Diana Price on some of Jonson's "friends"
Terry Ross
been the subject of considerable discussion on this newsgroup already, and
I'm sure what we have seen so far is only the beginning. I had hoped,
based on some essays of Price's that I had read, that she would be less
prone to the kind of antistratfordian double standard that Dave Kathman
discusses in his "why I am not an Oxfordian"
http://www.clark.net/tross/ws/whynot.html
Alas, the use of a double standard is at the heart of Price's "new
evidence of an authorship problem." She claims that the other playwrights
of Shakespeare's time had "literary paper trails" but that Shakespeare,
uniquely, did not. This might be an interesting claim if Price were able
to demonstrate it fairly (although it would not be sufficient to cause us
to reject the standard attribution to Shakespeare of his works). When,
however, we look at what she counts as part of a "literary paper trail"
for other writers, we find that she does not use the same standards she
uses when she scrutinizes the evidence for Shakespeare. Much of her
denigration of Shakespeare's "literary paper trail" concerns her attempts
to reject Ben Jonson's descriptions of the Shakespeare he claimed to have
loved. By the application of an antistratfordian double standard Price
seeks to eliminate the evidence of Jonson's friendship with Shakespeare
while exaggerating the evidence for his friendship with such other writers
as Marston and Drayton.
Serious misreadings mar Price's discussion of Jonson's "To the memory of
my Beloved, the Author William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us." I
am sure that many of these misreadinjgs will be discussed on this
newsgroup in the coming weeks, but let us note here her absolute disregard
of the title. She tells us that "Shakespeare had no literary friends" --
if there were evidence that Shakespeare had indeed had "literary friends"
then Price would, presumably, admit that a sufficient "literary paper
trail" existed -- and contrasts the absence of "personal" tributes to
Shakespeare with the presence of "personal" tributes to other poets of the
day, noting, for example, that John Marston's "dedication to *The
Malcontent* reads (translated from Latin) 'John Marston, disciple to the
muses, gives and dedicates this his harsh comedy to 'his frank and
heartfelt friend, Benjamin Jonson, the weightiest and most finely
discerning of poets'" (120). In fact, so fond is Price of Marston's
dedication that she mentions it two other times: "In the end, there is no
contemporary reference to Shakespeare remotely comparable to Marston's
dedication to 'his frank and heartfelt friend, Benjamin Jonson, the
weightiest and most finely discerning of poets'" (138). "Marston dedicated
a play to 'his frank and heartfelt friend, Benjamin Jonson, the weightiest
and most discerning of poets'" (144).
What do we know of this thrice-great friendship between Marston and
Jonson? Price is satisfied with taking Marston's words as a clear
demonstration that such a friendship existed. Jonson himself, however,
told a different story to William Drummond. Drummond reports Jonson's
saying, "He beat Marston and took his pistol from him" [Ben Jonson, *The
Complete Poems*, ed. George Parfitt, page 465]. In fact, Drummond reports
this story again: "He had many quarrels with Marston, beat him, and took
his pistol from him, wrote his *Poetaster* on him; the beginning of them
were that Marston represented him in the stage" [Parfitt 468].
Price's only concession that the "friendship" between Marston and Jonson
was imperfect is her observation that "there was a 'theater war' going on
in 1600-02, with Jonson, John Marston, and Thomas Dekker taking potshots
at each other in a series of plays" (86). Perhaps Jonson's beating Marston
and taking his pistol from him prevented a literal exchange of potshots.
Was there a friendship between Marston and Jonson? We have no dedicatory
poem by Jonson to any of Marston's works, but we do have this tantalizing
epigram:
68. On Playwright
Playwright convict of public wrongs to men,
Takes private beatings, and begins again.
Two kinds of valor he doth show at once;
Active in's brain, and passive in his bones.
What other playwright is Jonson known to have beaten? While we cannot
positively identify many of the target's of Jonson's epigrams, it seems
much more likely that Marston is this "Playwright" than that Shakespeare
is "Poet-Ape."
Jonson says nothing about Marston in *Timber*, but he did have one other
comment to Drummond about the man Price unironically considers his friend:
"Marston wrote his father-in-law's preachings, and his father-in-law his
comedies" [Parfitt 466] (Marston's father-in-law was a chaplain to King
James).
The Marston-Jonson situation is extraordinary. Marston and Jonson
ridicule each other, and while Marston, perhaps in a spirit of
conciliation (or perhaps with ironic intent) praises Jonson in a
dedication, there is no friendly rejoinder, but rather Jonson decades
later continues to gloat over the beating he gave Marston and even tells
Drummond that Marston was not, in fact, the author of works that appeared
under his name.
Perhaps Jonson was being waggish in stating that Marston's father-in-law
wrote his comedies, but Drummond does not include it among Jonson's
"jests." Nor was Marston the only writer from whom Jonson would remove
credit. The Marston story immediately follows Jonson's telling Drummond
that "the best wits of England" (including Jonson himself) "were employed
for making of [Raleigh's] *History* and that "Sir P. Sidney had translated
some of the psalms, which went abroad under the name of the Countess of
Pembroke" [Parfitt, 466].
On the other hand, what comes next in Drummond are comments on two writers
whose works Jonson criticizes but whose authorship of those works he does
not question:
"Shakespeare, in a play, brought in a number of men saying that they had
suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where there is no sea near by some 100
miles.
"Daniel wrote *Civil Wars*, and yet hath not one battle in all his book"
[Parfitt 466].
As we have seen (but as Price neglects to say), Jonson was more than
capable of casting doubt about the authorship of some writer's works, but
while his comments on Shakespeare were not always complimentary, he never
stated (as he did of Marston, Raleigh, and Mary Sidney) that any of the
works attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by someone else.
But Marston, Price tells us, was Jonson's friend, while poor Shakespeare
had no literary friends. Let us return to the title of Jonson's great
poem on Shakespeare: "To the memory of my Beloved, the Author William
Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us."
The very title tells us that Jonson remembers and loved the man, and he
honors the man's works. True, he does not say "to the memory of my
beloved FRIEND, the author William Shakespeare, but he does not call Donne
either "beloved" or his "friend" in either of the poems he wrote to him,
yet he seems to have considered Donne a friend. Richard Brome is styled
Jonson's "beloved friend," so perhaps he was even more Jonson's friend
than Shakespeare had been, but Jonson certainly seems to have considered
Shakespeare more a friend than punching-bag Marston had been; yet Price
accepts without question the evidence that Marston and Jonson were friends
while she rejects any such relationship between Jonson and his beloved
Shakespeare.
Price quotes a translation of Marston's dedication without ever
considering that it is a text, that it may contain irony or falsehood or
misdirection -- yet every text supporting Jonson's friendship with
Shakespeare is subject to the most cynical antistratfordian scrutiny.
This is a double standard. She does not examine any other texts to see if
they shed light on the possible Marston-Jonson friendship, but in the case
of Shakespeare's friendship with Jonson multiple texts are pitted against
each other in order to reject all of them as evidence of the friendship.
This, too, is a double standard. What makes this latter double standard
particularly egregious is that Jonson's comments on Marston (which are far
harsher than anything he said against Shakespeare and which perhaps cast
the authorship of Marston's works into doubt) appear in Jonson's
*Conversations with Drummond*, a text Price discusses at length.
Another declaration of Jonson's love for Shakespeare is similarly
overlooked by Price. In *Timber* Jonson says of Shakespeare, "I loved the
man, and do honor his memory -- on this side idolatry -- as much as any."
Moreover, he describes the man in terms only a friend could use: "he was
(indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent fancy;
brave notions, and gentle expressions..." Of course he said much more than
this, and tempered his praise with criticism, but that he had such
perspective on Shakespeare that he could discuss not only his strengths
but also his flaws (as Jonson saw them) yet nevertheless declare his love
for the man suggests not a thorough-going ironic cover-up but the
strongest and most genuine friendship. Imagine how strongly Jonson's
tributes to Shakespeare would count toward Price's "literary paper trail"
if they concerned any writer except Shakespeare.
Price has nothing to say about the fact that Jonson twice professed his
love for Shakespeare. In place of analysis, she offers her own
"paraphrase" of what Jonson would have meant if he too had been an
antistratfordian, and then proceeds as if that paraphrase were what Jonson
had actually said.
DRAYTON-JONSON and DRAYTON-SHAKESPEARE
Perhaps the Marston instance is tangential to Price's notion of what
constitutes an acceptable "literary paper trail" by her ad-hoc lights.
The case of Michael Drayton is more important to her, as she devotes much
more space to suggesting that while Drayton and Jonson were demonstrably
friends, the same cannot be known of Jonson and Shakespeare or Jonson and
Drayton. Again, however, Price employs the typical antistratfordian
double standard of reading texts that concern Shakespeare cynically while
taking texts that deal with other writers as if they were transparent
expressions of immutable truths.
Diana Price considers that the evidence of Jonson's relationship with
Drayton is categorically different from that regarding Shakespeare's with
either Jonson or Drayton. She says,
"There is evidence that Jonson and Drayton knew each other. Jonson wrote
a poem to 'his friend' Drayton, whom he addresses familiarly as 'Michael'
before acknowledging some past affront. In conversation, Jonson told
William Drummond that 'Drayton feared him, and he esteemed not of him.'
However, there is nothing quite so clear-cut with respect to Jonson's or
Drayton's relationship with Shakspere [sic]" [196].
It is important to remember that according to Price, Shakespeare had no
"literary friendships" but that the "relationship" between Jonson and
Drayton is sufficiently well established to count as part of the "literary
paper trail" for each writer.
Let's take a closer look at "the evidence" that Price finds "so clear-cut"
and see whether it is qualitatively different from "the evidence"
regarding Shakespeare and the other writers. Jonson begins his dedicatory
poem to Drayton's *Battle of Agincourt* (1627 -- four years after Jonson's
poems on Shakespeare appeared in the First Folio) with these lines:
It hath been questioned, Michael, if I be
A friend at all; or, if at all, to thee:
Because, who make the question, have not seen
Those ambling visits, pass in verse, between
Thy muse and mine, as they expect. 'Tis true:
And, though I now begin, 'tis not to rub
Hanch against hanch, or raise a rhyming club
About the town: this reckoning I will pay,
Without conferring symbols. This is my day.
[Parfitt, 267]
It can indeed be difficult to know whether writers of the time were
friends at all, or of each other. Even the presence of "those ambling
visits" might not prove enough of a "symbol" of friendship, but Jonson's
poem is taken by Price as clear-cut evidence that he knew Drayton and knew
that Drayton was the author of the works attributed to him in the volume
where Jonson's poem appeared, and knew that Drayton the alleged author was
the same person as Drayton the man from Shakespeare's home county. Price
does not distinguish "Drayton" the author from, say, "Draiton" the man; it
never occurs to her that there might be more than one Michael Drayton or
that Jonson's "Vision" is a text that requires any interpretation. Once
again, her antistratfordian analyses require double standards.
Jonson's poem is titled "The Vision of Ben Jonson on the Muses of his
Friend M. Drayton." Was Jonson indeed Drayton's friend? The poem begins
by casting doubt first on whether Jonson is anybody's friend at all, then
on whether he is Drayton's. When Jonson says, "'Tis true" we cannot be
sure whether what is "true" is the friendship between the poets, or the
fact that there have been no poetical expressions of such friendship, or
the suspicion that Jonson is himself incapable of friendship with anyone.
Jonson, having cleared his throat, then begins his detailed tribute to
Drayton and his works with "It was no dream! I was awake and saw!" What
he "sees," however, he continues to describe as a "vision," and he
concludes his "vision" with these ambiguous lines (or rather, with lines
that would be ambiguous to Price if they concerned Shakespeare):
I congratulate thee and thy ends,
To all thy virtuous and well-chosen friends,
Only my loss is, that I am not there:
And, till I worthy am to wish I were,
I call the world, that envies me, to see
If I can be a friend, and friend to thee.
Jonson, then, clearly is not one of Drayton's (or Draiton's) "well-chosen
friends"; what may seem puzzling is that Drayton does praise Jonson in "To
My Most Dearly-Beloved Friend, Henry Reynolds, Esq., of Poets and Poesie"
a poem that appears in *Agincourt*, and to which Jonson's vision may be a
response of sorts. Here are Drayton's lines on Jonson:
Next these, learn'd Johnson, in this List I bring,
Who had drunk deepe of the Pierian spring,
Whose knowledge did him worthily prefer,
And long was Lord here of the Theater,
Who in opinion made our learn'st to sticke,
Whether in Poems rightly dramatique,
Strong Seneca or Plautus, he or they,
Should beare the Buskin, or the Socke away.
[The poem is quoted from Edward Taylor, *Literary Criticism of 17th
Century England*, 178-836]
I see no evidence of personal acquaintance in these lines. Jonson is noted
for his learning, but Drayton's lines are anything but unambiguous praise,
and in any event they do not rise beyond what Price would consider
"hearsay" if the lines concerned Shakespeare rather than Jonson. Did
Jonson's "knowledge" advance him, or was "knowledge" itself something that
Jonson preferred (and preferred to what?). The high "opinion" might be
that of the "learnedest" (what an awkward term!) or of Jonson himself --
and even the nature of that opinion is equivocal, as Jonson may or may not
be the equal of Seneca and Plautus in tragedy and comedy.
As Price notes, Jonson discussed Drayton with Drummond, but Price only
refers to the second of Jonson's five observations:
"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." [Parfitt, 461]
"Drayton feared him, and he esteemed him not."
"Sir W. Alexander was not half kind unto him, and neglected him, because a
friend to Drayton." [Parfitt, 465]
"That Drayton was challenged for entitling one book *Mortimuriados*.
"That S[ir] J. Davies played in an epigram on Drayton, who in a sonnet
concluded his mistress might have been the ninth Worthy; and said, he used
a phrase like Dametas in Arcadia, who said, 'For wit his mistress might be
a giant.'" [466]
Of these comments, only the first might suggest that Jonson and Drayton
knew each other personally, but both the "fear" and the lack of "esteem"
could reflect a minor and entirely literary relationship -- in contrast to
Jonson's relationship with Marston, which on Jonson's side included his
having beaten the man and having stated that he was not the author of
works attributed to him. Jonson's comment about Sir William Alexander
(who was indeed Drayton's friend) suggests that there was some enmity
between Jonson and Drayton that prevented Jonson's gaining Alexander's
favor, but again there is no confirmation that Jonson and Drayton knew
each other personally and that each knew the other was the author of the
works attributed to him. There is nothing "clear-cut" in any of this, and
if it concerned Shakespeare rather than Drayton, Price would not consider
it acceptable evidence of a "literary paper trail."
What of the relationship between Shakespeare and Drayton? We have nothing
from Shakespeare one way or the other, but in the same poem in which he
ambiguously praised Jonson, Drayton said this of Shakespeare:
And be it said of thee,
Shakespeare thou hadst as smooth a Comicke vaine,
Fitting the socke, and in thy naturall braine,
As strong conception, and as Cleere a rage,
As any one that trafiqu'd with the stage.
