Kent, Kent, really you should be more careful.  The confusion below does not 
become you.


> Joe,
>
> The story of Shakespeare stealing deer is completely apocryphal,
> according to a couple books I've recently read. But so, of course, is
> just about everything else concerning Shakespeare's biography.

        I think you're confusing the books you so recently read -- I presume 
they are S. Schoenbaum's +Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life+ (406 
pages, downsized) and (by the same author) +Shakespeare's Lives+ (640 
pages).  It's the second one which chronicles the apochrypha (including the 
Deerslayer Tale -- "My heart's in the highlands, my heart is not here / My 
heart's in the highlands a-slaying the deer," -- Traditional Scottish Song), 
the former which collects the documentation together.  Lotsa pages in the 
former book for someone about whom so little is known.

> What we do know, from the few documents

        [Cor --  *only 406 pages of them!]

>that survive in relation to him,

        Hey, let's play a game.  My Significant Other is convinced that boys 
are always playing the "mine's bigger than yours" game, so let's do it with 
lists.  I bet my list of Elizabethan and Renaissance dramatists about whom 
we know [much] *less than we do about Shakespeare is longer than yours where 
more is known.  I'll give you Jonson, for starters, and even allow Fulke 
Greville (though I do think citing closet dramatists is cheating a little, 
even though he never did come out of the closet).  Against that, Webster, 
Ford, Middleton, Cyril Tourneur (+The Atheist's Tragedy+), "Tourneur" (+The 
Revenger's Tragedy+, unless the author of that was actually Jonson, Webster, 
or Middleton), Massinger ...

        I could go on, but I think we'd better agree to leave out Marlowe, 
whether Christopher, Philip, or the Man With No First Name in Conrad, since 
we could argue till pigs fly over the authority of the Baines Report, and 
anyway, as Christopher Marlowe has been put forward as a candidate to have 
written the plays in the First Folio, it all gets too, too confusing.

        Bottom line is that we know more about Shakespeare than virtually 
*any other English Renaissance playwright.  Odd that, if you think on it.

> is that the man was a litigious bastard of the most petty kind,
> ready to screw over his fellow Stratfordians for a few extra
> shillings--fast to hoard grain, even, in a time of hunger.

        Typical bloody writer.

> And then he
> wrote a barely literate will giving his second best bed to his wife
> (nice guy!),

        At least he didn't divorce her, or some of the other things that 
writers have been reputed to do to their wives, like attempt to kill them 
(Willliam Burroughs) or not notice that they were dying (Thomas Hardy).

>leaving one of his daughters entirely out of the bequests

        Yeats was a lousy father, and there's a good case for seeing James 
Joyce as responsible for his daughter's schizophrenia.  Wallace Stevens 
seems to have been the exception rather than the rule.

> (bequests which bear no trace of any literary vocation whatsoever, not
> even a few books).

        Hey, Kent, as I presume you've written your will, you leaving me any 
of yours?  I have to say that mine aren't mentioned in mine, though I do 
have an informal agreement with my son that in the wake of my death, he's 
going to declare open house to my friends for a couple of days for them to 
scour the shelves before the remains are given to the nearest charity shop. 
You're welcome to join in if you're around at the time.  I did consider 
listing the books as well as a few other things (such as my collection of 
self-constructed Micromodels) but my solicitor advised me to keep it simple, 
just say I was splitting everything equally between my two kids.  But I was 
welcome to do this if I wanted, as he could use the money he'd get for 
drawing up the longer version.

> But whoever Shakespeare really was (probably Edward DeVere, Earl of
> Oxford, from the best evidence, it seems),

        No, Kent baby, Oxford *isn't the most plausible candidate, he's 
simply the latest one, flavour of the month, and typically, if we leave 
aside Queen Elizabeth, the one of the highest social status.  Interesting 
how the candidates for the position of Shakespeare consistently drift *up 
the social scale.  The logical extension of the progression is that The 
Works could only have been written by God Herself.  I'm surprised that a 
nice SWP kid like you buys into such an obviously class-biased game.

> he was certainly a literary
> thief and poacher, albeit the greatest one in the language. But he
> poached plots and ideas,

        ... not eggs as well?

> not deer.

        <sigh>  A cliche a day keeps the doctor away.  Not the most 
powerfully worded statement you've ever come out with.  A bit trite really. 
Having a bad hair day, sonny jim?  <g>

> And Ben Jonson, a drunk and murderer,

        Um, no, that's a slightly imprecise use of language -- Jonson was a 
killer, not a murderer, on both occasions performing the act in the course 
of a duel, as Joe Green points out.  Anyway, Gabriel Harvey deserved it, by 
all accounts.  Uppity damn actors.

> as you say (albeit also the
> greatest one in the language) was in the pay of Oxford's close allies
> when he wrote the coded preface to the First Folio,

        *Did he?  I was under the impression that it was Heminge and Codell 
wrote the preface, and that Jonson was simply one of several who contributed 
poems of praise.  Shows how wrong I can be.  Learn something new every day.

> so that explains
> that, hey.

        Oh, give the "murderer" his due -- at least he worked for his money. 
There's not only the pome at the beginning of the First Folio -- and 
incidentally, do you know how much the others who wrote there were paid? 
How much did Milton get for his contribution to the scam in a later edition, 
and in "L'Allegro"? -- but the carefully-contrived references in the 
Discourses.  Bet those got a chuckle out of many hundreds who must have been 
in on the joke.

        But where Jonson really earned his pay was when Drummond of 
Hawthorne got him pissed out of his skull on that visit to Scotland.  Not so 
much what Jonson said then, "Shakeshpeer lacked art" among other things, but 
what he *didn't say.  Think of the temptation to pass on a juicy bit of 
Lunnon gossip to his host.  It would have trumped even Jonson's revelation 
to Drummond that Queen Elizabeth possessed a hymen so tough that no man 
could pierce it.

        But I'm breaking my own rule, never to try to engage rationally with 
children, drunks, or conspiracy theorists.  I blame it on Wikipedia, as what 
I thought was My Very Own Conspiracy Theory, that America is secretly run by 
members of the Institute of General Semantics, has been partially outed 
there.  So I want to put a marker down on this, establishing my prior 
intellectual rights.

        Mind you, the article on General Semantics, mentioning the name of 
A.E. Van Vogt and drawing attention to the link between General Semantics 
and Dianetics, misses out a few details, such as the closed session of the 
Science Fiction Writers of America, where Van Vogt was grilled for six hours 
over the business before he was allowed to begin republishing SF again.  And 
naturally enough, cowards that they are at Wikipedia and afraid of -- yah, 
boo, sucks :-p -- offending the Church of Scientology, no mention is made of 
the lash-up between General Semantics, the Sokal Hoax, Noam Chomsky, and 
American Left Activism generally.

                    Remember:  You Heard It Here First.

> long live dogs with names like Tray.
>
> Kent

            "Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when Lady 
the brach may stand by the fire and stink."  (I, iv)

Robin