Basic Problems of Anti-Stratfordianism
Christian Lanciai
finding out the truth, since he concealed his identity himself,
perpetuating his concealment for eternity. If he was Oxford, his last
ten years of clinical seclusion precludes any possibility to ever
identify him as Shake-Speare with any certainty. If he was Derby it's
even worse, since, while Oxford was an obvious poetic personality,
Derby was not, and after his death his library was burnt down by the
Puritans, who thus destroyed all traces of his works and activities.
If Shakespeare was Bacon's pseudonym, Bacon was meticulously careful
about keeping the Shakespeare activities separated from his own as
statesman, scientist and world-acclaimed philosopher, so careful, that
it's almost impossible to combine them with Bacon. If Bacon and
Shakespeare was one, Bacon for some abstruse and incomprehensible
reason made sure that he was never to be identified as Shakespeare.
That's also part of the anti-stratfordian problem: the probable
soubriquet of Shakespeare was so firmly established so as to never be
revocable, while the Oxford, Derby, Bacon and Marlowe characters
concealed as Shakespeare never can be more than theories, speculations
and guesses, until suddenly one day universally acceptable evidence is
found explaining all, which so far hasn't happened since research
began more than 300 years ago.
Marlowe is the most difficult case. If he survived May '93 (which he
probably did) and continued play-writing under Shakespeare's cover
(which he probably did) he didn't mind staying under cover for the
rest of his life. He accepted the preposterous situation and, like a
true philosopher, contented himself with just making the best of it,
taking on his existential confinement as merely a challenge and, one
might suspect, enjoying it, ignoring the fact that he thereby made
things difficult for literary historians for centuries to come, which
whole situation he of course couldn't take in himself.
So the anti-stratfordians have a difficult job with this mess of
ghosts, in which the last thing they may expect is any help from the
other side of the grave.
Most probably all five of them were involved in the Poet's fraud show
- Oxford, Derby, Bacon, Marlowe and Shakspere, in one way or another.
Chris
dustbird
> - Oxford, Derby, Bacon, Marlowe and Shakspere, in one way or another.
>
> Chris
I'm reading John Michell's Who Wrote Shakespeare. I thought Bacon was
the best candidate to be Shakespeare till I read about Oxford. I thought
Oxford was the best candidate till I read about Derby. But I've still got
56 pages to go. Who's next?
But it's hard to see the plays as being written by a collaborative
effort, unless they were actually written by one man. Don't they seem to
have been written by one personality?
There is no evidence that William Shakspere wrote the plays. There are
no manuscripts, no letters, no biographies. If it is true that he never
blotted out a line, couldn't that mean somebody gave him the finished
manuscripts? But if there is not a scrap of evidence that William Shakspere
wrote the plays, or that anybody else did, then if all the possibilities
have been ruled out, then whatever remains, however implausible, must be the
truth: there are no plays.
Art Neuendorffer
>>- Oxford, Derby, Bacon, Marlowe and Shakspere, in one way or another.
dustbird wrote:
> I'm reading John Michell's Who Wrote Shakespeare. I thought Bacon was
> the best candidate to be Shakespeare till I read about Oxford. I thought
> Oxford was the best candidate till I read about Derby. But I've still got
> 56 pages to go. Who's next?
> But it's hard to see the plays as being written by a collaborative
> effort, unless they were actually written by one man. Don't they seem to
> have been written by one personality?
Oxford & Derby are not necessarily conflicting options.
Since Oxford died in 1604 before half the plays were published
it makes sense to claim that Oxford wrote the bulk of the works
and Derby perfected/editted them.
> There is no evidence that William Shakspere wrote the plays. There are
> no manuscripts, no letters, no biographies. If it is true that he never
> blotted out a line, couldn't that mean somebody gave him the finished
> manuscripts? But if there is not a scrap of evidence that William Shakspere
> wrote the plays, or that anybody else did, then if all the possibilities
> have been ruled out, then whatever remains, however implausible,
> must be the truth: there are no plays.
There are no plays like Holmes'.
Art Neuendorffer
Tom Veal
close to accounting for the data as simply, elegantly and plausibly as
the theory that the works of William Shakespeare were written by the
known William Shakespeare who had theatrical connections and was
identified by contemporaries as the author. The few additional
assumptions needed to harmonize what is known about Shakespeare of
Stratford with the plays and poems are well within the range of
believable human behavior. The assumptions required by
anti-Stratfordian scenarios start at the unlikely and work up to the
bizarre.
clan...@hotmail.com (Christian Lanciai) wrote in message news:<7e67b43b.02121...@posting.google.com>...
Art Neuendorffer
> The really basic problem is that no anti-Stratfordian hypothesis comes
> close to accounting for the data as simply, elegantly and plausibly as
> the theory that the works of William Shakespeare were written by the
> known William Shakespeare who had theatrical connections and was
> identified by contemporaries as the author.
Nothing comes close to accounting for the sudden appearance of
presents on December 25th as simply, elegantly and plausibly as
the theory that a magical elf does the job.
He is even observed annually on radar!
> The few additional
> assumptions needed to harmonize what is known about Shakespeare of
> Stratford with the plays and poems are well within the range of
> believable human behavior.
The few additional assumptions needed to harmonize what
is known about Santa are well within the range
of human gullibility.
Almost all anti-Strats began as Strats.
Almost all anti-Santa believers began as Santa believers.
> The assumptions required by anti-Stratfordian scenarios
> start at the unlikely and work up to the bizarre.
Nothing is stranger than truth.
Art Neuendorffer
KQKnave
clan...@hotmail.com (Christian Lanciai) writes:
>The basic problem is that we get no co-operation from the Poet in
>finding out the truth, since he concealed his identity himself,
>perpetuating his concealment for eternity.
BS. Here's some of the evidence for Shakespeare of Stratford
as the author:
His name on over forty title pages; his monument in Stratford,
which quite clearly states that he is a writer, and compares
his art to Virgil:
IVDICIO PYLIVM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM,
TERRA TEGIT, POPVLVS MAERET, OLYMPVS HABET.
("In judgement a Nestor, in wit a Socrates, in
art a Virgil; the earth buries him, the people
mourn him, Olympus possesses him")
STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST,
READ IF THOV GANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH HATH PLAST
WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE: WITH WHOME,
QVICK NATVRE DIDE WHOSE NAME, DOTH DECK YS TOMBE,
FAR MORE, THEN COST: SIEH ALL, YT HE HATH WRITT,
LEAVES LIVING ART, BVT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.
("SIEH" is a typo for "Sith")
Robert Greene's attack on Shakespeare in Greene's Groatsworth
of Wit (1592), where he paraphrases a play by Shakespeare while
referring to "Shake-scene", a clear pun on his name; the
Parnassus plays (1598-1601), where Shakespeare is mentioned by name
and Venus and Adonis and Romeo & Juliet are parodied, and
where Shakespeare is said to have "put them [university playwrights]
all down, aye, and Ben Jonson too"; Gabriel Harvey (nlt 1603), who said
"The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus, &
Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of
Denmarke, have it in them, to please the wiser sort," and who
called Shakespeare "one of our florishing metricians;" and
Francis Meres (1598), who said "...so the English tongue is mightily
enriched, and gorgeously invested in rare ornaments and
resplendent abiliments by sir Philip Sidney, Spencer, Daniel,
Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlow and Chapman...."
[notice that he distinguishes between Marlowe and Shakespeare
and mentions Oxenforde separately in another section as well]
and who also said that Shakespeare was one of England's
"best Lyrick Poets" and "our best for tragedie" and among the
"best Poets for Comedy" and "the most passionate among us
to bewaile and bemoane the perplexities of Love;" and
Francis Beaumont (1608), who said "...here I would let slippe/
(If I had any in mee) schollershippe,/ And from all Learning keepe
these lines as cleere/ as Shakespeare's best are, which our
heires shall heare/ Preachers apte to their auditors to showe/
how farre sometimes a mortall man may goe/ by the dimme
light of Nature...;"
In 1604 appeared Antony Scolloker's "Diaphantus; or, the
Passions of Love." In his preface, telling us what an epistle
to the reader should be, Scolloker writes: "It should be like
the Never-too-well read Arcadia, where the Prose and verce
(Matters and Words) are like his Mistresses eyes, one still
excelling another and without Co-rivall: or to come home to
the vulgars Element, like Friendly Shakespeare's Tragedies,
where the Commedian rides, when the Tragedian stands on
tip-toe: Faith it should please all, like Prince Hamlet.
It's difficult to see how Scolloker could refer to Shakespeare as
"friendly" unless he knew him personally.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/price.html:
"a letter survives in the hand of Leonard Digges, who in 1613
compared the sonnets of Lope de Vega to those of "our Will
Shakespeare" - notice the use of the familiar "Will" by a close
neighbor of Shakespeare's in both Aldermarston and in London....
Leonard Digges was the step-son (from 1603) of Thomas Russell,
a man who was not only a neighbor of Shakespeare's both in London
and in Stratford, but whom Shakespeare remembered in his will,
and indeed appointed one of the two overseers of his will."
In addition:
That Jonson was acquainted with Shakespeare
personally is indisputable: Shakespeare's name
appears on the list of players who acted in
"Every Man in His Humour", and Jonson's
extended comments upon Shakespeare in his
"Timber" (see below) are proof of that: he
says that Shakespeare was "(indeed) honest,
and of an open, and free nature:" and that
he "loved the man". Jonson, moreover, was
familiar with many of the nobility and gentleman
of his time due to his close associations with
the court of King James, and would certainly
have heard any rumours involving the Earl
of Oxenforde if there had been any related
to playwrighting.
Jonson's comments on his contemporaries were
typically a mix of praise and censure. Here
are some examples from "Conversations with
William Drummond":
"Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no
children: but no poet."
"That Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (if he had
performed what he promised to write, the deeds
of all the worthies) had been excellent: his
long verses pleased him not."
"He esteemeth John Donne the first poet in the
world, in some things: his verses of the lost
chain he hath by heart; and that passage of
'The Calm', that dust and feathers do not stir,
all was so quiet. Affirmeth Donne to have written
all his best pieces ere he was twenty-five
years old."
And many more. His comment on Shakespeare in
these conversations is quite typical:
"Shakespeare, in a play, brought in a number of men
saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where there
is no sea near by some 100 miles."
In "Timber: or Discoveries", Jonson again mixes
criticism with praise:
"De Shakespeare Nostrat
I remember, the players have often
mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that
in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never
blotted out line. My answer hath been, would
he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought
a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity
this, but for their ignorance, who choose that
circumstance to commend their friend by,
wherein he most faulted. And to justify mine
own candour (for I loved the man, and do honour
his memory - on this side idolatry - as
much as any). He was (indeed) honest, and of
an open, and free nature: had an excellent
fancy; brave notions, and gentle expressions:
wherein he flowed with that facility, that
sometime it was necessary he should be
stopped: sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said
of Haterius. His wit was in his own power;
would the rule of it had been so too. Many
times he fell into those things, could not escape
laughter: as when he said in the person of
Caesar, one speaking to him; "Caesar, thou
dost me wrong'. He replied: 'Caesar did never
wrong, but with just cause': and such like;
which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his
vices, with his virtues. There was ever more in
him to be praised, than to be pardoned."
Jonson clearly doesn't feel that the portrait
in the Folio does Shakespeare any justice
as far as portraying his wit, as his little poem
shows:
"This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the Graver had a strife
with Nature, to out-doo the life :
O, could he but have drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face ; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke."
And finally, Jonson's masterful eulogy
for Shakespeare, where he seems to be
quite convinced that the man who acted in
his plays was a better playwright than
Marlowe, and worthy of Euripides and
Sophocles. Notice that he calls Shakespeare
the "sweet swan of Avon", not the "tempestuous
tin-miner of tuxbury" or some such:
"TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED THE AUTHOR,
MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AND WHAT HE
HATH LEFT US.
To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much;
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin, where it seem'd to raise.
These are, as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed,
Above th' ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportion'd Muses,
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!
Nature herself was proud of his designs
And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature's family.
Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame,
Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet's made, as well as born;
And such wert thou. Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned, and true-filed lines;
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanc'd, and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage;
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light."
On the other hand, here is how the Earl of Oxenforde
sounded (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson):
Oxford to Burghley; [30 October 1584] (W247-8;F320-1,332).
(In hand of amanuensis)
It is not vnknowne to your Lordship that I haue entred into a
greate nomber of bondes to suche, as haue purchasyd landes
of me, to discharge them of all Incombraunces: And bycause
I stande indebtid vnto her Maiestie (as your Lordship knowythe)
many of ye said purchasers do greatly feare somme troble likely
to fall vppon them, by reason of her Maiestyes said debt, &
espesially if the Bondes of ye Lord Darcy and Sir William Walgraue
should be extendyd for the same, who haue two seuerall statutes
of great sommes for their discharge Wheruppon [diu] many of ye
said purchasers haue ben suters vnto me to procuer the discharginge
of her Maiestyes said Debt, and do seme very willinge to beare the
burden therof, yf by my meanes the same might be stalled paiable
at some convenyent dayes / I haue therfore thought good to
acquaynte your Lordship with this their suyte, requierynge moste
earnestly your Lordships furtheraunce in this behalfe, wherby I
shalbe vnburdened of a greate care, which I haue for the savynge
of my honor, And shall by this meanes also vnburden my wyves
Ioincture of yat charge which might happen herafter to be ymposyd
vppon ye same, yf god should call your Lordship and me away before her. /
(Oxford's hand takes over)
Yowre Lordships
(signed) Edward Oxenford (sec. f; 4+7)
Doesn't sound much like Shakespeare, does he? In fact he seems
to be the very business man that Oxfordians like to claim William
Shakespeare must have been, which I find to be...well, ironic. Are
there any letters in Shakespeare's hand showing him to be
as interested in money and tin mining as Oxenforde's letters show?
No. In fact, the only document in Shakespeare's hand is part of
a play, ("Sir Thomas More") in his style, typical of his concerns
and in every way consistent with what we know about William
Shakespeare's writing.
As for Shakespeare not having the proper background to be
the author, he was the son of a wealthy middle class homeowner,
like most great writers. For example, here are most of the records
related to John Shakespeare, William's father. Even at the end of
his life, his estate was valued at 500 pounds, an enormous sum
at a time when 40 pounds could purchase a house with land.
1556 - purchased an estate with garden and croft in
Greenhill street
1556 - purchased a house with garden in Henley street.
1556 - chosen as one of two "ale-tasters" (inspector of
bread and beer makers)
1558 - sworn in as constable
1559 - witnessing the minutes of the Leet as an afeeror,
and appointed one of the town's 14 burgesses.
~1560-62 Inherited his father's property and either gave
or sold it to his brother-in-law.
1565 - Elected alderman
1568 - Elected bailiff*
1571 - Elected chief alderman and deputy to the new bailiff
1572 - Along with the bailiff, rode to London together on
borough business, with permission from the aldermen
and burgesses to proceed 'according to their discretions'.
1572 - awarded 50 pounds by a court for money owed to him
1575 - Bought two houses with garden and orchard for 40 pounds
1578 - raised 40 pounds by mortgaging a house and 56 acres in
Wilmcote that he owned. (He was unable to pay the
mortgage on time and lost the land).
~1580 - Paid the bail of Michael Price (10 pounds)
~1580 - Forfeited a bond of 10 pounds on behalf of a debt
incurred by his brother Henry. Escaped jail because
a friend (Alderman Hill) paid his bail.
1582 - Petitioned for sureties of the peace against 4 men,
one of whom was the bailiff, for 'fear of death
and mutilation of his limbs'. This may or may not
have had something to do with his financial troubles.
Before 1590 - sold the house on Greenhill street.
1592 - Twice called on to assist in making inventories of
deceased neighbors.
1596 - The grant of his coat-of-arms notes that he has
"land and tenements of good wealth and substance"
worth 500 pounds.
1597 - sold small plot of land (one-half yard by 28 yards)
at the Henley street property for 50 shillings
(equal to about 100 days pay for an artisan).
At about the same time he also sold a 17 by 17
foot piece of land on Henley street.
1601 - Richard Quiney rode to London to plead the borough's
cause, listing on a document the names of John
Shakespeare and other town worthies to the effect
that he (Quiney) was able to speak on behalf of
the borough.
See my demolition of Monsarrat's RES paper!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/monsarr1.html
The Droeshout portrait is not unusual at all!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/shakenbake.html
Agent Jim
Art Neuendorffer
"[T.V. is] a vast wasteland." - Newton Minow
-------------------------------------------------------
> Tom Veal wrote:
>
>> The really basic problem is that no anti-Stratfordian hypothesis comes
>> close to accounting for the data as simply, elegantly and plausibly as
>> the theory that the works of William Shakespeare were written by the
>> known William Shakespeare who had theatrical connections and was
>> identified by contemporaries as the author.
>
> Nothing comes close to accounting for the sudden appearance of
> presents on December 25th as simply, elegantly and plausibly as
> the theory that a magical elf does the job.
>
> He is even observed annually on radar!
<<Queensman, John Weever (1576-1632), was in an extraordinarily
interesting & eccentric character - connoisseur of graveyards,
tobacco-enthusiast, sycophant, satirist, dwarf, penner of dirty
ditties, egotist, pugnacious Lancashire man and proud of it.>>
> Tom Veal wrote:
>
>> The few additional assumptions
>> needed to harmonize what is known about Shakespeare of
>> Stratford with the plays and poems are well within
>> the range of believable human behavior.
Art Neuendorffer wrote:
> The few additional assumptions needed to harmonize what
> is known about Santa are well within the range
> of human gullibility.
> Almost all anti-Strats began as Strats.
> Almost all anti-Santa believers began as Santa believers.
> Tom Veal wrote:
>
>> The assumptions required by anti-Stratfordian scenarios
>> start at the unlikely and work up to the bizarre.
Art Neuendorffer wrote:
> Nothing is stranger than truth.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Le Strange Family
http://www.ls.u-net.com/le_Strange/home_main.htm
Epitaph, inscribed upon the tomb of Sir Thomas Stanley, in
Tongue church by Dugdale (at the end of his Visitation of Salop):
"the following verses were made by William Shakespeaere,
the late famous tragedian."
East end of tomb:
Ask who lyes heare but do not weep,
he is not dead he doth but sleep,
this stoney register is for his BONES,
His fame is more perpetual than these STONES,
and his own goodness with himself being gone,
shall lyve when earthlie monument is none.
West end of tomb:
Not monumental stone presERVE our Fame,
nor sky aspiring *pyramids* our name,
the memory of Him for whom this stands,
shall outlive marble and defacers Hands,
when all to tyme's consumption shall be geaven,
Standley for whom this stands shall stand in Heaven".
-------------------------------------------------------------
Describing the death of John Talbot,
the 10th Lord Strange of Blackmere.
But where's the great Alcides of the field, Valiant Lord Talbot, Earl
of Shrewsbury, Created, for his rare success in arms, Great Earl of
Washford, Waterford and Valence; Lord Talbot of Goodrig and Urchinfield,
Lord Strange of Blackmere, Lord Verdun of Alton, Lord Cromwell of
Wingfield, Lord Furnival of Sheffield, The thrice-victorious
Lord of Falconbridge; Knight of the noble order of Saint George, Worthy
Saint Michael and the Golden Fleece; Great marshal to Henry the Sixth,
Of all his wars within the realm of France?
[Lucy, Act IV, Scene VII, Henry V
Founder's Surname.
The present founder of 'le Strange' is said to be Roland
who was 'the foreigner' or (le stranger). He was a Breton who
had emigrated from France and inherited his wife's fortune.
The surname is also pronounced in Latin as Extraneus.
Roland's forename is reminiscent of the 8th century French national
hero of Charlemagne's army featured in the popular tale of Chanson de
Roland (c.1098-1100). In Breton & Welsh (not forgetting the earlier
Welsh-French historical connections with France) it is translated
as Rhiwallonus, in Latin it is Ruallus, and other variants of this
found in ancient documents are Riuallonus, Rhiwallon, Ruat, Rualdus,
Rodlando.
Since early times, the head of the elder branch became the 'Lord High
Admiral of the Wash'. The title, which is a complimentary one today, was
used by Roman military officials patrolling the coastline. In order to
measure his boundary, a new heir would first have to prove his
competence in spear throwing. The rule was to throw it from horseback
at low tide, as far into the Wash as his strength would allow.
This longstanding family title would inevitably define the le Strange
landholdings, though it is unknown how long it has been in existence
with the Norfolk branch. The founder's estate was inherited through
marriage in 1112 and his manor house infeudated to his descendants by
the Arundel earls, after their westward migration. For about 200 hundred
years the family fought in the Anglo-Welsh wars from their bases in
Shropshire until John le Strange, 2nd Lord of Knockin, vested his
brother, Hamon le Strange in Hunstanton, in 1310. Until then there had
been only one cadet branch, in Blackmere. The investment gave rise to
the two cadency emblems, a rose & handshake, which Hamon was subject
to pay annually.>>
----------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.quns.cam.ac.uk/Queens/Record/1997/History/Shakes.html
<<Queensman, John Weever (1576-1632), was in an extraordinarily
interesting and eccentric character - connoisseur of graveyards,
tobacco-enthusiast, sycophant, satirist, dwarf, penner of dirty ditties,
egotist, pugnacious Lancashire man and proud of it. Overleaf to
Weever's 1599 account of an early 1595 Queens' production of _Laelia_:
Ad Gulielum Shakespear
Honie-TONG'd Shakespeare when I saw thaie issue
I swore Apollo got them and none other,
Their rosie-tainted features cloth'd in tissue,
Some heaven born goddesse said to be their mother:
Rose checkt Adonis with his amber tresses,
Faire fire-hot Venus charming him to love her,
Chaste Lucretia virgine-like her dresses,
Prowd lust-stung Tarquine seeking still to prove her:
Romea [sic] Richard, more whose names I know not,
Their sugred tongues, and power attractive beuty
Say they are Saints althogh that Sts they shew not
For thousands vowes [sic] to them subiective dutie:
They burn in love thy children Shakespear het them,
Go, wo [?with] thy Muse more Nymphish brood beget them.
This is the earliest poem ever addressed to Shakespeare.
(Interestingly, one of the others, equally admiring,
is by Weever's own tutor, William Covell, another Lancastrian).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.clark.net/tross/ws/rep.html
<<William Covell's _Polimanteia_ lists Sidney, Spenser, Alabaster,
Daniel, and Shakespeare -- but not Oxford?>>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Oxford thou maist extoll thy courte-deare-verse"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://home.earthlink.net/~mark_alex/1596.htm
<<1595 Printed marginal note in an epistle by William Covell appended to
_Polimanteia, or the meanes lawfull and unlawfull to judge of the fall
of a Commonwealth, against the frivolous and foolish conjectures of
this age_: The author is eulogizing the poets of England as superior
to those of foreign nations. The marginal notes appear
to be illustrative examples in support of the main text:
All praise Let divine Bartasse, eternally
worthy. praiseworthie for his weeks worke,
Lucrecia say the best thinges were made first
Sweet Shak- : Let other countries (sweet
speare. Cambridge) enuie, (yet admire) my
Eloquent Virgil, thy petrarch, diuine Spenser.
Gaveston. And Vnlesse I erre, (a thing easie in
Wanton such simplicitie) deluded by dearlie
Adonis. beloued Delia, and fortunatelie
Watsons fortunate Cleopatra ; Oxford thou
heyre. maist extoll thy courte-deare-verse
So well gra- happie Daniell, whose sweete
nie deser- refined muse, in contracted shape,
veth immor- were sufficient amongst men, to
tall praise gaine pardon of the sinne to
from the hand Rosemond, pittie to distressed
of that di- Cleopatra, and euerliuing praise to
uine Lady her louing Delia.
who like Co-
rinna conten-
ding with
Pindarus
was oft vi-
ctorious.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
NIL VERO-VERIU(S) S = 19th letter (Islamic)
OUR EVER-LIVIN(G) G = 33th letter (Masonic)
UNO VERE-VIR(G)IL G = 33th letter (Masonic)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/monrefs.html
<<In 1631, a year before his death, John Weever published the massive
Ancient Funerall Monuments, which recorded many inscriptions from
monuments around England, particularly in Canterbury, Rochester, London,
and Norwich. Shakespeare's monument does not appear in the published
book, but two of Weever's notebooks, containing his drafts for most of
the book as well as many unpublished notes, survive as Society of
Antiquaries MSS. 127 and 128. In one of these notebooks, under the
heading "Stratford upon Avon," Weever recorded the poems from
Shakespeare's monument and his gravestone, as follows:
Iudcio Pilum, Genio Socratem, Arte Maronem
Terra tegit, populus maeret, Olympus habet.
Stay Passenger, why goest thou by so fast
Read if your canst whome envious death hath plac'd
Within this monument Shakespeare with whome
Quick Nature dy'd whose name doth deck his Tombe
far more then cost, sith all yt hee hath writt
Leaves living Art but page to serve his witt.
ob Ano doi 1616 AEtat. 53. 24 die April
In the margin opposite the heading "Stratford upon Avon", Weever wrote
"Willm Shakespeare the famous poet", and opposite the last two lines of
the epitaph he wrote "vpo[n] the grave stone". Although Weever, like
Dugdale, was not 100% accurate in the details of his transcription, it
is obvious that the inscriptions on both the monument and the gravestone
were substantially the same in 1631 as they are today. Furthermore,
Weever apparently knew Shakespeare personally -- his 1598 Epigrammes
includes the first full poem in honor of Shakespeare ever printed, a
sonnet entitled "Ad Gulielmum Shakespear" in which he praises Venus
and Adonis, Lucrece, and Romeo and Juliet.>>
---------------------------------------------------------------
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Hesiod/homrhes.html
<<Xanthus and Gorgus, son of Midas the king, invited Homer to compose a
epitaph for the tomb of their father on which was a bronze figure of a
maiden bewailing the death of Midas. He wrote the following lines: --
`I am a maiden of bronze and sit upon the tomb of Midas. While
water flows, and tall trees put forth leaves, and rivers swell,
and the sea breaks on the shore; while the sun rises and shines
and the bright moon also, ever remaining on this mournful tomb
I TELL THE PASSER-BY that Midas here lies buried.'>>
-----------------------------------------------------------
Stay Traveller, for underneath this Pew
Lies fast asleep that merry Man Andrew;
When the last Day's great Sun shall gild the Skies,
Then he shall from his Tomb get up and rise.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Stay Passenger, why goest thou by so fast
Read if your canst whome envious death
hath plac'd Within this *monument Shakespeare*
Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast,
Read if thou canst whom envious death
hath plast within this *monument Shakspeare*
-----------------------------------------------------------
<<For these verses they gave him a silver bowl which
he dedicated to Apollo at Delphi with this inscription:
`Lord Phoebus, I, Homer, have given you a noble gift
for the wisdom I have of you: do you ever grant me renown.'>>
-----------------------------------------------------------
Sonnet 131
OR I shall live your epitaph to make
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live,-such virtue hath my pen,-
Where breath most breathes,-even in the mouths of men.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Book I : CHAP. II. _Joseph Andrews_ by Henry Fielding
MR. Joseph Andrews, the Hero of our ensuing History, was esteemed
to be the only Son of Gaffar and Gammer Andrews, and Brother to the
illustrious Pamela, whose Virtue is at present so famous. As to his
Ancestors, we have searched with great Diligence, but little Success:
being unable to trace them farther than his Great Grandfather, who, as
an elderly Person in the Parish remembers to have heard his Father say,
was an excellent Cudgel-player. Whether he had any Ancestors before
this, we must leave to the Opinion of our curious Reader, finding
nothing of sufficient Certainty to relie on. However, we cannot omit
inserting an Epitaph which an ingenious Friend of ours hath
communicated.
Stay Traveller, for underneath this Pew
Lies fast asleep that merry Man Andrew;
When the last Day's great Sun shall gild the Skies,
Then he shall from his Tomb get up and rise.
Be merry while thou can'st:
for surely thou Shall shortly be as sad as he is now.
---------------------------------------------------------------
//www.mistral.co.uk/hammerwood/elgin.htm
<<The story of Babel: the consequence of man getting
too close to heaven was disrupted communications- Hermes,
responsible for communications identified by the frieze
to be in the "SATAN" party.
How do colony leaders teach obedience?