Price considers this "lukewarm praise"; well, okay, if we want to play
that game we can always read any praise as "lukewarm" if we are determined
to shape evidence to serve pre-determined ends. Price, however, sees
nothing "lukewarm" in Drayton's lines on Jonson. She objects that
"Drayton spoke of Jonson's sock and buskin, yet he associated Shakespeare
only with the 'sock' of comedy, not with tragedy, history, or poetry."
Price is wrong to say Drayton did not "associate" Shakespeare with
"poetry" -- Drayton's entire poem concerns "poets and poesie."
Nor is the praise "lukewarm": contrast the lines on Shakespeare with
Drayton's lines on a pair of earlier Elizabethan poets --
Gascoine and Churchyard after them againe
In the beginning of Eliza's raine,
Accoumpted were great Meterers many a day,
But not inspired with brave fier, had they
Liv'd but a little longer, they had seene,
Their workes before them to have buried beene.
Obviously Drayton was capable of "lukewarm" praise when he thought it
appropriate; he said Gower "fell far short of [Chaucer's] store" and that
Samuel Daniel's "maner beter fitted prose." What some of these poets
lacked above all was "brave fire", the extraordinary quality of innate
poetic genius or inspiration that Drayton saw in Marlowe (he speaks of the
poet's "raptures" and "fine madness") and Shakespeare ("as Cleere a
rage"). In fact, within the context of Drayton's poem, the praise of
Shakespeare is much, much warmer than Price's antistratfordian double
standard allows her to measure.
Price further misleads the reader by complaining that Drayton did not
praise Shakespeare's contributions to all the genres, only to comedy --
yet Drayton does not mention any genres whatsoever for Chaucer or Marlowe,
two of the other poets whom, like Shakespeare, he praises highly, and he
does indeed allude to one of Shakespeare's tragedies (more on this in a
minute). Now, it may be that Drayton admired Shakespeare's comedies above
all, but any fair reader will acknowledge that the praise of Shakespeare
is qualitatively much more like that lavished on Chaucer and Marlowe than
the mixed evaluations Drayton awards Gower, Gascoigne, Churchyard, and
Daniel.
There is another element of this poem that Price overlooks. She says
Drayton "gave no indication of a personal friendship." There is indeed an
"indication" in Drayton's referring to Shakespeare in the second person:
"thee ... thou ... thy natural brain." Drayton refers to Chaucer, Gower,
Surrey, Brian, Gascoigne, Churchyard, Spenser, Sidney, Warner, Marlowe,
Nashe, Daniel, Jonson, Chapman, Sylvester, and Sandys in the third person.
On the other hand, Drayton prefaces his praise of Shakespeare with the
words "be it said of thee," and refers to him throughout in the second
person. The only other poets he refers to in the second person are "my
Alexander," "my dear Drummond," and "the two Beaumonts and my Browne."
In other words, Drayton reserves the second person in this poem
exclusively for those poets who were his dearest friends, and for his
friend Reynolds -- and for William Shakespeare. On the basis of Drayton's
poem, the evidence is stronger that Drayton was Shakespeare's friend than
that he was Jonson's, yet by Price's antistratfordian double standard only
the supposed Jonson-Drayton relationship counts towards a "literary paper
trail."
Price, as is her custom in her book, substitutes for Drayton's words her
own paraphrase and then accepts her own version as the relevant
"evidence." She imagines that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, and that
Drayton ever-so-sneakily suggested that he knew the difference between the
"two." She imagines that Drayton is describing Shakespeare the actor
(whom she believes was a different person from Shakespeare the writer).
She does this in a manner that one again demonstrates an antistratfordian
double standard:
"Drayton chose several words associated with acting and play brokering.
'Trafficking,' for example, is generally associated with trading in
commodities, negotiating, and bargaining." (Price 214).
I cannot believe that Price missed Drayton's allusion to Shakespeare's
*Romeo and Juliet* Or does she imagine that *Romeo and Juliet* is a play
about commodity brokers? How else to explain the "two-hours traffic of
our stage" announced by the prologue? But once we note Drayton's graceful
nod to one of Shakespeare's tragedies, it would be worth our while to see
the lines that immediately follow Drayton's "As any one that traffiq'd
with the stage":
Amongst these Samuel Daniel, whom if I
May speak of, but to sensure do denie
The "these" can only be those traffickers whom Price imagines were
brokers, negotiators, or bargainers. If Drayton thought Shakespeare was
such a trafficker, then he thought Daniel was one as well. Immediately
after the lines on Daniel come those on Jonson, beginning
Next these, learn'd Johnson, in this List I bring,
Jonson is another of the same set of "these" as Shakespeare and Daniel.
Drayton praises Shakespeare for having "as clear a rage / As any one that
trafficked with the stage" and then gives his evaluation of two more poets
who also "trafficked with the stage." If Price thinks Drayton is
signaling that Shakespeare is not a writer but a commodities trader, then,
she ought to believe that Drayton is saying the same thing of Daniel and
Jonson -- to do otherwise is to provide one more instance of the
antistratfordian double standard.
Price notes that "two writers whom historians most closely associate with
Shakespeare -- Jonson and Drayton -- never wrote about him by name during
his lifetime" [293]. I am not sure of the significance of this: we have
no record that Jonson ever wrote about Drayton by name or Drayton about
Jonson by name during Shakespeare's lifetime either. Drayton was a year
older than Shakespeare, but Jonson praised Shakespeare in print and by
name four years before he wrote about Drayton. Moreover, while the
question whether Jonson was indeed Drayton's friend is unresolved in
Jonson's "Vision," he proclaims in the First Folio that William
Shakespeare was his "beloved." and, as we have seen, Jonson professed his
"love" for Shakespeare in *Timber* as well
A careful reader will observe that the kind of double standard we have
observed in Price's treatment of the Jonson-Marston and Jonson-Drayton
relationships, as contrasted with how she approaches the
Jonson-Shakespeare and Drayton-Shakespeare relationships, is an essential
characteristic of her project. We have here not "new evidence of an
authorship problem" but a reconfirmation that antistratfordianism cannot
exist without such double standards.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
http://www.clark.net/pub/tross/ws/will.html
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Diana Price
Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message
news:Pine.GSO.4.21.0102111622050.15869-100000@mail...
Since Mr. Ross's comments are somewhat lengthy, I will offer some responses
in a couple of installments.
| Alas, the use of a double standard is at the heart of Price's "new
| evidence of an authorship problem." She claims that the other playwrights
| of Shakespeare's time had "literary paper trails" but that Shakespeare,
| uniquely, did not. This might be an interesting claim if Price were able
| to demonstrate it fairly (although it would not be sufficient to cause us
| to reject the standard attribution to Shakespeare of his works). When,
| however, we look at what she counts as part of a "literary paper trail"
| for other writers, we find that she does not use the same standards she
| uses when she scrutinizes the evidence for Shakespeare. Much of her
| denigration of Shakespeare's "literary paper trail" concerns her attempts
| to reject Ben Jonson's descriptions of the Shakespeare he claimed to have
| loved. By the application of an antistratfordian double standard Price
| seeks to eliminate the evidence of Jonson's friendship with Shakespeare
| while exaggerating the evidence for his friendship with such other writers
| as Marston and Drayton.
Terry Ross's reaction to my book focuses largely on his impression that I
have used a double standard in my evaluation of evidence. This perceived
fundamental failure is the central theme of his posting, and he is not the
first critic to complain about it. However, it is one thing to apply a
double standard. It is another to apply a consistent standard and thus
arrive at a different conclusion. I suggest that Mr. Ross has confused the
one with the other.
Mr. Ross begins by claiming that even if he thought my comparative analysis
of evidence fairly demonstrated that Shakespeare's chroniclers have no
personal literary paper trails on which to base their literary biography,
that such a deficiency "would not be sufficient to cause us to reject the
standard attribution to Shakespeare of his works." I disagree. Such a
deficiency is surely at the core of questions that concern the construction
of Shakespeare's literary biography. Not the biography of a doctor, for whom
we would reasonably expect personal medical records. Or a lawyer, for whom
we would expect personal legal records, but the life of a writer. Readers
are routinely assured that there is plenty of documentary evidence to
support Shakespeare's biography which is, ostensibly, a literary biography.
If there is no literary evidence to underpin his biography, then it is, by
definition, not a literary biography.
The parameters of my comparative analysis of literary evidence were simple
and the criteria straightforward. The evidence I analyzed was
contemporaneous, ie, left during the writer's lifetime (with the obvious
exception of notice at death). Two questions were put to any piece of
evidence: (1) is it personal, i.e., based on firsthand information (this
means that it is not reliant on, or derivative of some other source), and
(2) does it relate to literary activity or the vocation of writing. Any
evidence for which the answer to those two questions is "yes" would serve as
support for the simple statement, "he was a writer." That should not be a
tall order for any professional writer; the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers
whom I investigated easily jumped the hurdle, as it were. Shakespeare is the
only one for whom I cannot support the statement "he was a writer" without
relying on posthumous evidence.
snip
Concerning the personal commendatory verse from Marston to Jonson and what
it says about their relationship: Mr. Ross's objection that the verse does
not begin to reflect the ups-and-downs or realities of their relationship
entirely misses my point. I use the verse for one purpose only: it shows
that the two men *knew* each other, regardless of whether they were
arch-enemies, friends, or ran hot and cold. Writer A personally recognized
another individual as Writer B. Had Marston written "To Ben Jonson, the most
indiscriminate of writers, and my heartfelt nemesis for life" it would make
no difference to its value as evidence that the two writers personally
recognized each other. There is nothing comparable for Shakespeare.
I attempt to meet the standards found in other biographies or histories. So
I try to distinguish between personal and impersonal evidence. I also
attempt to distinguish professional evidence from other evidence of a
general nature. Many literary allusions, whether about Shakespeare or
anybody else, are not evidence of a personal relationship, so they don't
tell us anything about who the writer was. Such allusions are based on the
written works themselves. I refer to some of them as the Elizabethan
equivalent of book reviews. Most book reviews are written by people who do
not know personally the author whose work they are criticizing.
Many examples of these sorts of distinctions that I might cite come from
biographies of other writers, but here's one relating to Shakespeare. In his
book on Weever, Honigmann considers the sonnet that Weever wrote in praise
of Shakespeare's work, but Honigmann stops short of drawing the conclusion
that Shakespeare and Weever were known to each other. Instead he asks
questions:
"Could it be that [Weever] was one of the 'private friends' [referred to by
Meres]? Or had he read *The Passionate Pilgrim" ('By W. Shakespeare') which
also came out in 1599 and perhaps preceded the *Epigrammes*? " Honigmann
then asks if Weever's use of the sonnet form "impl[ies] that he had seen a
manuscript of the 'sugared sonnets among his private friends'.>> [p.90]
Honigmann's questions make it clear that he does not know whether Weever
wrote his poem because he recognized Shakespeare as a personal friend, or
because he had read something Shakespeare wrote. Honigmann might wish to
think that the two men were acquainted or even friends, but the evidence was
not sufficiently explicit to support such a conclusion. This is the sort of
standard that I attempt to maintain in my book. For all the other writers I
surveyed, I found evidence that attested to personal knowledge of the man in
question. (Marston's verse to Jonson, whatever else may be made of it,
demonstrates that the one writer knew and recognized the other one as a
writer. Hence, a personal literary paper trail.)
Now let me contrast Honigmann's conservative standard to that employed by
the traditional biography. We are told that Shakespeare was personally
recognized as a nice guy and had a circle of friends who said so. If that is
true, then there will be personal literary paper trails to prove it. These
paper trails will show evidence of first-hand knowledge of the person, of
the sort that was missing in the poem by Weever in praise of Shakespeare.
I submit that there are no such personal literary paper trails for
Shakespeare, so how does the biographer support statements that Shakespeare
was recognized as an affable chap or that knew this or that writer? The
orthodox biographer creates that admiring circle of Shakespeare's friends by
converting impersonal literary commentary into personal literary evidence.
That is surely a departure from the usual standard.
Here's part of my analysis. Samuel Schoenbaum concluded that "almost
everyone seems to have thought well of Shakespeare." From my book:
"Schoenbaum's ... conception of the mild-mannered and well-liked Shakspere
is not supported by the allusions that he quoted. For example, he mentioned
the author of Daiphantus (1604) who "remarks on 'Friendly Shakespeare's
Tragedies'. Did the two men know one another, as the phrase suggests?"
(Documentary, 205)." End quote.
This passage was mentioned in an earlier message to this group, but, to
repeat, the phrase "friendly Shakespeare" is from a satirical epistle. It is
literary commentary. Taken in context, "friendly" conveys the idea, not that
Shakspere himself was known to be affable, but that Shakespeare's plays are
accessible or user-friendly:
Schoenbaum cites John Davies's epigrammatic reference to "good Will" as
evidence of Shakspere's affable disposition, but I devote several pages of
analysis that show that the epigram is not only cryptic, it is impersonal.
The verse reads like hearsay ("Some say . . . "). It is found in a series of
epigrams addressed to colleagues whom Davies addresses familiarly as "my
worthily-disposed friend," or "my well-accomplish'd friend," until he gets
to Shakespeare's epigram, when he switches to the impersonal "our" -- "our
English Terence Mr. Will: Shake-speare." There is no agreement on what
Davies was trying to say in this verse.
After the Davies allusion, Schoenbaum continues to appropriate more
impersonal literary commentary for personal literary paper trails. Again,
from my book: Schoenbaum quotes William Barksted, a lesser poet and
playwright, who referred to "Shakespeare" as "so dear loved a neighbour."
Schoenbaum was discussing what Shakspere's supposed circle of friends
thought about him personally, and what testimony they left to posterity to
prove it. But again, this quote is an impersonal literary allusion found in
Barksted's 1607 narrative poem, Mirrha, the Mother of Adonis. It describes
events leading up to Mirrha's death, at which point Adonis goes off to have
the adventures described in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. In a sort of
epilogue, Barksted begins the Venus and Adonis story, then stops in his
tracks and apologizes for encroaching on the adjoining literary territory:
<< [Barksted's verse]: "But stay my Muse in thine own confines keep, / &
wage not war with so dear lov'd a neighbor / But having sung thy day song,
rest and sleep / preserve thy small fame and his greater favor: / His Song
was worthy merit (Shakspeare he) / sung the fair blossom, thou the withered
tree / Laurel is due to him, his art and wit / hath purchased it, Cypress
thy brow will fit.
In other words, Barksted's Muse is not going to wage war with Shakespeare's
Muse. Barksted is clearly distinguishing his "neighbor" in the sense of
adjoining literary subject matter, one story abutting another, one muse
poised to compete with another. There is nothing in the verse to suggest
that Barksted and Shakespeare were neighbors or even personally acquainted.
