indo-European root etymologies, and OneLook.com pulls up definitions from a bunch of different dictionaries all at once.)

So what is the significance of the hyphen? Well, I would suggest -- as others have before me -- that it highlights the pun that was involved in de Vere's eventual choice of nom de plume.

As BE2 pointed out, de Vere had long before chosen for himself a coat of arms that depicted a spear being shaken. Moreover, de Vere is known to have been especially fond both of Ovid and of Ovid's Metamorphoses, both in the original Latin and as translated into English by one of his uncles, Arthur Golding, who was one of de Vere's tutors when he was growing up, and the Metamorphoses contain a prominent passage about the goddess Minerva (Roman) or Pallas Athena (Greek) shaking a spear. These ancillary points all feed into the two main points, which are that de Vere is well known to have identified personally with the imagery of a spear being shaken, and that he was likewise so identified by others in his day. Although he also was referred to on occasion as a spear-breaker, due to his apparent prowess at jousting -- see, e.g.,

               Why I'm Not an Oxfordian: Bacon Versus De Vere

-- he was often referred to as "spear-shaker", with or without a definite or indefinite article.

Most tellingly of all, in 1578 a fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge University by the name of Gabriel Harvey wrote and published a long and tedious poem in praise of de Vere. In this poem, Harvey addressed de Vere and said of him (albeit in Latin):

               "Thy will shakes spears."

Here we find not only corroboration of the identification of de Vere with the shaking of a spear, but a published phrase that would account for de Vere's choice of pseudonymous first name as well!

(See

               The True Story of the Shakespeare Publications

for full quotation and citation.)

This is just speculation on my part, but I imagine that this incredibly sycophantic, butt-smooching poem by Gabriel Harvey probably embarrassed de Vere more than a little, and became something of a standing joke among him and his friends -- something about which they would teasingly remind him in later years by calling him "spear-shaker". Thus, the subsequent practice of referring to de Vere as "spear-shaker" probably was, at least in part, something of a standing, inside joke.

In any event, what a happy accident it must have been when, many years later, de Vere learned of the existence of an actor in London by the name of Will -- or sometimes William -- Shakspere! And how easily this must have suggested to de Vere the pseudonym of Will -- or William -- Shake-speare.

          *          *          *

All that said, I remain most curious to learn what points might be made in support of this Henry Neville character, of whom I have never heard before.

Also, I have to admit that, as I was using Google to refresh my recollection of some of these details, and to find specific sources to cite, I came across some arguments against de Vere and in favor of Francis Bacon that I found at least superficially powerful. Of greatest force was an argument about The Tempest having been unmistakably based on a shipwreck that took place some 5 years after de Vere's death -- an argument similar to one already recounted here, about Macbeth being based on (or at least alluding to) an incident that took place the year after de Vere died. While it is not impossible per se that some of the plays de Vere wrote could have been published only after his death, it is obviously impossible that any of them could have been written after his death and still be written by him. Thus, Macbeth and The Tempest both provide a very serious problem or challenge for the Oxfordian thesis.

All the same, though, I still have a hard time imagining anyone else having so many facts add up so compellingly in his or her* favor as de Vere.


* Queen Elizabeth I herself has been considered as a possible candidate. She was remarkably well educated (and traveled?) in many of the same ways that de Vere was, and reportedly was fluent in as many as 6 languages in addition to English. (Sources appear to differ on the number of languages, and on the degree of fluency in some of them, but it appears that she definitely was fluent in Latin, French and Italian, probably in Greek, and possibly in Spanish as well. It appears that German would have been the sixth language, but I am not sure of her degree of fluency therein.) I mention this not because I believe that Elizabeth should be seriously considered as a possible author of the plays and poems, but only because it is an interesting fact.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 05 Nov 05 - 12:27 PM

Could this be the same Neville that was in The Telegoons?

The names are very similar.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 05 Nov 05 - 06:46 PM

In that splendid book "No Bed for Bacon" by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon there is a lovely running joke of Shakespeare constantly trying out different ways of spelling his name, and never able to satisfy himself as to which is best.

Incidentally, "No Bed for Bacon" was significantly drawn on by Tom Stoppard in the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love - I don't think he ever acknowledged that, but I could be wrong. Anyway it is well worth getting hold of and reading. Great fun.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: robomatic
Date: 07 Nov 05 - 12:08 PM

Education is no substitute for genius. Consider the following short speech:

Nov. 19, 1863

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.


Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who died here that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have hallowed it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.