Every month the new beings are required to bring 10% of
the food which they have grown to share with their creators.>>>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
10% Interest
-------------------------------------------------------------------
John COMBE's "inscription" was going to be:
"Ten in the hundred lies hERE engraVED;
'Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved.
If any man asks, "Who lies in this Tombe?"
Oh! ho! quoth the DEVil 'Tis my John-a COMBE."
"Ten in a Hundred the DEVil alloWS
But COMBE will have twelve, he SWears&voWS:
If anyone asks who lies in this Tombe:
hOh! quoth the DEVil 'Tis my John-a COMBE."
----------------------------------------------------
<<[O]r spunne out Riddles, or weav'd fifty Tomes
[O]f Logographes, or curious Palindromes;
[O]r pump'd for those hard trifles, Anagrams,
[O]r Ecrosticks, or your finer flames
[O]f Egges, and Halbards, Cradles, and a Herse,
[A] paire of Sizers, and a COMBE in VER(s)E;
[A]crosticks, and Tellesticks, or jumpe names,>>
-- Ben Jonson
-------------------------------------------------------------------
All's Well That Ends Well Act 2, Scene 2
COUNTESS It must be an answer of most monstrous size
that must fit all demands.
<<In "King Lear" Act 2, Sc. 4: "To bandy hasty words, to scant my
sizes". The expression "scanting of sizes" was used exclusively
at Cambridge to denote the punishment of a SIZAR (a poor student
who received sizes or allowances) by cutting his rations or sizes.
The Oxford Dictionary states the use of this word was peculiar to
Cambridge.>> - ED. JOHNSON http://home.att.net/~tleary/johnson.htm
-------------------------------------------------------------
Oh! ho! quoth the DEVil 'Tis my John-a COMBE."
-------------------------------------------------------------
Like any good Templar Humanist who earned money by usury
John COMBE made up for his ways by willing £1,000 to the poor.
[A paire of Sizars: Oxford & Shakspere: £1,000/yr.]
John COMBE's Epitaph final version:
"How ere he lived judge not
John COMBE WILL nEVER be forgott
While poor, hath Memmorye, for he did gather
To make the poor the Issue; he their father
As record of his tilthe or seede
Did crown him in his latter deede."
finis W: Shak.
-------------------------------------------------------------
From _Finnegans Wake_:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
[3:14 529.19] was this hackney man in the COOMBE
[1:3 73.29] Yed he med leave to many a door beside of Oxmanswold for
so witness his chambered cairns a cloudletlitter silent that are at
browse up hill and down COOMBE
Washington Monument:
[3:12 423.25] The alum that winters on his top is the stale
of the staun that will soar when he stambles till
that hag of the COOMBE rapes the pad off his lock.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Did James Joyce think that the
Earl of Oxford was buriedin COMBE's tomb at SCHUTE:
(Stratford Church of the Holy & Undivided Trinity, England)
(P)oldy, (S)tephen, (M)olly
(P)reparatory to, (S)tately Plump, (M)r. Leopold Bloom
----------------------------------------------------------------
judicium (P)ylium, genio (S)ocratem, arte (M)aronem
Nestor Socrates VIRGIL
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice
the pftjSCHUTE of Finnegan,"
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/shaxmon.html
Shakespeare's Stratford Monument
at "SCHUTE" [i.e.,
(S)tratford
(C)hurch of the
(H)oly &
(U)ndivided
(T)rinity,
(E)ngland]
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BLOOM O, I know. Bulldog on the premises. But he's a Trinity student.
Patrons of your establishment. Gentlemen that pay the rent. ( He makes
a masonic sign .) Know what I mean? Nephew of the vice-chancellor.
You don't want a scandal.
BELLA ( Angrily .) Trinity! Coming down here ragging after the boat
races and paying nothing. Are you my commander here? Where is he? I'll
charge him. Disgrace him,
STEPHEN How do I stand you? The hat trick! Where's the third person of
the Blessed Trinity? Soggarth Aroon? The reverend Carrion Crow.
STEPHEN In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago,
Richard Crookback, Edmund in King Lear , two bear the wicked uncles'
names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his
brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark.
BEST I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my name.
( Laughter .)
QUAKERLYSTER ( A tempo .) But he that filches from me my good name...
STEPHEN ( Stringendo .) He has hidden his own name, a fair name,
William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old
Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in
the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John O'Gaunt his name
is dear to him, as dear as the coat of arms he toadied for, on a bend
sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer
than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What's in a name?
That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that
we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake rose at his birth.
It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night,
and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent
constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars.
His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear,
as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight,
returning from Shottery and from her arms.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.ccel.org/c/calvin/comment2/ps1-18.htm
THE BOOK OF PSALMS BY JOHN CALVIN
THE EPISTLE DEDICATORY
[PREFIXED TO THE ORIGINAL TRANSLAT10N, 1571.]
To The Right Honorably And Verie Good Lord,
EDWARD DE VERE, ERLE OF OXINFORD,
Lord Great Chamberlain Of England, Vicount Bulbecke, Etc.
ARTHUR GOLDING
To the furtherance wherof, God hath by householde alyance lincked vnto
your Lordship a long experienced *NESTOR* whose counsaile and footsteps
if you folowe, no doubte but you shalbee bothe happie in your selfe,
and singularly profitable to your common welth; and moreouer, God
shall blisse you with plentiful and godly issue by your vertuous and
deerbeloued Spouse, to continew the honor and renoavne of your noble
house after the happy knitting vp of bothe your yeeres,which I pray God
may bee many in vnseperable loue, like the loue of Ceix and Alcyonee,
to the glory of God, and the contentation of bothe your desires.
Written at London, the 20:of October 1571.
Your good Lordship's moste humlble to commaund, Arthur Golding.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/monrefs.html
<<Next to the infamous engraving in Dugdale's Antiquities of
Warwickshire, Dugdale transcribed both the Latin and English verses from
Shakespeare's tomb, along with the verse from the gravestone. Except for
minor spelling differences (entirely typical of Dugdale), these verses
are the same as those seen today. The Latin reads:
Ivdicio Pylivm, genio Socratem, arte Maronem,
Terra tegit, popvlvs maeret, Olympvs habet
which may be translated thus:
In judgment a Nestor, in wit a Socrates, in art a Virgil;
the earth buries [him], the people mourn [him], Olympus possesses [him]
On the page facing the engraving of the monument,
Dugdale writes the following in his account of Stratford:
One thing more, in reference to this antient town is observable,
that it gave birth and sepulture to our late famous Poet Will.
Shakespeare, whose Monument I have inserted in my discourse
of the Church. [Shakspere Allusion-Book, II, 62]
-------------------------------------------------------------------
juDicium (P)YLium, gENio (S)ocraTEm, arte (M)ARONem
(P)oLDY, (S)TEphEN, (M)ARiON
(P)reparatory to, (S)tately Plump, (M)r. Leopold Bloom
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Y V S P M J G D A
Z W T Q N K H E B
X U R O L I F C
[S]enatvs [S]tately
[P]opvlvs [P]lvmp
[Q]ue [B]uck
[R]omanvs [M]vlligan
------------------------------------------------------------------
<<Go in for scribenery with the satiety of arthurs in S.P.Q.R.ish
and inform to the old sniggering publicking press and its nation
of sheepcopers about the whole plighty troth between them, ma-
lady of milady made melodi of malodi, she, the lalage of lyon-
esses, and him, her knave arrant.>> -- FW 229
---------------------------------------------------------------
The *Swan of Mantua* : VIRGIL.
Virgil's tomb, once treated like a shrine, has disappeared.
His epitaph was supposedly:
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope.
Mantua GAVE me BIRTH, the Calabrians took me, now Naples holds me;
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
IVDICIO [P]YLIVM, GENIO [S]OCRATEM, ARTE [M]ARONEM,
TERRA TEGIT, POPVLVS MAERET, OLYMPVS HABET.
("In judgement a *Nestor*, in wit a *Socrates*, in art a *Virgil*
the earth buries him, the people mourn him, Olympus possesses him")
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
. . .and my singing the absentminded beggar and wearing a brooch for
lord Roberts when I had the map of it all and POLDY not Irish enough was
it him managed it this time I wouldnt put it past him like he got me on
to sing in the Stabat Mater by going around saying he was putting Lead
Kindly Light to music I put him up to that till the jesuits found out
he was a FREEMASON thumping the piano lead . . .
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Art Neuendorffer
>> Since Oxford died in 1604 before half the plays were published
>> it makes sense to claim that Oxford wrote the bulk of the works
>> and Derby perfected/editted [sic] them.
David L. Webb wrote:
> Have you editted your post, Art?
>
> No, it doesn't make sense, because there is no credible evidence
> that Oxford had anything to [sic] with the works of Shakespeare.
Have you editted your post, Dave?
There is no credible evidence that the illiterate Stratford boob
(assuming he even existed at all) had anything to DO
with the works of Shakespeare.
David L. Webb wrote:
> MoreoVER,
> the works were attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford,
> who lived long enough to have completed the entire canon;
How *unlike* Virgil.
KQKnave wrote:
> His monument in Stratford, which quite clearly states
> that he is a writer, and compares his art to Virgil:
----------------------------------------------------------------
<<Vergil was paid hansomely by Augustus to write the "Aeneid"
to immortalize Rome but Vergil died before he could finish.
Vergil's friends & *HEIRS* :Lucius VARIUS & Plotius TUCCA,
revised the "Aeneid" after his death by order of Augustus:
He had arranged with VARIUS, before leaving Italy, that if anything
befell him a his friend should burn the "Aeneid "; but VARIUS
had emphatically declared that he would do no such thing.>>
-----------------------------------------------------------------
NIL.VERO-VERIUS. POET.
OUR.EVER-LIVING. POET.
UNO.VERE-VIRGIL. POET.
---------------------------------------------------------------
The *Swan of Mantua* : VIRGIL.
Virgil's tomb, once treated like a shrine, has disappeared.
His epitaph was supposedly:
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope.
Mantua GAVE me BIRTH, the Calabrians took me, now Naples holds me;
-------------------------------------------------------------------
IVDICIO PYLIVM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM,
TERRA TEGIT, POPVLVS MAERET, OLYMPVS HABET.
("In judgement a *Nestor*, in wit a *Socrates*, in art a *Virgil*
the earth buries him, the people mourn him, Olympus possesses him")
---------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.ccel.org/c/calvin/comment2/ps1-18.htm
To The Right Honorably And Verie Good Lord,
EDWARD DE VERE, ERLE OF OXINFORD,
Lord Great Chamberlain Of England, Vicount Bulbecke, Etc.
ARTHUR GOLDING
To the furtherance wherof, God hath by householde alyance
lincked vnto your Lordship a long experienced *NESTOR*
---------------------------------------------------------------
Read if thou canst whom envious death
hath *plast* within this *monument Shakspeare*
--------------------------------------------------------------
SNOUT-THOMA(s): You can never bring in a *wall*
[SOUTHAM(p)TON] What say you, BOTtom?
BOTtom: Some man or other must present *Wall* : and let him
have some *PLASTer* , or some loam, or some rough-cast
about him, to signify *wall*; and let him hold his
fingers thus, and through that cranny shall
Pyramus and Thisby whisper.
------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
John W. Kennedy
> There is no evidence that William Shakspere wrote the plays.
Yes there is.
> There are
> no manuscripts, no letters, no biographies.
Which is true of a good 95% of professional writers throughout history,
up to the mid 17th century or so.
> If it is true that he never
> blotted out a line, couldn't that mean somebody gave him the finished
> manuscripts?
In other words, it's OK to accept Hemmings and Condell's word for one
detail out of context, and twist the meaning, but it's not OK to believe
them when they say that Shakespeare wrote the plays.
> But if there is not a scrap of evidence that William Shakspere
> wrote the plays,
But there is.
> or that anybody else did,
And there is not.
> then if all the possibilities
> have been ruled out, then whatever remains, however implausible, must be the
> truth: there are no plays.
Very brief, and to exceeding good sense- less.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly;
the rich have always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Man Who Was Thursday"
John Bede
> about keeping the Shakespeare activities separated from his own as
> statesman, scientist and world-acclaimed philosopher, so careful, that
> it's almost impossible to combine them with Bacon. If Bacon and
> Shakespeare was one, Bacon for some abstruse and incomprehensible
> reason made sure that he was never to be identified as Shakespeare.
> That's also part of the anti-stratfordian problem: the probable
> soubriquet of Shakespeare was so firmly established so as to never be
> revocable, while the Oxford, Derby, Bacon and Marlowe characters
> concealed as Shakespeare never can be more than theories, speculations
> and guesses, until suddenly one day universally acceptable evidence is
> found explaining all, which so far hasn't happened since research
> began more than 300 years ago.
>
Just a short note passing by commenting on this Bacon query, to add
yet another foggy theory to your forest of inexplicable difficulties
with the Shakespeare complexity: Bacon might have had a reason for
keeping his Shakespeare activities separate from his official career.
From the works of Shakespeare we understand he must have been
something of a profound philosopher, since there is a philosophical
undercurrent permeating all his plays and poems. As a philosopher and
playwright he is definitely an idealist, idealizing man in all his
different aspects in sustained continuity from Hieronimo to Cardinal
Wolsey and beyond. But Lord Bacon was a practical politician sticking
firmly to reality. As such he got mixed up with all kinds of rotten
business, especially during the miserable reign of James I. Already
when the Essex crisis began he must have felt an urge to keep some
integrity of his free from the entanglements of rotten goings-on at
court and in politics. At that time the first plays are published
under the name of Shakespeare.
My theory is that Bacon, who was deeply involved in theatre activities
from the start, constructed an ideal extra existence for himself
creating a better dramatic world for the stage in which he channelled
his experience of the world. He certainly got bruised by his dealings
with debatable men like Essex and James, and it's a deeply hurt and
bitter man who writes plays like Lear, Timon and Coriolanus. Creating
this philosophical world for the stage was his way of keeping his nose
clean after all, or at least his soul, for posterity.
I don't know if I am clear enough, and I am aware my theory might seem
somewhat muddled, but I will be glad to develop it further as time
comes by.
It's just a theory - like all Shakespeare theories.
There is nothing wrong in speculating.
John Bede
Art Neuendorffer
> http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/price.html:
> "a letter survives in the hand of Leonard Digges, who in 1613
> compared the sonnets of Lope de Vega to those of "our Will
> Shakespeare" - notice the use of the familiar "Will" by a close
> neighbor of Shakespeare's in both Aldermarston and in London....
---------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.spanish-books.net/literature/i_lopedevega.htm
Lope *always based his poetry on his personal love-life* .
His first works are ballads dedicated to Elena Osorio, called Filis.
This first poetic cycle featured the Moorish ballads,in which the lady
calls her lover Zaide. A little later came the poems dedicated to his
legitimate wife, Isabel de Urbino, under the name of Belisa. Pastoral
ballads were abundant in these poems. This first stage saw the
appearance of the sonnet, a type of verse which Lope developed
from the beginning through to the end of his poetry writing.>>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lopevega.htm
<<In 1598 Lope married Doña Juana de Guardo, daughter of a wealthy
butcher. His son Carlos Félix died in 1612 which also depressed him deeply.
Lope bought a house in the Calle de Francos in 1610. Three years later
Doña Juana died, and Lope had an affair with Jerónima de Burgos, and
then with Doña Marta de Nevares Santoyo - this time his indiscretions
with her were criticized even by Cervantes. In 1614 Lope entered a
religious order and was appointed an officer of the Inquisition. Lope's
work as a playwright was not approved by the church, but he wrote many
of his comedias during his priesthood. However, the Pope Urban VIII
idolized him and made him Knight of Malta and doctor of theology in
1627. Lope's daughter Amarilis, who was stricken with blindness and
insanity, died in 1632. His son Lope Félix drowned off the coast of
Venezuela, and another daughter, Antonia, was abducted by a courtier.
Lope turned more and more to religious contemplation and exercises,
scourging himself so furiously that he bloodied the walls of his room.
He died in Madrid on August 26, 1635 more or less poor. Most of his
large incomes was devoted to charity and church. Lope's state funeral
lasted for nine days.>>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lopevega.htm
<<Some of his essential ideas were elaborated in EL ARTE NUEVO DE HACER
COMEDIAS (1609), a poetical essay, in which the principal characters for
comedia nueva were defined as violation of the Aristotelian unities
(unity of action, time, and place), division of the play in three acts,
and the use of a variety of metrical forms in each play. "Tragedy mixed
with comedy -Terence with Seneca - will cause much delight," Lope once
stated. "Nature gives us the example, being through such variety
beautiful.">>
http://www.theatrehistory.com/spanish/bates001.html
<<No poet ever enjoyed in his lifetime so much of glory and adulation.
When and wherever he showed himself, a crowd surrounded him and saluted
him as "the prodigy of nature." Children followed him with cries of
pleasure, and every eye was fixed upon him. He died on the 26th of
August, 1635, having attained the age of seventy-three. His obsequies
were celebrated with royal pomp. Three bishops in their pontifical
habits officiated for three days at the funeral of the "Spanish
phoenix," as he is called in the title page of his comedies, his
writings being alone sufficient to furnish forth a library of no
insignificant proportions. He wrote negligently and he matured nothing;
his great and incontestable merit was that he gave the Spanish stage a
range and scope of which it had not before been thought capable, and
taught his contemporaries how to find dramatic situations and develop a
plot.>>
----------------------------------------------------------------
Feastdays for St. Adrian: SEPTEMBER 8 & AUGUST 26.
----------------------------------------------------------------
John Shakspere was buried on SEPTEMBER 8, 1601
the feastday of the Birth of Mary
(His wife Mary died exactly seven years later)
& of St. ADRIAN - patron saint of BUTCHERS
Mary Arden's sister, Margaret Webbe, was buried on AUGUST 26, 1614
[John (7th) Earl of Oxford at] Battle of Crécy on AUGUST 26, 1346.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.ntin.net/McDaniel/1125.htm
November 25, 1562, Spanish playwright Lope de Vega, a contemporary of
Cervantes, was born. He was prolific, writing more than two thousand
plays. The most famous is Fuenteovejuna (The Sheep Well).
"Harmony is pure love, for love is complete agreement."
(from Fuenteovejuna, c. 1613)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.catholic.org/saints/saints/catherinealexandria.html
St. Catherine of Alexandria
<<St. Catherine, Virgin & Martyr whose feast day is November 25th
is the patroness of philosophers and preachers. St.Catherine
is believed to have been born in Alexandria of a noble family.
Converted to Christianity through a vision, she denounced Maxentius for
persecuting Christians. Fifty of her converts were then burned to death
by Maxentius. Maxentius offered Catherine a royal marriage if she would
deny the Faith. Her refusal landed her in prison. While in prison, and
while Maxentius was away, Catherine converted Maxentius' wife and two
hundred of his soldiers. He had them all put to death. Catherine was
likewise condemned to death. She was put on a spiked wheel, and when
the wheel broke, she was beheaded. She is venerated as the patroness of
philosophers and preachers. St. Catherine's was one of the voices heard
by St. Joan of Arc. Maxentius' blind fury against St. Catherine is
symbolic of the anger of the world in the face of truth and justice.>>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Influence of the Commedia Dell'arte in the Early Drama
of Lope De Vega, 1585-1608 by Carrie A. Prettiman, Princeton
http://www.r-s-a.org/pub/rnn/10-1/m-p.html
<<In the late 1500s,
itinerant Italian theatrical troupes straggled across
the Iberian Peninsula, giving performances in the commedia dell'arte
style to appreciative Spanish audiences. The characters of Harlequin,
Pantalone, Scaramuccio, and their compatriots were aptly suited to the
Spanish boards and had a great impact on the fertile imagination of a
young writer named Lope de Vega. But oddly, few scholars today seem to
know of this significant influence upon the theatrical ideas and
execution of this prodigious and prolific playwright.
I will identify Lope's specific borrowings of characters and scenari,
especially the zanni, which became his gracioso. I will postulate
that Lope flagrantly lifted the personalities and costumes of
Harlequin, Pantalone, and other characters, even to the point of
retaining their Italian names. He clearly did not regard this wholesale
borrowing as something to be obfuscated; in his plays he often saluted
contemporary Italian actors, playwrights, and managers of the time with
full confidence that his audience would understand and appreciate his
tributes. While Lope made greater use of some commedia stock types than
others, he created a uniquely Spanish representation of all of them. I
will conclude that even as an inexperienced playwright Lope recycled
bits and pieces of Italian comedy into more than a Castilian pastiche of
an older, foreign tradition. In his mature plays, these prototypes
became the immortal capa y espada characters of the Spanish national
theater.>>
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Observations on Shelton's Don Quixote
http://www.sirbacon.org/links/langdon.html
By Dr. R. Langdon-Down
Fitzmaurice-Kelly himself draws attention to a curious fact, Don Quixote
was licensed for the press in September 1604 and was published in Madrid
early in 1605. "Oddly enough," he says, "the book is twice named at a
date earlier than that imprinted on its title page." Lope de Vega in a
letter dated August 4th, 1604 writes-- "No budding poet is as bad as
Cervantes, none so foolish as to praise Don Quixote."
It is indeed difficult to understand how it was that the book was known
in the literary world of Madrid some six months before its publication
and its author had openly praised it at the time. Some explanation is
needed, but is not given.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio (1562-1635)
byname Fénix de los Ingenios
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lopevega.htm
<<Prolific playwright, pioneer of Spanish drama, author of as many
as 1,800 comedias and several hundred shorter dramatical pieces, of
which about 500 of his productions have been printed. Lope de Vega's
achievement is considered second among Spanish writers only to that of
Cervantes. His life was as dramatic as his plays: his was a volunteer on
the Invincible Armada, his many love affairs brought him both notoriety
and problems with the law, resulting in prison terms and exile.
Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio was born in Madrid. His parents were not
wealthy and came were from the mountain region of Santander, in northern
Spain. Lope showed his talents already in his childhood. He started to
compose verses at an early age, before he could use a pen. At the age of
ten he started to translate poems from Latin and at age 12 Lope wrote
his first play.
Lope studied under the Jesuits in Madrid, and after studying at the
University of Alcalá, he joined the army in 1583. Lope returned then to
Madrid, becoming the leader of the literary circles. Around this time he
formed a liaison with Elena Osorio, the married daughter of a leading
theatre manager. She became the inspiration of Lope's early poems, the
'Filis' for whom the poet wrote a number of verses. When Elena started
to favour a younger suitor, Lope attacked her in his poems and was
expelled from Castile for two years.
In 1588 Lope married Isabela de Urbina from Madrid. Her aristocratic
family had opposed the marriage with the lowborn Lope. After a few weeks
of the marriage, Lope joined the Invincible Armada. During this period
he wrote LA HERMOSURE DE ANGÉLICA, which had as its model Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso.
Returning home penniless after the defeat of Spain, Lope settled with
Isabela in Valencia. He entered in 1590 the service of the Duke of Alba,
and remained in Toledo until 1595. Isabella died in the spring of that
year, and Lope returned to Madrid, where he was prosecuted for an
illicit relationship with Antonia Trillo. He also wrote sonnets to
Lucinda, a literary pseudonym for Micaela de Luxán, a mysterious beauty.
In 1598 Lope married Doña Juana de Guardo, daughter of a wealthy
butcher. He became the secretary to the Marqués de Malpica and Marques
de Sarría. Next years Lope divided his time between Seville, where
Micaela and their children lived, and Madrid. His fame as a dramatist
had been established by the turn of the century, and in 1598 Lope gained
fame as a ballad writer with the pastoral romance La Arcadia. In 1605 he
became friends with Duke of Sessa and his confidential secretary. In
spite of his popularity, supporters from nobility, and productivity,
Lope was troubled by financial problems. His son Carlos Félix died in
1612 which also depressed him deeply.
Lope bought a house in the Calle de Francos in 1610. Three years later
Doña Juana died, and Lope had an affair with Jerónima de Burgos, and
then with Doña Marta de Nevares Santoyo - this time his indiscretions
with her were criticized even by Cervantes. In 1614 Lope entered a
religious order and was appointed an officer of the Inquisition. Lope's
work as a playwright was not approved by the church, but he wrote many
of his comedias during his priesthood. However, the Pope Urban VIII
idolized him and made him Knight of Malta and doctor of theology in
1627. Lope's daughter Amarilis, who was stricken with blindness and
insanity, died in 1632. His son Lope Félix drowned off the coast of
Venezuela, and another daughter, Antonia, was abducted by a courtier.
Lope turned more and more to religious contemplation and exercises,
scourging himself so furiously that he bloodied the walls of his room.
He died in Madrid on August 26, 1635 more or less poor. Most of his
large incomes was devoted to charity and church. Lope's state funeral
lasted for nine days.
"Harmony is pure love, for love is complete agreement." (from
Fuenteovejuna, c. 1613)
Lope's productivity was phenomenal: he boasted that he had numerous
times composed a piece and brought it on the stage within 24 hours. His
success also shadowed Cervantes's attempts as a playwright. Lope once
wrote: "No one is so stupid as to admire Miguel de Cervantes."
Essentially he wrote two types of drama, of which the cloak-and-sword
plays depicted contemporary manners and intrigue, and historical plays
based on national legends or stories. Lope chose easily the themes for
his works according to the taste of his audience. Some of his works were
based on his own chaotic love life, among them Dorothy (1632). I could
be called a novel in dialogue. The author himself tells us that Dorotea
is written in prose, that vehicle being more sure as an imitation of
truth to life than verse when characters are speaking.
EL NIÑO INOCENTE DE LA GUARDIA was applauded because of its anti-Semitic
theme, and EL REMEDIO EN LA DESDICHA and PEDRO CERBONERO portrayed Moors
sympathetically, in accordance with popular sentiment. IN FUENTEOVEJUNA,
PERIBÁNEZ, and EL MEJOR ALCALDE, EL REY common people and the king are
portrayed against a corrupt feudal nobility. Fuenteovejuna, depicting a
peasant uprising, was again performed with great acclaim in the 1990s.
LA DRAGONTEA (1598), a historical epic, was directed against Sir Francis
Drake, the English hero who defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. Among
his heroic plays based on Spanish legends and chronicles were EL ÚLTOMO
GODO, dealing with Rodrigo, LAS ALMENAS DE TORO, about El Cid, and EL
BASTARDO MUDARRA, about the legend of the seven infantes of Lara.
Various critics have denied through decades that LA ESTRELLA DE SEVILLA
was written by Lope de Vega, but according to Ford Madox Ford, "from the
purely literary standpoint it would seem rather obvious that the pen
that wrote the picaresque scenes of the Dorotea could also have given us
the - in effect romantic - episodes of the Estrella." (from The March of
the Literature, 1938)
Lope's output included also pastoral romances, verse histories of recent
events, verse biographies of saints, prose tales, and poems. A
collection of Lope's nondramatic works in verse and prose published from
1776 to 1779 filled 21 volumes. Some of his essential ideas were
elaborated in EL ARTE NUEVO DE HACER COMEDIAS (1609), a poetical essay,
in which the principal characters for comedia nueva were defined as
violation of the Aristotelian unities (unity of action, time, and
place), division of the play in three acts, and the use of a variety of
metrical forms in each play. "Tragedy mixed with comedy -Terence with
Seneca - will cause much delight," he once stated. "Nature gives us the
example, being through such variety beautiful."
----------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.theatrehistory.com/spanish/bates001.html
<<Lopé Felix de Vega Carpio was born at Madrid on the 25th of November,
1562, fifteen years after Cervantes. His relations, who were noble,
though poor, gave him the basis of a liberal education, and in
consequence of their death before he entered the university, he was sent
there by the inquisitor-general, Don Jeronimo Manriquez, completing his
studies at Alcala. Prodigies of imagination and learning are related of
him even at this early period. The duke of Alva, soon after his
marriage, took him into his employment as secretary, but being forced
into an affair of honor, Lopé inflicted a dangerous wound on his
adversary and was compelled to seek safety in flight. He passed some
years in exile, and on his return lost his wife. The grief which he felt
upon this occasion, added to his religious and patriotic zeal, drove him
into the army, and he took service with the "Invincible Armada," which
was intended to place England under the Spanish yoke and was itself
almost annihilated. On his return to Madrid he again married, and for
some time lived happily in the bosom of his family; but the death of his
second wife determined him to renounce the world and enter into orders.