To sum up, Schoenbaum first invested Shakspere with civility and an
"uprightness of dealing" by quoting Chettle's apology to somebody else. He
then piled one impersonal or cryptic allusion (such as "good Will") onto
another, as though they constituted reliable evidence of Shakspere's
friendly personality and gentle conduct.
In a footnote, I add that Schoenbaum's treatment of this evidence did not
change over time. Earlier, in 1971, he described Shakespeare, the man, in
similar terms: "Apart from Greene, none of his contemporaries seems to have
uttered a malicious word about Shakespeare. Chettle . . . praised his civil
demeanour and uprightness of dealing. From others, we hear of good Will,
sweet Shakespeare, friendly Shakespeare, so dear loved a neighbor" (14).]>>
[end extract]
So here we have an example of a double standard, or perhaps no standard at
all. Schoenbaum's uses impersonal allusions Shakespeare's verse to invent a
"sweet," "friendly," "dear loved" Shakespeare, and to conjure up, by
extension, his personal circle of friends. Schoenbaum has transformed
impersonal literary commentary into personal literary paper trails. This is
not the sort of "standard" that I have attempted to use for my own analysis.
| But Marston, Price tells us, was Jonson's friend, while poor Shakespeare
| had no literary friends. Let us return to the title of Jonson's great
| poem on Shakespeare: "To the memory of my Beloved, the Author William
| Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us."
|
| The very title tells us that Jonson remembers and loved the man, and he
| honors the man's works. True, he does not say "to the memory of my
| beloved FRIEND, the author William Shakespeare, but he does not call Donne
| either "beloved" or his "friend" in either of the poems he wrote to him,
| yet he seems to have considered Donne a friend. Richard Brome is styled
| Jonson's "beloved friend," so perhaps he was even more Jonson's friend
| than Shakespeare had been, but Jonson certainly seems to have considered
| Shakespeare more a friend than punching-bag Marston had been; yet Price
| accepts without question the evidence that Marston and Jonson were friends
| while she rejects any such relationship between Jonson and his beloved
| Shakespeare.
|
|snip
| Another declaration of Jonson's love for Shakespeare is similarly
| overlooked by Price. In *Timber* Jonson says of Shakespeare, "I loved the
| man, and do honor his memory -- on this side idolatry -- as much as any."
| Moreover, he describes the man in terms only a friend could use: "he was
| (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent fancy;
| brave notions, and gentle expressions..." Of course he said much more than
| this, and tempered his praise with criticism, but that he had such
| perspective on Shakespeare that he could discuss not only his strengths
| but also his flaws (as Jonson saw them) yet nevertheless declare his love
| for the man suggests not a thorough-going ironic cover-up but the
| strongest and most genuine friendship. Imagine how strongly Jonson's
| tributes to Shakespeare would count toward Price's "literary paper trail"
| if they concerned any writer except Shakespeare.
|
| Price has nothing to say about the fact that Jonson twice professed his
| love for Shakespeare. In place of analysis, she offers her own
| "paraphrase" of what Jonson would have meant if he too had been an
| antistratfordian, and then proceeds as if that paraphrase were what Jonson
| had actually said.
By emphasizing the biographers' reliance on Jonson's Folio and Timber
testimony concerning Shakespeare, Ross is underscoring my point: there is no
contemporaneous evidence with which to make the case for Shakespeare as a
writer. This is a unique feature in a literary biography. For no other
writer from the time period are historians forced to rely on posthumous
evidence to support the simple statement "he was a writer." For all these
other writers, they have personal literary paper trails, left during the
author's lifetime.
In addition, the evidence that Ross would cite as straightforward testimony
in the Folio and Timber is a topic that consumes the better part of two
chapters in my book. Readers of Ross's criticism would understandably be
skeptical of my treatment of this evidence if they relied on his report.
Jonson's testimony is most certainly not straightforward, and I do not just
cavalierly brush it aside, ignore it, or reject it out of hand. Beginning
with the epistles, moving through the title and content of Jonson's eulogy,
then on to Timber, I consider the key points in all his testimony. I
consider them in light of his other allusions to Shakespeare's writing. I
also researched at length the Jonsonian critics to see what they had to say
about it all, especially the Folio eulogy. They have a lot more to say about
it than do the Shakespearean critics, and they all find Jonson contradicting
himself and/or employing ambiguity. That alone should raise some eyebrows.
Mr. Ross seems to have skimmed over my analysis of Timber (De Shakespeare
Nostrati), in which I demonstrate Jonson's reliance on Seneca, which affects
the interpretation of the Timber entry, a point which Mr. Ross has missed.
I will continue with this response.
Diana Price
PWDBard
criticism of Price's analysis concerning literary paper trails confirms my
prediction that the Strats would look grossly foolish in trying to respond to
her work. The botton line remains the same no matter how many different ways
the Strat try to reconfigure the situation: all documentation which is
definitely linked to or are about the Stratford man *as such* are of a
non--literary nature. Ross is fumbling around trying to create a bridge
between literary allusions or statements about the writer Shakespeare
(regardless of his identity) to the Stratford man. And as Price has shown in
her book and her initial reponse to Ross, this strategy will not work...because
it presumes in advance that the Strat man was in fact the Bard...a proposition
which remains to be demonstrated in the discussion if the exercise is a
legitimate search for the truth. Of course, the Strats are not really
interested in the search for the truth, but instead in propping up a
traditional claim which close scrutiny has exposed as wanting, as requiring too
many questionable assumptions to make it work for a serious scholar. Ross is
playing a loser's game against Price because he cannot banish profound
skepticism...which is all the more justified when one reads her
anti-Stratfordian (though not Oxfordian) book.
Buckeye Pete
Bob Grumman
late (of HLAS) friend Richard Kennedy managed to
show that "Shake-speare" could not be identified
with William Shakespeare's last name: first, he
said that no one ever used a hyphenated name as
other than a pseudonym; when several examples of
hyphenated real names were brought to his
attention, he said that no one ever used
a hyphenated name that was not made up of two
family names as other than a pseudonym; when
some hyphenated non-pseudonyms were found that
did not consist of two family names (including
Shake-speare," itself), he said that no one
ever used a hyphenated non-pseudonym on the
title page of a literary work; when a printer who
put his own hyphenated real name on a title page
was found, Kennedy declared that no AUTHOR had ever used
a hyphenated non-pseudonym on the title-page of a work
of his. When no one could find an author, other than
Shakespeare, for which this was true, he assumed he'd
proved "Shake-speare" to be a pseudonym. Moral, anyone
can, with sufficient diligence, fine-tune away all
evidence against his position. Not that I believe Price
in this case has done that as well as Kennedy did, for
Terry has shown pretty convincingly that even by her
absurd criteria, there were "personal references" to
Shakespeare as a writer, while he was alive.
--Bob G.
--
Posted from nut-n-but.net [205.161.239.5]
via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
PWDBard
alive. The issue is not that...but the question of whether there are documents
that explicitly finger the Stratford man as the great literary genius known as
Shakespeare. The answer is no, as Price's book reconfirms, at least not during
his own lifetime.
The first real explicit, uncontestable linkage between the great literary
figure and the specific town of Stratford *on Avon* is to be found in a joke
book no less published in about 1630, the Book of Jeasts. That is no mere
coincidence..a joke book about 15 years after his death.
The Second Folio in 1632 is far more explicit than the First Folio because the
"i" from "moniment" in the Digges and Jonson dedicatory poems has been relaced
with a "u". Prior to this time, the early 1630s, there is no incontestable
linkage.
Buckeye Pete
Buckeye Pete
Mark Steese
<20010212233122...@ng-cv1.aol.com>:
>Although I will take a second look to see if I missed something, Ross'
>criticism of Price's analysis concerning literary paper trails confirms
>my prediction that the Strats would look grossly foolish in trying to
>respond to her work.
Who would have imagined that Peter's prediction would have come true? I'm
sure all of HLAS is reeling from the revelation that Peter thinks a
Shakespearean scholar looked "grossly foolish."
>The botton line remains the same no matter how many different ways the
>Strat try to reconfigure the situation: all documentation which is
>definitely linked to or are about the Stratford man *as such* are of a
>non--literary nature.
After all of the documentation of a literary nature is thrown out.
>Ross is fumbling around trying to create a bridge between literary
>allusions or statements about the writer Shakespeare (regardless of his
>identity) to the Stratford man. And as Price has shown in her book and
>her initial reponse to Ross, this strategy will not work...because it
>presumes in advance that the Strat man was in fact the Bard...a
>proposition which remains to be demonstrated in the discussion if the
>exercise is a legitimate search for the truth.
This is excellent! It's a textbook example of projection; the anti-
Shakespeareans, who presume in advance that Shakespeare was not
Shakespeare, naturally assume that the Shakespeareans do the same. Since
they throw out all the evidence in Shakespeare's favor for no reason other
than that it is in his favor, they naturally assume that Shakespeareans
accept said evidence for the same reason. Notice how accurate Peter's next
paragraph is after only a few minor changes are made:
>Of course, the [anti-Shakespeareans] are not really interested in the
>search for the truth, but instead in propping up a [non-]traditional claim
>which close scrutiny has exposed as wanting, as requiring too many
>questionable assumptions to make it work for a serious scholar. [Price]
>is playing a loser's game against [Ross] because [she] cannot banish
>profound skepticism...which is all the more justified when one reads her
>anti-Stratfordian (though not Oxfordian) book.
Five minor changes, and we have a statement whose veracity few can doubt.
Yours,
Mark Steese
--
Bibrau is the name of the girl who sits in the blue
-Runic inscription from Greenland, c. 11th C. A.D.
Ingigerth is the most beautiful of women
-Runic inscription from Maes Howe, c. 1153-54 A.D.
Diana Price
| The very title tells us that Jonson remembers and loved the man, and he
| honors the man's works. True, he does not say "to the memory of my
| beloved FRIEND, the author William Shakespeare, but he does not call Donne
| either "beloved" or his "friend" in either of the poems he wrote to him,
| yet he seems to have considered Donne a friend. Richard Brome is styled
| Jonson's "beloved friend," so perhaps he was even more Jonson's friend
| than Shakespeare had been, but Jonson certainly seems to have considered
| Shakespeare more a friend than punching-bag Marston had been; yet Price
| accepts without question the evidence that Marston and Jonson were friends
| while she rejects any such relationship between Jonson and his beloved
| Shakespeare.
Again, I think Mr. Ross misses my larger point. One, if he chooses to accept
the information in the First Folio at face value, that is his choice. None
of the Jonsonian critics whom I cite would agree that it can all be taken at
face value, and I spend much of the chapter explaining why I don't either.
But in my view, the evidentiary value of the Folio testimony is lessened
because it is ambiguous, and it is posthumous by 7 years. Those statements
that clearly identify Shakespeare of Stratford as the author are the first
in the documentary record to do so. I can only repeat that for no other
writer is one forced to rely on posthumous (and ambiguous) evidence to prove
a man was a writer.
Any reader who takes the time to read through the records for other writers
that I compiled in the appendix will see a stream of unambiguous evidence
left during the subject's lifetime to support the literary vocation. The
contrast between the evidence there, and the evidence in Shakespeare's
biography is what this discussion is all about. We can disagree ad infinitum
about the meaning of the Folio material. But I doubt we would disagree over
the meaning, evidentiary value, or the conclusions we can draw from, i.e.,
* the letter by Sir George Carey to his wife: "nashe hath dedicated a booke
unto you with promis of a better, will cotton will disburs vls or xx nobles
in yowr rewarde to him and he shall not finde my purs shutt to relieve him
out of prison there presently in great missery malicied for writinge against
the londoners. "
This document proves that Thomas Nashe obtained patronage and that he was
paid for
writing.
or
* Drummond's letter to Drayton: "your most happy Albion put me into a new
trance...which... shall be read... so long as men read books." Drayton's
reply: "I thank you, my dear, sweet Drummond, for your good opinion of
Polyolbion. I have done twelve books more..."
No guesswork required. Drayton is writing PolyOlbion.
or
* John Selden's 1614 preface to Titles of Honor, referring to a book "in the
well-furnisht Librarie of my beloved friend that singular Poet M. Ben:
Jonson."
Here is good evidence that Jonson owned books, and that Selden regarded
Jonson as a friend and a writer.
or
* John Chamberlain's letter reporting that "Spenser, our principal poet,
coming lately out of Ireland, died at Westminster on Saturday last."
Here is evidence that the man who died a few days ago was recognized as a
writer.
The appendix cites a wealth of such explicit documentation for other
writers, and it is surely a reasonable question to ask where the comparable
evidence is for Shakespeare. Mr. Ross may disagree with my interpretation
of Jonson's Timber, or the Folio, but he does not offer contemporaneous
evidence, comparable to that cited above, that proves Shakespeare was a
writer.
| Price quotes a translation of Marston's dedication without ever
| considering that it is a text, that it may contain irony or falsehood or
| misdirection -- yet every text supporting Jonson's friendship with
| Shakespeare is subject to the most cynical antistratfordian scrutiny.
No, I am simply looking for testimony that tells me that Person A
recognized Person B as a writer. And, in Shakespeare's case, I can't
find it until seven years after he died.
| This is a double standard. She does not examine any other texts to see if
| they shed light on the possible Marston-Jonson friendship, but in the case
| of Shakespeare's friendship with Jonson multiple texts are pitted against
| each other in order to reject all of them as evidence of the friendship.
There is no double standard here. I examined the testimony and texts, and do
not reject them as evidence of a friendship or a rivalry. I reject the
testimony as evidence that Shakespeare was unambiguously regarded as a
writer. Selden
regarded Jonson as a writer, and he said so during
Jonson's lifetime. Marston recognized Jonson as a writer, whether you
believe or not that he really thought Jonson was "finely discerning." But in
the Folio, Jonson contradicted himself, used double-talk, and threw in a few
insults in a book where one would have expected straightforward praise.
Those are good reasons to revisit all of Jonson's testimony and question
what he was saying, including his identification of Shakespeare as a writer.
| This, too, is a double standard. What makes this latter double standard
| particularly egregious is that Jonson's comments on Marston (which are far
| harsher than anything he said against Shakespeare and which perhaps cast
| the authorship of Marston's works into doubt) appear in Jonson's
| *Conversations with Drummond*, a text Price discusses at length.
Again, I am concerned with finding evidence that identifies a man as a
writer, that connects the individual to the activity or vocation. Marston's
or Jonson's words, whether harsh or kind, make it clear that the one
man recognized the other as a writer. As I say in the last chapter,
Shakespeare "apparently had no literary friends-or enemies-or if he did, as
far as we know, they inexplicably failed to invite him to contribute
commendatory verses, never exchanged letters with him, and never mentioned
him as though they knew him." I am aware of no contemporaneous evidence that
contradicts this statement.
| Another declaration of Jonson's love for Shakespeare is similarly
| overlooked by Price. In *Timber* Jonson says of Shakespeare, "I loved the
| man, and do honor his memory -- on this side idolatry -- as much as any."
| Moreover, he describes the man in terms only a friend could use: "he was
| (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent fancy;
| brave notions, and gentle expressions..." Of course he said much more than
| this, and tempered his praise with criticism, but that he had such
| perspective on Shakespeare that he could discuss not only his strengths
| but also his flaws (as Jonson saw them) yet nevertheless declare his love
| for the man suggests not a thorough-going ironic cover-up but the
| strongest and most genuine friendship. Imagine how strongly Jonson's
| tributes to Shakespeare would count toward Price's "literary paper trail"
| if they concerned any writer except Shakespeare.