It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

The person who wrote The Gettysburg Address had one year of formal education. He ruled a government of intelligent college graduates, many of whom thought, at first, that they should have his job. Most of them eventually realized their error and became his supporters and defenders.

So if a rustic backwoodsman from Illinois can be credited, as he is, with the above and other great writings, surely a superb playwright such as Shakespeare can be thought to have created his great works without the same formal education as the nobs of his era. He wrote almost as well as Lincoln, and probably had more access to the education of his time.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: EBarnacle
Date: 07 Nov 05 - 07:03 PM

Ah, but how many books were in his library?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: beardedbruce
Date: 07 Nov 05 - 07:18 PM

EB,

Check the availability of books in 1560 vs 1860.... Why was it that lending libraries were developed in the early 1800's ( in London)? The price of books had come down to the point that non-nobility could actually get hold of books.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 07 Nov 05 - 07:52 PM

You don't need to own a book to read a book. You don't need a library to borrow a book. And that was as true in the 16th century as it is now. And the suggestion that you had to be "a noble" in order to get hold of books back then is just plain wrong.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 07 Nov 05 - 10:15 PM

Indeed, you did not need to be a noble in Shakespeare's time to get books. You may have had to have some money, which Shakespeare definitely did--he was quite successful as an impresario, actor, and later made good property investments.

However, sorry Robo, Lincoln doesn't help your case. According to David Herbert Donald, by the time Lincoln was 28 he had been:

1) militia captain
2) postmaster
3) surveyor
4) Illinois state legislator

And he was an attorney.

It's a reasonable conclusion that Lincoln's success was partly due to his mastery of the language, which was in turn due at least in part to his constant reading.

There is no evidence to support any literary accomplishment of Shakespeare until about age 28. If evidence surfaces of "Shakespeare's lost years" (birth to age 28), this may change.

Even after age 28, when the "paper trail" becomes more substantial, there are still gnawing questions about Shakespeare.

1) Although he had several admirable, articulate and independent women in his plays, he did not have his own daughters educated. Why?

2) Why did he not bequeath anything to the school he supposedly attended--in his home town, Stratford?

3) Yet again, why no plays or even any books in the will? (especially since, as McGrath says, you did not have to be a noble to have books).

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: beardedbruce
Date: 08 Nov 05 - 07:08 AM

"You don't need to own a book to read a book."

The point was that Shakespeare did not leave any books in his will- thus ownership is the criteria. The claim has been made in this thread that, because he did not own books, he did not read them.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: robomatic
Date: 08 Nov 05 - 08:12 AM

That one can name accomplishments of Lincoln in early life and cannot name anything about Shakespeare's advances no case.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 08 Nov 05 - 08:43 AM

Its also a matter of record that Robbie williams was in Mork and Mindy, years before Take That.

genius like that doesn't happen overnight and burst upon us unexplained - you can take my word on that!

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 08 Nov 05 - 09:20 AM

A lot of weight is being placed, in these arguments, on features of Shakespeare's will, and his erratic spelling. Trouble is, I (and I suspect most of us here) don't know what a normal playwright's, or business man's, will was like in those days. Or spelling, for that matter. We are asked to draw big conclusions from Shakespeare's not leaving plays and books to anyone in his will; the implcation being that he was therefore not a playwright. So, did other Elizabethan playwrights leave plays and books in their wills? And were they better, worse, or about the same when it came to spelling?
    And how about that leaving his second-best bed to his wife. What is the current theory on that suprficially rather strange bequest?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 08 Nov 05 - 12:48 PM

Here's a site with Will's will.

No specific mention of books, but then why should there be? No specific mention of clothes either, but that doesn't mean we have to assume he walked around naked.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: greg stephens
Date: 08 Nov 05 - 01:01 PM

There's no mention of books in my will, but the house is full of them, shelves, boxes, under the beds, on the stairs. Doesnt prove a thing.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: robomatic
Date: 08 Nov 05 - 04:22 PM

Mudcat - A vagrant thread title fell through a time warp and into my AMD powered little bit-buster. It's title is "Linux - written by Sir William Gates?" and purports to be about how after he created Microsoft Windows, Sir Bill went on to found the great Linux operating system. The tales that some student created it while on break are mere stuff of legend, obviously untrue. "What some vagrant student taught himself? Come On Then!"

There was something about how bicycle mechanics never invented the aeroplane, but I woke up then.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 12:13 AM

All anybody can do in this discussion is cite facts. The point is there are precious few facts to establish that the writer of the plays is William Shakespeare of Stratford.