Notwithstanding this change, Lopé continued, to the end of his life, to
cultivate poetry with so wonderful a facility that a drama of more than
two thousand lines, intermingled with sonnets and enlivened with all
kinds of unexpected incidents and intrigues, frequently cost him no more
than the labor of a single day. He tells us himself that he has produced
more than a hundred plays, which were represented within twenty-four
hours after their first conception. What has before been said of the
wonderful facility of Italian improvisatori applies with equal truth to
the Spaniards, in whose language and metres it was more difficult to
compose; but of the hundreds of Castilian improvisatori, who expressed
themselves in verse with the same ease as in prose, Lopé was the most
remarkable, for the task of versification seems never to have retarded
his progress. His friend and biographer, Montalvan, has remarked that he
composed more rapidly than his amanuensis could copy.
While Cervantes did much for the Spanish drama, it was by Lopé de Vega
that its national forms were permanently established. Selecting from his
ruder predecessors all the varieties that were best worth preserving, he
molded them into the shapes best adapted to the capabilities of the
stage, as he found it, toward the close of the sixteenth century. While
others aided in the work, Lopé was the true founder of the modern drama,
not only in Spain, but to a great extent in all European countries,
which borrowed largely from the two great southern nations that gave to
the secular stage its earliest development, after emerging from the
darkness of the middle ages. Not only in giving form and cohesion to the
drama, but in the fertility and variety of his own productions, Lopé has
no rival among modern authors. His plays and other works almost taxed
the powers of the printing press, so that their very number greatly
injured his reputation, notwithstanding their general excellence. It is
estimated that his writings contained more than 21,000,000 lines and
covered about 133,000 large and closely written sheets of paper, a
quantity which few ordinary men could copy within the span of a
lifetime. Doubtless, if he had written one-tenth as much, his labors
would have been ten times as effectual; yet in his own special line, as
a comedian, he is unrivaled except by Calderon.
The managers of the theatres, who always kept him on the spur,
left him no time either to read or revise his compositions, and with
inconceivable fertility he produced 1,800 comedies and 400 autos
sacramentales, in all 2,200 dramas, of which about 300 have been
published in 25 quarto volumes. His other poems were reprinted at Madrid
in 1776, under the title of the detached works of Lopé de Vega, in 21
volumes in quarto. His prodigious literary labors produced money as well
as glory, and he amassed 100,000 ducats; but his treasures did not long
abide with him. The poor ever found his purse open to them, and the pomp
and extravagance characteristic of Castilians soon dissipated his
wealth. After living in splendor, he died almost in poverty.
No poet ever enjoyed in his lifetime so much of glory and adulation.
When and wherever he showed himself, a crowd surrounded him and saluted
him as "the prodigy of nature." Children followed him with cries of
pleasure, and every eye was fixed upon him. The religious college of
Madrid, of which he was a member, elected him their president; Pope
Urban VIII presented him with the cross of Malta, the title of Doctor of
Theology and the diploma of treasurer of the Apostolic chamber, marks of
distinction which he owed at least as much to his fanatical zeal as to
his poems. In the midst of the homage thus rendered he died on the 26th
of August, 1635, having attained the age of seventy-three. His obsequies
were celebrated with royal pomp. Three bishops in their pontifical
habits officiated for three days at the funeral of the "Spanish
phoenix," as he is called in the title page of his comedies, his
writings being alone sufficient to furnish forth a library of no
insignificant proportions. He wrote negligently and he matured nothing;
his great and incontestable merit was that he gave the Spanish stage a
range and scope of which it had not before been thought capable, and
taught his contemporaries how to find dramatic situations and develop a
plot.>>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Two Examples of Poetic Parallelism
between John Donne and Lope de Vega
by Jesús Cora Universidad de Alcalá (Spain)
[Originally published in the journal of the "Sociedad Española
de Estudios Renacentistas Ingleses -SEDERI- Spanish Society
for English Renaissance Studies: SEDERI 6 (1996): 21-28]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/cora.htm
<<The identification and comparison between English metaphysical poetry
and Spanish poesía conceptista was suggested for the first time by James
Smith, and then studied by Frank J. Warnke and Lowry Nelson. Later
bibliography has focused almost exclusively on the analysis of Francisco
de Quevedo's affinity with metaphysical poetry, and John Donne in
particular. Critics and scholars have studied Quevedo's use of the
conceit, and the metaphysical themes of some of his poems, and quite
recently, the comparative study of Quevedo's and Donne's poems has been
undertaken.
As a contrast, only a few authors have dealt with John Donne in
relationship with Lope de Vega, or viceversa, even though some of Lope
de Vega's poems also belong to the conceptista vein. Frank Warnke
included two sonnets by Lope de Vega in his collection of European
metaphysical poems, and he pointed to the stylistic similarities between
the devotional poems of Quevedo and Lope and those of Donne's (52,
59-60). Octavio Paz mentioned the existence of similarities between the
passion, both amorous and religious, of Lope de Vega and Donne. Daniel
L. Heiple discovered that Lope had used the term 'metaphysical' in much
the same way as John Dryden and Dr. Johnson did later. Not long ago,
Laurie Ann Kaplis, wrote, as her doctoral thesis, an extensive, yet not
definitive, comparative study of Donne and Lope. She provided a general
study of the autobiographical and sincere character of their poems, and
how the adoption of personæ diluted it somewhat. Kaplis indicated the
common characteristics of conceptismo and metaphysical poetry, and she
also pointed out the basic similarities and differences between Donne's
poems and those of Lope de Vega's as regards to the themes of profane
and religious love, although she did not really focus on the very
analysis of pairs of poems. This is not surprising for after all, none
of her predecessors actually compared texts to prove this parallelism.
Curiously enough, Octavio Paz even deemed this unnecessary since "este
género de comparaciones, fundadas en el gusto tanto o más que en la
razón, no necesitan pruebas ni demostraciones" (7).
I definitely disagree with this statement for, indeed, we must find
arguments and proofs to support such comparisons and show that, in fact,
they respond to reason rather than taste.
In my opinion, the correspondences and similarities between John Donne
and Lope de Vega are of course limited, given their different evolution
and the greater variety and amount of Lope de Vega's production.
However, within the compass of these limits, it is possible to find
remarkable similarities between some of their compositions.
If Richard E. Hughes's division of Donne's life into three periods is to
be followed,1 the poet's works can also be roughly divided into three
groups accordingly: one, satires and cynically antipetrarchan love
poems; two, sincere, deeply-felt neoplatonic amatory poems, and
philosophical complimentary verses to influential female friends; and
three, his devotional poems.
In a similar way, if Dámaso Alonso's four-period division of Lope de
Vega's poems is accepted but partly amended by adding one more group,
his works fall into five classes: one, written in the Petrarchan
tradition; two, devotional; three, formally obscure or gongorinos;2
four, philosophical or difficult as to content or conceptistas;3 and
five, antipetrarchan and full of literary self-mockery.
Bearing in mind these classifications, it is quite evident that the
possible parallelisms between Donne and Lope de Vega must be restricted
to just three groups of poems, namely: those that are a subversion of
Petrarchan conventions, those that express neoplatonic love, and those
that give vent to a sinner's religious crisis.
It is the aim of this paper to contribute a study of two pairs of poems,
which, in my opinion, perfectly illustrate two of the aforementioned
resemblances: the authors' antipetrarchism and their addresses to God
seeking help to achieve repentance and forgiveness. The first couple of
poems is that of Donne's 'The Flea', from Songs and Sonnets,4 and Lope
de Vega's 'La pulga, falsamente atribuida a Lope', from his volume Rimas
humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos, published under a
pseudonym in 1634 and containing poems written throughout his career.
The second pair is formed by the practically contemporary number five in
Donne's Holy Sonnets, a sequence written circa 1609-1614, and sonnet VI
from Lope de Vega's Rimas sacras, a volume published in 1614.
The poems dealing with the naughty, little insect may belong to a fairly
common Renaissance topos that developed in France, Italy and Spain and
which John Donne and Lope de Vega may have been acquainted with as R. O.
Jones has pointed out in a very enlightening essay. However, whether
Donne and Lope de Vega knew the French and Italian poems on fleas that
impudently bite beautiful ladies in most inappropriate points of their
anatomical geography is not especially relevant for the purpose of this
essay. The parallelism between their poems is quite clear as regards
subject matter even if we do not take into account those precedents. If
both authors read some of those poems, they worked within the limits of
a common background. If they struck on a happy coincidence quite by
chance, then, this only underlines the idea of the existence of
resemblances between some of the poets' works.
It is evident that the approach to the same incident is different in
each poem, but, in any case, the common elements of these two poems are
more important than their differences. In both of them a flea bites a
lady who, in retaliation, suddenly punishes the poor flea's effrontery
with death. In both poems, the speaker piquantly relates the biting to
his sexual desire. Apart from the fact that, according to Jones, one of
the traditions that shaped the lady-bitten-by-flea topos may have its
ultimate origin in Petrarch's sonnet CXLI,5 these two compositions are
parodies of Petrarchan conventions. Far from being poems praising a real
or fictitious lover, they focus on a more banal subject with the same
erotic end and using very a very similar technique.
Donne's 'The Flea', as opposed to Lope de Vega's 'La pulga...', is a
longer poem free from the sonnet's formal limitations, and, therefore,
an apter vehicle for experimentation, originality, and full-blown
ingenuity. In this poem, the flea is the foundation upon which the
speaker builds the edifice of a rhetorical and cynical lesson in love
with which he tries to appease an anonymous lady's misgivings and
persuade her to lay with him and put an end to her maidenhood. The flea
remains the centre of attention of the speaker (Donne or his persona),
the lady, and the reader. Contrary to the Petrarchan habit of praising
the beauties of the loved lady, by comparing teeth to pearls, lips to
rubies, hair to gold, and so on and so forth, or extolling her virtues
by relating them to religious ideas in witty conceits, Donne, in a bold,
hyperbolical inversion of values and imagery, diminishes the importance
of the lady and that of the loss of her virginity, and stresses the
significance of the flea. He equates the loss of maidenhood to the
flea's bite and therefore establishes an implicit and jocular, if
inappropriate, association between the two losses of blood. On the other
hand, he transforms the flea into 'something rich and strange', a living
emblem of their prospective intimate union, by means of several
conceits. As the flea has 'sucked' both the speaker and the lady, thus
mixing their bloods, it turns into a nuptial bed and a temple where
their marriage takes place de facto. The flea's shining, black, keratin,
exoskeleton becomes a precious cloister with 'walls of jet'. The flea
undergoes the same poetical transformation as Laura's features do in
Petrarch's poems. This has a double, if paradoxical effect. The
importance of the flea is greater than that of the lady, as I have
already said, but, at the same time, the union of such dissimilar terms
to create those conceits produces a debasement of the religious
referents that almost results in sheer irreverence, if not blasphemy.
Then, the speaker beseeches the lady not to kill this symbol of their
union alleging the act would be a triple sin: murder, because of the
speaker's blood in it; suicide, because of their own blood in it, and
sacrilege for the flea is now sacred as it has transformed into a temple.
However, the lady kills the insect as a presumably enraged rejection of
his twisted arguments. Far from being taken aback, the speaker remains
aloof and he chides the lady for her behaviour. He has the last word.
Prompted by the lady's observation that she does not find him or herself
any weaker after having been bitten by the flea, the speaker, this
cynical teacher, concludes his 'didactic' monologue with an irrefutable
point, an observation that is still dependent on the image of the loss
of blood and intended to dispel her fears definitively: she will not
find herself any weaker either after making love for the first time, and
so much fuss about honour and chastity will prove to be futile nonsense.
Lope de Vega's poem is closer to the Petrarchan model both in form and
imagery, but the very occasion that the sonnet celebrates and its
festive mood are a significative baroque departure from the usual
Renaissance seriousness of the form. This contrast constitutes Lope de
Vega's subversion and parody of the Italian conventions.
Leonor is one of the fictitious lovers of Tomé de Burguillos, Lope de
Vega's persona at the end of his life and career. Leonor is beautiful,
her skin is white and rosy, and her fingers look like ivory as the
commonplace metaphors indicate. Her beauty is so special that it even
makes the flea attractive, contrary to what it might be expected. As in
Donne's poem, the flea undergoes a transformation by means of metaphors.
The sharp contrast of the flea's dark body with Leonor's white skin
transmogrifies it into a precious stone, a different but inoffensive
insect, even a quite seductive mole on Leonor's breast.
However, Leonor, like the anonymous lady in Donne's poem, crushes the
flea with a sudden, mortal finger twist, thus avenging both her bitten
breasts in a single action.
The ejaculation, and I mean the flea's words, of course, is a very
skilful, humorous, rhetorical device, that consists in a personification
of the flea and a dramatization of its death. These words, put in the
flea's mouth, so to speak, allow Tomé de Burguillos, Lope de Vega's
persona, to retort with an ingenious, exaggerated request full of
innuendo aimed at bringing his desire home to Leonor, the presupposed
listener of this theatrical sonnet. This is not an altogether dissimilar
artifice from the argumentation Donne used in 'The Flea', both of them
belong to the resources of rhetoric, they seek the same end, and they
certainly are as witty.
Inspiration, antipetrarchism, rhetoric, wit, finality, these are the
common elements between Donne's 'The Flea' and Lope de Vega's 'La pulga...'.
In the same way that the flea poems have a most likely common
background, Donne's religious sonnets and those of Lope de Vega's also
share a common source. Laurie Ann Kaplis points out6 quite convincingly
that both John Donne and Lope de Vega based their devotional verses on
the method of meditation created by Ignatius of Loyola in his Ejercicios
espirituales (1521-1541).7 As Kaplis explains,8 these exercises, which
were quite popular in England of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods,
were intended to provoke repentance and contrition in a three-step
process: first, meditation had to be initiated with a vivid
visualization of a religious scene, the compositio loci, then followed
an analysis of sins by using feelings, affections and senses, and
finally, a direct address to God expressing feelings, misgivings, asking
for help to avoid the way to perdition. For Kaplis, John Donne and Lope
de Vega follow the Ignatian meditation method and their religious poetry
can be divided into three phases corresponding to the three stages of
this kind of meditation. Thus, she states that Lope de Vega's Romancero
and Donne's La Corona belong to the first, visualisation stage,
Soliloquios amorosos de un alma a Dios and the Hymns correspond to the
second one, that of self-analysis, and Rimas sacras and Holy Sonnets
parallel the last stage, that of direct communication and prayer to God.9
Therefore, both Lope de Vega's and John Donne's sonnets not only share
the same background, but also express similar feelings and ideas. In
them, their authors admit their sinful natures, their unworthiness of
salvation, they express their powerful sense of guilt and their equally
ardent desire for help so that they can repent from their sins, be
forgiven, and obtain divine grace. They even put these ideas in very
passionate, sincere, similar words, although as a rule John Donne's mood
tends to be more pessimistic than Lope de Vega's.
However, there is an important difference related to the fact that the
authors belong to different persuasions: Anglican and Roman Catholic
respectively. Donne addresses God only, but Lope also demands help and
support from the Virgin Mary and the Saints. As a consequence, and as
Kaplis points out, only those poems that the authors address to God can
be fully analogous.
That is precisely the case with both sonnet five from the Holy Sonets
and sonnet VI from Rimas sacras.10 Both sonnets are a supplication to
God. The two of them express their authors' fear of death, not only
physical, but also spiritual, and they constitute anxious demands of
divine help to attain repentance, expiation for their sins, unbending
faith and religious steadfastness.
Curiously enough, not only do these poems share the same feelings, they
also render them in practically identical terms for Donne and Lope de
Vega use contemporary scientific notions to convey their longings. They
base their imagery on closely related ideas within the still medieval
dominant worldview, namely: the four elements as constituents of the
universe, their correspondences in the four humours of Hippocratical
medicine, and the scholastic cosmology based on the Ptolemaic geocentric
system.11
Donne sees himself as a microcosm, a little world, composed of, on the
one hand, the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire that make up
his body, and on the other, the 'angelic sprite' which is his soul.
Because of his sins, he risks death on a double plane of existence, he
is not only in danger of physical death, but also metaphysical death:
both his body and soul are condemned.
Continuing with the scientific imagery, Donne resorts to the discoveries
of his age and the idea of the universe structured in Earth-centred
concentrical spheres to express, quite grandiosely, his desire for and
need of help to repent from his past sins by shedding abundant, sincere
tears.
Donne desperately wants to weep profusely, until his microcosm of self
is flooded. This image harks back to the biblical deluge and, by doing
so, it also offers an alternative to destruction and death. God
promised, as recorded in Genesis 9:11, that the Earth would not be
flooded again. Thus, in a perfect correspondence between macrocosm and
microcosm, Donne's tears may be not his end, but the means to cleanse
all trace of sin from his soul.
However, in a cry of despair and in contraposition to the water of his
tears of remorse and the somewhat cryptic reference to the deluge, Donne
introduces fire as the cause of the end of both the microcosm and the
macrocosm. He implicitly associates fire with the flames of Hell, where
his soul will go because of his sins, and apocalyptical fire, as
prophesied in St. John's Book of Revelation. Indeed, Donne says a sinful
fire has consumed him so far, ruining him physically and spiritually, so
it can be perfectly identified as the means of his own destruction.
Donne is persuaded he must burn and he is resigned to his fate, but,
quite adroitly, he asks God for a totally different kind of fire. He
demands the fire of zeal, that is to say, religious enthusiasm, strong
faith, and self-restraint all rolled into one, which far from
destructive, is restorative, as the paradox in the last line indicates.
Thus, along his train of thought, Donne reduces the four elements
introduced at the beginning of the poem to just two: water, which stands
for repentance, and fire, that represents the Day of Doom, the flames of
Hell, sin and finally grace.
In Lope de Vega's sonnet we find the same preoccupation in very similar
images. Like Donne, Lope de Vega finds himself close to dying both a
physical and a spiritual death. The first indications he has of his
impending death are dryness and cold. These symptoms can be interpreted
in the light of the theory of the four humours as typical of the
melancholic 'complexion', for black bile or melancholy was a cold and
dry humour, often associated to the stage previous to death.12 However,
they also mean, together with Lope's hard frozen heart, his
irresponsiveness to God and, presumably, his sins.
Lope needs to reform as badly as Donne and his change is expressed as a
variation in the predominant humour in his body. He needs to turn his
complexion from melancholic to sanguine, that is from cold and dry, to
warm and moist. The only way in which Lope de Vega can aspire to both
keeping his earthly and spiritual life is through showing real
repentance, symbolised metonymically by tears as in Donne's sonnet. His
warm feelings for God and his desire to cry a river of tears, analogous
to Donne's will to weep seas, are the only way in which he will melt the
ice of sin and find salvation and true life. Lope will send his tears to
God, the author of the supreme sphere, a clear reference to the
contemporary ideas about the structure of the universe. This river of
tears will reach God's pity and grace, which is as vast as the sea, the
final destination where all sinners' tears go.
In the same way as Donne created an opposition between water and fire,
Lope contrasts ice, water and fire. However, Lope does not ask for
burning zeal, for he is already experiencing it. He seems to be in a
better situation than Donne, but, in fact, this does not make a
difference with Donne's plight because Lope, just like the English poet,
needs God's grace to avoid sin. In order to melt the ice of sin and
indifference completely, he needs God's intervention. Lope expresses
this with a complex conceit that might have been created by Donne
himself. Besides, this conceit shares with Donne's paradox at the end of
sonnet number five an identical function of closing the poem by posing
an intellectual problem to the reader. In the last two lines of his
sonnet, Lope asks God for the beams of his holy fire and the crystals of
his sacred heaven. It is quite easy to ascertain that God's holy fire
stands for spiritual illumination and divine grace, however it is quite
hard to realise what the meaning of the crystals is. I was puzzled
myself for some time trying to decipher the meaning, but, finally, I
succeeded in elaborating an interpretation after poring over the sonnet.
In fact, the crystals hark back to line eight where Lope de Vega refers
to God as 'the author of the supreme sphere'. Here he introduces the
notion of the universe being a set of concentrical spheres. To
understand the relationship between the spheres and the crystals, it
must be taken into account that, according to some theoreticians, these
spheres were made of crystal and a planet was 'inlaid' in them, while
according to others, all the spheres, including the Primum Mobile, the
outer limit of the created universe, were encompassed by a crystalline
sphere beyond which the Empyrean heaven and God Himself could be found.
In any case, God's light and grace have to go through a crystal to reach
sinners here on Earth. Therefore, the meaning of this image is quite
evident now. Lope employs a true metaphysical conceit in which a
religious concept and a common optics experiment are linked up. In fact,
Lope asks God for light beams and lenses to help him melt the ice that
symbolises his sins and unheeding attitude to God.
This conceit has no equivalent in Donne's sonnet number five, but it is
very similar in its inspiration to that in the final couplet of sonnet
number one in which the effect of grace on Donne's hard heart -as hard
as Lope's- is put in terms of magnetism: 'Thy Grace may wing me to
prevent his [the Devil's] art / And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart.'
Suffering, repentance, tears and a demand for help to overcome sin, as
well as the expression of these ideas by means of images taken from the
incipient scientific experiments of the time are the similitudes between
these religious sonnets.
Here ends my limited contribution to the analysis of the parallelisms
between the poetic arts of John Donne and Lope de Vega, I only hope that
it has provided you with new ideas and encouraged you to find
similarities that, I am sure, are waiting to be found and discussed.
------------------------------------------------------------
This is my own Englishing of Lope de Vega's two sonnets
discussed in this paper.
'The Flea, falsely attributed to Lope de Vega.'
A daring, living atom suckèd
Fair Leonór's white breasts,
A garnet amidst pearls, a mite in a rose,
A brief mole with an invisible tooth.
She, two points of shining ivory,
with sudden disquiet, whining, bathed,
and with her twisting its boisterous life,
in a single torment, it feels a double revenge.
When the flea expired, it quoth: 'Alas me, wretch,
for such a petty wrong, so sharp the pain!'
'Oh, flea!' quoth I, 'happy thou wert,
'Hold thy ghost, and tell Leonór
to let me suck where thou wert
and I'll exchange my life for thy death.'
VI
If stern and fearsome death's
beginnings are dryness and coldness,
my hard heart, this ice of mine,
signs are of which I could be afraid.
Yet if life expects to keep itself
in warmth and moisture, let my eyes form
a river, which to thy merciful sea I send,
divine author of the supreme sphere.
Warmth will give my love, water my tears,
let dryness go hence, let ice forsake me
which from life diverted me so much.
And thou, who know'st now my burning zeal,
give me the beams from thine holy fire,
and the crystals from thy sacred heav'n.
----------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Christian Lanciai
Very interesting, and I hope you will develop this theory further.
However, whenever Philosophy is associated with some established
politician, I get the creeps and hear the alarm sounding all over the
place. Plato in his position of immense responsibility as leading
philosopher of all ages banished Homer from any right of existence in
the perfect political state. Seneca was the leading philosopher of his
day, preaching humility and extolling the advantages of poverty while
he was the richest man in Rome and brought up Nero. Some hypocrite!
While Bacon prided himself in his philosophy (has anyone ever
understood it?) he obseqiuously served one of the worst kings of
England ever and helped in sending the old poet Raleigh to his
execution. The Baconians still have to explain that. Another
philosopher difficult to take seriously was Leo Tolstoy, who preached
poverty and communism while he remained a rich count and international
representative of Czarist Russia. The political philosophers don't
seem to be able to avoid total inconsistency, which make them all
appear as frauds and fools to posterity, with one single exception:
Marcus Aurelius.
Chris
John Bede
- I will try to express this most delicate theory. Suppose, just
suppose, that Bacon as an experienced man of law and politics could
see much further than any other contemporary man. Suppose, just
suppose, that he found no possibility to save Raleigh after his Guiana
tragedy raiding Spanish garrisons, which before going he was strictly
forbidden to do by king James, in fact, he was allowed to go only on
that very condition - I know, he didn't do it himself, his captain did
it, because he had no choice, and he committed suicide afterwards, I
know that story, but that does not make Raleigh in any way less
responsible for the whole expedition and its outcome. So suppose Bacon
could not save Raleigh's skin in any way. So he had to try to make the
best of some very bad business.
Bacon was no fool and had viewed the fall of Essex all too close at
hand and had also followed the first trial of Raleigh, wherein Raleigh
made fools of the whole prosecution, the government and especially of
poor king James, the consummate fool. Bacon certainly had no reason to
love king James. He was bound to his liege in duty but in duty only
and formally, never in affection. Bacon being a wise man, he would
rather have been the contrary to affectionate in his relation to king
James.
He had been sitting in Parliament all his life and had followed the
sentiments of the people close at hand for twenty years or more.
Perhaps better than anyone else he must have known and felt the
popular vibrations of the nation. He must have been aware that people
were all for Raleigh and naught for the king. But Bacon as a lawyer
could do nothing to alter the king's case, since the king was supreme.
Neither could he save Raleigh. So he had no choice but to help the
king wreck his own case and government and future by assisting him in
making the Raleigh case the perfect scandalous stumbling-block for the
Stuart establishment.
I put it to you that Bacon very well could have foreseen that the
Stuart king ruined his own position by carrying through his injustice
in the Raleigh case. And Bacon simply could not stop him. Neither
could he save Raleigh. He did not assist in the execution of Raleigh,
and he did not stop the king from executing him, since he could save
neither case. He could only stick to his duties, which were to let the
king conduct his follies to the future ruin of his own family and its
standing with the English people..
It's just a theory, I am merely stating that this could have been the
case, and you can't deny it. No Baconian can deny the possibility or
even the probability that Marlowe could have absconded from his
certain death at the hands of the Star Chamber bureaucratic machinery,
and likewise no Marlovian or Oxfordian can deny that Bacon saw the
king implement his own political ruin by persecuting Raleigh to his
death and that he just let him do it.
This of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the authorship
question, which is an entirely different issue. The above proves
nothing in any direction. I am just possibly trying to add to some
deeper understanding of the Bacon case.
John Bede
Christian Lanciai
> clan...@hotmail.com (Christian Lanciai) wrote in message news:<7e67b43b.02122...@posting.google.com>...
<snips>
> > While Bacon prided himself in his philosophy (has anyone ever
> > understood it?) he obseqiuously served one of the worst kings of
> > England ever and helped in sending the old poet Raleigh to his
> > execution. The Baconians still have to explain that.
>
This is a very intriguing theory. Before answering it properly, I have
to check up with my sources, but the risk is, of course, that you are
subject to wishful thinking. Stand by!
Chris
John Bede
Wishful thinking, Chris, that I might be wrong. Although you will find
no proof of my theory, there are more factors speaking for than
against it. Above all: you will find no other personality in
Elizabethan England answering to all the clearcut characteristics of
"Shake-Speare" than Bacon, the detached politician, the lone thinker,
the profound observer, the intimate theatre lover, the greatest master
of his age in England of the Word and linguistics, the misanthropist
and the natural scientist. Oxford comes closest as another personlaity
answering approximately to the "Shake-Speare" character, but he falls
far behind Bacon's universality, while there is no sign whatever of
Marlowe or Derby or Shakspere having had any such endowment. Bacon is
the only possible "Shake-Speare" candidate, or you'll have to prove me
wrong.
J.B.
John W. Kennedy
> Wishful thinking, Chris, that I might be wrong. Although you will find
> no proof of my theory, there are more factors speaking for than
> against it. Above all: you will find no other personality in
> Elizabethan England answering to all the clearcut characteristics of
> "Shake-Speare" than Bacon, the detached politician, the lone thinker,
> the profound observer, the intimate theatre lover, the greatest master
> of his age in England of the Word and linguistics, the misanthropist
> and the natural scientist. Oxford comes closest as another personlaity
> answering approximately to the "Shake-Speare" character, but he falls
> far behind Bacon's universality, while there is no sign whatever of
> Marlowe or Derby or Shakspere having had any such endowment. Bacon is
> the only possible "Shake-Speare" candidate, or you'll have to prove me
> wrong.
No, shithead, you have to prove you're right.
The messages beamed into your head by aliens don't count.
Christian Lanciai
My previous post in this thread has for some reason been lost by HLAS,
but since it is preserved in your answer message, I don't mind. But
this has never happened to me in HLAS before.