Mr. Ross has effectively repeated what the traditional biographers have to
say about the De Shakespeare Nostrati. I confront head-on the very words
Ross is implying that I discount. My book proposes a new reading and offers
reasons and
support for those readings, including an in-depth look at the classical
sources that
underlie the key passages in Timber. Biographers do not quote all of what
Jonson borrowed from Seneca; the few who mention it do so only to explain
the 'Suffliminandus erat' phrase. Nor have I read a Shakespearean biography
that analyzes in such detail the Nostrati passage in light of Jonson's
surrounding
material. Mr. Ross's criticism of my section on Timber ignores these new
arguments
| Price has nothing to say about the fact that Jonson twice professed his
| love for Shakespeare.
I have a lot to say about the entire passage, including the line "(for I
loved the man, and do honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as
any)". I just don't read it the same way that most biographers and Mr. Ross
do.
If Jonson had such love and admiration for Shakespeare, why did he not
mention him once during Shakespeare's lifetime?
I'll move on to Drayton tomorrow.
Diana Price
Erik Nielsen
Diana Price wrote:
>
> Further responses to Mr. Ross's posting.
>
> | The very title tells us that Jonson remembers and loved the man, and he
> | honors the man's works. True, he does not say "to the memory of my
> | beloved FRIEND, the author William Shakespeare, but he does not call Donne
> | either "beloved" or his "friend" in either of the poems he wrote to him,
> | yet he seems to have considered Donne a friend. Richard Brome is styled
> | Jonson's "beloved friend," so perhaps he was even more Jonson's friend
> | than Shakespeare had been, but Jonson certainly seems to have considered
> | Shakespeare more a friend than punching-bag Marston had been; yet Price
> | accepts without question the evidence that Marston and Jonson were friends
> | while she rejects any such relationship between Jonson and his beloved
> | Shakespeare.
>
> Again, I think Mr. Ross misses my larger point. One, if he chooses to accept
> the information in the First Folio at face value, that is his choice. None
> of the Jonsonian critics whom I cite would agree that it can all be taken at
> face value, and I spend much of the chapter explaining why I don't either.
> But in my view, the evidentiary value of the Folio testimony is lessened
> because it is ambiguous, and it is posthumous by 7 years. Those statements
> that clearly identify Shakespeare of Stratford as the author are the first
> in the documentary record to do so.
Except for the dozens of other contemporary references which you
conveniently throw out.
> I can only repeat that for no other
> writer is one forced to rely on posthumous (and ambiguous) evidence to prove
> a man was a writer.
Again, there is evidence enough there, if one were not so transparently
trying to pretend there weren't.
First of all, it is surely NOT reasonable to "expect" any such
documentation to have survived. It would only be reasonable to "expect"
it if there were some reason for the people of that time to have kept
it, which there wasn't.
Second of all, what about the "Parnassus Plays"? Or Gabriel Harvey's
comments on the subject (in his own copy of Chaucer -- so who is he
trying to fool by including it there?) Or Meres' Palladis Tamia? Or
Beaumont's poem "To Mr. B. J.", addressed to Jonson? Or the man's name
on quartos by the dozen? Or, of course, the many comments made by
Jonson after Shakespeare's death, Digges' poem, Basse's poem... they all
point obviously to Shakespeare, UNLESS one has decided ahead of time
that they cannot.
> Mr. Ross may disagree with my interpretation
> of Jonson's Timber, or the Folio, but he does not offer contemporaneous
> evidence, comparable to that cited above, that proves Shakespeare was a
> writer.
>
> | Price quotes a translation of Marston's dedication without ever
> | considering that it is a text, that it may contain irony or falsehood or
> | misdirection -- yet every text supporting Jonson's friendship with
> | Shakespeare is subject to the most cynical antistratfordian scrutiny.
>
> No, I am simply looking for testimony that tells me that Person A
> recognized Person B as a writer. And, in Shakespeare's case, I can't
> find it until seven years after he died.
And so? There is certainly plenty of other evidence that supports the
fact that Shakespeare was writing at that time. Is there some kind of
strange standard of evidence that requires personal letters from one man
to another man to make a writer? Pity that so many of those personal
letters no longer exist then, eh?
> | This is a double standard. She does not examine any other texts to see if
> | they shed light on the possible Marston-Jonson friendship, but in the case
> | of Shakespeare's friendship with Jonson multiple texts are pitted against
> | each other in order to reject all of them as evidence of the friendship.
>
> There is no double standard here. I examined the testimony and texts, and do
> not reject them as evidence of a friendship or a rivalry. I reject the
> testimony as evidence that Shakespeare was unambiguously regarded as a
> writer. Selden regarded Jonson as a writer, and he said so during
> Jonson's lifetime. Marston recognized Jonson as a writer, whether you
> believe or not that he really thought Jonson was "finely discerning." But in
> the Folio, Jonson contradicted himself, used double-talk, and threw in a few
> insults in a book where one would have expected straightforward praise.
> Those are good reasons to revisit all of Jonson's testimony and question
> what he was saying, including his identification of Shakespeare as a writer.
No... is, for example, Catullus' praise of Cicero (clearly meant
sarcastically) to be taken as evidence that Catullus "knew" Cicero was
not a writer? No, it is evidence of ambiguity -- an ambiguity also
found in Jonson's comments to Drummond on, say, John Donne. Jonson was
like that.
> | This, too, is a double standard. What makes this latter double standard
> | particularly egregious is that Jonson's comments on Marston (which are far
> | harsher than anything he said against Shakespeare and which perhaps cast
> | the authorship of Marston's works into doubt) appear in Jonson's
> | *Conversations with Drummond*, a text Price discusses at length.
>
> Again, I am concerned with finding evidence that identifies a man as a
> writer, that connects the individual to the activity or vocation. Marston's
> or Jonson's words, whether harsh or kind, make it clear that the one
> man recognized the other as a writer. As I say in the last chapter,
> Shakespeare "apparently had no literary friends-or enemies-or if he did, as
> far as we know, they inexplicably failed to invite him to contribute
> commendatory verses,
Maybe Shakespeare didn't like to write commendatory verses.
> never exchanged letters with him,
And you somehow know who exchanged letters with whom? Balderdash, utter
balderdash.
> and never mentioned
> him as though they knew him." I am aware of no contemporaneous evidence that
> contradicts this statement.
You're quite aware of it; you throw it out because it doesn't fit your
pre-conceived notions.
> | Another declaration of Jonson's love for Shakespeare is similarly
> | overlooked by Price. In *Timber* Jonson says of Shakespeare, "I loved the
> | man, and do honor his memory -- on this side idolatry -- as much as any."
> | Moreover, he describes the man in terms only a friend could use: "he was
> | (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent fancy;
> | brave notions, and gentle expressions..." Of course he said much more than
> | this, and tempered his praise with criticism, but that he had such
> | perspective on Shakespeare that he could discuss not only his strengths
> | but also his flaws (as Jonson saw them) yet nevertheless declare his love
> | for the man suggests not a thorough-going ironic cover-up but the
> | strongest and most genuine friendship. Imagine how strongly Jonson's
> | tributes to Shakespeare would count toward Price's "literary paper trail"
> | if they concerned any writer except Shakespeare.
>
> Mr. Ross has effectively repeated what the traditional biographers have to
> say about the De Shakespeare Nostrati.
Yes, and the "traditional biographers" are right.
> I confront head-on the very words
> Ross is implying that I discount.
You sweep them under the rug by one or another arbitrary method.
> My book proposes a new reading and offers
> reasons and
> support for those readings, including an in-depth look at the classical
> sources that
> underlie the key passages in Timber.
If your book is anything like this post, it is a series of blatant
rationalizations.
> Biographers do not quote all of what
> Jonson borrowed from Seneca; the few who mention it do so only to explain
> the 'Suffliminandus erat' phrase. Nor have I read a Shakespearean biography
> that analyzes in such detail the Nostrati passage in light of Jonson's
> surrounding
> material. Mr. Ross's criticism of my section on Timber ignores these new
> arguments
>
> | Price has nothing to say about the fact that Jonson twice professed his
> | love for Shakespeare.
>
> I have a lot to say about the entire passage, including the line "(for I
> loved the man, and do honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as
> any)". I just don't read it the same way that most biographers and Mr. Ross
> do.
No; the biographers and Ross had no chips on their shoulders.
> If Jonson had such love and admiration for Shakespeare, why did he not
> mention him once during Shakespeare's lifetime?
>
> I'll move on to Drayton tomorrow.
>
Please don't. I, for one, have had enough of this foolish sophistry and
ridiculous pseudo-reasoning. You, Ms. Price, are a charlatan, and a
charlatan of the worst kind. Go away.
--nielsen
Terry Ross
author reply so promptly to one's comments.
Dave and I will at some point be putting up a detailed response to her
book on the Shakespeare Authorship page. Most of the essays on our site
have begun as posts in this forum, where the candid exchange of opinions
can be so useful in helping us refine our views and where critical readers
are never hesitant to point out flaws on our arguments. To gain the
attention of Price herself is quite a luxury.
In this post I am responding to the first of Price's replies, but I am
also including more fundamental criticisms of her entire approach to
Elizabethan attribution studies, which I believe is profoundly misguided.
Most of my comments about what I call her "filter" are near the top of
this post, and if the post seems needlessly repetitious in its length,
well, that is a risk that is endemic to this genre.
On Tue, 13 Feb 2001, Diana Price wrote:
>
> Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message
> news:Pine.GSO.4.21.0102111622050.15869-100000@mail...
>
> Since Mr. Ross's comments are somewhat lengthy, I will offer some responses
> in a couple of installments.
>
> | Alas, the use of a double standard is at the heart of Price's "new
> | evidence of an authorship problem." She claims that the other playwrights
> | of Shakespeare's time had "literary paper trails" but that Shakespeare,
> | uniquely, did not. This might be an interesting claim if Price were able
> | to demonstrate it fairly (although it would not be sufficient to cause us
> | to reject the standard attribution to Shakespeare of his works). When,
> | however, we look at what she counts as part of a "literary paper trail"
> | for other writers, we find that she does not use the same standards she
> | uses when she scrutinizes the evidence for Shakespeare. Much of her
> | denigration of Shakespeare's "literary paper trail" concerns her attempts
> | to reject Ben Jonson's descriptions of the Shakespeare he claimed to have
> | loved. By the application of an antistratfordian double standard Price
> | seeks to eliminate the evidence of Jonson's friendship with Shakespeare
> | while exaggerating the evidence for his friendship with such other writers
> | as Marston and Drayton.
>
> Terry Ross's reaction to my book focuses largely on his impression that I
> have used a double standard in my evaluation of evidence.
No, not just on my "impression" but on Diana Price's actual procedures.
She treats records that concern Shakespeare differently from the way she
treats those concerning other authors.
> This perceived fundamental failure is the central theme of his
> posting, and he is not the first critic to complain about it.
And I'm sure I will not be the last; it is a very noticeable feature of
her book.
> However, it is one thing to apply a double standard. It is another to
> apply a consistent standard and thus arrive at a different conclusion.
> I suggest that Mr. Ross has confused the one with the other.
We shall see when we look at her remarks about my specific comments. Let
me offer a more general observation about her attempt to use a "consistent
standard." I have no doubt that she meant to approach her task as
objectively and dispassionately as was possible, but the result is
indistinguishable from the work of someone who had set out, Looney-like,
to fashion a set of criteria believing in advance that they did not apply
particularly well to Shakespeare. The literary historian, on the other
hand, is not in the business of stacking the deck.
Price has devised a system to filter records so that those relating to
Shakespeare do not pass through, but some of those relating to some other
writers of the time do. It is known by all that there are no records of
Shakespeare's education -- this is not particularly surprising, since
Shakespeare almost certainly attended the Stratford school, from which no
such records survive for anyone in his time, but most scholars doubt that
he had any further formal education. Price therefore includes education
records as part of a "literary paper trail." Why does she do this? The
great majority of those for whom there IS an educational record made no
contribution to the canon of English literature, yet if we applied her
filter to all Elizabethan records, we would find that the number of
non-authors for whom her filter would show what she calls a "literary
paper trail" was far larger than the number of known authors.
On the other hand, there are a great many title pages that bear
Shakespeare's as the author of his works. Since this kind of record
exists for Shakespeare, her antistratfordian filter is set so that it
rejects every one of them -- yet the correspondence between being named as
the author on a title page and being a writer is far stronger than that
between having left an educational record and having been a writer.
While the presence of an author's name on the title page of the work is of
no value to Price's filter whatsoever, she will allow certain sorts of
front-matter that she knows in advance are not found in Shakespeare's
works. If there are dedications that sound to her more personal than
Shakespeare's dedications to Southampton, those dedications count. The
filter seems designed to follow a *Lucrece* rule: any dedication more
personal-sounding gets through; any dedication that is less personal does
not count at all.
I cannot see why even an unsuccessful dedication should not count in any
fairly-designed filter. Stephen Gosson dedicated his *School for Abuse*
to Sidney and was, Harvey tells us, "was scorned for his labors." Price
would ignore the dedication but probably allow Harvey's comment -- yet to
the literary historian both are of interest, and any reasonable attempt to
collect evidence of a "literary paper trail" for Gosson should include
both.. A writer who seeks patronage is a writer, whether or not he is
ever rewarded by a patron, and the very act of seeking such patronage in a
dedication is not something that should be ignored -- unless, of course,
one is operating with a filter that is designed expressly to reject
Shakespearean records.
Thus, while it might be possible to construct a filter that would block
every Shakespeare record but allow some records for other writers, the
mere fact that such a filter is possible to construct is not in itself
sufficient reason to reject the standard attribution to Shakespeare of his
works.
Of course, as I have suggested, Price does not operate her filter fairly.
Here is another example (the book is riddled with them). Price counts
"evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given." Thus Marston
gets credit because his father left him some law books. The same credit
goes to every other Elizabethan whose father left him law books (or any
other books), and whether the recipient of such paternal bounty ever wrote
a single line of verse is a matter of supreme indifference to the filter.
Again, it is difficult to see why the filter should ignore every title
page that names the author of the work while it allows every book record.
The great majority of those who left "evidence of books owned, written in,
borrowed, or given" made no contribution to the canon of Elizabethan
literature. If we filtered the entire set of Elizabethan records for
every bit of "evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given," we
would have far more non-authors than authors for whom there was what Price
calls a "literary paper trail."