Robo--I only responded to your citing of the Gettysburg Address, which I believe to be a red herring in the discussion. I was prepared to drop the topic, at least temporarily--in fact the thread had fallen off the list--but you brought it back. I'm still interested in the Neville book, which it appears neither I nor anybody else has found.

Since it's back--

No books in Shakespeare's library to be bequeathed--but both Jonson and Donne had substantial libraries.

Not only no books--we have no proof of anything--including manuscripts, correspondence, or diaries written by him.

I notice nobody has addressed my other points--about the lack of bequest to the Stratford school, women's education, the 7-year gap before any literary figure commented on him (including his supposed friend, Ben Jonson). I've also read that Jonson was paid to write what he did (can't cite the source for that now).

There are a lot more questions--that's just scratching the surface. The Oxfordian argument is particularly intriguing.

"Just the facts, ma'am"---and the facts are scarce.

Greg--no mention of books in your will. I have to say I'm surprised--there will be in mine. To coin a phrase--"doesn't prove a thing".

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Ron Davies
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 12:48 AM

Second-best bed-- I've read that was because the best bed was to be reserved for guests.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: robomatic
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 07:22 AM

Facts schmacts. You can prove anything with facts!
Homer Simpson

Ron:

So much of the arguments made against Shakespeare in this thread and other venues are in favor of some nobleman, based on class and education. I find these arguments inherently suspicious, that a commoner just doesn't have the background, breeding, or education for great works. In this thread I have brought forth a couple of commoners, Samuel Johnson and Abraham Lincoln, people who outstripped the nobs of their day in literary and intellectual merit by their powers and application, breeding notwithstanding.

I once met an English gentleman who had a great deal of contempt for a gentleman's education. As far as a nobleman's education, I'm under the impression it was very optional.

As far as the rest of the 'theory' goes, it is over-reaching to draw conclusions from apparent gaps in years, lack of information, and coincidences in histories. People have been predicting the end of the world by just such information gleaned from Scripture. It is an even more profitable industry than writing books about who wrote Shakesepeare's material.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 07:51 AM

who knows - perhaps his mates nicked his books - perhaps he gave them away - perhaps they were under the matress and nobody checked

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: EBarnacle
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 09:23 AM

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? We are arguing based upon supposition about the unprovable, lacking actual contemporary evidence.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 11:17 AM

I am only back in town for 24 hours or so, so don't be miffed if any response to this post is left unanswered for another week or two.   While I was away, the discussion on whether our Bill wrote the sonnets and plays seems to have drifted off into a interesting, if somewhat sterile, side streams.   

Was it our Bill what wrote them masterpieces?   

Some argue that our Bill did not have the education or noble background to write so well, and others rightly dismiss this as being elitist nonsense.   The case that it might not of been him really rests on the facts that Bill never claimed authorship, never did anything in any way to support any claim that he was the author, and the people of Stratford who argue long and loud that Bill was the man: well, they rely on others who said they knew it was him.    What matters, really, is those others, back in the 1600's, who gave our Bill credit for authorship - if they were right to do so, our quest is over..

How did those others know?   Let me back-track for a moment.

We know that there are 154 sonnets and about 40 plays that were written by one person in the late 1580's early 1600's.   They were attributed to our Bill some 7 years after he died.

The earliest play seem to have been written before Bill arrived in London, and several are given co-authors who, from all contemporary records, were people who never actually met our Bill.   (Not necessarily suspicious - many works have been changed after their first issue by others who want to revise areas worthy of revision).   

Our Bill was a member of an informal club "The Mermaid Tavern" from about 1604 to 1613, (along with Ben Johnson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher and others).    Members of this group printed the first portfolio of plays and gave the author's name as William Shake-speare.   They did this 7 years after Bill had died.   The hyphen the typesetter put in our Bill's name was not of any significance.

Later editions of these early plays showed some revisions had taken place after Bill's death, which means that others definitely did have their hand in "correcting" those masterpieces.   This is accepted as being normal for the day.

The sonnets fall into two groups 1 to 126 addressed to a fair young man, and 127 to 154 to "a dark lady".   Most scholars agree that the fair young man is the Earl of Southampton, but where and when our Bill had an affair with him remains a mystery.   