So far I have been able to find nothing to refute your theory, so, by
all means, it might be true. But, as you say yourself, it has no
bearing at all on the authorship question. To me, Bacon remains
unconvincing as the Shake-Speare author. The writings we have of him,
the authorship of which is undisputable, do not exhibit the same
architecturally perfect sense of form which we find in all of
Shake-Speare's and Marlowe's works. In fact, the form sense is what
links them together as being by the same author, more than any other
similarities. Bacon's works are often only beginnings, he starts on
ambitious works only to leave them unfinished, he embarks on
intellectual voyages without completing them, he is just an
experimentator; while Marlowe-Shakespeare never leaves a work
unfinished, and the finished work always carries the stamp of an
accomplished master of form. There is only one single exception: "Hero
and Leander", which for obvious reasons was left unfinished at the
moment of the May crisis of 1593, when he was summoned to the Star
Chamber, synonymous with torture and death, and he had to leave the
stage suddenly.
I leave it to you to refute my conclusion that Bacon was no master of
form, which excludes him from the Marlowe-Shakespeare authorship,
since Marlowe-Shakespeare if anything is so definitely a genius of
form.
Chris
John Bede
>snip<
To me, Bacon remains
> unconvincing as the Shake-Speare author. The writings we have of him,
> the authorship of which is undisputable, do not exhibit the same
> architecturally perfect sense of form which we find in all of
> Shake-Speare's and Marlowe's works. In fact, the form sense is what
> links them together as being by the same author, more than any other
> similarities. Bacon's works are often only beginnings, he starts on
> ambitious works only to leave them unfinished, he embarks on
> intellectual voyages without completing them, he is just an
> experimentator; while Marlowe-Shakespeare never leaves a work
> unfinished, and the finished work always carries the stamp of an
> accomplished master of form. There is only one single exception: "Hero
> and Leander", which for obvious reasons was left unfinished at the
> moment of the May crisis of 1593, when he was summoned to the Star
> Chamber, synonymous with torture and death, and he had to leave the
> stage suddenly.
>
> I leave it to you to refute my conclusion that Bacon was no master of
> form, which excludes him from the Marlowe-Shakespeare authorship,
> since Marlowe-Shakespeare if anything is so definitely a genius of
> form.
>
> Chris
My dear fellow, you don't know what you are talking about. If
anything, Bacon is a genius of form. He is the most systematic thinker
Britain has ever produced. His whole life is nought but based on order
of thought. So is the Shakespeare canon.
I can understand you marlovians. Marlowe is in many ways the ideal
Shakespeare candidate, mainly because he is totally obscure. Nothing
is known about him except a few formal clashes with the law. The
Baines note is the only testimony we have of his personality, which
quite clearly illustrates the proud mind inspired by the leading
free-thinking minds of the day, that is Raleigh, Harriot and Bacon.
Marlowe must have been in close contact with Anthony Bacon through his
intelligence work and, consequently, must have been in touch with the
Cecils and Francis Bacon.
Not only the perfected sense of form cultivated and refined throughout
Bacon's life, as he trained himself as a philosopher, marks
Shakespeare's works, but also Bacon's singular humility. In an age
full of proud and boastful hubris-stricken egotists, Bacon kept
strikingly apart with an entirely different attitude: he termed
himself the servant of man. He felt his task was to educate man and
took this seriously upon himself, concentrating on his internationally
oriented Latin works but also availing himself of the possibility of
instructing his fellow Englishmen by means of the theatre, which he
enjoyed and made himself intimate with from the beginning (the "Gesta
Grayorum"). Most of his plays are moral observations concerning the
misuse of power.
The image of Bacon was tainted from the start by his own misfortunes
at the hands of power abusers, but nothing has clouded his memory as
fatally as all the rubbish written of him in the form of legends and
fantasies during the last century. The assertions that he wrote all of
Lyly's, Jonson's, Montaigne's and Cervantes' works and the Bible
translation is all rubbish. I don't for a second believe that he was a
bastard son of Elizabeth, and even the story that he dressed in purple
for his wedding just to provoke king James, I would regard as a
spurious legend. The whole Bacon mythology should be ruthlessly rinsed
out since it's only effect is to blur out the truth - which is all
about the contrary: Bacon's persistent humility.
His obseqiuousness has been despised as a deplorable weakness, but you
forget, that unless he served characters like Essex and king James, he
could not serve man or his country. He had to serve them to reach his
objective, which was the intellectual evolution and liberation of the
society of man.
No doubt you will answer this by some new interesting ideas and
theories. The question between us is: will you end up in my camp, or
will I end up in yours?
John Bede, the purged apostate
Christian Lanciai
> >snip<
Very well, John, but I still beg to differ. In most of the
biographies, it is often pointed out as a disturbing weakness in
Bacon, that he continued supporting and serving Essex and king James
although he knew they were crooks. That shows a lack of integrity.
There is no such lack of integrity in Shakespeare. On the contrary,
the integrity in Shakespeare is sustained throughout in perfect
incorruptibility. Bacon was innocent of the fall of Essex, I am the
first to admit that, but he nevertheless accepted a large property by
the benevolent hands of his benefactor Essex and then was the first to
betray him. A decent man would not have done that. He would simply
have resigned and returned that Twickenham property to the family that
bestowed it on him. Instead he sold it and acquired a lot of money for
it.
In the case of king James, Bacon was of course sacrificed by the king
for the corruption of his first favourite Buckingham. Nothing can
excuse James from that, and Bacon was totally innocent. However, no
one knew better than Bacon that James was the worst crook in England,
and nevertheless he served him faithfully and obsequiously for 18
years and even helped him in murdering Raleigh, the first and last
Elisabethan, 65 years old, the favourite of crown prince Harry and
imprisoned in the Tower for 13 years by that same king. Bacon must
have turned a blind eye to many things in order to carry on serving
such a king. But Shakespeare never turns a blind eye to anything.
Therefore, I find Shakespeare's works wholly irreconcilable with the
life and career of Francis Bacon.
Whoever wrote Shakespeare, he must have been independent and free from
obligations to society. Like for most Marlovians, my argument for
Marlowe mainly consists of the arguments against all the others. We
know next to nothing of Marlowe since he remains perfectly concealed
after May 1593. But while there are pertinent arguments against
Shakspere, Oxford, Derby and Bacon as the possible author, there is no
pertinent argument at all against Marlowe once you have realized the
probability that he absconded from his almost certain death in May
1593.
Your argument.
Chris
John Bede
> > >snip<
>
You are hopeless but not serious. It's like a symptom. Your desire to
idealize Shakespeare turns you blind to reality, and you see only what
you want to see: the only picture that fits into your ideal
Shakespeare picture, which is the picture of Marlowe, which is no
picture at all. At the same time you turn a blind eye to what we
really know about Marlowe: his quarrels, his unkindness to Thomas Kyd,
his unpleasantness and cruelty, as exposed in Tamburlaine and other
plays of sheer cruelty and sadism like "The Massacre at Paris", "The
Jew of Malta" and "Edward II". All right, I hear your objection, let's
exclude Edward II from this discourse, since that cruelty is taken
from the Holinshed reality. But the rest.... no kindness, no
gentleness, no good ways are found in Marlowe, only cruelty.
Try for a minute to imagine a contrasting and more plausible theory.
You took the wrong train from the beginning, but you can still change.
All that gentleness and nicety which was evidenced of Shakespeare was
found in Bacon, the careful background counsellor and state solicitor.
The praise of Shakespeare is never voiced so as to not be applicable
to Bacon, in fact, more credible as applied to Bacon, a generally
trusted man, while Shakspere did fool around with his wife, pestering
his neighbours with liabilities, neglecting his illiterate daughters,
who turned out boobs like probably their father. But why then, you
ask, did Bacon bother to mask his poet's identity and veil it in the
confounded figurehead of Shake-Speare? There is only one possible
answer. It pleased Bacon to create a mystery. He wanted people to
think better of him than of Bacon. He knew he had blown it with Essex
and James and hated himself for it, - who wouldn't, after having lost
a life-time's work on such wasted loyalty, so he separated the poet's
character from his own. You earlier expressed the idea that you could
only fit Shakespeare into Bacon if Bacon was a split personality, or a
multiple personality, as you said. Well, that's perfectly reasonable.
Let's assume he was, and everything is explained. Bacon, well aware of
that he was notorious as Bacon, kept his poet's work apart and gave it
another name to make it possible for you and others to continue
idealizing his theatrical work idefinitely.
There are no facts speaking for Marlowe. All known facts speak for
Bacon: the paper trails, the production dates, the perfect fitting of
Bacon's career into the chronology of the plays, the first appearance
of the Shake-Speare name on the plays at a crucial moment in Bacon's
career, the fact that Bacon idealizes Henry VII as much in his book as
Shake-Speare does the Lancastrian kings (omitting Henry VII, since he
was to become a special book later on,) the sudden interruption of the
plays exactly as Bacon becomes more politically involved than what's
good for him, the exact fitting of the last Roman and legal play
"Appius and Virginia" into the last year of Bacon's life, and so on.
You can't refute that theory. It's too damn overwhelmingly
self-evident!
your irrevocable Baconian John Bede
Christian Lanciai
>snip<
No, it's not self-evident.
"Though Francis Bacon possessed much learning, sophistication, and
keen intellect, he expressed these qualities in a different manner
than Shakespeare, whose work is charged throughout with "imagination,
passion and idealism" in the words of two commentators. Although Bacon
had wide knowledge of the law, Shakespeare used legal terminology in
high metaphorical terms. The verses, which exist today from Francis
Bacon, the metrical settings of the "Psalms," is stilted and as unlike
Shakespeare's as possible. It is unlikely that Francis Bacon, who
wrote numerous works and who had many preoccupations other than
writing, could have also authored thirty-six plays, 154 sonnets and
two long narrative poems of the quality Shakespearean works exhibit."
Taken from an article of the "Shakespeare Authorship Trust" on the
web. There are many authorities who endorse this view. One of them was
the Mendenhall experiment 100 years ago, when Augustus Hemingway
engaged Doctor Mendenhall to scientifically prove Bacon wrote
Shakespeare by scientific stylometrics, which experiment proved the
opposite: Shakespeare and Bacon differed immensely. Even if Bacon was
a multiple personality and could suit his language to different kinds
of people, his literary style would always have remained basically of
the same characteristic dryness. The extant works of Bacon, especially
his poems, prove him incapable of writing poetry like Shakespeare's.
Your "overwhelming self-evidence" is just another a loose theory.
I also thought we were agreed that the same man wrote the works of
Marlowe and Shakespeare. Now you separate them, which is inconsistent
of you. Although the Mendenhall experiment was not infallible, it
showed quite clearly that Marlowe and Shakespeare could have been the
same author.
The "Shakespeare Authorship Trust" agent also excludes Derby from the
authorship possibility:
"And finally, the other possibility is the Earl of Derby. His case
rests on two 1599 documents: one, which describes him as "busied only
in penning comedies for the common players," and the other, by his
wife in a letter to Robert Cecil, as "taking delight in the players."
His wife is Elizabeth Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford's oldest daughter.
Oxfordians concede that Derby may have had a hand in the composition
of the Shakespeare plays, and that such a supposition could account
for the evidence of collaboration in some of the late dramas.
Nevertheless, the facts of Derby's life do not fit the
autobiographical implications of the Sonnets and of many plays as do
the facts of Oxford's life. Finally, Derby lived well past the
publication of the "First Folio" and could have corrected the
cornucopia of textual problems left unresolved in that publication."
The writer is called Edward Vere and is a descendant of Oxford, so of
course he is an Oxfordian and biassed.
Chris
lyra
John Bede wrote in message news:<7e3701fc.03012...@posting.google.com>...
> >snip<
> > You are hopeless but not serious. It's like a symptom. Your desire to
> > idealize Shakespeare turns you blind to reality, and you see only what
> > you want to see: the only picture that fits into your ideal
> > Shakespeare picture, which is the picture of Marlowe, which is no
> > picture at all. At the same time you turn a blind eye to what we
> > really know about Marlowe: his quarrels, his unkindness to Thomas Kyd,
> > his unpleasantness and cruelty, as exposed in Tamburlaine and other
> > plays of sheer cruelty and sadism like "The Massacre at Paris", "The
> > Jew of Malta" and "Edward II". All right, I hear your objection, let's
> > exclude Edward II from this discourse, since that cruelty is taken
> > from the Holinshed reality. But the rest.... no kindness, no
> > gentleness, no good ways are found in Marlowe, only cruelty.
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"My folks were always putting him down (down, down)
They said he came from the wrong side of town
(whatcha mean when ya say that he came from the wrong side of town?)
They told me he was bad
But I knew he was sad
That's why I fell for (the leader of the pack)"
"Leader of the Pack"
(G. Morton - J. Barry - E. Screenwich)
"If they don't like him that way, they won't like me after today
I'll be standing right by his side, when they say
He's a rebel and he'll never ever be any good
He's a rebel 'cause he never ever does what he should
And just because he doesn't do what everybody else does"
He's a Rebel
(Gene Pitney)
"Wild thing
You make my heart sing
You make everything...groovy
Wild thing"
mountain_queen ;)
(lyra)
>
> No, it's not self-evident.
>
> "Though Francis Bacon possessed much learning, sophistication, and
> keen intellect, he expressed these qualities in a different manner
> than Shakespeare, whose work is charged throughout with "imagination,
> passion and idealism" in the words of two commentators. Although Bacon
> had wide knowledge of the law, Shakespeare used legal terminology in
> high metaphorical terms. The verses, which exist today from Francis
> Bacon, the metrical settings of the "Psalms," is stilted and as unlike
> Shakespeare's as possible. It is unlikely that Francis Bacon, who
> wrote numerous works and who had many preoccupations other than
> writing, could have also authored thirty-six plays, 154 sonnets and
> two long narrative poems of the quality Shakespearean works exhibit."
>
<various snips>
>
> Your "overwhelming self-evidence" is just another a loose theory.
>
> I also thought we were agreed that the same man wrote the works of
> Marlowe and Shakespeare. Now you separate them, which is inconsistent
> of you. Although the Mendenhall experiment was not infallible, it
> showed quite clearly that Marlowe and Shakespeare could have been the
> same author.
> Chris
John Bede
<the usual snips>
Sometimes you manage to get it all so wrong that it's impossible to
get anything sorted out right. No offence! You've just mixed all
things up in error.
The Shakespeare Authorship Trust is not Oxfordian. The fellow you
mentioned is called CHARLES VERE. He is inclined towards oxfordianism,
but the Trust makes some effort to neutrality. They are not committed
to any standpoint, and they even admit the Shakspere case is not lost.
That's at least my impression.
Their elucidation of the problem is very instructive. They pinpoint
the major problems of the main candidates well, and none of them is
without problems. To me it still appears, though, that our two
candidates have the least problems.
The problems of Oxford is not only his premature death in 1604. To me,
his major problem is his isolation. In order to write plays like those
of Shake-Speare, you have to associate on a daily basis with actors,
theatre life and town life. You can't sit alone out in the country
with only wine and dreams for company without seeing anyone, which
seems to have been how the earl of Oxford spent the last ten years of
his life. Bacon did spend his entire life in the hub of London public
and political life and in court, so his life does provide the perfect
setting for the outlook of Shake-Speare the clandestine dramatist, who
could not write in his own name.
Your arguments against Bacon are not without relevance, but they can
still be answered, though I admit they are the greatest problem of
Baconianism. But I find it humanly possible for an established author
to write in different styles. He can use his established style for
official works, as Bacon did, and clandestinely use a different style
to vent all his private feelings in an alternative authorship so
honest, that he could never acknowledge it officially. That reason is
also given for Oxford's possible later authorship, while Marlowe is
given a very different reason. But it's perfectly clear from the plays
and poems that the author must have been a nobleman and intimate with
nobility and royalty. Only Oxford/Derby and Bacon fit that picture.
So Bacon is still in the picture for me. Mendenhall's investigation
could have been wrongly conducted, for instance comparing the prose of
Bacon with Shakespeare verses - I don't know. And of course you are
right: there are many reasons for assuming that Marlowe and
Shake-Speare was one. I was carried away in my last post by wild
fancies, and you were right to observe it. We basically agree on that
one thing only, that whoever wrote Shakespeare also wrote Marlowe.
still on line,
J.B.
Christian Lanciai
That at least is something, and perhaps a common platform to start
from. However, Mendenhall's investigation was carried out in perfect
objectivity, he was employed by Augustus Heminway (note his spelling)
for the specific purpose of having Bacon identified as Shakespeare,
since that gentleman was cocksure Bacon was the man. The surprising
results of the investigation were totally unexpected. You can't just
brush them under the carpet. However, neither of us know the exact
details of what was investigated, whether it was verse or prose, and
you could be right about that only Bacon's prose was compared with
Marlowe's and Shakespeare's verse. However, the investigation
specifically points out that Marlowe stylometrically agrees as well
with Shakespeare as Shakespeare does with himself.
Was then Marlowe Bacon? I would say no. The dialects in Shakespeare
are not indicative of Bacon. There is lots of Kentish and Lancastrian,
and above all, we have that apocryphal Shakespeare play called "Arden
of Feversham", which is all Kent and Marlowe. Only Marlowe could have
been intimate with the proceedings of the play, as they occurred in
reality, since his parents had experienced the scandalous drama
'live'. The realism of the play with lots local settings around
Canterbury is not Shakspere, not Oxford, not Derby and not Bacon but
very much Marlowe.
The Oxford touch in Shakespeare is inescapable, Bacon and Oxford were
related, Bacon also had business with Derby, but then the links from
Oxford and Derby to Marlowe are more convincing than to Bacon. Bacon
was the family lawyer, whose job was to stay cool and detached in
order to extricate Derby from his family quarrels, while he had
nothing in common with the extreme romantic Oxford. Marlowe was
intimately connected with Ferdinando Stanley, the 5th Derby, who
produced his plays, which company after his death was taken over by
the 6th Derby. But this paragraph about the 6th Derby, which I found,
> > "Nevertheless, the facts of Derby's life do not fit the
> > autobiographical implications of the Sonnets and of many plays as do
> > the facts of Oxford's life. Finally, Derby lived well past the
> > publication of the "First Folio" and could have corrected the
> > cornucopia of textual problems left unresolved in that publication."
does not only exclude Derby from having had anything to do with the
Shakespeare canon, but it does exclude Oxford in the same breath. If
Oxford had written the canon, Derby would have felt some
responsibility in the editing problems, but since he did nothing, he
can't have felt any responsibility. On the other hands, it's quite
clear that Bacon was involved in this.
What I mean to suggest is, that Marlowe remains the only link uniting
them all. Oxford is incompatible with Bacon, Derby is incompatible
with the Folios, but Marlowe had business with them all: Oxford
produced his first play (Scanderbeg, now lost), the Oxford personality
could have meant a lot to Marlowe the young dramatist, the Derbys
became the subsequent producers, and the Bacon brothers were the key
figures in the Marlowe intelligence business and probably in the case
of his disappearance. I would say, that the Deptford scenario enabled
Marlowe to continue working at leisure wherever he chose to be. Since
he was officially dead, no one could touch him. He could continue his
intelligence work abroad as well as continue his theatre work at home
even in London, since the theatre better than any other place provided
with excellent disguise possibilities. He could even act as the actor
William Shakspere when Will had business in Stratford for six months
or so.
So I find the Marlowe link the only possible link that could unite
them all: Oxford, the Derbys and the Bacons - and Shakspere, the actor
and theatre agent. Bacon was much too tied up with politics and legal
duties to be able to engage so passionately in the subjective
dreamworld of theatre life.
Chris
Christian Lanciai
> In article <7e67b43b.03012...@posting.google.com>,
> clan...@hotmail.com (Christian Lanciai) wrote:
>
> > filea...@yahoo.com (John Bede) wrote in message
> news:<7e3701fc.03012...@posting.google.com>...
> > >snips<
>
> > > could have been wrongly conducted, for instance comparing the prose of
> > > Bacon with Shakespeare verses - I don't know. And of course you are
> > > right: there are many reasons for assuming that Marlowe and
> > > Shake-Speare was one. I was carried away in my last post by wild
> > > fancies, and you were right to observe it. We basically agree on that
> > > one thing only, that whoever wrote Shakespeare also wrote Marlowe.
> > >
> > > still on line,
> > >
> > > J.B.
> >
> >
> > That at least is something, and perhaps a common platform to start
> > from. However, Mendenhall's investigation was carried out in perfect
> > objectivity, he was employed by Augustus Heminway (note his spelling)
> > for the specific purpose of having Bacon identified as Shakespeare,
> > since that gentleman was cocksure Bacon was the man. The surprising
> > results of the investigation were totally unexpected. You can't just
> > brush them under the carpet. However, neither of us know the exact
> > details of what was investigated, whether it was verse or prose, and
> > you could be right about that only Bacon's prose was compared with
> > Marlowe's and Shakespeare's verse. However, the investigation
> > specifically points out that Marlowe stylometrically agrees as well
> > with Shakespeare as Shakespeare does with himself.
>
> "stylometric" methodology -- because the numbers I've seen cited refer to
> "Mendenhall's results" for a statistical measure that wasn't developed
> until after 1895, and Mendenhall is cited as having completed his
> research, I believe, before that date. (I wish I could be more specific
> as to the dates, but can only say that the vagueness of the citation,
> combined with what I do know for certain of the chronology, make the terms
> in which the research has been, in more recent work, described, sound just
> a bit fishy to me.) It further seems unlikely that Mendenhall would have
> been aware of those particular techniques until _well_ after they had been
> developed and published, but of course it's entirely possible that
> Mendenhall had just happened to be an early amateur evolutionary
> biologist, who also just happened to make a practice of reading the latest
> publications in the field of physical anthropology, and also just happened
> to have an interest in Bacon-as-Shakespeare and the ability to engage
> large numbers of human calculators in his project.
>
> It is just barely possible that Mendenhall could have seen an early
> version of the technique; it is in no way possible (unless there is a
> major flaw in all history of statistics) that he could have used the
> formula the paper in question asserts he had used. (More precisely, the
> paper asserts that modern techniques provide results directly comparable
> to Mendenhall's, and lists the result -- for p, I think? -- obtained by
> the more recent researcher, alongside the result (asserted to have been)
> obtained by Mendenhall. It is also possible that the more recent
> researchers had reworked Mendenhall's data, but that is not what they are
> cited as having done, and I'm not inclined to accept a plausible
> rationalization when all the writers who cite the research themselves
> decline to take that route.)
>
> I hesitate to say this, somewhat, because I'm not really able to research
> it, but it is really obvious to anyone who knows the bare facts as they'd
> be described in an encyclopedia entry.
>
> A good history of statistics that goes into the development of these
> techniques in detail (including mathematical detail) is D.P. Mackenzie's.
> Helen Walker's probably has a comparable level of detail, and she was in
> Worcester, where Mendenhall had also been, so that might be interesting to
> check, but I don't have library access or the knowledge of statistics
> necessary, at the present time. If anyone was really interested, I have
> enough material at hand to provide something a little more specific, but
> I'm not sure exactly how specific that would be.
>
> ----
> Janice Miller
> Framingham, Massachusetts
> <http://world.std.com/~jbmiller/>
Doctor Thomas Corwin Mendenhall published his astonishing research
results in December 1901. His method was purely mechanical, consisting
of just counting the amount of letters in as many words as possible.
His idea was, that each author had unconsciously his own 'mechanical
fingerprint', graphically providing a curve (marking how many words of
so many letters, from 1 to 15, he used) which separated him from all
other authors. To prove his point, he collected such graphs from the
writings of Thackeray, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, Dickens
and others, and comparing them he actually could show how each one was
markedly different from the others. He invented this method in the
1880s, and almost 20 years later the Baconian from Boston, Augustus
Heminway, engaged his services in an effort to have it proven that
Bacon had written Shakespeare.
What Dr Mendenhall did to oblige his employer was to engage a number
of ladies to count the amount of letters in words from Bacon,
Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Marlowe, Goldsmith, Lord
Lytton, Addison, and others. The ladies could only work 3-5 hours a
day, since the drudgery of counting how many letters there were to
millions of words was quite fatiguing. They counted the letters of
about two million words, 200,000 from Bacon's "The Advancement of
Learning" and "Henry VII" (all prose), 400,000 from Shakespeare,
75,000 from Jonson and all the words from all the plays by Marlowe.
The results almost immediately showed sharp discrepancies between
Bacon and Shakespeare, while the graphs of Shakespeare and Marlowe
proved identical. The sensation of this was, that Dr Mendenhall had
never before found any author's 'fingerprint graph' to correspond with
any other author's.
Naturally objections were raised. It was unfair to compare Bacon's
prose with Shakespeare's verse. Spelling varied in different editions
and different ages. Mistakes could have been made. Nevertheless, the
astonishing results of the purely mechanical research stand to this
day to be seen as authentic.
They don't prove anything, of course, but they clearly indicate that
Marlowe and Shakespeare were the same author, whoever he was. It has
not been disproved that he was Bacon, but the indications are more in
favour of that Marlowe wrote Marlowe, - which would indicate that
Marlowe rather than Bacon also wrote Shakespeare.
Chris
Graham
"Christian Lanciai" <clan...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:7e67b43b.0301...@posting.google.com...
> Marlowe and Shakespeare were the same author, whoever he was. It has
> not been disproved that he was Bacon, but the indications are more in
> favour of that Marlowe wrote Marlowe, - which would indicate that
> Marlowe rather than Bacon also wrote Shakespeare.
>
> Chris
There's just this little problem of Marlowe snuffing it, leaving this mortal
coil, pushing up the daisies, joining the choir invisible etc. a few years
too soon.
David Kathman
Praline: Hello, I wish to register a complaint.
Shopkeeper: Sorry, we're closing for lunch.
Praline: Never mind that my lad, I wish to complain about
this poet what I purchased not half an hour ago from
this very boutique.
Shopkeeper: Oh yes, Christopher Marlowe. What's wrong
with him?
Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with him. He's dead,
that's what's wrong with him.
Shopkeeper: No, no, he's resting, look!
Praline: Look my lad, I know a dead poet when I see one,
and I'm looking at one right now.
Shopkeeper: No, no sir, he's not dead. He's resting.
Praline: Resting?
Shopkeeper: Yeah, remarkable poet, Christopher Marlowe,
beautiful verbiage.
Praline: The verbiage don't enter into it. He's stone dead.
Shopkeeper: No, no -- he's just resting.
Praline: All right then, if he's resting I'll wake him up.
(shouts into cage) Hello, Marlowe! I've got some
nice tobacco for you when you wake up, Christopher Marlowe!
Shopkeeper (jogging cage): There, he moved.
Praline: No, he didn't. That was you pushing the cage.
Shopkeeper: I did not.
Praline: Yes, you did. (takes Marlowe out of cage, shouts)
Hello Marlowe, Marlowe! (bangs him against counter)
Christopher Marlowe, wake up! Marlowe! (throws him
in the air and lets him fall to the floor) Now that's
what I call a dead poet.
Shopkeeper: No, he's stunned.
Praline: Look my lad, I've had just about enough of this.
That poet is definitely deceased. And when I bought
him not half an hour aog, you assured me that his lack
of movement was due to his being tired and shagged out
after buggering several young boys.
Shopkeeper: He's probably pining for Cambridge.
Praline: Pining for Cambridge? What kind of talk is that?
Look, why did he fall flat on his back the moment
I got him home?
Shopkeeper: Christopher Marlowe prefers keeping on his back.
Beautiful poet, lovely verbiage.
Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examining that poet,
and I discovered that the only reason he had been
sitting on his perch was that he had been nailed there.
Shopkeeper: Well, of course he was nailed there. Otherwise
he would muscle up to those bars, and voom!
Praline: Look, matey (picks up Marlowe) this poet wouldn't
voom if I put four thousand volts through him. He's
bleeding demised.
Shopkeeper: He's not, he's pining.
Praline: He's not pining, he's passed on. This poet is
no more. He has ceased to be. He's expired and gone
to meet his maker. This is a late poet. He's a stiff.
Bereft of life, he rests in peace. If you hadn't
nailed him to his perch, he would be pushing up the
daisies. He's rung down the curtain and joined the
choir invisible. This is an ex-poet.
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
Gary Kosinsky
still have some questions about your post:
On 28 Jan 2003 13:40:46 -0800, clan...@hotmail.com (Christian
Lanciai) wrote:
>Doctor Thomas Corwin Mendenhall published his astonishing research
>results in December 1901. His method was purely mechanical, consisting
>of just counting the amount of letters in as many words as possible.