To be sure, there would be some authors among the great many book-evidence
folk her filter allows, and one of them, if she applied her filter fairly,
would be William Shakespeare -- yet Price does not mention Shakespeare's
signature in *Archaionomia*, which certainly would constitute "evidence of
books owned, written in, borrowed, or given" by or to Shakespeare IF she
operated her filter fairly.
Thus we can see two fundamental problems with her filter: it is designed
to generate "literary paper trails" for a great many non-authors while at
the same time being deliberately designed to ignore those kinds of
evidence that Price knows apply in the case of Shakespeare and are better
determinants of whether a person is an author. Price's method therefore
would not seem to be a useful tool for attribution studies even if it were
applied without further prejudice, but Price, as we have seen, does not
apply even this inadequate filter fairly.
Here is another example. We know that Shakespeare's authorship of his
works was recognized in a great many records of the time, but we also know
that there is no record of the sort "William Shakespeare was paid X for
writing *Hamlet*." Most of the records of that sort that we do have are
found in Henslowe's diary, in which Shakespeare's name does not appear
(Henslowe began noting playwright's names in 1597, by which time
Shakespeare was well established as the playwright for a rival theater
company).
Since Henslowe doesn't mention Shakespeare, the filter is set up so that
every writer whose name appears in Henslowe as being paid gets credit for
a literary trail; thus Henslowe's reference to "maxton" counts for
Marston, even though there is no first name for "maxton" and no play is
named. Price's standards for writers other than Shakespeare do not compel
to ask how we know this "maxton" is the right John Marston or any
particular "Marston" at all.
On the other hand, since Shakespeare's "Shaxberd" records in the Revels
accounts do not mention money, they does not have to be considered by
Price, even though the author "Shaxberd" is named for performances of
"Measure for Measure" on December 26, 1604; "The Play of Errors" on
December 28; and "The Merchant of Venice" on February 10 and 12, 1605 (of
the latter performance we learn from the revels accounts that it was
"Againe Comanded by the Kings Majestie"). In the same list of
performances we find other authors named: Heywood for "How to Larne of a
Woman to Wooe" and George Chapman for "All Foulles." Why is Price's
filter set up to reject such evidence for Shakespeare, Chapman, and
Heywood? Price cannot object to the spelling "Shaxberd" in the revels
accounts if she accepts "maxton" for "Marston" in Henslowe.
>
> Mr. Ross begins by claiming that even if he thought my comparative
> analysis of evidence fairly demonstrated that Shakespeare's
> chroniclers have no personal literary paper trails on which to base
> their literary biography, that such a deficiency "would not be
> sufficient to cause us to reject the standard attribution to
> Shakespeare of his works." I disagree.
See my discussion above. I do not accept that Diana Price's filter is the
appropriate means by which to determine whether there is a "literary paper
trail." Her filter grants supposedly "literary" trails to more non-authors
than to authors, and it is designed to reject many of the most important
classes of evidence that we have, such as title pages and the Stationer's
Register. Even if such an experimental means for filtering evidence were
valuable, Price does not apply her filter fairly.
> Such a deficiency is surely at the core of questions that concern the
> construction of Shakespeare's literary biography. Not the biography of
> a doctor, for whom we would reasonably expect personal medical
> records. Or a lawyer, for whom we would expect personal legal records,
> but the life of a writer.
Price's filter creates a "literary" paper trail for every Elizabethan who
is known ever to have studied law or medicine; it does not ask whether the
lawyers and doctors were ever listed as authors but whether there is a
record that they were educated. It does not ask whether their names
appear in the Stationer's Register but whether they were ever mentioned
described as having owned a book.
> Readers are routinely assured that there is plenty of documentary
> evidence to support Shakespeare's biography which is, ostensibly, a
> literary biography. If there is no literary evidence to underpin his
> biography, then it is, by definition, not a literary biography.
Price, having constructed a filter that will reject Shakespeare while
allowing what she calls "literary paper trails" for more non-writers than
writers now confuses her filter with "documentary evidence" of
Shakespeare's "literary biography." The Stationer's Register, the title
pages of Shakespeare's works, the front-matter of the First Folio, the
Revels accounts -- none of this counts for Shakespeare, but the fact that
a person is named on the buttery roles for Cambridge DOES count, even if
that person never wrote a line of verse.
>
> The parameters of my comparative analysis of literary evidence were
> simple and the criteria straightforward.
It is impossible to tell from the design and operation of the filter that
is was NOT designed specifically to exclude Shakespeare. Hence the very
broad "criteria" in areas where she believes there are no Shakespeare
records (education, "book" evidence); hence the very narrow "criteria"
when Shakespeare's records are present (dedications must be more
"personal" than Shakespeare's dedications; references to having written a
play must be accompanied by a notation of payment).
> The evidence I analyzed was contemporaneous, ie, left during the
> writer's lifetime (with the obvious exception of notice at death).
Again, this has the appearance of a standard designed specifically to
exclude Shakespeare -- specifically the First Folio, and even more
precisely Ben Jonson's remarks about his "beloved" Shakespeare both in the
First Folio and elsewhere. The trick is how to get the timing just right.
If she makes death itself the cut-off point, then she loses too many
non-Shakespearean writers, such as Marlowe. If she makes seven years the
cut-off point, then she allows the First Folio. What then is the cut-off
point? Beaumont get points for having been buried in Westminster Abbey,
but no stone marks his grave, and the very first notice of Beaumont's
death -- the first indication that the place of Beaumont's burial was a
tribute to him as a writer -- is Basse's eulogy for Shakespeare. Price
quotes the praise for Spenser on his monument, but that monument was
erected in 1620; Spenser died in 1599. It seems that Price's "shortly
after death rule" does not apply to Spenser, which again demonstrates her
use of a double standard. Basse's eulogy dates sometime between
Shakespeare's and Beaumont's deaths and the First Folio (we cannot be more
specific than that). The cut-off point, presumably, is just shorter than
whatever the interval is between the deaths of those poets and the
composition of Basse's poem, but without Basse Price has only the fact
that Beaumont was buried without a monument as was the yet monumentless
Spenser.
> Two questions were put to any piece of evidence: (1) is it personal,
> i.e., based on firsthand information (this means that it is not
> reliant on, or derivative of some other source), and
This, of course, is impossible to know in many cases (e.g., if poet X says
that he is poet Y's friend, he may not be telling the truth), and there is
much useful information that is not known to be first-hand. The
Stationer's register is not as reliable or detailed as we would like, but
a statement there that text B was written by writer X is a good indication
that writer X is indeed a writer certainly it is a much better indication
than the fact that Z once owned a book. Compile two lists: on one of
them, included every person from Shakespeare's time who passes the
filter's book test. On another, include every person who is named as an
author in the Stationer's register. Neither list is sufficiently
comprehensive of course, but which list would have a greater percentage of
people know to be authors? Which list would contain more false positives?
> (2) does it relate to literary activity or the vocation of writing.
This is not, in fact, one of Price's criteria (see my discussion of the
education and book features of her filter).
> Any evidence for which the answer to those two questions is "yes"
> would serve as support for the simple statement, "he was a writer."
Price's filter would, even it were fairly applied, result in a great many
false positives (all those non-literary Oxford, Cambridge, and Inns of
Court johnnies) while ignoring much of the best evidence that serves to
establish that a person was a writer.
> That should not be a tall order for any professional writer; the
> Elizabethan and Jacobean writers whom I investigated easily jumped the
> hurdle, as it were. Shakespeare is the only one for whom I cannot
> support the statement "he was a writer" without relying on posthumous
> evidence.
Again, Price is confusing the operation of her filter with what should
count as evidence. Moreover, the only reason her filter rejects every
Shakespeare record is that it operates as if it were designed specifically
to reject evidence about Shakespeare allowing a great deal of evidence
about non-writers; moreover, she ignore Shakespearean evidence that even
her filter should allow if it were fairly used.
Let me restore the part of my post that Diana Price snipped.
==============
=============================
Back to Price's response.
>
> Concerning the personal commendatory verse from Marston to Jonson and
> what it says about their relationship: Mr. Ross's objection that the
> verse does not begin to reflect the ups-and-downs or realities of
> their relationship entirely misses my point. I use the verse for one
> purpose only: it shows that the two men *knew* each other, regardless
> of whether they were arch-enemies, friends, or ran hot and cold.
Diana Price has evidently forgotten her own words. She cites Marston's
dedication to Jonson not merely to show that the two men knew each other,
but to show that they were friends. She contrast the situation of poor
Shakespeare, who, she tells us "had no literary friends" (120). When we
turn to Jonson, we see that this "friendship" consisted of beating
Marston, taking his pistol from him, attacking him in a play, and telling
Drummond that Marston had not written the comedies that were attributed to
him. But as far as Price is concerned, the statement of someone who knew
Marston that Marston did not, in fact, write the plays that were
attributed to him contributes to a "personal literary trail" that Marston
was indeed a writer.
> Writer A personally recognized another individual as Writer B. Had
> Marston written "To Ben Jonson, the most indiscriminate of writers,
> and my heartfelt nemesis for life" it would make no difference to its
> value as evidence that the two writers personally recognized each
> other. There is nothing comparable for Shakespeare.
There is indeed: Jonson wrote a poem "To the memory of my Beloved, the
Author William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us." Jonson said, "I
loved the man, and do honor his memory -- on this side idolatry -- as much
as any." Anthony Scoloker wrote of "Friendly Shakespeare's Tragedies"
while Barksted called Shakespeare "so deer lov'd a neighbor." Jonson
certainly knew Shakespeare; did Scoloker and Barksted as well? Even
Honigmann, who wishes to debunk somewhat the notion of "gentle
Shakespeare" and who opines that Scoloker's comment may be "ironical" and
is "open to more than one interpretation, does not reject the possibility
that the comment was personal. Nor does he reject the possibility that
Shakespeare himself was "so deere lov'd" by Barksted, although he thinks
it may have been *Venus and Adonis* rather than its author that Barksted
loved. We are dealing here with possibilities rather than certainties,
but Price's filter is set to allow no possibilities that favor Shakespeare
-- while if a text concerns some other writer the filter becomes a sluice,
and interpretation is no longer allowed. Marston was a noted satirist,
and his dedication to Jonson should be open to the suspicion that it may
be, let us say, insincere, but Price only suspects irony when the subject
of praise is Shakespeare.
>
> I attempt to meet the standards found in other biographies or
> histories.
I'm sure Price meant to do so, and thought she had succeeded; the careful
reader, however, will note instances of double standards throughout the
work.
> So I try to distinguish between personal and impersonal evidence.
This may be part of Price's project, but the filter and its application
give every instance of being designed to distinguish between Shakespeare's
records (impersonal, ambiguous) and everybody else's (to be a college man
is to be literary, there is no irony or ambiguity where Shakespeare is not
mentioned).
> I also attempt to distinguish professional evidence from other
> evidence of a general nature. Many literary allusions, whether about
> Shakespeare or anybody else, are not evidence of a personal
> relationship, so they don't tell us anything about who the writer was.
> Such allusions are based on the written works themselves. I refer to
> some of them as the Elizabethan equivalent of book reviews. Most book
> reviews are written by people who do not know personally the author
> whose work they are criticizing.
But we don't really have "the Elizabethan equivalent of book reviews" for
Shakespeare's works, do we? Book reviews are commonly commissioned by the
sort of publications that did not exist in Shakespeare's day. Most of the
comments on Shakespeare are voluntary expressions of approbation, both of
the works and the man. In the smaller circle of London letters the
chances are much greater that writers knew each other.
>
> Many examples of these sorts of distinctions that I might cite come
> from biographies of other writers, but here's one relating to
> Shakespeare. In his book on Weever, Honigmann considers the sonnet
> that Weever wrote in praise of Shakespeare's work, but Honigmann stops
> short of drawing the conclusion that Shakespeare and Weever were known
> to each other.
This might be a good time to talk about another major failure of Price's
filter: it pretends to be binary. Every record either does or does not
contribute to a "literary paper trail." All doubtful or even probable
cases are resolved against Shakespeare. Thus the probability that
Shakespeare knew Weever or Barksted or Scoloker or Drayton is not worth
considering, yet Price relaxes her scrutiny when considering every other
writer. A more fair but still skeptical approach would, at a minimum,
credit Shakespeare with quite a few probables.
> Instead he asks questions:
>
> "Could it be that [Weever] was one of the 'private friends' [referred to by
> Meres]? Or had he read *The Passionate Pilgrim" ('By W. Shakespeare') which
> also came out in 1599 and perhaps preceded the *Epigrammes*? " Honigmann
> then asks if Weever's use of the sonnet form "impl[ies] that he had seen a
> manuscript of the 'sugared sonnets among his private friends'.>> [p.90]
>
> Honigmann's questions make it clear that he does not know whether Weever
> wrote his poem because he recognized Shakespeare as a personal friend, or
> because he had read something Shakespeare wrote. Honigmann might wish to
> think that the two men were acquainted or even friends, but the evidence was
> not sufficiently explicit to support such a conclusion. This is the sort of
> standard that I attempt to maintain in my book. For all the other writers I
> surveyed, I found evidence that attested to personal knowledge of the man in
> question. (Marston's verse to Jonson, whatever else may be made of it,
> demonstrates that the one writer knew and recognized the other one as a
> writer. Hence, a personal literary paper trail.)
Because Meres does not name the friends among whom his sonnets circulated,
one cannot say that Weever was one of them, but Honigmann does not doubt
that there were such friends. Price's filter, however, rejects everything
Meres says about Shakespeare; Honigmann, whose standards Price admires,
does not.
>
> Now let me contrast Honigmann's conservative standard to that employed
> by the traditional biography. We are told that Shakespeare was
> personally recognized as a nice guy and had a circle of friends who
> said so. If that is true, then there will be personal literary paper
> trails to prove it.
Not necessarily. For one thing, it would be unwise to mistake the results
of Price's filter as "literary paper trails." For another, she makes the
mistake that Jonson addresses in the beginning of his poem to Drayton:
readers may suppose that they are not friends merely because no verse
letters had been exchanged between them.
> These paper trails will show evidence of first-hand knowledge of the
> person, of the sort that was missing in the poem by Weever in praise
> of Shakespeare.
>
> I submit that there are no such personal literary paper trails for
> Shakespeare, so how does the biographer support statements that
> Shakespeare was recognized as an affable chap or that knew this or
> that writer? The orthodox biographer creates that admiring circle of
> Shakespeare's friends by converting impersonal literary commentary
> into personal literary evidence. That is surely a departure from the
> usual standard.
What seems to disturb Price most about this is the suggestion that
Shakespeare may have been a nice guy. As will become clear in future
posts, Price's book is designed not merely to filter out all evidence of
Shakespeare's authorship of his works but also to paint him as a terrible
human being, the kind of person no right-thinking poet could have had as a
friend. Her double standards are evident in the besmirching part of her
project as well, as will become evident in later posts.
