-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 18, 2016 3:34 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Why Shakespeare Matters debate<[log in to unmask]> In that debate video, when I watch Alexander Waugh, anti-Stratfordian grandson of Evelyn, and see how easily he offers arcane, rat-a-tat facts in off-the-cuff rebuttal, I am reminded how little I really know, or ever will know, now, and how modest my cerebrum is compared to those of many others, especially intellectuals from Britain trained at Oxbridge. That's meant as both a funny and serious sentence. If Robin Hamilton can rattle off his facts in stand-up fashion like that, I bow to him. But I'll bet he can't.
Or can he?
>>> Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> 10/18/16 12:44 PM >>>That acid trip, and his reporting Bowtwine Lincoln's assertion in a graduate seminar, is why my friend never did get his doctorate.-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 18, 2016 1:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Why Shakespeare Matters debate<[log in to unmask]>
>>> Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> 10/18/2016 12:19 PM >>>I always do, Kent, even yours.
But this mystery seems not to be mysterious to you, Kent. Nor to most of the rest of us. Not like, say, the identity of the Pearl Poet. Tho one of my friends while on an aside trip was visited by one Bowtwine Lincoln, who claimed to be the very same.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 18, 2016 12:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: WS/ Bohemia/ Adriatic<[log in to unmask]>
I guess the ultimate question is why this matters to you. What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?
-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 18, 2016 11:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: WS/ Bohemia/ Adriatic<[log in to unmask]> yes, Mark, I know you were.
Here are some people who would have/do disagree with you.
https://doubtaboutwill.org/past_doubters
>>> Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> 10/18/16 9:49 AM >>>
I was suggesting that it's not a very important issue.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 18, 2016 10:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: WS/ Bohemia/ Adriatic<[log in to unmask]> Here is the order link for the updated edition of Diana Price's book. It has been given grudging respect by major figures in the orthodox tradition, even, including Stanley Wells.
I think if you read it, you will indeed hear some cannon fire that shakes the household frames of assumption.
https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeares-Unorthodox-Biography-Evidence-Authorship/dp/0986032603/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361152167&sr=1-4&keywords=Shakespeare%27s+Unorthodox
>>> Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> 10/18/16 9:30 AM >>>
All of this is pretty silly (sound of cannons from the Johnson household). Here's an experiment to try: imagine Shakespeare's plays were anonymous.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 18, 2016 10:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: WS/ Bohemia/ Adriatic<[log in to unmask]> Michael, you eloquently raise a range of points that are central in the debate, so I'll comment on them one by one.
>>> "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]> 10/18/16 7:10 AM >>>
He he.David's remark is very clever, yes, and made me chuckle. But there are lots of very reputable "bores" in the wings by now, and certain key questions in the case must be taken seriously. Ad hominem jokes about Delia Bacon's mental health, or J. Thomas Looney's name--so common in responses by leading orthodox scholars--don't cut it any more.
Wikipedia's article on the The Winter's Tale puts unnecessary rationalizations of the coast of Bohemia, based on a tendentious ten years back in the 13th century, in some much-needed perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter%27s_TaleI've just read the article, and I'm not sure what "perspective" you mean, Michael. The article confirms that Bohemia ruled territory on the Adriatic at the height of its influence. The commentary there about the references to Bohemia being perhaps merely fanciful, following Greene's Pandosto, don't really have bearing on the authorship question at all.
None of the plays suggest to me that Shakespeare travelled beyond England; rather the opposite. Shakespeare's Italian geography in TGV is crazy, and yet perfectly normal im the kind of hastily-constructed exotic fictions that Shakespeare and others like him made out of their sources.You must read Roe's book, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy. It's causing real discomfort in orthodox circles. (See link in previous email.)
The lack of social, historical and literary context in the Declaration is dismaying. Its arguments are lumped together in a mass with no apparent awareness that some are possibly strong but others are incredibly weak. (A typical architectural device of uncritical conspiracy theory: the more mud the better.)I like the cleverness of "the more mud the better," but you'd have to point more directly to the mud.
Comments about the lack of cosy domestic anecdote from Jonson, or indeed the supposed lack of eulogies till a whole seven years after the author's death, betray a pretty basic lack of awareness about how differently biography and literary status were conceived in the sixteenth century, compared to our own individualistic times.As Diana Price has shown in Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography, comparing extant records of literary activity (of various categories and kinds) for Shakspere of Stratford with the two dozen most prominent writers of his time, his totally blank case is absolutely singular for writers of his time. No one comes close to his documentary invisibility. The most celebrated Author of his time actually violates all standards of "biography and literary status in the sixteenth century." Unless we understand "Shakespeare" (or, as commonly given, Shake-speare) to have been a pseudonym for an author wishing to remain behind the scenes, something in no way without precedent in literary behavior, of course.
Meanwhile no mention is made of such basic biographical sources as Greene's snobbish attack on the upstart uneducated ungentlemanly Shake-scene who had the temerity to write plays, or Meres' 1598 list of plays by Shakespeare, or of the Shakespeare securely embedded in a wider literary community that we might infer from e.g. Love's Martyr in 1601 ("several modern writers whose names are subscribed to their several works...").
The Greene case is curious, aside from Shakespeare poaching wholesale from him (as he stole from everyone, greatest Conceptual poet that he was). Perhaps the most interesting thing about the case is that Greene's publisher was forced to retract the pamphlet shortly after its publication, and with an apology that is so obsequious and terror-ridden it seems given under high threat by quite powerful agents.
That amounts to a mischievous suppression of evidence.
The case that there's something unacceptably odd about Shakespeare's authorship fizzles away when we look at a comparable workaday playwrights from relatively bourgeois backgrounds like Heywood and Dekker. The almost total lack of information about their lives strikes no-one as suspicious. Yet they produced plays by the hundred.See Price's careful research on this matter. There is tons more literary documentary evidence on Heywood and Dekker than on William Shakspere of Stratford.
What I would concede is this. Shakespeare was not just a normal bloke, if normal blokes do indeed exist. He has his enigmas, though those enigmas are absent from his legal and business records, and it looks like he led quite a divided life. Biographical material in the Sonnets suggest he had a pretty colourful life in the capital, well away from his wife, children and legal business. He did mix with top nobility and he was at least theoretically bisexual. The plays suggest someone with a more than exceptional openness to an incredible range of society and its interests.
But substituting Shakespeare for someone else (usually someone posh) doesn't make him less of an enigma and it generates significant new difficulties - such as how this posh person's full-time involvement in the commercial theatre for a quarter of a century could pass unremarked. (And turning the author into a noble lord makes it only more incredible that he could write, for example, the hostler's scene in 1H4.)No candidate can be securely substituted. The point is that there are clear reasons to doubt that William Shakspere of Stratford is the author of the poems and the plays.
Doubting that a person with Shakespeare's apparently commonplace background could be so interesting, gifted and enigmatic betrays an extraordinary scepticism about the possibilities of the human spirit. That's what I think, anyway.