>His idea was, that each author had unconsciously his own 'mechanical
>fingerprint', graphically providing a curve (marking how many words of
>so many letters, from 1 to 15, he used) which separated him from all
>other authors.
What if he was wrong in this assumption?
>To prove his point, he collected such graphs from the
>writings of Thackeray, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, Dickens
>and others, and comparing them he actually could show how each one was
>markedly different from the others. He invented this method in the
>1880s, and almost 20 years later the Baconian from Boston, Augustus
>Heminway, engaged his services in an effort to have it proven that
>Bacon had written Shakespeare.
Any idea how many authors he actually analyzed? Also, do you
have any idea how many would need to be studied to have a meaningful
analysis, statistically-speaking?
>What Dr Mendenhall did to oblige his employer was to engage a number
>of ladies to count the amount of letters in words from Bacon,
>Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Marlowe, Goldsmith, Lord
>Lytton, Addison, and others. The ladies could only work 3-5 hours a
>day, since the drudgery of counting how many letters there were to
>millions of words was quite fatiguing. They counted the letters of
>about two million words, 200,000 from Bacon's "The Advancement of
>Learning" and "Henry VII" (all prose), 400,000 from Shakespeare,
>75,000 from Jonson and all the words from all the plays by Marlowe.
>The results almost immediately showed sharp discrepancies between
>Bacon and Shakespeare, while the graphs of Shakespeare and Marlowe
>proved identical. The sensation of this was, that Dr Mendenhall had
>never before found any author's 'fingerprint graph' to correspond with
>any other author's.
So does this indicate that Shakespeare and Marlowe's works
were written by the same person, or does it indicate that Mendenhall's
theory was simply wrong, and that the frequency of different writer's
word-lengths can overlap?
>Naturally objections were raised. It was unfair to compare Bacon's
>prose with Shakespeare's verse. Spelling varied in different editions
>and different ages. Mistakes could have been made. Nevertheless, the
>astonishing results of the purely mechanical research stand to this
>day to be seen as authentic.
How can it be seen to be authentic if the analysts were
possibly comparing apples with oranges (ie prose and verse), and may
have been using incorrect spellings?
>They don't prove anything, of course, but they clearly indicate that
>Marlowe and Shakespeare were the same author, whoever he was. It has
>not been disproved that he was Bacon, but the indications are more in
>favour of that Marlowe wrote Marlowe, - which would indicate that
>Marlowe rather than Bacon also wrote Shakespeare.
Or possibly it proves that the basic idea behind the analysis,
that each writer has a unique mechanical fingerprint that can be
determined by his or her respective word-lengths, is incorrect. Yes?
No?
- Gary Kosinsky
John Bede
> > > >the usual snips<
The Mendenhall investigation presents quite a few problems.
1) Since it's so utterly incredible that two authors show the same
stylographics, could the ladies who counted so many letters in so many
words (two million) have committed a mistake? Since they apparently
worked for so long with this, and were paid for it, and since their
master Dr Mendenhall was a scientific man, it's not likely that any
mistake was committed.
2) Could the comparison of Bacon's prose with Shakespeare's verse have
had a crucial effect on the credibility of the investigation? Or in
other words: is it possible that Bacon (if he wrote Bacon AND
Shakespeare) used generally longer words in Baconian prose and shorter
words in Shakespearean verse? In fact, it's easier to write verse with
shorter words, while especially scientific and philosophic prose would
rather invite the use of longer words. So the answer here is positive.
3) Could Bacon have written Marlowe? This is the most crucial
question. Your point that only Marlowe could have written "Arden of
Feversham" is the greatest argument against the possibility. This is
mined area, and we tread in darkness. First, we don't know for sure
that Marlowe/Shakespeare wrote "Arden of Feversham", although it seems
reasonable enough that Marlowe did, since he came from Canterbury and
Kent, which is the scene of this play taken directly from reality. The
Kentish idioms in Shakespeare also speak for Marlowe and not for
Bacon.
All the same, Bacon could have had interest in Kentish crimes since he
was a lawyer. So although more reasons speak for Marlowe here than for
Bacon, it's not excluded that Bacon could have written "Arden of
Feversham" - and, according to your reasoning, in that case also of
all of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's works.
John Bede
Bob Grumman
> Praline: Hello, I wish to register a complaint.
> Shopkeeper: Sorry, we're closing for lunch.
> Praline: Never mind that my lad, I wish to complain about
> this poet what I purchased not half an hour ago from
> this very boutique.
I'd make it, "I wish to complain about this bard what I purchased . . ."
--Bob G., Apprentice Neuendorffer
Christian Lanciai
> Christian: I don't know much about Mendenhall or statistics, but I
> still have some questions about your post:
Thanks for your questions, Gary. They certainly are relevant. I will
try to give as honest answers as I can.
>
> On 28 Jan 2003 13:40:46 -0800, clan...@hotmail.com (Christian
> Lanciai) wrote:
>
> >Doctor Thomas Corwin Mendenhall published his astonishing research
> >results in December 1901. His method was purely mechanical, consisting
> >of just counting the amount of letters in as many words as possible.
> >His idea was, that each author had unconsciously his own 'mechanical
> >fingerprint', graphically providing a curve (marking how many words of
> >so many letters, from 1 to 15, he used) which separated him from all
> >other authors.
>
> What if he was wrong in this assumption?
He couldn't have been entirely wrong, since the stylometrics of
different writers differed so definitely. The fact that the
differences were so obvious and the likeness of Marlowe's and
Shakespeare's graphs so almost perfectly identical all but proved his
point.
>
> >To prove his point, he collected such graphs from the
> >writings of Thackeray, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, Dickens
> >and others, and comparing them he actually could show how each one was
> >markedly different from the others. He invented this method in the
> >1880s, and almost 20 years later the Baconian from Boston, Augustus
> >Heminway, engaged his services in an effort to have it proven that
> >Bacon had written Shakespeare.
>
> Any idea how many authors he actually analyzed? Also, do you
> have any idea how many would need to be studied to have a meaningful
> analysis, statistically-speaking?
>
I don't know exactly how many he analysed, but they were a
considerable number. I will try to look into it.
>
> >What Dr Mendenhall did to oblige his employer was to engage a number
> >of ladies to count the amount of letters in words from Bacon,
> >Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Marlowe, Goldsmith, Lord
> >Lytton, Addison, and others. The ladies could only work 3-5 hours a
> >day, since the drudgery of counting how many letters there were to
> >millions of words was quite fatiguing. They counted the letters of
> >about two million words, 200,000 from Bacon's "The Advancement of
> >Learning" and "Henry VII" (all prose), 400,000 from Shakespeare,
> >75,000 from Jonson and all the words from all the plays by Marlowe.
> >The results almost immediately showed sharp discrepancies between
> >Bacon and Shakespeare, while the graphs of Shakespeare and Marlowe
> >proved identical. The sensation of this was, that Dr Mendenhall had
> >never before found any author's 'fingerprint graph' to correspond with
> >any other author's.
>
> So does this indicate that Shakespeare and Marlowe's works
> were written by the same person, or does it indicate that Mendenhall's
> theory was simply wrong, and that the frequency of different writer's
> word-lengths can overlap?
>
The special curiosity about the Shakespeare-Marlowe graphs was that,
whereas other authors actually sometimes could overlap somewhat but
never perfectly, the Shakespeare-Marlowe graph separated itself from
all the others by a unique idiosyncrasy. Unfortunately I can't give
the graphs here, but they should be available on the web somewhere.
>
> >Naturally objections were raised. It was unfair to compare Bacon's
> >prose with Shakespeare's verse. Spelling varied in different editions
> >and different ages. Mistakes could have been made. Nevertheless, the
> >astonishing results of the purely mechanical research stand to this
> >day to be seen as authentic.
>
> How can it be seen to be authentic if the analysts were
> possibly comparing apples with oranges (ie prose and verse), and may
> have been using incorrect spellings?
>
See my answer to John Bede below.
>
>
> >They don't prove anything, of course, but they clearly indicate that
> >Marlowe and Shakespeare were the same author, whoever he was. It has
> >not been disproved that he was Bacon, but the indications are more in
> >favour of that Marlowe wrote Marlowe, - which would indicate that
> >Marlowe rather than Bacon also wrote Shakespeare.
>
>
> Or possibly it proves that the basic idea behind the analysis,
> that each writer has a unique mechanical fingerprint that can be
> determined by his or her respective word-lengths, is incorrect. Yes?
> No?
No, it proves nothing. It merely indicates that Mendenhall was not
entirely wrong.
Now to John Bede's problems:
John Bede wrote:
> The Mendenhall investigation presents quite a few problems.
> 1) Since it's so utterly incredible that two authors show the same
> stylographics, could the ladies who counted so many letters in so many
> words (two million) have committed a mistake? Since they apparently
> worked for so long with this, and were paid for it, and since their
> master Dr Mendenhall was a scientific man, it's not likely that any
> mistake was committed.
No problem.
> 2) Could the comparison of Bacon's prose with Shakespeare's verse
> have had a crucial effect on the credibility of the investigation? Or in
> other words: is it possible that Bacon (if he wrote Bacon AND
> Shakespeare) used generally longer words in Baconian prose and
> shorter words in Shakespearean verse? In fact, it's easier to write verse > with shorter words, while especially scientific and philosophic prose
> would rather invite the use of longer words. So the answer here is
> positive.
Yes, possibly so. I can't refute that.
> 3) Could Bacon have written Marlowe? This is the most crucial
> question. Your point that only Marlowe could have written "Arden of
> Feversham" is the greatest argument against the possibility. This is
> mined area, and we tread in darkness. First, we don't know for sure
> that Marlowe/Shakespeare wrote "Arden of Feversham", although it seems
> reasonable enough that Marlowe did, since he came from Canterbury and
> Kent, which is the scene of this play taken directly from reality. The
> Kentish idioms in Shakespeare also speak for Marlowe and not for
Bacon.
> All the same, Bacon could have had interest in Kentish crimes since he
> was a lawyer.
If he had such an interest in Kentish crimes, why are there no other
such domestic crime plays by Shakespeare? This unique play stands
quite alone - there is nothing like it in anything else written by
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon or Thomas Kyd. It must therefore have been
written from a special motivation, a personal interest in the affair,
which only can be explained by the fact that the matter was much
talked about in the older Kent generation, that is Marlowe's parents.
No one else comes even close to it.
So although more reasons speak for Marlowe here than for
> Bacon, it's not excluded that Bacon could have written "Arden of
> Feversham" - and, according to your reasoning, in that case also of
> all of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's works.
Yes, I would say Bacon is excluded, for another thing: there is never
any sense of humour in Bacon. The Shakespeare humour begins in "Arden
of Feversham" and then never stops as long as the Shakespeare plays
keep coming rolling on. Bacon is a prefectly dried out sterile desert
of systematic perfection, like a geometrical garden, with no beauty,
imagination or laughs. The grim humour of Marlowe gradually transcends
into the constantly more human congeniality of Shakespeare - although
the grimness occasionally reappears, especially in the tragedies.
Chris
Art Neuendorffer
> >
> > >Doctor Thomas Corwin Mendenhall published his astonishing research
> > >results in December 1901. His method was purely mechanical, consisting
> > >of just counting the amount of letters in as many words as possible.
> > >His idea was, that each author had unconsciously his own 'mechanical
> > >fingerprint', graphically providing a curve (marking how many words of
> > >so many letters, from 1 to 15, he used) which separated him from all
> > >other authors.
> gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote:
> > What if he was wrong in this assumption?
"Christian Lanciai" <clan...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> He couldn't have been entirely wrong, since the stylometrics of
> different writers differed so definitely. The fact that the
> differences were so obvious and the likeness of Marlowe's and
> Shakespeare's graphs so almost perfectly identical all but proved his
> point.
> > Christian Lanciai) wrote:
> >
> > >To prove his point, he collected such graphs from the
> > >writings of Thackeray, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott, Dickens
> > >and others, and comparing them he actually could show how each one was
> > >markedly different from the others. He invented this method in the
> > >1880s, and almost 20 years later the Baconian from Boston, Augustus
> > >Heminway, engaged his services in an effort to have it proven that
> > >Bacon had written Shakespeare.
> gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote:
> > Any idea how many authors he actually analyzed? Also, do you
> > have any idea how many would need to be studied to have a meaningful
> > analysis, statistically-speaking?
"Christian Lanciai" <clan...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know exactly how many he analysed, but they were a
> considerable number. I will try to look into it.
>
> > Christian Lanciai) wrote:
> >
> > >What Dr Mendenhall did to oblige his employer was to engage a number
> > >of ladies to count the amount of letters in words from Bacon,
> > >Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Marlowe, Goldsmith, Lord
> > >Lytton, Addison, and others. The ladies could only work 3-5 hours a
> > >day, since the drudgery of counting how many letters there were to
> > >millions of words was quite fatiguing. They counted the letters of
> > >about two million words, 200,000 from Bacon's "The Advancement of
> > >Learning" and "Henry VII" (all prose), 400,000 from Shakespeare,
> > >75,000 from Jonson and all the words from all the plays by Marlowe.
> > >The results almost immediately showed sharp discrepancies between
> > >Bacon and Shakespeare, while the graphs of Shakespeare and Marlowe
> > >proved identical. The sensation of this was, that Dr Mendenhall had
> > >never before found any author's 'fingerprint graph' to correspond with
> > >any other author's.
> gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote:
> > So does this indicate that Shakespeare and Marlowe's works
> > were written by the same person, or does it indicate that Mendenhall's
> > theory was simply wrong, and that the frequency of different writer's
> > word-lengths can overlap?
> gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote:
> The special curiosity about the Shakespeare-Marlowe graphs was that,
> whereas other authors actually sometimes could overlap somewhat but
> never perfectly, the Shakespeare-Marlowe graph separated itself from
> all the others by a unique idiosyncrasy. Unfortunately I can't give
> the graphs here, but they should be available on the web somewhere.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Word Length 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
------------------------------------------------------------------
Shakespeare
non-comedies 20246 81182 104078 111597 59962 36201 26057 15314
Shakespeare
non-comedies 2745 11005 14109 15128 8129 4908 3532 2076
normalized to:
Late Marlowe 2535 11182 14276 15263 8223 4697 3391 2065
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.sirbacon.org/mmarley.htm
<<According to Mendenhall every writer consistently and unconsciously
followed a definite pattern denoted by the frequency of word lengths in
his writing. Mendenhall's theory was that in any two substantial samples
of anyone's writing there is the same pattern of relative word-lengths:
so many two-letter, three-letter, four-letter words per thousand in each
sample.>>
http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/appx4a.htm
http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/appx3a.htm
http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/chap8.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------
This makes for an acceptable fit *except for the fact* that
Shakespeare uses *far more one-letter* words than Marlowe!!!
----------------------------------------------------------
Fisher's Exact Test
http://www.matforsk.no/ola/fisher.htm
------------------------------------------
1 to 2 letter words
------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 2535 , 11182 , 20246 , 81182 ]
Left : p-value = 0.00002054943377554582
Right : p-value = 0.9999814143379697
2-Tail : p-value = 0.00004138202998428299
--------------------------------------------------------
Note, however, certain Shakespeare plays do have
~ 20% lower number of 1 letter words:
--------------------------------------------------------
King Richard II
King Henry V
III King Henry VI
I King Henry VI
Macbeth
King Richard III
Titus Andronicus
Marlowe's works might be compatible with these works.
--------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------
Ratio of 1 letter Shakespeare words
to common 2-4 letter Shakespeare words
--------------------------------------------------------
All Shakespeare
A, 16031
I, 21374
O, 2757
----------------
Sum: 40162 Ratio: 0.25793
29998 THE
27470 AND
22310 YOU/THOU
21018 TO
18609 OF
12965 MY
11803 IN
11534 THAT
----------------
155707
------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
Romeo and Juliet
A, 468
I, 583
O, 160
----------------
1211 0.33855
684 THE
723 AND
568 YOU/THOU
540 TO
395 OF
323 IN
344 THAT
----------------
3577
------------------------------------------
Othello
A, 450
I, 838
O, 155
----------------
1443 0.32870
761 THE
795 AND
625 YOU/THOU
599 TO
473 OF
427 MY
338 IN
372 THAT
----------------
4390
------------------------------------------
Cymbeline
A, 478
I, 715
O, 118
----------------
1311 0.29075
971 THE
715 AND
662 TO
527 OF
573 YOU/THOU
383 MY
313 IN
365 THAT
----------------
4509
------------------------------------------
I King Henry IV
A, 544
I, 636
O, 57
----------------
1237 0.27885
867 THE
866 AND
575 YOU/THOU
459 TO
705 OF
333 MY
377 IN
254 THAT
----------------
4436
------------------------------------------
Julius Caesar
A, 265
I, 521
O, 72
----------------
858 0.26416
613 THE
637 AND
507 YOU/THOU
423 TO
368 OF
189 MY
226 IN
285 THAT
----------------
3248
------------------------------------------
Cromwell (Apocryphal)
A, 231
I, 397
O, 41
----------------
669 0.26061
431 THE
410 AND
369 YOU/THOU
389 TO
272 OF
348 MY
165 IN
183 THAT
----------------
2567
------------------------------------------
II King Henry IV
A, 546
I, 632
O, 65
----------------
1243 0.25944
1000 THE
894 AND
663 YOU/THOU
576 TO
629 OF
411 MY
322 IN
296 THAT
----------------
4791
------------------------------------------
King Lear
A, 406
I, 648
O, 103
----------------
1157 0.25802
910 THE
737 AND
679 YOU/THOU
570 TO
483 OF
458 MY
299 IN
348 THAT
----------------
4484
------------------------------------------
King Henry VIII
A, 459
I, 578
O, 64
----------------
1101 0.25790
947 THE
737 AND
442 YOU/THOU
607 TO
540 OF
373 MY
298 IN
325 THAT
----------------
4269
------------------------------------------
Antony and Cleopatra
A, 337
I, 553
O, 121
----------------
1011 0.25414
872 THE
676 AND
537 YOU/THOU
568 TO
452 OF
316 MY
266 IN
291 THAT
----------------
3978
------------------------------------------
Sir Thomas More (Apocryphal)
A, 394
I, 462
O, 4
----------------
860 0.25383
716 THE
526 AND
376 YOU/THOU
477 TO
371 OF
364 MY
288 IN
270 THAT
----------------
3388
------------------------------------------
Timon of Athens
A, 309
I, 402
O, 52
----------------
763 0.25323
507 THE
541 AND
472 YOU/THOU
438 TO
327 OF
267 MY
236 IN
225 THAT
----------------
3013
------------------------------------------
Troilus and Cressida
A, 466
I, 520
O, 92
----------------
1078 0.25322
844 THE
785 AND
582 YOU/THOU
552 TO
507 OF
311 MY
370 IN
306 THAT
----------------
4257
------------------------------------------
Pericles
A, 353
I, 365
O, 54
----------------
772 0.24759
635 THE
523 AND
445 YOU/THOU
514 TO
330 OF
244 MY
221 IN
206 THAT
----------------
3118
------------------------------------------
Coriolanus
A, 438
I, 569
O, 101
----------------
1108 0.23544
1128 THE
747 AND
727 YOU/THOU
715 TO
484 OF
256 MY
329 IN
320 THAT
----------------
4706
------------------------------------------
King John
A, 340
I, 405
O, 72
----------------
817 0.23382
731 THE
701 AND
402 YOU/THOU
510 TO
563 OF
280 IN
307 THAT
----------------
3494
------------------------------------------
Hamlet
A, 536
I, 569
O, 124
----------------
1229 0.22216
1148 THE
970 AND
654 YOU/THOU
747 TO
671 OF
514 MY
437 IN
391 THAT
----------------
5532
------------------------------------------
John Oldcastle (Apocryphal)
A, 365
I, 448
O, 20
----------------
833 0.22095
731 THE
652 AND
541 YOU/THOU
474 TO
424 OF
371 MY
316 IN
261 THAT
----------------
3770
------------------------------------------
II King Henry VI
A, 394
I, 542
O, 47
----------------
983 0.21986
948 THE
949 AND
399 YOU/THOU
590 TO
549 OF
414 MY
336 IN
286 THAT
----------------
4471
------------------------------------------
Titus Andronicus
A, 305
I, 407
O, 69
----------------
781 0.21779
656 THE
828 AND
405 YOU/THOU
494 TO
323 OF
321 MY
279 IN
280 THAT
----------------
3586
------------------------------------------
King Richard III
A, 375
I, 712
O, 81
----------------
1168 0.21573
992 THE
902 AND
760 TO
741 OF
592 YOU/THOU
599 MY
408 IN
420 THAT
----------------
5414
------------------------------------------
Macbeth
A, 252
I, 338
O, 36
----------------
626 0.21241
733 THE
566 AND
293 YOU/THOU
384 TO
347 OF
192 MY
204 IN
228 THAT
----------------
2947
------------------------------------------
I King Henry VI
A, 326
I, 431
O, 40
----------------
797 0.20663
729 THE
748 AND
356 YOU/THOU
484 TO
659 OF
325 MY
302 IN
254 THAT
----------------
3857
------------------------------------------
III King Henry VI
A, 304
I, 492
O, 42
----------------
838 0.19824
814 THE
947 AND
408 YOU/THOU
608 TO
431 OF
414 MY
277 IN
328 THAT
----------------
4227
------------------------------------------
King Henry V
A, 446
I, 465
O, 56
----------------
967 0.19662
1102 THE
1019 AND
476 YOU/THOU
538 TO
753 OF
282 MY
430 IN
318 THAT
----------------
4918
------------------------------------------
King Richard II
A, 293
I, 466
O, 42
----------------
801 0.19204
749 THE
743 AND
339 YOU/THOU
569 TO
727 OF
467 MY
295 IN
282 THAT
----------------
4171
-------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Elizabeth Weir
> gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote in message news:<3e3764e4...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>...
> > Christian: I don't know much about Mendenhall or statistics, but I
> > still have some questions about your post:
>
> >
> > >Naturally objections were raised. It was unfair to compare Bacon's
> > >prose with Shakespeare's verse. Spelling varied in different editions
> > >and different ages. Mistakes could have been made. Nevertheless, the
> > >astonishing results of the purely mechanical research stand to this
> > >day to be seen as authentic.
There are four reasons why you and Mendenhall are wrong.
The famous Strat professor Dr. Edwin Abbott, who apparently
leaned toward Bacon for a time [Abbott wrote the preface to
Bacon's Promus, then followed it with a mean biography
mixing praise with censure in imitation of Macaulay]
nevertheless wrote quite penetratingly about Bacon's styles:
Bacon's style varied almost as much as his handwriting; but
it was influenced more by the subject-matter than by youth
or old age. Few men have shown equal versatility in adapting
their language to the slightest shade of circumstance and purpose.
His style depended upon whether he was addressing a king, or a
great nobleman, or a philosopher, or a friend; whether he was
composing a State paper, pleading in a State trial, magnifying
the Prerogative, extolling Truth, discussing studies, exhorting
a judge, sending a New Year's present, or sounding a trumpet to
prepare the way for the Kingdom of Man over Nature. In the
early Devices written during his connection with Essex, he
uses a rich exuberant style and poetic rhythm; but he prefers
the rhetorical question of appeal to the complex period....The
Essays, both early and late, abound in pithy metaphor as their
natural illustration..... --Dr. Abbott
There are two further reasons that Bacon's style in his acknowledged
works do not respond to word-length analyses:
Bacon drafted his works in Latin [he thought in Latin from
childhood] which works were then translated by his secretaries
[Jonson was one] into English or into Italian by John Florio.
A further complication is that Bacon's Latin works--and
most of Bacon's works remained untranslated at the time of his death--
were translated in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries
by many scholars of widely varying merit into English vernaculars
of their respective periods.
Bacon later relied on scribes, sometimes with two or more scribes
taking dictation at a time. Bacon invented a shorthand which
his scribes were required to learn [I'm assuming Bacon's vision
began to decline after he passed middle age], the scribes took
down Bacon's words, then transcribed them into Latin or English.
Somewhere in this process Bacon's own style was altered.
In 1996 two computer analysts at the University of Utah did
analyses on Bacon's acknowledged works and concluded that Bacon
did not write his own works. They said that they "of course knew
Bacon had to have written his own works" but perhaps Hobbes wrote
some or part of Bacon's works. [Hobbes and Bacon agreed on nothing,
so I doubt it].
What these geniuses failed to do is take into consideration the
eccentricities of Bacon's texts.
[...]
> Now to John Bede's problems:
> John Bede wrote:
> > The Mendenhall investigation presents quite a few problems.
> > 1) Since it's so utterly incredible that two authors show the same
> > stylographics, could the ladies who counted so many letters in so many
> > words (two million) have committed a mistake? Since they apparently
> > worked for so long with this, and were paid for it, and since their
> > master Dr Mendenhall was a scientific man, it's not likely that any
> > mistake was committed.
I don't see anything wrong with Mendenhall's methodology either.
Like the computer analysts at the U of Utah Mendenhall didn't take the
ideosyncracies of Bacon's methods into consideration.
> No problem.
>
> > 2) Could the comparison of Bacon's prose with Shakespeare's verse
> > have had a crucial effect on the credibility of the investigation? Or in
> > other words: is it possible that Bacon (if he wrote Bacon AND
> > Shakespeare) used generally longer words in Baconian prose and
> > shorter words in Shakespearean verse?
That's likely and constitutes a fourth reason why Bacon's
acknowledged works cannot be compared to the Shakespeare plays.
> > In fact, it's easier to write verse
> > with shorter words, while especially scientific and philosophic prose
> > would rather invite the use of longer words. So the answer here is
> > positive.
>
> Yes, possibly so. I can't refute that.
>
> > 3) Could Bacon have written Marlowe? This is the most crucial
> > question. Your point that only Marlowe could have written "Arden of
> > Feversham" is the greatest argument against the possibility. This is
> > mined area, and we tread in darkness. First, we don't know for sure
> > that Marlowe/Shakespeare wrote "Arden of Feversham", although it seems
> > reasonable enough that Marlowe did, since he came from Canterbury and
> > Kent, which is the scene of this play taken directly from reality. The
> > Kentish idioms in Shakespeare also speak for Marlowe and not for
> Bacon.
Bacon was raised with his cousins the three Sidney children at
Lord Burghley's when Sir Henry Sidney was Governor of Ireland.
Bacon may have returned to Penshurst after his stay at the
Court of Henry IV. There's some indirect evidence that he did.
Bacon lived at Burghley's "academy for young earls" for ten
or eleven years and there had an opportunity to pick up the
dialects of other children who arrived from at least a dozen
English shires. As an adult, Bacon was famous for
doing his characters in dialect when he told stories to his
friends. He was a gifted mimic with a quick wit.
> > All the same, Bacon could have had interest in Kentish crimes since he
> > was a lawyer.
No problem there. Francis Bacon's father, Sir Nicholas Bacon,
was born in Chiselhurst, Kent.
> If he had such an interest in Kentish crimes, why are there no other
> such domestic crime plays by Shakespeare?
>
> This unique play stands
> quite alone - there is nothing like it in anything else written by
> Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon or Thomas Kyd. It must therefore have been
> written from a special motivation, a personal interest in the affair,
> which only can be explained by the fact that the matter was much
> talked about in the older Kent generation, that is Marlowe's parents.
> No one else comes even close to it.
Bacon's father, Sir Nicholas Bacon "comes a lot closer to it" than
either of Marlowe's parents.
After Cambridge, Sir Nicholas Bacon studied law at Middle Temple,
was a judge on the common law bench and eventually became, as
Lord Keeper, the Lord Chief Justice. It's certain that the
Lord Chief Justice would have been familiar with famous criminal
cases in Kent.
Francis Bacon was saturated with the law as a child--his father even
had legal maxims carved into the woodwork at Gorhambury so his
sons would memorize them.
An interesting twist on the Kent connection is that Sir Nicholas Bacon
was born in a house in Chiselhurst that belonged to Sir Francis
Walsingham, presumably owned by his father Thomas when Sir Nicholas
was born. I think that Marlowe's lover Thomas Walsingham was
the nephew of Sir Francis Walsingham. Marlowe was living at
Thomas Walsingham's house in Chiselhurst, Kent, when he was
arrested for atheism. I wonder if it was the same Walsingham house
in which Sir Nicholas was born. I've also read that Francis Bacon
was a cousin to Sir Francis Walsingham. Anthony Bacon was very close
to Sir Francis Walsingham and gave him a pension after Elizabeth
refused to reimburse Walsingham for any part of the great fortune
he spent keeping her singy ass from being assassinated.