The early reign of King James holds several tantalizing clues as to the court's attitude to our Bill.   When Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford died, King James had ten of our Bill's plays performed in court, to honor Edward's life.   Later, when Edward's wife died, another dozen of our Bill's plays were performed in court.   (Hypothesis: King James recognized that the works had been written by a great author)

To produce a revised bible, King James summoned the finest English poets and writers of the day to work on the project, which lasted from 1604 to 1611.   Our Bill was not included.    One may wonder why.   (Hypothesis: King James did not include our Bill on his list of great authors).

In 1610, our Bill left London and returned to Stratford to become a Corn Merchant.   He died in 1616.   It was not until 1623 that his name was finally linked as the author of the plays and sonnets, and the people so saying were his good friends and colleagues from the Mermaid Tavern.   If those good people had correctly identified the author, we are still left with an overwhelming doubt as to their veracity: why had none of them ever written it down before in diaries, correspondence, play bills - anything at all?   They maintained an absolute and total silence on the topic throughout Bill's life, for another 7 years after his death, and then suddenly remembered that it was him, after all.

We have had a long and interesting discussion on whether Guilliam Shagspere, proved or did not prove anything by constantly signing himself with variations of the name Shackspere.    The absence of an "e" in Shack and the absence of an "a" in spere is worthy of discussion, but quickly turns into a circular chase.   Let us, instead, concentrate on why Bill's friends acted in such a bizarre manner over revealing his name.   Oh - we cannot can we?   All they have ever had to say on the topic was said in the one act of publishing the first portfolio.   Any discussion can only be based on theoretical conceptions, can't it?

Perhaps we face a situation which is rather like that Theory of Evolution: until we have hard and fast data to overwhelm any alternative, we will always have some people who genuinely believe in the concept of intelligent design.   Not that their belief is "correct" or "incorrect", it is the only belief they have to be going on with.    Ask our educators in Kansas, they can explain it better than I.

May be it is a bit like that with this authorship debate.   Some have so long held the belief that our Bill wrote the plays - possibly gained from a school teacher who had gained the same view in a similar manner - that for it be untrue is quite unthinkable.    Until there is something that "proves" our Bill was not the author, they find it simpler to continue to accept the belief that he was.   It possibly helps them if they belittle and mock those with a different point of view, because making mock requires no critical thought.

Now, in my view, showing that others make more credible candidates for authorship simply magnifies the serious and continuing doubts about our Bill being the author.   

Was the real author De Vere or Neville?   I really don't know.   But De Vere certainly has more stuffing in his case than Bill ever had.   I have yet to read on the case for Neville, but early reviews suggest that it is merely based on chronology and little else.   

But was it our Bill?   

Let me turn it round and ask you the most basic of basic questions: "If you think William Shakespeare, citizen of Stratford upon Avon, wrote the sonnets and plays attributed to him after his death, what is the basis of your belief?"

Is it from some higher authority whose point of view you accept without question?   From historical evidence that overwhelming supports your view?   Or from some other basis?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 12:57 PM

"... what is the basis of your belief?" Because they were attributed to him when they were published only a few years after his death, and there are no indications that anybody at the time, or for cednturies afterwards ever disputed his authorship.

Perfectly adequate grounds for accepting that he wrote the works in question, it seems to me, in the absence of pretty solid reasons for doubting it.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: BaldEagle2
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 01:22 PM

But dear McGrath of Harlow, the doubts started within 50 years of his death and have continued to grow in volume year by year.   The list of academics, scholars, historians, authors, and other good folk just grows and grows.   ("Barking mad, all of them" I hear you riposte). Even Malcom X wrote about his doubts on our Bill.   (Ok, Malcolm X was not noted as a historian of Elizabethean legends, but he was, by all accounts, a pretty smart guy).

I suspect that the words "perfectly adequate" are merely a device used by those, so inclined, to stop themselve having to do any really deep examination of a topic.   It seems to me that you should be saying "if Bill's mates said he did it, that is good enough for me".   I would be inclined to join you, if some contemporary of Bill, other than his drinking buddies, had ever once written anything that even remotely suggested Bill was the author.

But you do have a good point, for I also have always held that my opinions are the only ones that matter, and to hell with any so-called fact or theory that casts a doubt on one of them.   :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: robomatic
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 04:18 PM

Well written Baldeagle the Two.

I suggest we put CSI on it. Not those Miami wimps either, the Las Vegas batch. William Petersen and Marg Helgenberger to the rescue.

Open his grave!
Homer Simpson

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: HawkBill Hunter
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 07:24 PM

David Caruso just makes incredibly snotty comments to people who have not yet been proven guilty -- even by forensic analysis, much less in court after a trial -- whereas William Peterson actually does forensics! The difference between the two shows is like that between night and day.