>
> Here's part of my analysis. Samuel Schoenbaum concluded that "almost
> everyone seems to have thought well of Shakespeare." From my book:
> "Schoenbaum's ... conception of the mild-mannered and well-liked Shakspere
> is not supported by the allusions that he quoted. For example, he mentioned
> the author of Daiphantus (1604) who "remarks on 'Friendly Shakespeare's
> Tragedies'. Did the two men know one another, as the phrase suggests?"
> (Documentary, 205)." End quote.
It is a reasonable question.
>
> This passage was mentioned in an earlier message to this group, but, to
> repeat, the phrase "friendly Shakespeare" is from a satirical epistle. It is
> literary commentary. Taken in context, "friendly" conveys the idea, not that
> Shakspere himself was known to be affable, but that Shakespeare's plays are
> accessible or user-friendly:
We see the double standard again. Price's reading might be the more
plausible reading if Scoloker had referred to "Shakespeare's Friendly
Tragedies" rather than "Friendly Shakespeare's Tragedies"; as it is (and
in context) the friendliness may well apply both to the man and to the
plays, or merely to the man. We know that Shakespeare had literary
friends from Meres's comment about the circulation of his sonnets "among
his private friends"; whether Meres was in that circle we do not know, but
Shakespeare was known as a man who shared his poems with his friends.
There are also a number of texts even before the folio that describe him
in terms consistent with the sweet and gentle Shakespeare of legend. No
doubt praise of the man and of the works can become intermingled as people
who might not know Jonson personally could still describe him as learned.
With comments on other writers, however, Price does not see the need for
such scrutiny. Since Price's filter is binary, it does not allow (as even
Honigmann does) that Scoloker's comments may well have been based on
personal acquaintance with Shakespeare.
>
> Schoenbaum cites John Davies's epigrammatic reference to "good Will"
> as evidence of Shakspere's affable disposition, but I devote several
> pages of analysis that show that the epigram is not only cryptic, it
> is impersonal.
One of Price's standard moves is to task a text about Shakespeare for
being in some wise unclear or allowing of more than one meaning, and then
using that as an excuse to reject the text as part of Shakespeare's
"literary paper trail." She does not subject the texts that mention other
writers to the same kind of scrutiny.
> The verse reads like hearsay ("Some say . . . ").
It appears, then, that Shakespeare's works and demeanor were a topic of
conversation in Davies's circle.
> It is found in a series of epigrams addressed to colleagues whom
> Davies addresses familiarly as "my worthily-disposed friend," or "my
> well-accomplish'd friend," until he gets to Shakespeare's epigram,
> when he switches to the impersonal "our" -- "our English Terence Mr.
> Will: Shake-speare." There is no agreement on what Davies was trying
> to say in this verse.
There is universal agreement among scholars that Davies was writing of the
actor and writer William Shakespeare.
>
> After the Davies allusion, Schoenbaum continues to appropriate more
> impersonal literary commentary for personal literary paper trails.
> Again, from my book: Schoenbaum quotes William Barksted, a lesser poet
> and playwright, who referred to "Shakespeare" as "so dear loved a
> neighbour." Schoenbaum was discussing what Shakspere's supposed circle
> of friends thought about him personally, and what testimony they left
> to posterity to prove it. But again, this quote is an impersonal
> literary allusion found in Barksted's 1607 narrative poem, Mirrha, the
> Mother of Adonis. It describes events leading up to Mirrha's death, at
> which point Adonis goes off to have the adventures described in
> Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. In a sort of epilogue, Barksted begins
> the Venus and Adonis story, then stops in his tracks and apologizes
> for encroaching on the adjoining literary territory:
>
> << [Barksted's verse]: "But stay my Muse in thine own confines keep, / &
> wage not war with so dear lov'd a neighbor / But having sung thy day song,
> rest and sleep / preserve thy small fame and his greater favor: / His Song
> was worthy merit (Shakspeare he) / sung the fair blossom, thou the withered
> tree / Laurel is due to him, his art and wit / hath purchased it, Cypress
> thy brow will fit.
>
> In other words, Barksted's Muse is not going to wage war with Shakespeare's
> Muse. Barksted is clearly distinguishing his "neighbor" in the sense of
> adjoining literary subject matter, one story abutting another, one muse
> poised to compete with another. There is nothing in the verse to suggest
> that Barksted and Shakespeare were neighbors or even personally acquainted.
This is not accurate; the phrase "so dear lov'd a neighbor" does indeed
suggest that Barksted and Shakespeare were acquainted. Now, the
suggestion may be misleading, but it is there, and even Honigmann does not
rule the possibility out.
>
> To sum up, Schoenbaum first invested Shakspere with civility and an
> "uprightness of dealing" by quoting Chettle's apology to somebody
> else.
So Price would have us believe, but regulars on this newsgroup will be
familiar with the reasons why it is not unreasonable to believe that
Chettle apologized to Shakespeare. Examination of the flaws in Price's
discussion of *Greene's Groatsworth of Wit* and *Kind-hart's Dream* will
have to wait for future posts.
> He then piled one impersonal or cryptic allusion (such as "good Will")
> onto another, as though they constituted reliable evidence of
> Shakspere's friendly personality and gentle conduct.
Price here might almost be projecting. She clearly considers Shakespeare
to have been a miserable excuse for a human being on the basis of
impersonal and cryptic allusions, some of which cannot be said to apply to
Shakespeare at all.
>
> In a footnote, I add that Schoenbaum's treatment of this evidence did
> not change over time. Earlier, in 1971, he described Shakespeare, the
> man, in similar terms: "Apart from Greene, none of his contemporaries
> seems to have uttered a malicious word about Shakespeare. Chettle . .
> . praised his civil demeanour and uprightness of dealing. From others,
> we hear of good Will, sweet Shakespeare, friendly Shakespeare, so dear
> loved a neighbor" (14).]>>
>
> [end extract]
>
> So here we have an example of a double standard, or perhaps no
> standard at all. Schoenbaum's uses impersonal allusions Shakespeare's
> verse to invent a "sweet," "friendly," "dear loved" Shakespeare, and
> to conjure up, by extension, his personal circle of friends.
> Schoenbaum has transformed impersonal literary commentary into
> personal literary paper trails. This is not the sort of "standard"
> that I have attempted to use for my own analysis.
Price is assuming what cannot be shown; it is possible that the praises of
Shakespeare's friendliness, sweetness, gentleness, and goodness applied
somewhat or also to his works; they may well also reflect the man's
character. The reader of Price's book (and there will be much more to say
about this in future posts) will note that Price accepts as harsh
criticism of Shakespeare's character much that cannot be shown even to be
directed at him. Price's standard for possible (even extremely unlikely)
complaints about Shakespeare's character is much looser than for possible,
even probable praise of him as a man.
There are two problems here: first, Price confuses the results of her very
flawed filtering process with what should be considered "evidence";
second, her use of "contemporaneous" is misleading.
For the first, there is (to take only one example) evidence that
Shakespeare sought patronage from Southampton for *Venus and Adonis*, and
he may well have been successful -- the dedication to *Lucrece* certainly
does not rule such an occurrence out, and is consistent with Southampton's
having reacted favorably.
As for "contemporaneous": certainly Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, and
Michael Drayton were contemporaries of each other; I have seen no
explanation from her why one should reject out-of-hand anything said by
one about either of the others. Drayton was born a year before
Shakespeare. Jonson never mentioned Drayton until he wrote a poem for
inclusion in a collection of Drayton's poems in 1627. Jonson never
mentioned Shakespeare until he wrote two poems for inclusion in a
collection of Shakespeare's plays in 1623. For Price, Jonson's Drayton
poem (despite its ambiguities and irony) counts as part of a literary
paper trail for both Jonson and Drayton, while Jonson's Shakespeare poems
do not. Is the First Folio too late for Price? Jonson in his 1619
conversations with Drummond (only three years after Shakespeare's death)
discussed Shakespeare's flaws as a writer. Price contrasts Spenser's
monument with Shakespeare's, so we know that for Spenser at least, the
"after death" rule extends more than 20 years, yet Jonson's conversations
with Drummond occurred only three years after Shakespeare's death, and in
the year before Spenser's monument was erected. A twenty-year rule might
be reasonable (though I'd like to hear the arguments), if it applied to
all writers rather than only to writers not named Shakespeare -- but why
not allow reports from everyone who had known an author?
> This is a unique feature in a literary biography. For no other writer
> from the time period are historians forced to rely on posthumous
> evidence to support the simple statement "he was a writer." For all
> these other writers, they have personal literary paper trails, left
> during the author's lifetime.
This is simply not true. Price once again confuses the products of her
filter with what a literary historian should consider evidence. She
should direct her attention to Tom Reedy and Dave Kathman's essay "How We
Know that Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts"
http://www.clark.net/tross/ws/howdowe.html
In this essay she will learn, as Tom and Dave say in their conclusion,
"The historical evidence demonstrates that one and the same man, William
Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, was William Shakespeare the player,
William Shakespeare the Globe-sharer, and William Shakespeare the author
of the plays and poems that bear his name -- and no person of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean eras ever doubted the attribution. No Elizabethan
ever suggested that Shakespeare's plays and poems were written by someone
else, or that Shakespeare the player was not Shakespeare the author, or
that Shakespeare the Globe-sharer was not Shakespeare of Stratford. No
contemporary of Shakespeare's ever suggested that the name used by the
player, the Globe-sharer, or the author was a pseudonym; and none of the
major alternative candidates -- not Francis Bacon, not the Earl of Oxford,
not Christopher Marlowe -- had any connection with Shakespeare's acting
company or with his friends and fellow actors."
Of course, Tom and Dave operated from different principles than those used
by Price's filter. Unlike Price, Tom and Dave do not use different
standards from those that they would use for other writers. Unlike
Price's filter, which generates "literary paper trails" for more
non-writers than for writers while ignoring much of the most valuable
evidence, Tom and Dave's procedures would be generally suitable for
attribution studies.
>
> In addition, the evidence that Ross would cite as straightforward
> testimony in the Folio and Timber is a topic that consumes the better
> part of two chapters in my book. Readers of Ross's criticism would
> understandably be skeptical of my treatment of this evidence if they
> relied on his report. Jonson's testimony is most certainly not
> straightforward, and I do not just cavalierly brush it aside, ignore
> it, or reject it out of hand.
This will be a subject of future posts, I am sure.
> Beginning with the epistles, moving through the title and content of
> Jonson's eulogy, then on to Timber, I consider the key points in all
> his testimony. I consider them in light of his other allusions to
> Shakespeare's writing. I also researched at length the Jonsonian
> critics to see what they had to say about it all, especially the Folio
> eulogy. They have a lot more to say about it than do the Shakespearean
> critics, and they all find Jonson contradicting himself and/or
> employing ambiguity. That alone should raise some eyebrows.
Ah, but eyebrow raising is only important to Price when references to
Shakespeare are under examination. Her eyebrows remain steady, and she
sees no ambiguity or contradiction in the cases of other writers. That
Jonsonians focus more on Jonson than Shakespeareans do should not
surprise, but I would hesitate to accuse Shakespeareans of ignorance about
scholarship on Jonson (there is a considerable overlap in the sets).
>
> Mr. Ross seems to have skimmed over my analysis of Timber (De
> Shakespeare Nostrati), in which I demonstrate Jonson's reliance on
> Seneca, which affects the interpretation of the Timber entry, a point
> which Mr. Ross has missed.
No, this is not a point I missed; it is a point I am willing to discuss at
length in later posts. I too have read Peterson (who somewhat beat Price
to the punch on what she calls HER "demonstration").
>
> I will continue with this response.
I appreciate your giving me and this newsgroup your time and attention.
A note about the availablility of Price's book: trying to save myself
$40, I recalled it from the U of Marylnad library months ago, as soon as
it was listed in the library's database. They're still looking for the
book, which was probably misshelved. Then I tried Barnes & Noble, which
had listed the book late last year and then delisted it. Then I went to
Amazon, which claimed to be able to send the book eventually. I asked
Amazon to email me when the book became available again. After hearing
nothing for two weeks, I ordered the book from the Greenwood Press's
online site, and had the book within a week. Now Amazon has emailed me
that it has the book in stock, and Barnes & Noble is once again offering
it. I advise those who are pretty sure that they want to buy Price's book
to order it soon, as it may disappear from bn.com and amazon.com again, or
to order it from the publisher.
Terry Ross
inconsistent rewritings even for me, so I am reposting this somewhat
cleaner version. Please direct responses, if any, to this one.
===
I'd like to thank Diana Price for her post; it's a privilege to have an
author reply so promptly to one's comments.
Dave and I will at some point be putting up a detailed response to her
book on the Shakespeare Authorship page. Most of the essays on our site
have begun as posts in this forum, where the candid exchange of opinions
can be so useful in helping us refine our views, and where critical
readers are never hesitant to point out flaws in our arguments. To gain
the attention of Price herself is quite a luxury.
In this post I am responding to the first of Price's replies, but I am
also including more fundamental criticisms of her entire approach to
Elizabethan attribution studies, which I believe is profoundly misguided.
Most of my comments about what I call her "filter" are near the top of
this post, and if the post seems needlessly repetitious in its length,
well, that is a risk that is endemic to this genre.
On Tue, 13 Feb 2001, Diana Price wrote:
>
> Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message
> news:Pine.GSO.4.21.0102111622050.15869-100000@mail...
>
> Since Mr. Ross's comments are somewhat lengthy, I will offer some responses
> in a couple of installments.
>
> | Alas, the use of a double standard is at the heart of Price's "new
> | evidence of an authorship problem." She claims that the other playwrights
> | of Shakespeare's time had "literary paper trails" but that Shakespeare,
> | uniquely, did not. This might be an interesting claim if Price were able
> | to demonstrate it fairly (although it would not be sufficient to cause us
> | to reject the standard attribution to Shakespeare of his works). When,
> | however, we look at what she counts as part of a "literary paper trail"
> | for other writers, we find that she does not use the same standards she
> | uses when she scrutinizes the evidence for Shakespeare. Much of her
> | denigration of Shakespeare's "literary paper trail" concerns her attempts
> | to reject Ben Jonson's descriptions of the Shakespeare he claimed to have
> | loved. By the application of an antistratfordian double standard Price
> | seeks to eliminate the evidence of Jonson's friendship with Shakespeare
> | while exaggerating the evidence for his friendship with such other writers
> | as Marston and Drayton.
>
> Terry Ross's reaction to my book focuses largely on his impression that I
> have used a double standard in my evaluation of evidence.
No, not just on my "impression" but on Diana Price's actual procedures.
She treats records that concern Shakespeare differently from the way she
treats those concerning other authors.
> This perceived fundamental failure is the central theme of his
> posting, and he is not the first critic to complain about it.
And I'm sure I will not be the last; it is a very noticeable feature of
her book.
> However, it is one thing to apply a double standard. It is another to
> apply a consistent standard and thus arrive at a different conclusion.