One way or another the Renaissance genius playwright Francis Bacon
had plenty of ways to know about the dialect and events in Kent.
I'm not exaggerating, Chris, when I say that Francis Bacon
is anywhere he needs to be to have written the Shakespeare works.
> > So although more reasons speak for Marlowe here than for
> > Bacon, it's not excluded that Bacon could have written "Arden of
> > Feversham" - and, according to your reasoning, in that case also of
> > all of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's works.
>
> Yes, I would say Bacon is excluded, for another thing: there is never
> any sense of humour in Bacon.
Your criticism of Bacon is hindered by the fact that you don't
know much about Bacon. Jonson didn't call Bacon the greatest
wit in many ages because Bacon had no sense of humor. Bacon was
famous for his sense of humor.
> The Shakespeare humour begins in "Arden
> of Feversham" and then never stops as long as the Shakespeare plays
> keep coming rolling on. Bacon is a prefectly dried out sterile desert
> of systematic perfection, like a geometrical garden, with no beauty,
> imagination or laughs.
Bacon and Marlowe do not fall into neat dualistic opposites. We know
very little about Marlowe apart from Deptford while Bacon, has
a relatively complete biography for an Elizabethan commoner. He's
nothing like you portray him and in fact, Bacon was a gifted landscape
architect who laid out extensive water gardens--not
geometrical--around
a charming house he designed himself and had built near Gorhambury.
The house, which was ruined in the Civil War, was not grimly
Elizabethan
or Jacobean but more like a 19th c. New Orleans mansion.
Bacon had huge wall-sized trick mirrors installed throughout to
befuddle his guests who would think they crossed the foyer and would
find
themselves out in the back garden. Bacon was bawdy and witty
not "sterile" and "dried out."
> The grim humour of Marlowe gradually transcends
> into the constantly more human congeniality of Shakespeare - although
> the grimness occasionally reappears, especially in the tragedies.
The Shakespeare plays after the death of Essex become more
darkly cynical. Bacon had a brief nervous breakdown after
Essex' death. I think he didn't believe Elizabeth would
go through with the execution.
Gary Kosinsky
wrote:
>gk...@vcn.bc.ca wrote:
>>(Christian Lanciai) wrote:
>>
>> >Doctor Thomas Corwin Mendenhall published his astonishing research
>> >results in December 1901. His method was purely mechanical, consisting
>> >of just counting the amount of letters in as many words as possible.
>> >His idea was, that each author had unconsciously his own 'mechanical
>> >fingerprint', graphically providing a curve (marking how many words of
>> >so many letters, from 1 to 15, he used) which separated him from all
>> >other authors.
>>
>> What if he was wrong in this assumption?
>
>He couldn't have been entirely wrong, since the stylometrics of
>different writers differed so definitely. The fact that the
>differences were so obvious and the likeness of Marlowe's and
>Shakespeare's graphs so almost perfectly identical all but proved his
>point.
Or the likeness of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's graphs
discredited his point.
I'm willing to accept that many different writers would
produce many different graphs using Mendenhall's system. The question
is: does **every** different writer produce a **unique** graph using
Mendenhall's system? **IF** this could be proven to be true, then
clearly those of us who believe that Marlowe and Shakespeare were two
different writers would have some explaining to do. But it seems to
me the only way to prove this assumption would be to increase
dramatically his sample size. From your original post it seems he
only analyzed twenty or thirty different writers, and maybe only a
half dozen from the Elizabethan Age at that. As I mentioned, I'm not
a statistician, but I suspect that he would have had to analyze
several hundred writers, and preferably as many as possible from the
Elizabethan/Jacobean Age, before too much is made of his results.
Having said that, was this analysis published in a book? If
so, would you know the title?
- Gary Kosinsky
bobgr...@nut-n-but.net
>>different writers differed so definitely. The fact that the
>>differences were so obvious and the likeness of Marlowe's and
>>Shakespeare's graphs so almost perfectly identical all but proved his
>>point.
>
> Or the likeness of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's graphs
>discredited his point.
> I'm willing to accept that many different writers would
>produce many different graphs using Mendenhall's system. The question
>is: does **every** different writer produce a **unique** graph using
>Mendenhall's system?
You don't need to be much of a statistician to know that can't be true since
there HAVE to be writers with the same Mendenhall profile--because there are
millions of writers but many fewer possible profiles. That is, if we assume
just about everyone's word-length averages between zero and twenty, and go to
the hundredths in describing a given word-length-usage, we'd only have two
thousand slots to put writers into.
>**IF** this could be proven to be true,
>then clearly those of us who believe that Marlowe and Shakespeare were two
>different writers would have some explaining to do.
Yes, but we could still say flukes can happen.
>But it seems to me the only way to prove this assumption would be to increase
>dramatically his sample size.
I'd say the only way to show there might be some small validity to the procedure
would be to prove that Marlowe was Shakespeare. As it is, the
near-proof that he was not demonstrates the Mendenhall method's lack of value.
Or am I not understanding it? I coming into this discussion in midstream.
--Bob G.
KQKnave
>> I'm willing to accept that many different writers would
>>produce many different graphs using Mendenhall's system. The question
>>is: does **every** different writer produce a **unique** graph using
>>Mendenhall's system?
>
>You don't need to be much of a statistician to know that can't be true since
>there HAVE to be writers with the same Mendenhall profile--because there are
>millions of writers but many fewer possible profiles. That is, if we assume
>just about everyone's word-length averages between zero and twenty, and go to
>the hundredths in describing a given word-length-usage, we'd only have two
>thousand slots to put writers into.
>
Dave Kathman posted this in the thread "Re: Five Arguments"
Feb 4, 2000:
"In any case, for his 1989 book *Elegy
by W.S.*, Foster did exhaustive counts of word-length
in Shakespeare, Bacon, Marlowe, and in elegies by
Donne, Tourneur, and Webster, more exhaustive and
rigorous than the counts done by Mendenhall. He
found that Marlowe's word lengths did not match
Shakespeare's appreciably better than Donne, Webster,
or Tourneur, though Marlowe was a much better match
than Bacon. Marlowe had more 2-letter words than
Shakespeare and fewer words of 6+ letters. I have
not compared Foster's results with yours, but I
also know that Shaxicon demonstrates that Marlowe's
rare vocabulary shares enough with Shakespeare's early
plays to show a clear influence, but not nearly
enough to indicate a single author."
What Foster did was to count the number of 1 through 6-letter
words in Shakespeare. He then compared several authors to
see how they compared. He says "To arrive at an expected
frequency for each word-length in a presumed poem by William
Shakespeare, we may set our parameters, quite narrowly
at 20 percent above and below the Shakespearean mean for
each category, while recognizing that a poem actually
written by him may deviate by more than 20 percent (short
poems, for example, neccessarily show less regularity
than do longer poems by the same poet)."
So, for example, the mean number of 1-letter words in
Shakespeare's poems (45070 words total; no plays included)
is 26.8/1000 words. This gives a range of 21.4 to 32.2 using the 20-percent
boundaries. Foster compared these numbers to a
200,000 word Bacon sample, a 133,495 word Marlowe sample,
Donne's "Funeral Elegy" (864 words), Tourneur's "Grief" (1,221
words), Webster's "Column" (2,624 words) and W.S.'s Funeral
Elegy (4,460 words). The two works by Tourneur and Webster are also funeral
elegies. In this case only Bacon, at 25, and W.S., at 21.5,
fell within the ranges. Bacon turns out to fall within the ranges
for only 2 kinds of words (1 and 3 letter), Marlowe falls
within four (2,3,4,5), Donne four (2,4,5,6), Tourneur four
(3,4,5,6), Webster five (2,3,4,5,6) and W.S.'s Elegy fit all
six. It would be interesting to see what the ranges are like
using much larger samples for Donne, Tourneur and Webster.
Foster comments that Mendenhall "a century ago found that
Shakespeare has a consistently higher frequency of four-letter
words than of two- or three-letter words. Many of his contemporaries-
Francis Bacon, for example- have a peak of three-letter words,
as do most modern authors. A few English authors (though not,
I believe, in Shakespeare's day) have a peak of two-letter words
(Mendenhall cites John Stuart Mill as an example)."
See my demolition of Monsarrat's RES paper!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/monsarr1.html
The Droeshout portrait is not unusual at all!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/shakenbake.html
Agent Jim
Gary Kosinsky
>>>He couldn't have been entirely wrong, since the stylometrics of
>>>different writers differed so definitely. The fact that the
>>>differences were so obvious and the likeness of Marlowe's and
>>>Shakespeare's graphs so almost perfectly identical all but proved his
>>>point.
>>
>> Or the likeness of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's graphs
>>discredited his point.
>
>> I'm willing to accept that many different writers would
>>produce many different graphs using Mendenhall's system. The question
>>is: does **every** different writer produce a **unique** graph using
>>Mendenhall's system?
>
>You don't need to be much of a statistician to know that can't be true since
>there HAVE to be writers with the same Mendenhall profile--because there are
>millions of writers but many fewer possible profiles. That is, if we assume
>just about everyone's word-length averages between zero and twenty, and go to
>the hundredths in describing a given word-length-usage, we'd only have two
>thousand slots to put writers into.
Well, as I said, I'm not much of a statistician, but I think
your figures are wrong, Bob. If I understand the process correctly
(and I may not), what is being graphed are the **percentages** of word
lengths that are being used. That is, 10% of Shakespeare's total
words might be two letters long, and 20% three letters long, etc.
Jonson's ratios may be 11% two-letter words and 19% three-letter
words, etc. Even if you assume the maximum word length is only seven
letters long, and if you assume the highest proportion any one group
could have would be, say 50%, it seems to me that you could have
millions and millions of different profiles. At any rate, certainly
more than two thousand. But I'm willing to defer to any of the
mathematicians in the group.
>
>>**IF** this could be proven to be true,
>>then clearly those of us who believe that Marlowe and Shakespeare were two
>>different writers would have some explaining to do.
>
>Yes, but we could still say flukes can happen.
True, but the larger his sample size, the more flukier it
becomes (assuming no other identical overlaps are found, of course).
>>But it seems to me the only way to prove this assumption would be to increase
>>dramatically his sample size.
>
>I'd say the only way to show there might be some small validity to the procedure
>would be to prove that Marlowe was Shakespeare. As it is, the
>near-proof that he was not demonstrates the Mendenhall method's lack of value.
That's pretty much what it indicates to me as well. Which is
why I'd be interested in seeing a larger sample size. It seems to me
that as more and more authors were examined, more and more identical
overlaps would be found, thus undercutting Mendenhall's initial
premise.
>Or am I not understanding it? I coming into this discussion in midstream.
So did I.
- Gary Kosinsky
Gary Kosinsky
SNIP
Obviously, then, Foster's analysis differs from Mendenhall's,
which, according to Christian, found a near-identical relationship
between Marlowe and Shakespeare. Clearly at least one of them made a
mistake in their tabulation.
And this illustrates some of the problems in doing a study
like this: can you compare poems with drama? How many lines of
poetry do you need for a statistically acceptable sample? For that
matter, what version do you use - the original spelling in the quatros
and the folios, or the modernized spellings?
>Foster comments that Mendenhall "a century ago found that
>Shakespeare has a consistently higher frequency of four-letter
>words than of two- or three-letter words. Many of his contemporaries-
>Francis Bacon, for example- have a peak of three-letter words,
>as do most modern authors. A few English authors (though not,
>I believe, in Shakespeare's day) have a peak of two-letter words
>(Mendenhall cites John Stuart Mill as an example)."
I'm glad you mentioned "in Shakespeare's day". This is
another problem with this sort of study. Even if a study was done of
hundreds of latter day writers, and none had overlapping graphs, it
might simply mean that there was a more common style in the
Elizabethan Age than in later days.
- Gary Kosinsky
bobgr...@nut-n-but.net
>>> I'm willing to accept that many different writers would
>>>produce many different graphs using Mendenhall's system. The question
>>>is: does **every** different writer produce a **unique** graph using
>>>Mendenhall's system?
>>
>>You don't need to be much of a statistician to know that can't be true since
>>there HAVE to be writers with the same Mendenhall profile--because there are
>>millions of writers but many fewer possible profiles. That is, if we assume
>>just about everyone's word-length averages between zero and twenty, and go to
>>the hundredths in describing a given word-length-usage, we'd only have two
>>thousand slots to put writers into.
>
> Well, as I said, I'm not much of a statistician, but I think
>your figures are wrong, Bob. If I understand the process correctly
>(and I may not), what is being graphed are the **percentages** of word
>lengths that are being used. That is, 10% of Shakespeare's total
>words might be two letters long, and 20% three letters long, etc.
>Jonson's ratios may be 11% two-letter words and 19% three-letter
>words, etc. Even if you assume the maximum word length is only seven
>letters long, and if you assume the highest proportion any one group
>could have would be, say 50%, it seems to me that you could have
>millions and millions of different profiles. At any rate, certainly
>more than two thousand. But I'm willing to defer to any of the
>mathematicians in the group.
You're right about the percentage of different word-lengths, Gary--as I finally
remembered after seeing someone else's post. As for number of profiles, it
would be in the multi-millions if we assumed every percentage would be from zero
to one. We can't, because the six used would have to add up to one hundred, but
we'd still get a lot of possible profiles. Another factor would reduce the
number, however: whatever figure is the minimum percentage possible for a given
length of word in any normal writing in English. For instance, the percentage
of three-letter words in anyone's text would have to be more than, say, five
percent. This would probably reduce the possible profiles substantially.
>>>**IF** this could be proven to be true,
>>>then clearly those of us who believe that Marlowe and Shakespeare were two
>>>different writers would have some explaining to do.
>>
>>Yes, but we could still say flukes can happen.
>
> True, but the larger his sample size, the more flukier it
>becomes (assuming no other identical overlaps are found, of course).
>
>>>But it seems to me the only way to prove this assumption would be to increase
>>>dramatically his sample size.
>>
>>I'd say the only way to show there might be some small validity to the procedure
>>would be to prove that Marlowe was Shakespeare. As it is, the
>>near-proof that he was not demonstrates the Mendenhall method's lack of value.
> That's pretty much what it indicates to me as well. Which is
>why I'd be interested in seeing a larger sample size. It seems to me
>that as more and more authors were examined, more and more identical
>overlaps would be found, thus undercutting Mendenhall's initial
>premise.
>>Or am I not understanding it? I'M coming into this discussion in midstream.
>
> So did I.
>- Gary Kosinsky
I love these kinds of investigations, so would welcome a larger sample size
myself.
--Bob G.
Christian Lanciai
> clan...@hotmail.com (Christian Lanciai) wrote in message news:<7e67b43b.03020...@posting.google.com>...
All this is very interesting, Elizabeth, but I have a few questions.
Would you say that the Sonnets were first thought in Latin and then
drafted in Latin before put into English? I would rather lean towards
the notion that a person never can know any language better than his
mother tongue and that the works of Shakespeare were written by
someone who thought in English first and last. Their language is too
direct to be translated from Latin. This also separates them from the
poems actually published in Bacon's name, which are stilted and really
could be translations from Latin drafts. Also the plays give the same
impression to be composed directly in English, especially if you
consider the comedy prose parts. I find it highly improbable that the
chronicles, the comedies or even tragedies like "Romeo and Juliet" and
"Timon of Athens" were first thought up and drafted in Latin. Some
plays, like the Merchant and Othello, were even almost direct
translations from the Italian and so could impossibly have been
drafted in Latin.
>
> A further complication is that Bacon's Latin works--and
> most of Bacon's works remained untranslated at the time of his death--
> were translated in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries
> by many scholars of widely varying merit into English vernaculars
> of their respective periods.
>
> Bacon later relied on scribes, sometimes with two or more scribes
> taking dictation at a time. Bacon invented a shorthand which
> his scribes were required to learn [I'm assuming Bacon's vision
> began to decline after he passed middle age], the scribes took
> down Bacon's words, then transcribed them into Latin or English.
This is a further argument against Bacon as Shakespeare, since
Shakespeare's verse is carefully wrought out through thorough
deliberation and hardly any loose improvisations. He could indeed have
dictated in Latin quite a lot, but Shakespeare's plays and poems are
not dictations. They are carefully deliberated inspirations produced
in intense concentration and therefore probably in solitude. You can't
allow yourself to be disturbed by the presence of others when you
compose let's say Hamlet's soliloquy.
Chiselhurst is in the south of London west of Bromley.
>
> > If he had such an interest in Kentish crimes, why are there no other
> > such domestic crime plays by Shakespeare?
> >
> > This unique play stands
> > quite alone - there is nothing like it in anything else written by
> > Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon or Thomas Kyd. It must therefore have been
> > written from a special motivation, a personal interest in the affair,
> > which only can be explained by the fact that the matter was much
> > talked about in the older Kent generation, that is Marlowe's parents.
> > No one else comes even close to it.
>
> Bacon's father, Sir Nicholas Bacon "comes a lot closer to it" than
> either of Marlowe's parents.
>
> After Cambridge, Sir Nicholas Bacon studied law at Middle Temple,
> was a judge on the common law bench and eventually became, as
> Lord Keeper, the Lord Chief Justice. It's certain that the
> Lord Chief Justice would have been familiar with famous criminal
> cases in Kent.
Yes, but so intimate with the human details of the case? The
psychology of Alice Arden the murderess? The almost sympathetic
comicality of Will the murderer and his repeated failures? The roguish
character of the play is more in style with Martin Marprelate's
mischievousness than with the perfect orderliness of Sir Francis Bacon
the public accuser of Essex' intolerable disorders.
>
> Francis Bacon was saturated with the law as a child--his father even
> had legal maxims carved into the woodwork at Gorhambury so his
> sons would memorize them.
>
> An interesting twist on the Kent connection is that Sir Nicholas Bacon
> was born in a house in Chiselhurst that belonged to Sir Francis
> Walsingham, presumably owned by his father Thomas when Sir Nicholas
> was born. I think that Marlowe's lover Thomas Walsingham was
> the nephew of Sir Francis Walsingham. Marlowe was living at
> Thomas Walsingham's house in Chiselhurst, Kent, when he was
> arrested for atheism. I wonder if it was the same Walsingham house
> in which Sir Nicholas was born. I've also read that Francis Bacon
> was a cousin to Sir Francis Walsingham. Anthony Bacon was very close
> to Sir Francis Walsingham and gave him a pension after Elizabeth
> refused to reimburse Walsingham for any part of the great fortune
> he spent keeping her singy ass from being assassinated.
>
> One way or another the Renaissance genius playwright Francis Bacon
> had plenty of ways to know about the dialect and events in Kent.
>
> I'm not exaggerating, Chris, when I say that Francis Bacon
> is anywhere he needs to be to have written the Shakespeare works.
I admit it's theoretically quite possible. Sir Nicholas Bacon's
background is certainly worth looking into more deeply.
>
> > > So although more reasons speak for Marlowe here than for
> > > Bacon, it's not excluded that Bacon could have written "Arden of
> > > Feversham" - and, according to your reasoning, in that case also of
> > > all of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's works.
> >
> > Yes, I would say Bacon is excluded, for another thing: there is never
> > any sense of humour in Bacon.
>
> Your criticism of Bacon is hindered by the fact that you don't
> know much about Bacon. Jonson didn't call Bacon the greatest
> wit in many ages because Bacon had no sense of humor. Bacon was
> famous for his sense of humor.
>
Jonson was dependent on Bacon's grace. Jonson thought of his pockets.
> > The Shakespeare humour begins in "Arden
> > of Feversham" and then never stops as long as the Shakespeare plays
> > keep coming rolling on. Bacon is a prefectly dried out sterile desert
> > of systematic perfection, like a geometrical garden, with no beauty,
> > imagination or laughs.
>
> Bacon and Marlowe do not fall into neat dualistic opposites. We know
> very little about Marlowe apart from Deptford while Bacon, has
> a relatively complete biography for an Elizabethan commoner.
And how do you fit the Sonnets into this complete biography, with
their sighs of despair in exile, their complaints of the treason of
friends and their obvious feelings of personal failure? Bacon was a
careerist. The author of the Sonnets was the opposite: he had given
up, and mind you, before 1609.
He's
> nothing like you portray him and in fact, Bacon was a gifted landscape
> architect who laid out extensive water gardens--not
> geometrical--around
> a charming house he designed himself and had built near Gorhambury.
> The house, which was ruined in the Civil War, was not grimly
> Elizabethan
> or Jacobean but more like a 19th c. New Orleans mansion.
> Bacon had huge wall-sized trick mirrors installed throughout to
> befuddle his guests who would think they crossed the foyer and would
> find
> themselves out in the back garden. Bacon was bawdy and witty
> not "sterile" and "dried out."
>
> > The grim humour of Marlowe gradually transcends
> > into the constantly more human congeniality of Shakespeare - although
> > the grimness occasionally reappears, especially in the tragedies.
>
> The Shakespeare plays after the death of Essex become more
> darkly cynical. Bacon had a brief nervous breakdown after
> Essex' death. I think he didn't believe Elizabeth would
> go through with the execution.
Quite possible.
Chris
Alan Jones
> elizabe...@mail.com (Elizabeth Weir) wrote in message
> news:<efbc3534.03020...@posting.google.com>...
>> The famous Strat professor Dr. Edwin Abbott,
Abbott was never a professor. There might be some debate as to how famous he
is or was, apart from his authorship of the mathematical fantasy "Flatland".
Students of Shakespeare still find his grammar useful.
[...]
>> Bacon drafted his works in Latin [he thought in Latin from
>> childhood] which works were then translated by his secretaries
>> [Jonson was one] into English or into Italian by John Florio.
>
> Would you say that the Sonnets were first thought in Latin and then
> drafted in Latin before put into English? I would rather lean towards
> the notion that a person never can know any language better than his
> mother tongue [...]
This generalisation may be shaky. Partly it depends on "know"; if you mean
this in the analytic sense, then I think Bacon would have "known" Latin
better than English, if only because there was at that time no grammar
textbook for English from which a student, even Bacon, could have learned as
much as he presumably knew about Latin. If you mean by "know" something like
"use fluently and accurately", at least consider the case of Joseph Conrad,
one of the greatest of English novelists but of Polish Ukrainian birth and
upbringing: English was apparently only his third language. So I have no
problem with a Bacon who as an adult thought and wrote with equal facility
in Latin and English, switching according to occasion and subject-matter.
Alan Jones
John W. Kennedy
> Christian Lanciai wrote:
>>Would you say that the Sonnets were first thought in Latin and then
>>drafted in Latin before put into English? I would rather lean towards
>>the notion that a person never can know any language better than his
>>mother tongue [...]
> This generalisation may be shaky. Partly it depends on "know"; if you mean
> this in the analytic sense, then I think Bacon would have "known" Latin
> better than English, if only because there was at that time no grammar
> textbook for English from which a student, even Bacon, could have learned as
> much as he presumably knew about Latin. If you mean by "know" something like
> "use fluently and accurately", at least consider the case of Joseph Conrad,
> one of the greatest of English novelists but of Polish Ukrainian birth and
> upbringing: English was apparently only his third language. So I have no
> problem with a Bacon who as an adult thought and wrote with equal facility
> in Latin and English, switching according to occasion and subject-matter.
True enough. However, the thought that Shakespeare's sonnets were first
drafted in Latin is nevertheless absurd.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly;
the rich have always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Man Who Was Thursday"
Alan Jones
> Alan Jones wrote:
>> Christian Lanciai wrote:
>>> Would you say that the Sonnets were first thought in Latin and then
>>> drafted in Latin before put into English? I would rather lean
>>> towards
>>> the notion that a person never can know any language better than his
>>> mother tongue [...]
>
>> This generalisation may be shaky. Partly it depends on "know"; if
>> you mean this in the analytic sense, then I think Bacon would have
>> "known" Latin better than English, if only because there was at that
>> time no grammar textbook for English from which a student, even
>> Bacon, could have learned as much as he presumably knew about Latin.
>> If you mean by "know" something like "use fluently and accurately",
>> at least consider the case of Joseph Conrad, one of the greatest of
>> English novelists but of Polish Ukrainian birth and upbringing:
>> English was apparently only his third language. So I have no problem
>> with a Bacon who as an adult thought and wrote with equal facility
>> in Latin and English, switching according to occasion and
>> subject-matter.
>
> True enough. However, the thought that Shakespeare's sonnets were
> first drafted in Latin is nevertheless absurd.
Yes. (In any case, how could one compose a sonnet in correct classical or
Renaissance Latin?) What I wrote concerned Bacon, whom I take *not* to be
the author of the Shakespeare sonnets or plays.
Alan Jones
Elizabeth Weir
> Christian Lanciai wrote:
> > elizabe...@mail.com (Elizabeth Weir) wrote in message
> > news:<efbc3534.03020...@posting.google.com>...
>
>
> >> The famous Strat professor Dr. Edwin Abbott,
>
> Abbott was never a professor. There might be some debate as to how famous he
> is or was, apart from his authorship of the mathematical fantasy "Flatland".
> Students of Shakespeare still find his grammar useful.
>
Perseus at Tufts University shows the Strat Edwin Abbott to have
been the headmaster of City of London School. We can split hairs
over the definition of "professor."
E. A. Abbott; A Shakespearean Grammar: (in English) Though
most widely known today as the author of Flatland, a Victorian
social satire and introduction to higher-dimensional geometry,
Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838 - 1926) was also for twenty-five years
the tireless headmaster of The City of London School . . .
Abbott was also the tireless author of a sneering biography of the
Renaissance genius Francis Bacon.
Abbott, Edwin Abbott
English clergyman and author, b. London. He wrote
several theological works and a biography (1885) of Francis Bacon,
but he is best known for his standard Shakespearian Grammar (1870)
and the pseudonymously written Flatland (by A Square, 1884,
6th ed. 1952).
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright © 2002
Columbia University Press
<http://www.bartleby.com/65/ab/Abbott-Edw.html>
<http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/vor?
type=phrase&alts=0&group=typecat&lookup=Shakespearean%20Grammar&collection=Perseus:collection:Renaissance>
Elizabeth Weir
> elizabe...@mail.com (Elizabeth Weir) wrote in message news:<efbc3534.03020...@posting.google.com>...
> > clan...@hotmail.com (Christian Lanciai) wrote in message news:<7e67b43b.03020...@posting.google.com>...
> snips
>
> All this is very interesting, Elizabeth, but I have a few questions.
Only "interesting?"
I just refuted Mendenhall and the computer analysts at the
University of Utah, none of whom did their homework on
Francis Bacon, the subject of their analyses.
I then quoted Bacon's worst enemy, Dr. Edwin Abbott,
who took a moment away from his character assassination of
the Renaissance genius to note that Bacon had, among his many
writing styles, a
" . . . rich exuberant style and poetic rhythm."
What more do you want? Your dismissal of Bacon is based on
the fact that Bacon flunked Mendenhall but Mendenhall flunked
constructing a scientific experiment. And I can cite many famous
minds who, like Abbott, found poetry in Bacon's "rich exuberant
style."
[...]
> Would you say that the Sonnets were first thought in Latin and then
> drafted in Latin before put into English?
You've obviously missed my phrase "acknowledged works" above.
> I would rather lean towards
> the notion that a person never can know any language better than his
> mother tongue and that the works of Shakespeare were written by
> someone who thought in English first and last. Their language is too
> direct to be translated from Latin. This also separates them from the
> poems actually published in Bacon's name, which are stilted and really
> could be translations from Latin drafts. Also the plays give the same
> impression to be composed directly in English, especially if you
> consider the comedy prose parts. I find it highly improbable that the
> chronicles, the comedies or even tragedies like "Romeo and Juliet" and
> "Timon of Athens" were first thought up and drafted in Latin. Some
> plays, like the Merchant and Othello, were even almost direct
> translations from the Italian and so could impossibly have been
> drafted in Latin.
See "acknowledged works" above.
[...]
>
> This is a further argument against Bacon as Shakespeare, since
> Shakespeare's verse is carefully wrought out through thorough
> deliberation and hardly any loose improvisations. He could indeed have
> dictated in Latin quite a lot, but Shakespeare's plays and poems are
> not dictations. They are carefully deliberated inspirations produced
> in intense concentration and therefore probably in solitude. You can't
> allow yourself to be disturbed by the presence of others when you
> compose let's say Hamlet's soliloquy.