(Just once, I would like to see the guy they initially suspect and start being gratuitously, seriously and repeatedly rude to turn out to be exonerated by the evidence, and Caruso have to eat crow and apologize! I'd actually resume watching the show -- which I hopefully gave about a half-dozen tries before finally giving up -- if something like this were ever to happen, even once.

As it is, it's kind-of as though the Las Vegas gang were moved to Miami, but with even William Peterson reduced to being just a minor player -- and all the other CSIs correspondingly reduced in importance as well along with him, naturally -- and Paul Guilfoyle were made by far and away the center of attention!

Only even Guilfoyle is usually not quite as obnoxious as Caruso, and is a *much* better actor. Anyone who saw and remembers Guilfoyle's *stunning* performance on Wiseguy -- alongside future U.S. Senator Fred Thompson, who also gave an *incredible* performance -- knows this to be true, even though CSI doesn't even begin to let him show what he can do.

Not that I have anything against Caruso as an actor -- he's just fine in his own right. It's not his fault the director chooses to direct him the way he does!)


P.S. If Homer J said it, it's good enough for me!

(One can just imagine the inarticulate growl he would droolingly emit over the sight of Marg Helgenberger!)

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 07:26 PM

Malcom X - well that changes everything...

So it was only after he had been dead 50 years that anyone suggested that he hadn't written that stuff? Wow!

But you're right enough - "if Bill's mates said he did it, that is good enough for me". True enough. Especially since no one else seems to have contradicted them until they were long dead. Though I suppose if someone had ventured to do that, he'd have got a thick ear - that's one thing mates are good for.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: M.Ted
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 09:02 PM

I have been reading some interesting material of late--that is, Luigi da Porto's original Novella about the Capellettis and Montecchis, as well as Bandello's re-write of the same--the bard's popular play follows it so closely, that it is impossible to think of him as "The Author" in the way that we understand that word--

Also read the Saxo Grammaticus History of the Danes, that is, the part that is the story of Hamlet, and found that the man, and his "madness" are there, as are most all of his adventures, including Mom and Ophelia--his curious character fully developed, hundreds of years before the Bard set quill to paper--

The true reason that Shakespearean authorship is so imprecisely credited may simply be that, in the time that the plays were current, the stories were so familar, and the sources of the works were so well known that "authorship" of the Shakespearean plays was not regarded as much of a literary achievement--being, perhaps, viewed much as we might view the "novelization" of a Star Trek episode--

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: M.Ted
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 09:34 PM

I have been reading some interesting material of late--that is, Luigi da Porto's original Novella about the Capellettis and Montecchis, as well as Bandello's re-write of the same--the bard's popular play follows it so closely, that it is impossible to think of him as "The Author" in the way that we understand that word--

Also read the Saxo Grammaticus History of the Danes, that is, the part that is the story of Hamlet, and found that the man, and his "madness" are there, as are most all of his adventures, including Mom and Ophelia--his curious character fully developed, hundreds of years before the Bard set quill to paper--

The true reason that Shakespearean authorship is so imprecisely credited may simply be that, in the time that the plays were current, the stories were so familar, and the sources of the works were so well known that "authorship" of the Shakespearean plays was not regarded as much of a literary achievement--being, perhaps, viewed much as we might view the "novelization" of movie script or writing a "Made-for-TV" movie about a recent news story--

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: M.Ted
Date: 09 Nov 05 - 09:38 PM

Whoa--that was strange! I double posted--but with slightly different ending--perhaps you can choose the one you like best(I only meant to send the second one, fearing that a "Star Trek" comparison would be viewed as trivializing the work of the great one--

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: HawkBill Hunter
Date: 10 Nov 05 - 05:44 AM

Geen Coon or Dorothy Fontana?

Actually, many Star Trek episodes were themselves adapted from previously existing stories. For example, "Arena" was based on Frederic Brown's famous science-fiction short story by the same name, "Operation: Annihilate!" was based on Robert Heinlein's novel The Puppet Masters, and "Balance of Terror" was based on a classic film about submarine warfare in World War II, 1957's The Enemy Below, which starred Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens.

In all such cases that I know of, the originals were good (or better than good), and so were the Star Trek adaptations (i.e., the TV scripts).* And for that matter, so were James Blish's short-story adaptations of the respective TV episodes!