> I suggest that Mr. Ross has confused the one with the other.
We shall see when we look at her remarks about my specific comments. Let
me offer a more general observation about her attempt to use a "consistent
standard." I have no doubt that she meant to approach her task as
objectively and dispassionately as was possible, but the result is
indistinguishable from the work of someone who had set out, Looney-like,
to fashion a set of criteria, believing in advance that they did not apply
particularly well to Shakespeare. The literary historian, on the other
hand, is not in the business of stacking the deck.
Price has devised a system to filter records so that those relating to
Shakespeare do not pass through, but some of those relating to some other
writers of the time do. It is known by all that there are no records of
Shakespeare's education -- this is not particularly surprising, since
Shakespeare almost certainly attended the Stratford school, from which no
such records survive for anyone in his time, but most scholars doubt that
he had any further formal education. Price therefore includes education
records as part of a "literary paper trail." Why does she do this? The
great majority of those for whom there IS an educational record made no
contribution to the canon of English literature, yet if we applied her
filter to all Elizabethan records, we would find that the number of
non-authors for whom her filter would show what she calls a "literary
paper trail" was far larger than the number of known authors.
On the other hand, there are a great many title pages that bear
Shakespeare's name as the author of his works. Since this kind of record
exists for Shakespeare, her antistratfordian filter is set so that it
rejects every one of them -- yet the correspondence between being named as
the author on a title page and being a writer is far stronger than that
between having left an educational record and having been a writer.
While the presence of an author's name on the title page of the work is of
no value to Price's filter whatsoever, she will allow certain sorts of
front-matter that she knows in advance are not found in Shakespeare's
works. If there are dedications that sound to her more personal than
Shakespeare's dedications to Southampton, those dedications count. The
filter seems designed to follow a *Lucrece* rule: any dedication more
personal-sounding gets through; any dedication that is less personal does
not count at all.
I cannot see why even an unsuccessful dedication should not count in any
fairly-designed filter. Stephen Gosson dedicated his *School for Abuse*
to Sidney and was, Harvey tells us, "scorned for his labors." Price would
ignore the dedication but probably allow Harvey's comment -- yet to the
literary historian both are of interest, and any reasonable attempt to
collect evidence of a "literary paper trail" for Gosson should include
both. A writer who seeks patronage is a writer, whether or not he is ever
rewarded by a patron, and the very act of seeking such patronage in a
dedication is not something that should be ignored -- unless, of course,
one is operating with a filter that is designed expressly to reject
Shakespearean records.
Thus, while it might be possible to construct a filter that would block
every Shakespeare record but allow some records for other writers, the
mere fact that such a filter is possible to construct is not in itself
sufficient reason to reject the standard attribution to Shakespeare of his
works.
Of course, as I have suggested, Price does not operate her filter fairly.
Here is another example (the book is riddled with them). Price counts
"evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given." Thus Marston
gets credit because his father left him some law books. The same credit
goes to every other Elizabethan whose father left him law books (or any
other books), and whether the recipient of such paternal bounty ever wrote
a single line of verse is a matter of supreme indifference to the filter.
Again, it is difficult to see why the filter should ignore every title
page that names the author of the work while it allows every book record.
The great majority of those who left "evidence of books owned, written in,
borrowed, or given" made no contribution to the canon of Elizabethan
literature. If we filtered the entire set of Elizabethan records for
every bit of "evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given," we
would have far more non-authors than authors for whom there was what Price
calls a "literary paper trail."
To be sure, there would be some authors among the great many book-evidence
folk her filter allows, and one of them, if she applied her filter fairly,
would be William Shakespeare -- yet Price does not mention Shakespeare's
signature in *Archaionomia*, which certainly would constitute "evidence of
books owned, written in, borrowed, or given" by or to Shakespeare IF she
operated her filter fairly.
Thus we can see two fundamental problems with her filter: it is designed
to generate "literary paper trails" for a great many non-authors, while at
the same time it is deliberately designed to ignore those kinds of
evidence that Price knows apply in the case of Shakespeare and that are
better determinants of whether a person is an author. Price's method
therefore would not seem to be a useful tool for attribution studies even
if it were applied without further prejudice, but Price, as we have seen,
does not use even this inadequate filter fairly.
Here is another example. We know that Shakespeare's authorship of his
works was recognized in a great many records of the time, but we also know
that there is no record of the sort "William Shakespeare was paid X for
writing *Hamlet*." Most of the records of that sort that we do have are
found in Henslowe's diary, in which Shakespeare's name does not appear
(Henslowe began noting playwright's names in 1597, by which time
Shakespeare was well established as the playwright for a rival theater
company).
Since Henslowe doesn't mention Shakespeare, the filter is set up so that
every writer whose name appears in Henslowe as being paid gets credit for
a literary trail; thus Henslowe's reference to "maxton" counts for
Marston, even though there is no first name for "maxton" and no play is
named. Price's standards for writers other than Shakespeare do not compel
her to ask how we know this "maxton" is the right John Marston or any
particular "Marston" at all.
On the other hand, since Shakespeare's "Shaxberd" records in the Revels
accounts do not mention money, they does not have to be considered by
Price, even though the author "Shaxberd" is named for performances of
"Measure for Measure" on December 26, 1604; "The Play of Errors" on
December 28; and "The Merchant of Venice" on February 10 and 12, 1605 (of
the latter performance we learn from the revels accounts that it was
"Againe Comanded by the Kings Majestie"). In the same list of
performances we find other authors named: Heywood for "How to Larne of a
Woman to Wooe" and George Chapman for "All Foulles." Why is Price's
filter set up to reject such evidence for Shakespeare, Chapman, and
Heywood? Price cannot object to the spelling "Shaxberd" in the revels
accounts if she accepts "maxton" for "Marston" in Henslowe.
>
> Mr. Ross begins by claiming that even if he thought my comparative
> analysis of evidence fairly demonstrated that Shakespeare's
> chroniclers have no personal literary paper trails on which to base
> their literary biography, that such a deficiency "would not be
> sufficient to cause us to reject the standard attribution to
> Shakespeare of his works." I disagree.
See my discussion above. I do not accept that Diana Price's filter is the
appropriate means by which to determine whether there is a "literary paper
trail." Her filter grants supposedly "literary" trails to more non-authors
than to authors, and it is designed to reject many of the most important
classes of evidence that we have, such as title pages and the Stationer's
Register. Even if such an experimental means for filtering evidence were
valuable, Price does not apply her filter fairly.
> Such a deficiency is surely at the core of questions that concern the
> construction of Shakespeare's literary biography. Not the biography of
> a doctor, for whom we would reasonably expect personal medical
> records. Or a lawyer, for whom we would expect personal legal records,
> but the life of a writer.
Price's filter creates a "literary" paper trail for every Elizabethan who
is known ever to have studied law or medicine; it does not ask whether the
lawyers and doctors were ever listed as authors but whether there is a
record that they were educated. It does not ask whether their names
appear in the Stationer's Register as having written a book but whether
they were ever described as having owned a book.
> Readers are routinely assured that there is plenty of documentary
> evidence to support Shakespeare's biography which is, ostensibly, a
> literary biography. If there is no literary evidence to underpin his
> biography, then it is, by definition, not a literary biography.
Price, having constructed a filter that will reject Shakespeare while
allowing what she calls "literary paper trails" for more non-writers than
writers, now confuses her filter with "documentary evidence" of
Shakespeare's "literary biography." The Stationer's Register, the title
pages of Shakespeare's works, the front-matter of the First Folio, the
Revels accounts -- none of this counts for Shakespeare, but the fact that
a person is named on the buttery roles for Cambridge DOES count, even if
that person never wrote a line of verse.
>
> The parameters of my comparative analysis of literary evidence were
> simple and the criteria straightforward.
It is impossible to tell from the design and operation of the filter that
is was NOT designed specifically to exclude Shakespeare. Hence the very
broad "criteria" in areas where she believes there are no Shakespeare
records (education, "book" evidence); hence the very narrow "criteria"
when Shakespeare's records are present (dedications must be more
"personal" than Shakespeare's dedications; references to having written a
play must be accompanied by a notation of payment).
> The evidence I analyzed was contemporaneous, ie, left during the
> writer's lifetime (with the obvious exception of notice at death).
Again, this has the appearance of a standard designed specifically to
exclude Shakespeare -- especially the First Folio, and even more precisely
Ben Jonson's remarks about his "beloved" Shakespeare both in the First
Folio and elsewhere. The trick is how to get the timing just right. If
Price makes death itself the cut-off point, then she loses too many
non-Shakespearean writers, such as Marlowe. If she makes seven years the
cut-off point, then she allows the First Folio. What then is the cut-off
point?
Beaumont get points for having been buried in Westminster Abbey, but no
stone marks his grave, and the very first notice of Beaumont's death --
the first indication that the place of Beaumont's burial was a tribute to
him as a writer -- is Basse's eulogy for Shakespeare. Price quotes the
praise for Spenser on his monument, but that monument was erected in 1620;
Spenser had died in 1599. It seems that Price's "shortly after death rule"
does not apply to Spenser, which again demonstrates her use of a double
standard. Basse's eulogy dates sometime between Shakespeare's and
Beaumont's deaths and the First Folio (we cannot be more specific than
that). The cut-off point, presumably, is just shorter than whatever the
interval is between the deaths of those poets and the composition of
Basse's poem, but without Basse, Price has only the fact that Beaumont was
buried without a monument as was the yet monumentless Spenser.
> Two questions were put to any piece of evidence: (1) is it personal,
> i.e., based on firsthand information (this means that it is not
> reliant on, or derivative of some other source), and
This, of course, is impossible to know in many cases (e.g., if poet X says
that he is poet Y's friend, he may not be telling the truth), and there is
much useful information that is not known to be first-hand. The
Stationer's Register is not as reliable or detailed as we would like, but
a statement there that text B was written by writer X is a good indication
that writer X is indeed a writer -- certainly it is a much better
indication than the fact that Z once owned a book.
Compile two lists: on one of them, include every person from Shakespeare's
time who passes the filter's book test. On another, include every person
who is named as an author in the Stationer's Register. Neither list is
sufficiently comprehensive of course, but which list would have a greater
percentage of people known to be authors? Which list would contain more
false positives?
> (2) does it relate to literary activity or the vocation of writing.
This is not, in fact, one of Price's criteria (see my discussion of the
education and book features of her filter).
> Any evidence for which the answer to those two questions is "yes"
> would serve as support for the simple statement, "he was a writer."
Price's filter would, even it were fairly applied, result in a great many
false positives (all those non-literary Oxford, Cambridge, and Inns of
Court johnnies) while ignoring much of the best evidence that serves to
establish that a person was a writer.
> That should not be a tall order for any professional writer; the
> Elizabethan and Jacobean writers whom I investigated easily jumped the
> hurdle, as it were. Shakespeare is the only one for whom I cannot
> support the statement "he was a writer" without relying on posthumous
> evidence.
Again, Price is confusing the operation of her filter with what should
count as evidence. Moreover, the only reason her filter rejects every
Shakespeare record is that it operates as if it were designed specifically
to reject evidence about Shakespeare, while at the same time allowing a
great deal of evidence about non-writers; moreover, she ignores
Shakespearean evidence that even her filter would allow if it were fairly
used.
>
Let me restore the part of my post that Diana Price snipped.
==============
Was there a friendship between Marston and Jonson? We have no dedicatory
=============================
Back to Price's response.
>
> Concerning the personal commendatory verse from Marston to Jonson and
> what it says about their relationship: Mr. Ross's objection that the
> verse does not begin to reflect the ups-and-downs or realities of
> their relationship entirely misses my point. I use the verse for one
> purpose only: it shows that the two men *knew* each other, regardless
> of whether they were arch-enemies, friends, or ran hot and cold.
Diana Price has evidently forgotten her own words. She cites Marston's
dedication to Jonson not merely to show that the two men knew each other,
but to show that they were friends. She contrast the situation of poor
Shakespeare, who, she tells us "had no literary friends" (120). When we
turn to Jonson, we see that this "friendship" consisted of beating
Marston, taking his pistol from him, attacking him in a play, and telling
Drummond that Marston had not written the comedies that were attributed to
him. But as far as Price is concerned, the statement of someone who knew
Marston that Marston did not, in fact, write the plays that were
attributed to him contributes to a "personal literary trail" that Marston
was indeed a writer.
> Writer A personally recognized another individual as Writer B. Had
> Marston written "To Ben Jonson, the most indiscriminate of writers,
> and my heartfelt nemesis for life" it would make no difference to its
> value as evidence that the two writers personally recognized each
> other. There is nothing comparable for Shakespeare.
There is indeed: Jonson wrote a poem "To the memory of my Beloved, the
Author William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us." Jonson said, "I
loved the man, and do honor his memory -- on this side idolatry -- as much
as any." Anthony Scoloker wrote of "Friendly Shakespeare's Tragedies"
while Barksted called Shakespeare "so deer lov'd a neighbor." Jonson
certainly knew Shakespeare; did Scoloker and Barksted as well? Even
Honigmann, who wishes to debunk somewhat the notion of "gentle
Shakespeare" and who opines that Scoloker's comment may be "ironical" and
is "open to more than one interpretation, does not reject the possibility
that the comment was personal. Nor does he reject the possibility that
Shakespeare himself was "so deere lov'd" by Barksted, although he thinks
it may have been *Venus and Adonis* rather than its author that Barksted
loved.
We are dealing here with possibilities rather than certainties (and this
circumstance is hardly unique to Shakespeare's records), but Price's
filter is set to allow no possibilities that favor Shakespeare -- but if a
text concerns some other writer the filter becomes a sluice, and
interpretation is no longer allowed. Marston was a noted satirist, and
his dedication to Jonson should be open to the suspicion that it may be,
let us say, insincere, but Price only suspects irony when the subject of
praise is Shakespeare.
>
> I attempt to meet the standards found in other biographies or
> histories.
I'm sure Price meant to do so, and thought she had succeeded; the careful
reader, however, will note instances of double standards throughout the
work.
> So I try to distinguish between personal and impersonal evidence.
This may be part of Price's project, but the filter and its application
give seem designed to distinguish between Shakespeare's records
(impersonal, ambiguous) and everybody else's (to be a college man is to be
literary, there is no irony or ambiguity where Shakespeare is not
mentioned).
> I also attempt to distinguish professional evidence from other
> evidence of a general nature. Many literary allusions, whether about
> Shakespeare or anybody else, are not evidence of a personal
> relationship, so they don't tell us anything about who the writer was.
> Such allusions are based on the written works themselves. I refer to
> some of them as the Elizabethan equivalent of book reviews. Most book
> reviews are written by people who do not know personally the author
> whose work they are criticizing.
But we don't really have "the Elizabethan equivalent of book reviews" for
Shakespeare's works, do we? Book reviews are commonly commissioned by the
sort of publications that did not exist in Shakespeare's day. Most of the
comments on Shakespeare are voluntary expressions of approbation, both of
the works and the man. In the smaller circle of London letters the
chances are much greater that writers knew each other.