I differentiated between Bacon's *acknowledged works* and
the Shakespeare works.
> > [...]
> >
> > No problem there. Francis Bacon's father, Sir Nicholas Bacon,
> > was born in Chiselhurst, Kent.
>
> Chiselhurst is in the south of London west of Bromley.
Google has 445 hits that say that Chiselhurst is in Kent.
You can't dismiss the fact that Lord Chief Justice Bacon, born
in Chiselhurst, Kent, is more likely to be familiar with the
legal points of the Arden murder than the non-lawyer parents
of Marlowe.
Lord Bacon had been for some years a judge in the common law
courts who presided over murder cases including a murder case
in which his famous ruling referred to in Merry Wives.
Of course the Strats can't attribute Arden of Feversham but the
fact that it's heavily dependent on Seneca is significant. Bacon
was a Stoic and much indebted to Seneca not only in terms of his
personal philosophy [Christian Stoic] but to Senecan rhetoric and
style.
> > > If he had such an interest in Kentish crimes, why are there no other
> > > such domestic crime plays by Shakespeare?
> > >
> > > This unique play stands
> > > quite alone - there is nothing like it in anything else written by
> > > Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon or Thomas Kyd. It must therefore have been
> > > written from a special motivation, a personal interest in the affair,
> > > which only can be explained by the fact that the matter was much
> > > talked about in the older Kent generation, that is Marlowe's parents.
> > > No one else comes even close to it.
> >
> > Bacon's father, Sir Nicholas Bacon "comes a lot closer to it" than
> > either of Marlowe's parents.
> >
> > After Cambridge, Sir Nicholas Bacon studied law at Middle Temple,
> > was a judge on the common law bench and eventually became, as
> > Lord Keeper, the Lord Chief Justice. It's certain that the
> > Lord Chief Justice would have been familiar with famous criminal
> > cases in Kent.
>
> Yes, but so intimate with the human details of the case? The
> psychology of Alice Arden the murderess? The almost sympathetic
> comicality of Will the murderer and his repeated failures? The roguish
> character of the play is more in style with Martin Marprelate's
> mischievousness than with the perfect orderliness of Sir Francis Bacon
> the public accuser of Essex' intolerable disorders.
Sir Nicholas Bacon, according to Jonson, was the greatest wit until
the very greatest wit, his son, the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon,
succeeded him. Both were riveting, witty story-tellers. Francis Bacon
also had plenty of sources in Kent--he was related to the Sidney-erberts;
at Court with Mary Sidney when they were the ages of Romeo and Juliet
respectively, raised with Philip and Robert Sidney, was close to
Sir Francis Walsingham and the Bacons had long ties to the emminent
Digges family in Kent.
Francis Bacon no doubt heard the details of the crime many times.
Bacon, who worked at Westminster and lodged at Gray's Inn just
before the play was published, had access to the records of the murder
and trial. Marlowe would not. The Burgher would not. We have no
knowledge of whether Marlowe or the Burgher were fascinating story
tellers--we know very little about them--almost nothing about
Marlowe.
> > Francis Bacon was saturated with the law as a child--his father even
> > had legal maxims carved into the woodwork at Gorhambury so his
> > sons would memorize them.
> >
> > An interesting twist on the Kent connection is that Sir Nicholas Bacon
> > was born in a house in Chiselhurst that belonged to Sir Francis
> > Walsingham, presumably owned by his father Thomas when Sir Nicholas
> > was born. I think that Marlowe's lover Thomas Walsingham was
> > the nephew of Sir Francis Walsingham. Marlowe was living at
> > Thomas Walsingham's house in Chiselhurst, Kent, when he was
> > arrested for atheism. I wonder if it was the same Walsingham house
> > in which Sir Nicholas was born. I've also read that Francis Bacon
> > was a cousin to Sir Francis Walsingham. Anthony Bacon was very close
> > to Sir Francis Walsingham and gave him a pension after Elizabeth
> > refused to reimburse Walsingham for any part of the great fortune
> > he spent keeping her singy ass from being assassinated.
> >
> > One way or another the Renaissance genius playwright Francis Bacon
> > had plenty of ways to know about the dialect and events in Kent.
> >
> > I'm not exaggerating, Chris, when I say that Francis Bacon
> > is anywhere he needs to be to have written the Shakespeare works.
>
> I admit it's theoretically quite possible. Sir Nicholas Bacon's
> background is certainly worth looking into more deeply.
>
It's sad that in losing Francis Bacon we've also lost
Sir Nicholas Bacon, a figure in the Elizabethan era so
noble and decent he was a "paradigm to young men"
into the 19th century when, of course, Strats commenced
to destroy his son and the Renaissance along with him to
keep their feudal Burgher.
> > > > So although more reasons speak for Marlowe here than for
> > > > Bacon, it's not excluded that Bacon could have written "Arden of
> > > > Feversham" - and, according to your reasoning, in that case also of
> > > > all of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's works.
> > >
> > > Yes, I would say Bacon is excluded, for another thing: there is never
> > > any sense of humour in Bacon.
I posted on Bacon's bawdy wit. I'm looking for a Jonson quote that
Bacon was an unstoppable punster. Bacon's Apopthegms are quite witty
although they're not written in the modern style.
> > Your criticism of Bacon is hindered by the fact that you don't
> > know much about Bacon. Jonson didn't call Bacon the greatest
> > wit in many ages because Bacon had no sense of humor. Bacon was
> > famous for his sense of humor.
> >
>
> Jonson was dependent on Bacon's grace. Jonson thought of his pockets.
Jonson wrote his highest praise of Bacon in 1640. Bacon was dead.
> > > The Shakespeare humour begins in "Arden
> > > of Feversham" and then never stops as long as the Shakespeare plays
> > > keep coming rolling on. Bacon is a prefectly dried out sterile desert
> > > of systematic perfection, like a geometrical garden, with no beauty,
> > > imagination or laughs.
> >
> > Bacon and Marlowe do not fall into neat dualistic opposites. We know
> > very little about Marlowe apart from Deptford while Bacon, has
> > a relatively complete biography for an Elizabethan commoner.
>
> And how do you fit the Sonnets into this complete biography, with
> their sighs of despair in exile, their complaints of the treason of
> friends and their obvious feelings of personal failure? Bacon was a
> careerist. The author of the Sonnets was the opposite: he had given
> up, and mind you, before 1609.
Bacon traveled to Scotland twice in the 1590s leaving
his platonic "my other myself," Sir Tobie Matthew ["Man of Hews"]
behind in at the Court in London, a cause for anxiety. Sonnet 20
precisely describes Mathew who was so astonishingly handsome he
was pursued by both men and women. Mathew was exiled from England
after he converted to Catholicism and refused to take the loyalty
oath. More separation.
I've posted on only one of Mathew's letter strongly suggesting that
Bacon was a concealed poet. There are several others that
corroborate the first.
Alan Jones
> "Alan Jones" <a...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:<xyO%9.7094$lZ1....@news-binary.blueyonder.co.uk>...
>> Christian Lanciai wrote:
>>> elizabe...@mail.com (Elizabeth Weir) wrote in message
>>> news:<efbc3534.03020...@posting.google.com>...
>>
>>
>>>> The famous Strat professor Dr. Edwin Abbott,
>>
>> Abbott was never a professor. There might be some debate as to how
>> famous he
>> is or was, apart from his authorship of the mathematical fantasy
>> "Flatland".
>> Students of Shakespeare still find his grammar useful.
>>
>
> Perseus at Tufts University shows the Strat Edwin Abbott to have
> been the headmaster of City of London School. We can split hairs
> over the definition of "professor."
In British English a professor holds a Chair at a university. Schoolmasters
are not professors. This isn't, to my mind, hairsplitting. You didn't
mention Abbott's time as a Fellow of his Cambridge college, or that he was
an Anglican priest: his chief interests seem to have been theology and
mathematics.
Alan Jones (who was introduced to "Flatland" as a boy and still has it, and
Abbott's "Grammar" on hsi shelves)
Lorenzo4344
>Alan Jones (who was introduced to "Flatland" as a boy and still has it, and
Abbott's "Grammar" on hsi shelves)
Likewise with the "Grammar." It's a great old book. I have had a lot of fun
with that tome. Alan, have you seen Jonathan Hope's "A Grammar Of Shakespeare"
that was published a few months ago (I haven't)? In the PDF intro at:
http://www.ardenshakespeare.com/reading_room/grammar_intro.pdf
Hope says it, "was conceived as a replacement for Abbott 1870." It is elsewhere
said ( http://www.ardenshakespeare.com/grammar.htm ) that, "This volume meets
the identified need for an authoritative and systematic grammar of Shakespeare
which takes account both of current linguistic developments and of the current
state of knowledge about Early Modern English." It is called a "complete
revision." Just wondering if you have seen the "upgrade," and if so, how you
think it compares with our crusty trusty.
Lorenzo
"Mark the music."
(Who marvels to be part of the thread that will not die.)
Christian Lanciai
> clan...@hotmail.com (Christian Lanciai) wrote in message news:<7e67b43b.03020...@posting.google.com>...
> > snips
> >
> > All this is very interesting, Elizabeth, but I have a few questions.
>
> Only "interesting?"
>
> I just refuted Mendenhall and the computer analysts at the
> University of Utah, none of whom did their homework on
> Francis Bacon, the subject of their analyses.
>
> I then quoted Bacon's worst enemy, Dr. Edwin Abbott,
> who took a moment away from his character assassination of
> the Renaissance genius to note that Bacon had, among his many
> writing styles, a
>
> " . . . rich exuberant style and poetic rhythm."
>
> What more do you want? Your dismissal of Bacon is based on
> the fact that Bacon flunked Mendenhall but Mendenhall flunked
> constructing a scientific experiment. And I can cite many famous
> minds who, like Abbott, found poetry in Bacon's "rich exuberant
> style."
>
> [...]
> > Would you say that the Sonnets were first thought in Latin and then
> > drafted in Latin before put into English?
>
> You've obviously missed my phrase "acknowledged works" above.
>
You explicitly said "Bacon drafted his works in Latin" without
specifying which works, which would have included also the Shakespeare
works, if he wrote them. The "acknowledged" works you only mentioned
in connection with Abbott's investigations.
No, you did not, except in connection with professor Abbott.
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > No problem there. Francis Bacon's father, Sir Nicholas Bacon,
> > > was born in Chiselhurst, Kent.
> >
> > Chiselhurst is in the south of London west of Bromley.
>
> Google has 445 hits that say that Chiselhurst is in Kent.
It might be formally within Kent, but geographically it's within
London. It might actually be right on the Kent border, between Croydon
and Bromley, closer to London than to Rochester, which is the first
real Kentish town east of London.
Ben Jonson died in 1637. Your inaccuracies are so amusing.
To conclude our merriment: Here is a paragraph from a letter I had
from Holland recently:
"This summer I've been reading two books by a Welsh writer called
Jasper Fforde who had this issue deeply inbedded in his story. The two
books are called "The Eyre Affair" and "Lost in a Good Book" and I
highly recommend them to you. Don't get me wrong, these are no studies
but novels, and light reading I might say, but they gave me great
plaeasure. In this book the people are so fanatic about their opinion
about who wrote Will's plays that they go around knocking on doors
like Jehova's witnesses trying to convince people that they're right.
There are even riots between the Marlowe followers and those who
follow Bacon! Highly amusing!"
I've never heard of Jasper Fforde. Have you?
Chris
John W. Kennedy
> In British English a professor holds a Chair at a university.
I am aware of the distinction, but (sincere question) what about
Hogwarts? (Of course, in the Potterverse, there does not appear to be a
university for wizards....)
Alan Jones
> Alan Jones wrote:
>> In British English a professor holds a Chair at a university.
>
> I am aware of the distinction, but (sincere question) what about
> Hogwarts? (Of course, in the Potterverse, there does not appear to
> be a university for wizards....)
Ah, that would have to be a minor application of "professor" in BrE, to
distinguished practitioners who serve their art by teaching at Schools of
Music. I suppose the Hogwart professors have a similar status in Magic. Or
perhaps they are self-appointed, as are street conjurers or puppeteers
calling themselves "Professor".
My objection to Elizabeth Weir's use of the term was her implication (as I
saw it) that Abbott was a university professor in a subject related to
Shakespeare or to 17th century history. He wasn't.
Another instance of a much more influential schoolmaster is Henry Fowler of
"Modern English Usage" - a classicist, I think.
Alan Jones
Alan Jones
No, I haven't seen it but will look for a copy (a library copy, since I
expect it will be too expensive for me to buy). Thanks for mentioning it - I
hadn't seen it reviewed.
Alan Jones
Elizabeth Weir
I saw "Prof. Edwin Abbott," probably in one of the 19th c. American
literary journals I've been browsing. Americans, especially in the
19th century, used "professor" in a much broader sense [see Twain]
than the British "holder of a Chair at a university."
Elizabeth Weir
I specifically stated that Bacon drafted his *acknowledged works*
in Latin. Bacon in no way *acknowledged* the Shakespeare plays.
If he had we wouldn't be here.
What makes you think that the computer analysts at the U of Utah
would consider the Shakespeare plays Bacon's works? They'd lose
tenure.
> > > > [...]
> > > >
> > > > No problem there. Francis Bacon's father, Sir Nicholas Bacon,
> > > > was born in Chiselhurst, Kent.
> > >
> > > Chiselhurst is in the south of London west of Bromley.
> >
> > Google has 445 hits that say that Chiselhurst is in Kent.
>
> It might be formally within Kent, but geographically it's within
> London. It might actually be right on the Kent border, between Croydon
> and Bromley, closer to London than to Rochester, which is the first
> real Kentish town east of London.
I looked at a page of the hits on Chiselhurst, Kent. There is
definitely a village or town named Chiselhurst in Kent. I don't
believe London is in Kent. The Walsingham and Bacon articles said
"Chiselhurst, Kent."
He may have died in 1637 but I believe that Discoveries was printed
in 1640. Maybe I'm wrong on the date but that's a very minor issue
and does not detract from my point which is that Johnson wrote his
highest praise of Bacon long after Bacon could give him patronage.
No, but I've seen the title "The Eyre Affair" here and there.
I don't think it was well-reviewed.
Furthermore, Baconians will never riot. Ideologues riot and
Baconians are not, by virtue of their empirical approach to
the authorship question, ideologues.
Christian Lanciai
> clan...@hotmail.com (Christian Lanciai) wrote in message news:<7e67b43b.03020...@posting.google.com>...
> > > > snips
> > specifying which works, which would have included also the Shakespeare
> > works, if he wrote them. The "acknowledged" works you only mentioned
> > in connection with Abbott's investigations.
>
> I specifically stated that Bacon drafted his *acknowledged works*
> in Latin. Bacon in no way *acknowledged* the Shakespeare plays.
> If he had we wouldn't be here.
>
Excuse me, Elizabeth, but this is what you wrote verbatim:
"Bacon drafted his works in Latin [he thought in Latin from
childhood] which works were then translated by his secretaries
[Jonson was one] into English or into Italian by John Florio. "
Maybe you meant something else, or maybe I have misunderstood
something - nevertheless, my quotation is correct.
> > > >snips
> > > > >
> > > > > No problem there. Francis Bacon's father, Sir Nicholas Bacon,
> > > > > was born in Chiselhurst, Kent.
> > > >
> > > > Chiselhurst is in the south of London west of Bromley.
> > >
> > > Google has 445 hits that say that Chiselhurst is in Kent.
> >
> > It might be formally within Kent, but geographically it's within
> > London. It might actually be right on the Kent border, between Croydon
> > and Bromley, closer to London than to Rochester, which is the first
> > real Kentish town east of London.
>
> I looked at a page of the hits on Chiselhurst, Kent. There is
> definitely a village or town named Chiselhurst in Kent. I don't
> believe London is in Kent. The Walsingham and Bacon articles said
> "Chiselhurst, Kent."
You should look up real maps. Chiselhurst is in the north-western tip
of Kent, where Kent, Surrey and the City of London meet. There is no
other Chiselhurst in Kent. You should go there yourself and find out.
In the very centre of the village you'll find what's left of Scudbury,
Thomas Walsingham's place, where they came to take Christopher Marlowe
away, whereupoon he vanished in the Deptford mystery. Scudbury today
is all in ruins but very well kept as an enchanting park with the moat
still there.
>
> > >snips
> > > Jonson wrote his highest praise of Bacon in 1640. Bacon was dead.
> > >
> >
> > Ben Jonson died in 1637. Your inaccuracies are so amusing.
>
> He may have died in 1637 but I believe that Discoveries was printed
> in 1640. Maybe I'm wrong on the date but that's a very minor issue
> and does not detract from my point which is that Johnson wrote his
> highest praise of Bacon long after Bacon could give him patronage.
>
So Jonson was much obliged and grateful for the protection and good
graces of Bacon. That's natural but has no connection with the
Shakespeare case.
> >snip
> > To conclude our merriment: Here is a paragraph from a letter I had
> > from Holland recently:
> >
> > "This summer I've been reading two books by a Welsh writer called
> > Jasper Fforde who had this issue deeply inbedded in his story. The two
> > books are called "The Eyre Affair" and "Lost in a Good Book" and I
> > highly recommend them to you. Don't get me wrong, these are no studies
> > but novels, and light reading I might say, but they gave me great
> > plaeasure. In this book the people are so fanatic about their opinion
> > about who wrote Will's plays that they go around knocking on doors
> > like Jehova's witnesses trying to convince people that they're right.
> > There are even riots between the Marlowe followers and those who
> > follow Bacon! Highly amusing!"
> >
> > I've never heard of Jasper Fforde. Have you?
>
> No, but I've seen the title "The Eyre Affair" here and there.
> I don't think it was well-reviewed.
>
> Furthermore, Baconians will never riot. Ideologues riot and
> Baconians are not, by virtue of their empirical approach to
> the authorship question, ideologues.
I respect Baconians for their good sense of diplomacy, which you
actually seldom find in the camps of Oxfordians or Marlites and least
of all in Stratford. I was delighted the other day to read Art
Neuendorffer's account of Derek Jacobi's taking sides in the debate.
Absolutely refreshing.
Chris
Bob Grumman
>> in Latin. Bacon in no way *acknowledged* the Shakespeare plays.
>> If he had we wouldn't be here.
That's not certain. Why should we take his word when all the evidence suggests
he was lying. If he acknowledged the plays as his AND left behind
incontrovertible evidence that they were his, we would still be here--except
that the wacks would be arguing against Bacon as The World's Greatest Author
instead of Shakespeare. And, gee, Elizabeth, you would be the David Kathman of
the discussion!
--Bob G.
Christian Lanciai
Another odd thing: if Bacon wrote all his acknowledged works by
dictation, and if he also wrote all the Shakespeare works, why would
he write them by totally different procedures? To hide his Shakespeare
authorship from Jonson and Florio? To go at any length to keep his
play-writing clandestine? It doesn't make sense. If Bacon wrote so
many works by dictation, he would have written all his works by the
same method. If he wrote the Shakespeare works privately in hiding he
would have written all his works the same way.
Ergo, Bacon probably didn't write Shakespeare.
Chris
John Bede
> Another odd thing: if Bacon wrote all his acknowledged works by
> dictation, and if he also wrote all the Shakespeare works, why would
> he write them by totally different procedures? To hide his Shakespeare
> authorship from Jonson and Florio? To go at any length to keep his
> play-writing clandestine? It doesn't make sense. If Bacon wrote so
> many works by dictation, he would have written all his works by the
> same method. If he wrote the Shakespeare works privately in hiding he
> would have written all his works the same way.
>
> Ergo, Bacon probably didn't write Shakespeare.
>
>
> Chris
You have allowed the very knowledgeable Elizabeth Weir to lead you
astray in her very muddled arguments. That's the basic problems of
Baconianism: the research area is so vast, that it's fairly impossible
not to get lost in the maze.
The truth is, we don't know how Bacon wrote his works, who his
secretaries were for which works, when he wrote them or anything at
all about the mode of their creation, but we do know that he was the
only Shakespeare contemporary who was qualified enough to write them.
All the most extreme emotions expressed in Shakespeare were present in
bacon's life while we find nothing of them in Shakespeare, Marlowe or
Derby. He probably learned much from Oxford, who was his relative and
senior predecessor in dramatic poetry, but there is nothing at all of
Shakespeare in the others. And of course, either bacon or Oxford (or
perhaps both together) wrote Marlowe.
John Bede, at it again.
PS: A hint to the old ridiculous but learned fool KQKnave alias Agent
Jim: just have a look at all the John Bedes that you find by google
search. There is not one of them in America, while they are almost all
Anglican bishops or worse. Why ever would such a ridiculous but
learned character as John Baker choose a pseudonym of that category? I
rather suspect, Jim, that YOU are John Baker.
bobgr...@nut-n-but.net
>> dictation, and if he also wrote all the Shakespeare works, why would
>> he write them by totally different procedures? To hide his Shakespeare
>> authorship from Jonson and Florio? To go at any length to keep his
>> play-writing clandestine? It doesn't make sense. If Bacon wrote so
>> many works by dictation, he would have written all his works by the
>> same method. If he wrote the Shakespeare works privately in hiding he
>> would have written all his works the same way.
>>
>> Ergo, Bacon probably didn't write Shakespeare.
>>
>>
>> Chris
Forget methods, wack: the First Folio says that the man who wrote its contents
was DEAD. Bacon was alive at the time. Ergo: Bacon was not Shakespeare.
>You have allowed the very knowledgeable Elizabeth Weir
Amazing what you wacks are able to call "knowledgeable."
> to lead you
>astray in her very muddled arguments. That's the basic problems of
>Baconianism: the research area is so vast, that it's fairly impossible
>not to get lost in the maze.
>
>The truth is, we don't know how Bacon wrote his works, who his
>secretaries were for which works, when he wrote them or anything at
>all about the mode of their creation, but we do know that he was the
>only Shakespeare contemporary who was qualified enough to write them.
>All the most extreme emotions expressed in Shakespeare were present in
>Bacon's life while we find nothing of them in Shakespeare, Marlowe or
>Derby.
I don't have them, either, of course--but is it because I'm a commoner or
because I delayed in going to college for fifteen years?
>He probably learned much from Oxford, who was his relative and
>senior predecessor in dramatic poetry, but there is nothing at all of
>Shakespeare in the others. And of course, either Bacon or Oxford (or
>perhaps both together) wrote Marlowe.
>
>John Bede, at it again.
Do you wacks at least realize that the more people you require for your
conspiracy (intentional or accidental), the less plausible it is?
--Bob G.
Elizabeth Weir
> >> in Latin. Bacon in no way *acknowledged* the Shakespeare plays.
> >> If he had we wouldn't be here.
>
> That's not certain. Why should we take his word when all the evidence suggests
> he was lying.
Grumman. Grumman grumman grummmmmmnnn.
What evidence suggests he was lying about what?
Bacon didn't lie about anything because nobody--except the
Privy Council--ever asked him anything about it. I think
he rather dissembled about "some old tales of mine" when
he was facing Essex' prosecutor Edward Coke but the powers
that be--either Burghley or Elizabeth--always protected
their genius from exposure.
> If he acknowledged the plays
He didn't acknowledge the plays.
> as his AND left behind
> incontrovertible evidence that they were his,
> we would still be here--except
> that the wacks would be arguing against Bacon as The World's Greatest Author
> instead of Shakespeare.
There would be no claims against Bacon's authorship because Bacon's
philosophies would finally be read--they've been neglected since Kant
who successfully sabotaged them for the sake of Plato--and then it
would be apparent that the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon wrote the
Shakespeare plays.
> And, gee, Elizabeth, you would be the David Kathman of
> the discussion!
>
> --Bob G.
Not a chance. I would never falsify Oxford's claim to authorship
and *then* send Sir Dudley Digges to Aldermanbury without the
Strachey letter.
You don't seem to understand, Grumman, that Kathman has dealt
the final death blow to Stratfordianism. It's over. Done.
David Kathman
filea...@yahoo.com (John Bede) wrote:
>You have allowed the very knowledgeable Elizabeth Weir
This may be the funniest thing I have ever read in this
newsgroup.
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
David L. Webb
"David Kathman" <dj...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
I was about to say the same thing. Unfortunately, this gem says far
more about John Bede and the lesser Kennedy than about Elizabeth Weird.
Christian Lanciai
> >
> > Another odd thing: if Bacon wrote all his acknowledged works by
> > dictation, and if he also wrote all the Shakespeare works, why would
> > he write them by totally different procedures? To hide his Shakespeare
> > authorship from Jonson and Florio? To go at any length to keep his
> > play-writing clandestine? It doesn't make sense. If Bacon wrote so
> > many works by dictation, he would have written all his works by the
> > same method. If he wrote the Shakespeare works privately in hiding he
> > would have written all his works the same way.
> >
> > Ergo, Bacon probably didn't write Shakespeare.
> >
> >
> > Chris
>
> You have allowed the very knowledgeable Elizabeth Weir to lead you
> astray in her very muddled arguments. That's the basic problems of
> Baconianism: the research area is so vast, that it's fairly impossible
> not to get lost in the maze.
>
Agreed.
> The truth is, we don't know how Bacon wrote his works, who his
> secretaries were for which works, when he wrote them or anything at
> all about the mode of their creation, but we do know that he was the
> only Shakespeare contemporary who was qualified enough to write them.
> All the most extreme emotions expressed in Shakespeare were present in
> bacon's life while we find nothing of them in Shakespeare, Marlowe or
> Derby.
I find no emotionalism at all in Bacon's writings. On the contrary -
he is all dried up.
He probably learned much from Oxford, who was his relative and
> senior predecessor in dramatic poetry, but there is nothing at all of
> Shakespeare in the others.
I agree that Oxford's influence is palpable, but his death in 1604
excludes him from any practical complicity . Whoever wrote the works
must have been an admirer close enough to Oxford to have been able to
study him thoroughly, and that excludes only the Stratman.
And of course, either bacon or Oxford (or
> perhaps both together) wrote Marlowe.
>
Here I must disagree. Only Marlowe could have written Marlowe. His
style and character is clearcut: his impish humour, his ridicule of
religious establishments (the Marprelate pamphlets, attributable
almost only to him, since we find the same ridicule of religious
establishments in almost only "Doctor Faustus","The Massacre at Paris"
and "King John". Mark well: the Marprelate pamphlets were published in
Canterbury, Marlowe's town;) which bold free-thinking led him to
trouble with the religious establishment (of course) which ended up in
the Deptford crisis, after which he changed style completely and
started on a new life as a new personality. But you can never ignore
the Marlowe that remains concealed in Shakespeare.
Chris
Christian Lanciai
I already answered this post once, but somehow apparently it didn't
get through, so like Thomas Carlyle I'll try to redo it all...
> > Another odd thing: if Bacon wrote all his acknowledged works by
> > dictation, and if he also wrote all the Shakespeare works, why would
> > he write them by totally different procedures? To hide his Shakespeare
> > authorship from Jonson and Florio? To go at any length to keep his
> > play-writing clandestine? It doesn't make sense. If Bacon wrote so
> > many works by dictation, he would have written all his works by the
> > same method. If he wrote the Shakespeare works privately in hiding he
> > would have written all his works the same way.
> >
> > Ergo, Bacon probably didn't write Shakespeare.
> >
> >
> > Chris
>
> You have allowed the very knowledgeable Elizabeth Weir to lead you
> astray in her very muddled arguments. That's the basic problems of
> Baconianism: the research area is so vast, that it's fairly impossible
> not to get lost in the maze.
Agreed.
>
> The truth is, we don't know how Bacon wrote his works, who his
> secretaries were for which works, when he wrote them or anything at
> all about the mode of their creation, but we do know that he was the
> only Shakespeare contemporary who was qualified enough to write them.
> All the most extreme emotions expressed in Shakespeare were present in
> bacon's life while we find nothing of them in Shakespeare, Marlowe or
> Derby. He probably learned much from Oxford, who was his relative and
> senior predecessor in dramatic poetry, but there is nothing at all of
> Shakespeare in the others.
There is much of Oxford in Shakespeare, and no doubt the author must
as an admirer of Oxford have been in a position to be able to study
him thoroughly. Bacon, Derby and Marlowe could be fitted into this
picture but not Shakspere.