But surely nobody thinks of James Blish (may he rest in peace) as the "author "of any of the stories in question, which of course was M.Ted's point. I disagree with its application to the plays in question -- which I think deserve to be considered great literary works in their own right, despite their derivative nature -- and I am fairly sure that people thought so of them even when they were first performed and published, but it remains an interesting point nonetheless.


* Actually, I think Geen Coon's version of "Arena" was actually much better than Frederic Brown's original. The enemy in the Star Trek version (kind-of a lizard-man) is not nearly as anatomically ridiculous as that in the original (a red, ball-shaped creature with retractable tentacles that rolls to and fro across the battlefield) -- although there's no denying that the costume used in the Star Trek version bespoke of cheesiness and a limited budget -- and the plot changes involving the Metrons made for a better story with a more surprising ending, in my opinion. (These changes also made the Metrons appear much more sophisticated and clever, and morally subtle, than the pan-dimensional buttinsky in Brown's version.) Furthermore, making the alien, rather than the human, the one with the advantage in physical strength -- so that the human had to out-wit it in order to survive and win -- also made the Star Trek version more interesting.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 10 Nov 05 - 06:21 AM

Many years ago as a child, I was given some books by an old lady. There was an autograph embossed on the cover.

Snarlesboro Wickford.... I wondered who he was.

The weight of evidence points towards Charles Dickens. However if you feel the Snarlsboro Wickford autograph bears a bit of looking at, I think you may find it a more profitable avenue of investigation than the present one.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: robomatic
Date: 10 Nov 05 - 07:50 AM

Some small points:

The Bard's gift lay in his language and insight into his characters. His plots were mostly derived, and that includes his histories which were tributes to whoever was in power. This is not to detract from his genius which still enriches our lives.

Star Trek was originally pitched as: "Hornblower In Space".

There are many gifted actors who've done some good work going on to film and television exploits that have fallen short of expectation:

Halle Berry
David Caruso
Oliver Platt
Robin Williams
Sean Young

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 10 Nov 05 - 08:26 AM

I don't think anyone has ever suggested that Shakespeare made up the plots of most, or even any, of his plays. (That's one reason why modernised versions which throw overboard the language and keep the plots are really rather a pointless exercise. Or rather, whatever point they have is nothing to do with Shakespeare.)

As Kipling wrote in respect of another storyteller:

When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
An' what he thought 'e might require,
'E went an' took, the same as me!

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: M.Ted
Date: 10 Nov 05 - 10:47 AM

There is a difference between the plot and the story, and the Bard lifted more than that.
Lay your hands upon Da Porto and Bandello--you will learn why Italians call Shakepeare "The Plagarist"--the story details, the characters, and their personalities are there, as well as bits of surprisingly familar dialogue--(and, interestingly, some of the plot problems in the Shakespearean play are resolved in a more sensible way)--

Ben Jonson, who alone, wrote of the Bard by name, also left us this commentary:

                                ON POET-APE 

Poor POET-APE, that would be thought our chief,
   Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit,
From brokage is become so bold a thief,
   As we, the robb'd, leave rage, and pity it.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
   Buy the reversion of old plays ;  now grown
To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
   He takes up all, makes each man's wit his own :
And, told of this, he slights it.  Tut, such crimes
   The sluggish gaping auditor devours ;
He marks not whose 'twas first : and after-times
   May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
Fool !  as if half eyes will not know a fleece
   From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece ?

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: EBarnacle
Date: 10 Nov 05 - 04:51 PM

Curst be he who moves these bones!

As is acknowledged in copyright law, you can't copyright ideas, only solid text. It was even more common in that era to "borrow" the ideas of other playwrights and create your own presentation. the genius is in the execution, even more than in coming up with the idea. The fact that X was able to make them resonate with relevance, even now is enough to make the works great.

The importance of S's work is that, unlike almost all his contemporaries, his friends made an effort to send as much as they could down to us intact. Now, why would they do a thing like that?

Even were his work all adapted,
It would still be well enacted.

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: M.Ted
Date: 10 Nov 05 - 06:40 PM

I think that a contemporary writer would risk significant legal trouble if they took your interpretation of copyright law to heart, Barnacle--still, there are pieces of text in Shakespeare that seems to have gone missing from the works of others--food for thought, at least--

Subject: RE: BS: Shakespeare: Henry Neville?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 10 Nov 05 - 07:55 PM

Current copyright law would make a Shakespeare impossible, and it has the same effect on other art forms as well. That's far too high a price to pay for protecting intellectual property rights.

I hope that eventually the impact of the internet, and whatever the internet grows into, will sweep it away.