And of course, either bacon or Oxford (or
> perhaps both together) wrote Marlowe.
Here I must disagree. Only Marlowe could have written Marlowe, because
only in him you find that ecclesiastical background which is betrayed
in his plays as impish satire against religious establishments, like
in "Doctor Faustus", "The Massacre at Paris" and "King John" but which
is most flagrant in the Marprelate pamphlets, that were published in
Canterbury, Marlowe's home town. Naturally, as a result he got into
problems with the religious authorities, which led down to the
Deptford crisis, after which he changed style completely, but it is
impossible to ignore the Marlowe traits that remain in Shakespeare.
Chris
John Bede
And whart makes you so sure that Marlowe was Martin Marprelate? Is
there anything to suggest it at all? Isn't it more probable that the
man behind 'Martin Marprelate' really was John Penry, a professional
cleric, whose whole life was dedicated to the church and religion
only, and who really was motivated enough to challenge the clerical
establishment? He was provedly at Canterbury where the pamphlets were
published and where he used the same printing press for less
controversial publications. Of course he denied his Marprelate
authorship all his life, since he knew they would hang him directly if
he confessed to them. I ask you: isn't it just possible that John
Penry was Martin Marprelate?
And then we have all this tremendous Marlovian mythology and chaos of
legends and ridiculous conjecture. There is nothing at all to prove
any authorship of his at all. I am quite convinced that Marlowe and
Shakespeare was the same author, but there is nothing to convince me
that Marlowe was that author, in fact, as little as I am convinced
that Shakspere was. So disperse all the foggy dreams and delusions and
concentrate on reality and what evidence we really have. There is
nothing to prove anything concrete about who 'Shakespeare' was, but
all the circumstantial evidence points in one single direction. When
Shakespeare at first began to be suspected of not having been the
author, the only possible alternative candidate was immediately found
to be Bacon. Two hundred years of further research has only repeatedly
failed in disproving the Bacon theory, while all alternative theories
have proved considerably weaker, especially the Marlowe theory.
John Bede, at it again, as usual
richard kennedy
Elizabeth Weir, which is wanting to know if Bacon was an actor. If
not, why does his name head the list of players in the first folio?
richard kennedy
Elizabeth Weir, which is wanting to know if Bacon was an actor. If
not, why does his name head the list of players in the first folio?
So disperse all the foggy dreams and delusions and
Elizabeth Weir
> Good, another Baconian who might answer the question I asked of
> Elizabeth Weir, which is wanting to know if Bacon was an actor. If
> not, why does his name head the list of players in the first folio?
Bacon is thought to have played Prospero at Court. He was the
greatest orator "in many ages" so stage fright was not a problem.
It's known that his friend Sir Tobie Matthew took parts in plays
at Court. Southampton as well. Both were young, pretty men so I
assume they took womens' roles.
Dame Daphne DuMaurier hired a team of professional researchers in
preparation for a book on Francis and Anthony Bacon's involvement
in the theatre. Her researchers discovered that Anthony bought
a house in Bishop's Gate adjacent to one of the theatres and
Francis, who was almost always destitute, lived there for several
years. She found some evidence that both were active in the theatre
but I'm not sure in what sense. There are numerous letters from
both Lord Burghley and their mother warning the brothers to stay
out of the theatres. They apparently did not.
As to your question, I suppose Jonson, who loved--that's the only
word for it--Francis Bacon, put Bacon's pen name first on
the list for the same reason that The Tempest opens the First Folio.
The First Folio is Jonson's parodic tribute to a genius he first despised,
then later came to idolize. Jonson's O Happy Genius! to Lord Bacon
is one of the great Elizabethan poems. Strats don't pay much attention
to it. I wonder why.
It just occurred to me that it would require a philosopher to write
the character of a philosopher in the plays. Philosophers--particularly
philsophers of the standing of Bacon who "overturned Aristotle" and "stood
Plato on his head"--are one in a billion, not one in a million.
How could a rustic Burgher with an uncertain education, even assuming
[without the slightest evidence] that he was a natural genius, write
the philosophical dialogue of a philosopher?
We are expected to believe that the Burgher not only created the
character of a philosopher in The Tempest, but that the Burgher
put Bacon's philosophy in Prospero's mouth before it was
published by Bacon.
I think this stands as a logical proof of Bacon's authorship.
> So disperse all the foggy dreams and delusions and
> > concentrate on reality and what evidence we really have. There is
> > nothing to prove anything concrete about who 'Shakespeare' was, but
> > all the circumstantial evidence points in one single direction. When
> > Shakespeare at first began to be suspected of not having been the
> > author, the only possible alternative candidate was immediately found
> > to be Bacon. Two hundred years of further research has only repeatedly
> > failed in disproving the Bacon theory,
Yep. All that character assassination of Bacon and Baconians and it
only cost us the Renaissance.
It didn't touch Bacon's authorship.
John W. Kennedy
> Bacon is thought to have played Prospero at Court.
Substantiate, please.
> He was the
> greatest orator "in many ages"
Source?
> so stage fright was not a problem.
> It's known that his friend Sir Tobie Matthew took parts in plays
> at Court.
Source?
> Southampton as well.
Source?
> Both were young, pretty men so I
> assume they took womens' roles.
You assume.
> Dame Daphne DuMaurier hired a team of professional researchers in
> preparation for a book on Francis and Anthony Bacon's involvement
> in the theatre. Her researchers discovered that Anthony bought
> a house in Bishop's Gate adjacent to one of the theatres and
> Francis, who was almost always destitute, lived there for several
> years. She found some evidence that both were active in the theatre
> but I'm not sure in what sense.
"Some evidence" but you're not sure of what it is?
> There are numerous letters from
> both Lord Burghley and their mother warning the brothers to stay
> out of the theatres. They apparently did not.
Source?
> As to your question, I suppose Jonson, who loved--that's the only
> word for it--Francis Bacon,
Substantiate, please.
> put Bacon's pen name first on
> the list for the same reason that The Tempest opens the First Folio.
Your reasoning, if any?
> The First Folio is Jonson's parodic tribute to a genius he first despised,
> then later came to idolize.
Your reasoning, if any?
> Jonson's O Happy Genius! to Lord Bacon
> is one of the great Elizabethan poems. Strats don't pay much attention
> to it. I wonder why.
Because it has nothing to do with Shakespeare?
> It just occurred to me that it would require a philosopher to write
> the character of a philosopher in the plays.
You realize, of course, that if Joe Straczynski hears that you've
revealed the fact that he possesses a triluminary, the Men in Black will
come after you?
> Philosophers--particularly
> philsophers of the standing of Bacon who "overturned Aristotle" and "stood
> Plato on his head"--are one in a billion, not one in a million.
Bacon, in fact, built on both of them.
> How could a rustic Burgher with an uncertain education, even assuming
> [without the slightest evidence] that he was a natural genius, write
> the philosophical dialogue of a philosopher?
The only philosopher in all the plays is Apemantus.
(Well, that's not entirely fair. In Elizabethan parlance, Friar
Lawrence is a "philosopher", too. Maybe Prospero, too.)
> We are expected to believe that the Burgher not only created the
> character of a philosopher in The Tempest, but that the Burgher
> put Bacon's philosophy in Prospero's mouth before it was
> published by Bacon.
Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
> I think this stands as a logical proof of Bacon's authorship.
-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! [Stopping to wipe the tears of laughter
from my eyes.] You don't even know squat about Bacon, do you?
--
John W. Kennedy
"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only
the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots
would fight a war on twelve fronts"
-- "Babylon 5"
David L. Webb
Elizabeth has never known what she was talking about when discussing
ANY subject yet, from history to lexicography to relativity to
hyperbolic geometry to foreign languages; why should Bacon be any
different?
fred
"John W. Kennedy" <jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote in message
news:RVTaa.81818$gf7.18...@news4.srv.hcvlny.cv.net...
> Elizabeth Weir wrote:
> > Bacon is thought to have played Prospero at Court.
>
> Substantiate, please.
>
He liked to ham it up a bit!
Sorry, but her frequent spewings on the so-called 'renaissance genius' are
as tedious and repetitive as Art's.
Alan Jones
It's the "renaissance" that baffles me. I'd have thought Bacon (and of
course Shakespeare) a little late for even the English Renaissance. But
perhaps the term is elastic.
Alan Jones
Elizabeth Weir
The sheer dullness of Strat evidence--the billionth go-round on the
illiterate scrawls, the Droeshout dummy, the second best bed--that's
not tedious and repetitive? The insufferably dull Strat case is
no doubt the cause of all the Strat snapping and biting in HLAS.
At least Oxford is entertaining, really one of the most fascinating
Elizabethans in his own wicked way, even if his young cousin the
Renaissance genius Francis wrote the Shakespeare plays.
John W. Kennedy
>>>Substantiate, please.
Well, in practice, Elizabeth I seems to be regarded as the archetypal
English-Renaissance monarch, and Shakespeare certainly counts as an
"Elizabethan". Bacon is more problematic, but I suppose there's a
certain convenience in regarding the "English Renaissance" as extending
to the Civil War, for lack of a convenient name for the interim (just
as, in theatre-history circles, the "Restoration" lasts until 1737).
What I find amusing about Weird Lizzie is her complete failure to
understand or appreciate Bacon. I can understand the Oxfordians'
pathological need to create a phantasy version of the horrid De Vere,
but why can't Baconians deal with the real man?
David L. Webb
"fred" <ying...@song.con> wrote:
Far more so, I would say. Art is at least intelligent (although I
admit that he conceals it very well) and occasionally witty.
John W. Kennedy
> The sheer dullness of Strat evidence--the billionth go-round on the
> illiterate scrawls, the Droeshout dummy, the second best bed--that's
> not tedious and repetitive? The insufferably dull Strat case is
> no doubt the cause of all the Strat snapping and biting in HLAS.
Note the quintessential anti-Strat logic.
Now every man wryting thus his name in a shell,
whom they would have banished: it is reported
there was a plaine man of the contry (very simple)
that coulde neither wryte, nor read, who came to
Aristides (being the first man he met with) and
gave him his shell, praying him to wryte Aristides
name upon it. He being abashed withall did aske
the contrie man, if Aristides bad ever done him
any displeasure. No, sayed the contrie man, he
never did me hurt, nor I know him not: but it
greeves me to heare every man call him a just man.
-- Plutarch (North's translation)
John Bede
> Elizabeth Weir, which is wanting to know if Bacon was an actor. If
> not, why does his name head the list of players in the first folio?
>
That's simply the definite proof of his personal involvement in "The
First Folio", like Hitchcock marking his presence in each of his
movies as a walker-on.
John Bede
L Wood
>snip<
> (just as, in theatre-history circles, the "Restoration"
> lasts until 1737).
>more snip<
Why is 1737 the cut-off? What happened then?
Lyn
John W. Kennedy
>>more snip<
The Stage Licensing Act.
Elizabeth Weir
> Elizabeth Weir wrote:
> > The sheer dullness of Strat evidence--the billionth go-round on the
> > illiterate scrawls, the Droeshout dummy, the second best bed--that's
> > not tedious and repetitive? The insufferably dull Strat case is
> > no doubt the cause of all the Strat snapping and biting in HLAS.
>
> Note the quintessential anti-Strat logic.
>
> Now every man wryting thus his name in a shell,
> whom they would have banished: it is reported
> there was a plaine man of the contry (very simple)
> that coulde neither wryte, nor read, who came to
> Aristides (being the first man he met with) and
> gave him his shell, praying him to wryte Aristides
> name upon it. He being abashed withall did aske
> the contrie man, if Aristides bad ever done him
> any displeasure. No, sayed the contrie man, he
> never did me hurt, nor I know him not: but it
> greeves me to heare every man call him a just man.
> -- Plutarch (North's translation)
Kennedy! You've come up with a great metaphor for the Strat
destruction of a genius. The adherents of the illiterate
"country man" don't know anything about the genius but
it grieves them to hear that he was one.
Mark Steese
Weir) that wrote news:efbc3534.03031...@posting.google.com, on
the day of 11 Mar 2003:
>> Note the quintessential anti-Strat logic.
>>
>> Now every man wryting thus his name in a shell,
>> whom they would have banished: it is reported
>> there was a plaine man of the contry (very simple)
>> that coulde neither wryte, nor read, who came to
>> Aristides (being the first man he met with) and
>> gave him his shell, praying him to wryte Aristides
>> name upon it. He being abashed withall did aske
>> the contrie man, if Aristides bad ever done him
>> any displeasure. No, sayed the contrie man, he
>> never did me hurt, nor I know him not: but it
>> greeves me to heare every man call him a just man.
>> -- Plutarch (North's translation)
>
> Kennedy! You've come up with a great metaphor for the Strat
> destruction of a genius. The adherents of the illiterate "country man"
> don't know anything about the genius but it grieves them to hear that
> he was one.
Are you saying that Bacon's acknowledged works are insufficient to
establish his genius? I have yet to encounter a Shakespearean who denies
Bacon's genius; his intellectual accomplishments far outstripped
Shakespeare's. It draws no envy on Bacon's name to 'deprive' him of the
credit for works that he neither wrote nor claimed to have written; the
Essays, the Novum Organum, the New Atlantis, the Proficience and
Advancement of Learning - who thinks these are insufficient to establish
Bacon's genius? Only Baconians, it seems.
-Mark Steese
--
there's a ribbon in the willow and a tire swing rope
and a briar patch of berries takin over the slope
the cat'll sleep in the mailbox and we'll never go to town
till we bury every dream in the cold cold ground
cold cold ground -Tom Waits
Theon252
> > Philosophers--particularly
> > philsophers of the standing of Bacon who "overturned Aristotle" and "stood
> > Plato on his head"--are one in a billion, not one in a million.
>
> Bacon, in fact, built on both of them.
>
> > How could a rustic Burgher with an uncertain education, even assuming
> > [without the slightest evidence] that he was a natural genius, write
> > the philosophical dialogue of a philosopher?
>
> The only philosopher in all the plays is Apemantus.
>
> (Well, that's not entirely fair. In Elizabethan parlance, Friar
> Lawrence is a "philosopher", too. Maybe Prospero, too.)
What's interesting about the authorship debate is that the Anti-Strats
tend to have a much higher view of the plays than the Strats do. One
Strat literature book said that the plays are "too bad for a Lord
Chancellor to have written".
bobgr...@nut-n-but.net
between dramatic literature and philosophy? Another: can a non-playwright have
any valid opinion about the writing of plays? I, of course, say, of course, but
I, unlike you, believe a non-philosopher can write a play with philosphers in
it. Not that Shakespeare ever did.
--Bob G.
Bob Grumman
>tend to have a much higher view of the plays than the Strats do.
Why, then, do the wacks always have to invent qualities for the plays like
philosophy and/or Political Importance to be able to appreciate them whereas the
sane find them to be masterpieces even though they find "nothing" in them but
interesting characters, absorbing plots, and superior diction?
--Bob G.
John W. Kennedy
> What's interesting about the authorship debate is that the Anti-Strats
> tend to have a much higher view of the plays than the Strats do.
Yes, that's at the very root of the anti-Strats' problem. They have
confused the "literature of power" with the "literature of knowledge",
falling into the same trap as those who enter "Jedi" on religious survey
forms. Too sophisticated for Mopsa's demand that the _stories_ of the
plays be true, the Baconians wished for them to be "true" in some other
manner, and settled on "philosophy". (Query: has any anti-Strat ever
been a trained philosopher?) The Oxfordians, being not so sophisticated
as their senior brethren, actually _do_ require the stories to be true
-- thus their insistence on the pointless allegories they spin out of
spit and shit. The Marlovians reject both, but continue with
anti-Stratfordianism out of mere habit, having forgotten that, without
their predecessor's errors, there was never any basis for
anti-Stratforianism to begin with.
Christian Lanciai
<snip>
> >
> > And of course, either bacon or Oxford (or
> > > perhaps both together) wrote Marlowe.
> >
> > Here I must disagree. Only Marlowe could have written Marlowe, because
> > only in him you find that ecclesiastical background which is betrayed
> > in his plays as impish satire against religious establishments, like
> > in "Doctor Faustus", "The Massacre at Paris" and "King John" but which
> > is most flagrant in the Marprelate pamphlets, that were published in
> > Canterbury, Marlowe's home town. Naturally, as a result he got into
> > problems with the religious authorities, which led down to the
> > Deptford crisis, after which he changed style completely, but it is
> > impossible to ignore the Marlowe traits that remain in Shakespeare.
> >
> > Chris
>
>
>
> And whart makes you so sure that Marlowe was Martin Marprelate? Is
> there anything to suggest it at all? Isn't it more probable that the
> man behind 'Martin Marprelate' really was John Penry, a professional
> cleric, whose whole life was dedicated to the church and religion
> only, and who really was motivated enough to challenge the clerical
> establishment? He was provedly at Canterbury where the pamphlets were
> published and where he used the same printing press for less
> controversial publications. Of course he denied his Marprelate
> authorship all his life, since he knew they would hang him directly if
> he confessed to them. I ask you: isn't it just possible that John
> Penry was Martin Marprelate?
Since there is no evidence neither for nor against John Penry or
Marlowe being Martin Marprelate, there is of course a slight
possibility, but it's not probable. John Penry had no sense of
humour, and scholars in general exclude him as Martin Marprelate. But
John Penry and Marlowe studied together at Cambridge, and the humour
in Marprelate is stylistically almost identical with Marlowe's
humorously satirical style. I am not sure, of course, but I would
consider it more probable to identify Marprelate with Marlowe than
with Penry. The prefix "Mar-" also suggests Marlowe, like "Sir Oliver
Martext" in "As You Like It". You should read the articles on John
Penry and Martin Marprelate in Encyclopaedia Britannica, which
excludes the former from the latter authorship.
>
> And then we have all this tremendous Marlovian mythology and chaos of
> legends and ridiculous conjecture.
What about the Baconian "tremendous mythology and chaos of legends and
ridiculous conjecture"? I think Baconian mythology definitely beats
the Marlovian mythology. Marlovians at least don't think Marlowe was
the son of the Virgin Queen, nor that he wrote Cervantes and Montaigne
in their original languages.
There is nothing at all to prove
> any authorship of his at all. I am quite convinced that Marlowe and
> Shakespeare was the same author, but there is nothing to convince me
> that Marlowe was that author, in fact, as little as I am convinced
> that Shakspere was. So disperse all the foggy dreams and delusions and
> concentrate on reality and what evidence we really have. There is
> nothing to prove anything concrete about who 'Shakespeare' was, but
> all the circumstantial evidence points in one single direction. When
> Shakespeare at first began to be suspected of not having been the
> author, the only possible alternative candidate was immediately found
> to be Bacon. Two hundred years of further research has only repeatedly
> failed in disproving the Bacon theory, while all alternative theories
> have proved considerably weaker, especially the Marlowe theory.
No, the Baconian theory is not stronger or weaker than the other
theories. They all have strong points and weak points, while the
weakest case of course is Shakspere.
>
> John Bede, at it again, as usual
Richard Kennedy wrote:
"Good, another Baconian who might answer the question I asked of
> Elizabeth Weir, which is wanting to know if Bacon was an actor. If
> not, why does his name head the list of players in the first folio?"
>
John Bede answered:
"That's simply the definite proof of his personal involvement in "The
First Folio", like Hitchcock marking his presence in each of his
movies as a walker-on."
That doesn't establish Bacon as the definite author, only that he had
a finger in it. Hitchcock put his name to all his films. So did Bacon
to all his works which don't include Shakespeare.
Chris
Bob Grumman
>What about the Baconian "tremendous mythology and chaos of legends and
>ridiculous conjecture"? I think Baconian mythology definitely beats
>the Marlovian mythology. Marlovians at least don't think Marlowe was
>the son of the Virgin Queen, nor that he wrote Cervantes and Montaigne
>in their original languages.
But the Baconians don't require that their man be Elizabeth's son or have
written Cervantes and Montaigne. Marlowe-backers DO require their man to
have pulled off an elaborate faked death at least as nutsw as any Baconian
absurdity and for which there is no evidence.
>> There is nothing at all to prove
>> any authorship of his at all.
Standard wack statement. (1) There is nothing to PROVE anybody ever wrote
anything. (2) There is plenty of strong evidence for Marlowe's authorship of
the works attributed to him--only it's no better than the evidence for
Shakespeare and just about all the other playwrights of Marlowe's time, so
can't be honored.
>> I am quite convinced that Marlowe and
>> Shakespeare was the same author, but there is nothing to convince me
>> that Marlowe was that author, in fact, as little as I am convinced
>> that Shakspere was. So disperse all the foggy dreams and delusions and
>> concentrate on reality and what evidence we really have. There is
>> nothing to prove anything concrete about who 'Shakespeare' was, but
>> all the circumstantial evidence points in one single direction. When
>> Shakespeare at first began to be suspected of not having been the
>> author, the only possible alternative candidate was immediately found
>> to be Bacon. Two hundred years of further research has only repeatedly
>> failed in disproving the Bacon theory, while all alternative theories
>> have proved considerably weaker, especially the Marlowe theory.
>
>No, the Baconian theory is not stronger or weaker than the other
>theories. They all have strong points and weak points, while the
>weakest case of course is Shakspere.
Of course--even weaker than the case for King James since all we have are
direct statements of his authorship.
>Richard Kennedy wrote:
>"Good, another Baconian who might answer the question I asked of
>> Elizabeth Weir, which is wanting to know if Bacon was an actor. If
>> not, why does his name head the list of players in the first folio?"
>>
>John Bede answered:
>"That's simply the definite proof of his personal involvement in "The
>First Folio", like Hitchcock marking his presence in each of his
>movies as a walker-on."
That Bacon allegedly had his pseudonym put on a list of actors is "the definite
proof of his personal involvement in The First Folio." So the fact that his
pseudonym was already on the title-page of the folio as author was not enough to
indicate (if not "prove") his involvement. Priceless.
My use of the name Wallace Stevens on various books is definite proof of my
involvement with those books.
>That doesn't establish Bacon as the definite author, only that he had
>a finger in it. Hitchcock put his name to all his films. So did Bacon
>to all his works which don't include Shakespeare.
>
>Chris
I'm confused. If Hitchcock's name was on certain films, who directed them? And
who wrote these things with Bacon's name on them?
--Bob G.
lyra
> You guys are hilarious.
>
>
> >What about the Baconian "tremendous mythology and chaos of legends and
> >ridiculous conjecture"? I think Baconian mythology definitely beats
> >the Marlovian mythology. Marlovians at least don't think Marlowe was
> >the son of the Virgin Queen, nor that he wrote Cervantes and Montaigne
> >in their original languages.
But Alfred Barkov (with his theory of Menippean satire)
*does*, on his website, think Marlowe was Elizabeth's son!
John Bede
> filea...@yahoo.com (John Bede) wrote in message news:<7e3701fc.03030...@posting.google.com>...
> <snip>
> Since there is no evidence neither for nor against John Penry or
> Marlowe being Martin Marprelate, there is of course a slight
> possibility, but it's not probable. John Penry had no sense of
> humour, and scholars in general exclude him as Martin Marprelate. But
> John Penry and Marlowe studied together at Cambridge, and the humour
> in Marprelate is stylistically almost identical with Marlowe's
> humorously satirical style. I am not sure, of course, but I would
> consider it more probable to identify Marprelate with Marlowe than
> with Penry. The prefix "Mar-" also suggests Marlowe, like "Sir Oliver
> Martext" in "As You Like It". You should read the articles on John
> Penry and Martin Marprelate in Encyclopaedia Britannica, which
> excludes the former from the latter authorship.
>
You have most incredibly succeeded in misunderstanding exactly
everything.
> >
> > And then we have all this tremendous Marlovian mythology and chaos of
> > legends and ridiculous conjecture.
>
> What about the Baconian "tremendous mythology and chaos of legends and
> ridiculous conjecture"? I think Baconian mythology definitely beats
> the Marlovian mythology. Marlovians at least don't think Marlowe was
> the son of the Virgin Queen, nor that he wrote Cervantes and Montaigne
> in their original languages.
>
No real Baconian embraces those myths.
My dear friend, as usual you have no idea what you are talking about.
Whoever gave you that idea that the Marprelate pamphlets were printed
in Canterbury? If that's your case, you have no case at all. Sorry,
but your Marprelate-Marlowe case is exploded. There is no connection
whatsoever between Marlowe and Marprelate, but there are obvious ones
between Marprelate and John Penry.
The pamphlets were printed in Kingston-upon-Thames close to
Twickenham, Bacon's place by the way, but as Penry's activities were
detected, they moved the press to Job Throgmorton's place. It is well
known and proved that John Penry used this very press together with
Job Throgmorton, a nephew of Nicholas Throgmorton's, whose daughter
Elizabeth became the wife of Sir Walter Raleigh. This is the only
possible connection I have been able to find bewteen Marlowe and
Marprelate: Marlowe's association with Raleigh and his possible
relationship with John Penry, together with Raleigh's wife's
relationship with her relative Job Throgmorton, but I am not sure of
the time factor here. The Marprelate pamphlets terrorized the Anglican
establishment around 1588, but Raleigh didn't make Bess Throgmorton
pregnant until 1592, when he was banished from court as a consequence.
Only then he made his union with Bess Throgmorton public. So the
connection between Marprelate and Marlowe is extremely far-fethed
indeed and certainly not enough to build a case on.
Job Throgmorton and John Penry both denied all knowledge of Marprelate
as long as they could save their lives, that is, until John Penry was
hanged. There is ceratinly a motive of his for denying his share in
the Marprelate pamphlets, since he never thought he would be hanged.
The pamphlets certainly would have hanged him.
I would say there is ten to one against Marlowe being Marprelate,
while it's 90% certain that John Penry was the man, with Job
Throgmorton's co-operation.
If Marprelate is the basis for your case for Marlowe, then you will
have some difficulty putting that case together again.
It is interesting to note, that Matthew Parker, who made it pssible
for Marlowe to go to Cambridge, was Nicholas Bacon's best friend -
they knew each other since childhood and never lost touch.
Curious is also the fact that both the Bacon brothers, Anthony and
Francis, were intimately connected with Essex, especially Anthony, and
that Anthony himself died three months after the execution of Essex.
So in that spring, Francis Bacon lost both his greatest
hero-friend-benefactor and his only brother, a credible trigger indeed
for the crisis of the great tragedies, starting with Hamlet directly
after Essex' and Anthony's death.
John Bede
David Kathman
filea...@yahoo.com (John Bede) wrote:
>Job Throgmorton and John Penry both denied all knowledge of Marprelate
>as long as they could save their lives, that is, until John Penry was
>hanged. There is ceratinly a motive of his for denying his share in
>the Marprelate pamphlets, since he never thought he would be hanged.
>The pamphlets certainly would have hanged him.
>
>I would say there is ten to one against Marlowe being Marprelate,
>while it's 90% certain that John Penry was the man, with Job
>Throgmorton's co-operation.
Actually, there's a lot of good evidence against Penry's
authorship of the Marprelate tracts, summarized by Leland
Carlson in *Martin Marprelate, Gentleman: Job Throkmorton
Laid Open In His Colours*, 271-307. Penry was clearly
involved in the production of the tracts, but Carlson
demolishes the case that Penry might have written them
and presents a very strong case for Job Throckmorton's
authorship. Carlson is especially hard on Donald McGinn's
book *John Penry and the Marprelate Controversy*, and with
good reason; that book is full of special pleading and
claims which are flat-out false. If you have any evidence
for Penry's authorship that Carlson neglected to include,
I'd be interested to see it.
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
Christian Lanciai
Well, John, this excellent expert argument of David Kathman's doesn't
at all seem to confirm your case for John Penry and against Marlowe.
Marlowe can't be proved not to have been involved in the Marprelate
pamphlets, and there are still some heavy arguments speaking for it,
while there is still no evidence of John Penry having been the author
while apparently there are quite a few valid arguments against it. I
would suggest that they all three (John Penry, Job Throckmorton and
Marlowe) worked on this together but that Marlowe was the stylist. He
and Penry were probably together the chief instigators with
Throckmorton handling the practicalities.
Please observe, that Throckmorton and Penry both denied having had
anything to do with it while Marlowe didn't. He wasn't asked, of
course, since he was suspected of anything but that; but both
Throckmorton and Penry denied their involvement with convincing
acceptability.
Enjoy!
Chris