>
> Many examples of these sorts of distinctions that I might cite come
> from biographies of other writers, but here's one relating to
> Shakespeare. In his book on Weever, Honigmann considers the sonnet
> that Weever wrote in praise of Shakespeare's work, but Honigmann stops
> short of drawing the conclusion that Shakespeare and Weever were known
> to each other.
This might be a good time to talk about another major failure of Price's
filter: it pretends to be binary. Every record either does or does not
contribute to a "literary paper trail." All doubtful or even probable
cases are resolved against Shakespeare. Thus the probability that
Shakespeare knew Weever or Barksted or Scoloker or Drayton is not worth
considering, yet Price relaxes her scrutiny when considering every other
writer. A more fair but still skeptical approach would, at a minimum,
credit Shakespeare with quite a few probable literary acquaintances.
> Instead he asks questions:
>
> "Could it be that [Weever] was one of the 'private friends' [referred to by
> Meres]? Or had he read *The Passionate Pilgrim" ('By W. Shakespeare') which
> also came out in 1599 and perhaps preceded the *Epigrammes*? " Honigmann
> then asks if Weever's use of the sonnet form "impl[ies] that he had seen a
> manuscript of the 'sugared sonnets among his private friends'.>> [p.90]
>
> Honigmann's questions make it clear that he does not know whether Weever
> wrote his poem because he recognized Shakespeare as a personal friend, or
> because he had read something Shakespeare wrote. Honigmann might wish to
> think that the two men were acquainted or even friends, but the evidence was
> not sufficiently explicit to support such a conclusion. This is the sort of
> standard that I attempt to maintain in my book. For all the other writers I
> surveyed, I found evidence that attested to personal knowledge of the man in
> question. (Marston's verse to Jonson, whatever else may be made of it,
> demonstrates that the one writer knew and recognized the other one as a
> writer. Hence, a personal literary paper trail.)
Because Meres does not name the friends among whom Shakespeare's sonnets
circulated, one cannot say that Weever was one of them, but Honigmann does
not doubt that there were such friends. Price's filter, however, rejects
everything Meres says about Shakespeare; Honigmann, whose standards Price
admires, does not.
>
> Now let me contrast Honigmann's conservative standard to that employed
> by the traditional biography. We are told that Shakespeare was
> personally recognized as a nice guy and had a circle of friends who
> said so. If that is true, then there will be personal literary paper
> trails to prove it.
Not necessarily. For one thing, it would be unwise to mistake the results
of Price's filter for "literary paper trails." For another, she makes the
mistake that Jonson addresses in the beginning of his poem to Drayton:
readers may suppose that they are not friends merely because no verse
letters had been exchanged between them.
> These paper trails will show evidence of first-hand knowledge of the
> person, of the sort that was missing in the poem by Weever in praise
> of Shakespeare.
>
> I submit that there are no such personal literary paper trails for
> Shakespeare, so how does the biographer support statements that
> Shakespeare was recognized as an affable chap or that knew this or
> that writer? The orthodox biographer creates that admiring circle of
> Shakespeare's friends by converting impersonal literary commentary
> into personal literary evidence. That is surely a departure from the
> usual standard.
What seems to disturb Price most about this is the suggestion that
Shakespeare may have been a nice guy. As will become clear in future
posts, Price's book is designed not merely to filter out all evidence of
Shakespeare's authorship of his works but also to paint him as a terrible
human being, the kind of person no right-thinking poet could have had as a
friend. Her double standards are evident in the besmirching part of her
project as well, as will become evident in later posts.
>
> Here's part of my analysis. Samuel Schoenbaum concluded that "almost
> everyone seems to have thought well of Shakespeare." From my book:
> "Schoenbaum's ... conception of the mild-mannered and well-liked Shakspere
> is not supported by the allusions that he quoted. For example, he mentioned
> the author of Daiphantus (1604) who "remarks on 'Friendly Shakespeare's
> Tragedies'. Did the two men know one another, as the phrase suggests?"
> (Documentary, 205)." End quote.
It is a reasonable question.
>
> This passage was mentioned in an earlier message to this group, but, to
> repeat, the phrase "friendly Shakespeare" is from a satirical epistle. It is
> literary commentary. Taken in context, "friendly" conveys the idea, not that
> Shakspere himself was known to be affable, but that Shakespeare's plays are
> accessible or user-friendly:
We see the double standard again. Price's reading might be the more
plausible reading if Scoloker had referred to "Shakespeare's Friendly
Tragedies" rather than "Friendly Shakespeare's Tragedies"; as it is (and
in context) the friendliness may well apply both to the man and to the
plays, or merely to the man. We know that Shakespeare had literary
friends from Meres's comment about the circulation of his sonnets "among
his private friends"; whether Scoloker was in that circle we do not know,
but Shakespeare was known as a man who shared his poems with his friends.
There are also a number of texts even before the folio that describe him
in terms consistent with the sweet and gentle Shakespeare of legend. No
doubt praise of the man and of the works can become intermingled; people
who might not know Jonson personally could still describe him in
personal-sounding terms that perhaps should have been applied to his
works. With comments on other writers, however, Price does not see the
need for such scrutiny. Since Price's filter is binary, it does not allow
(as even Honigmann does) that Scoloker's comments may well have been based
on personal acquaintance with Shakespeare.
>
> Schoenbaum cites John Davies's epigrammatic reference to "good Will"
> as evidence of Shakspere's affable disposition, but I devote several
> pages of analysis that show that the epigram is not only cryptic, it
> is impersonal.
One of Price's standard moves is to task a text about Shakespeare for
being in some wise unclear or allowing of more than one meaning, and then
use that as an excuse to reject the text as part of Shakespeare's
"literary paper trail." She does not subject the texts that mention other
writers to the same kind of scrutiny.
> The verse reads like hearsay ("Some say . . . ").
It appears, then, that Shakespeare's works and demeanor were a topic of
conversation in Davies's circle.
> It is found in a series of epigrams addressed to colleagues whom
> Davies addresses familiarly as "my worthily-disposed friend," or "my
> well-accomplish'd friend," until he gets to Shakespeare's epigram,
> when he switches to the impersonal "our" -- "our English Terence Mr.
> Will: Shake-speare." There is no agreement on what Davies was trying
> to say in this verse.
There is universal agreement among scholars that Davies was writing of the
actor and writer William Shakespeare.
>
> After the Davies allusion, Schoenbaum continues to appropriate more
> impersonal literary commentary for personal literary paper trails.
> Again, from my book: Schoenbaum quotes William Barksted, a lesser poet
> and playwright, who referred to "Shakespeare" as "so dear loved a
> neighbour." Schoenbaum was discussing what Shakspere's supposed circle
> of friends thought about him personally, and what testimony they left
> to posterity to prove it. But again, this quote is an impersonal
> literary allusion found in Barksted's 1607 narrative poem, Mirrha, the
> Mother of Adonis. It describes events leading up to Mirrha's death, at
> which point Adonis goes off to have the adventures described in
> Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. In a sort of epilogue, Barksted begins
> the Venus and Adonis story, then stops in his tracks and apologizes
> for encroaching on the adjoining literary territory:
>
> << [Barksted's verse]: "But stay my Muse in thine own confines keep, / &
> wage not war with so dear lov'd a neighbor / But having sung thy day song,
> rest and sleep / preserve thy small fame and his greater favor: / His Song
> was worthy merit (Shakspeare he) / sung the fair blossom, thou the withered
> tree / Laurel is due to him, his art and wit / hath purchased it, Cypress
> thy brow will fit.
>
> In other words, Barksted's Muse is not going to wage war with Shakespeare's
> Muse. Barksted is clearly distinguishing his "neighbor" in the sense of
> adjoining literary subject matter, one story abutting another, one muse
> poised to compete with another. There is nothing in the verse to suggest
> that Barksted and Shakespeare were neighbors or even personally acquainted.
This is not accurate; the phrase "so dear lov'd a neighbor" does indeed
suggest that Barksted and Shakespeare were acquainted. Now, the
suggestion may be misleading, but it is there, and even Honigmann does not
rule the possibility out.
>
> To sum up, Schoenbaum first invested Shakspere with civility and an
> "uprightness of dealing" by quoting Chettle's apology to somebody
> else.
So Price would have us believe, but regulars on this newsgroup will be
familiar with the reasons why it is not unreasonable to believe that
Chettle apologized to Shakespeare. Examination of the flaws in Price's
discussion of *Greene's Groatsworth of Wit* and *Kind-hart's Dreame* will
have to wait for future posts.
> He then piled one impersonal or cryptic allusion (such as "good Will")
> onto another, as though they constituted reliable evidence of
> Shakspere's friendly personality and gentle conduct.
Price here might almost be projecting. She clearly considers Shakespeare
to have been a miserable excuse for a human being, on the basis of
impersonal and cryptic allusions, some of which cannot be said to apply to
Shakespeare at all.
>
> In a footnote, I add that Schoenbaum's treatment of this evidence did
> not change over time. Earlier, in 1971, he described Shakespeare, the
> man, in similar terms: "Apart from Greene, none of his contemporaries
> seems to have uttered a malicious word about Shakespeare. Chettle . .
> . praised his civil demeanour and uprightness of dealing. From others,
> we hear of good Will, sweet Shakespeare, friendly Shakespeare, so dear
> loved a neighbor" (14).]>>
>
> [end extract]
>
> So here we have an example of a double standard, or perhaps no
> standard at all. Schoenbaum's uses impersonal allusions Shakespeare's
> verse to invent a "sweet," "friendly," "dear loved" Shakespeare, and
> to conjure up, by extension, his personal circle of friends.
> Schoenbaum has transformed impersonal literary commentary into
> personal literary paper trails. This is not the sort of "standard"
> that I have attempted to use for my own analysis.
Price is assuming what cannot be shown; it is possible that the praises of
Shakespeare's friendliness, sweetness, gentleness, and goodness applied
somewhat or also to his works; they may well also reflect the man's
character. The reader of Price's book (and there will be much more to say
about this in future posts) will note that Price accepts as harsh
criticism of Shakespeare's character much that cannot be shown even to be
directed at him. Price's standard for possible (even extremely unlikely)
complaints about Shakespeare's character is much looser than for possible,
even probable praise of him as a man.
>
There are two problems here: first, Price confuses the results of her very
> This is a unique feature in a literary biography. For no other writer
> from the time period are historians forced to rely on posthumous
> evidence to support the simple statement "he was a writer." For all
> these other writers, they have personal literary paper trails, left
> during the author's lifetime.
This is simply not true. Price once again confuses the products of her
filter with what a literary historian ought to consider evidence. She
should direct her attention to Tom Reedy and Dave Kathman's essay "How We
Know that Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts"
http://www.clark.net/tross/ws/howdowe.html
In this essay she will learn, as Tom and Dave say in their conclusion,
"The historical evidence demonstrates that one and the same man, William
Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, was William Shakespeare the player,
William Shakespeare the Globe-sharer, and William Shakespeare the author
of the plays and poems that bear his name -- and no person of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean eras ever doubted the attribution. No Elizabethan
ever suggested that Shakespeare's plays and poems were written by someone
else, or that Shakespeare the player was not Shakespeare the author, or
that Shakespeare the Globe-sharer was not Shakespeare of Stratford. No
contemporary of Shakespeare's ever suggested that the name used by the
player, the Globe-sharer, or the author was a pseudonym; and none of the
major alternative candidates -- not Francis Bacon, not the Earl of Oxford,
not Christopher Marlowe -- had any connection with Shakespeare's acting
company or with his friends and fellow actors."
Of course, Tom and Dave operated from different principles than those used
by Price's filter. Unlike Price, Tom and Dave do not use different
standards from those that they would use for other writers. Unlike
Price's filter, which generates "literary paper trails" for more
non-writers than for writers while ignoring much of the most valuable
evidence, Tom and Dave's procedures would be generally suitable for
attribution studies.
>
> In addition, the evidence that Ross would cite as straightforward
> testimony in the Folio and Timber is a topic that consumes the better
> part of two chapters in my book. Readers of Ross's criticism would
> understandably be skeptical of my treatment of this evidence if they
> relied on his report. Jonson's testimony is most certainly not
> straightforward, and I do not just cavalierly brush it aside, ignore
> it, or reject it out of hand.
This will be a subject of future posts, I am sure.
> Beginning with the epistles, moving through the title and content of
> Jonson's eulogy, then on to Timber, I consider the key points in all
> his testimony. I consider them in light of his other allusions to
> Shakespeare's writing. I also researched at length the Jonsonian
> critics to see what they had to say about it all, especially the Folio
> eulogy. They have a lot more to say about it than do the Shakespearean
> critics, and they all find Jonson contradicting himself and/or
> employing ambiguity. That alone should raise some eyebrows.
Ah, but eyebrow raising is only important to Price when references to
Shakespeare are under examination. Her eyebrows remain steady, and she
sees no ambiguity or contradiction in the cases of other writers. That
Jonsonians focus more on Jonson than Shakespeareans do should not
surprise, but I would hesitate to accuse Shakespeareans of ignorance about
scholarship on Jonson (there is a considerable overlap in the sets).
>
> Mr. Ross seems to have skimmed over my analysis of Timber (De
> Shakespeare Nostrati), in which I demonstrate Jonson's reliance on
> Seneca, which affects the interpretation of the Timber entry, a point
> which Mr. Ross has missed.
No, this is not a point I missed; it is a point I am willing to discuss at
length in later posts. I too have read Peterson (who somewhat beat Price
to the punch on what she calls HER "demonstration").
>
> I will continue with this response.
I appreciate your giving me and this newsgroup your time and attention.
A note about the availability of Price's book: trying to save myself
$40, I recalled it from the U of Maryland library months ago, as soon as
it was listed in the library's database. They're still looking for the
book, which was probably misshelved. Then I tried Barnes & Noble, which
had listed the book late last year and then delisted it. Then I went to
Amazon, which claimed to be able to send the book eventually. I asked
Amazon to email me when the book became available again. After hearing
nothing for two weeks, I ordered the book from the Greenwood Press's
online site, and had the book within a week. Now Amazon has emailed me
that it has the book in stock, and Barnes & Noble is once again offering
it. I advise those who are pretty sure that they want to buy Price's book
to order it soon, as it may disappear from bn.com and amazon.com again, or
to order it from the publisher.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik Nielsen
message. Let's just say I was tired and rather angry, and did not
realize the content of my post had quite the tone in question, and let
it go at that..
--nielsen
Diana Price
|
| > Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message
| > news:Pine.GSO.4.21.0102111622050.15869-100000@mail...
| No, not just on my "impression" but on Diana Price's actual procedures.
| She treats records that concern Shakespeare differently from the way she
| treats those concerning other authors.
|
| > This perceived fundamental failure is the central theme of his
| > posting, and he is not the first critic to complain about it.
|
| And I'm sure I will not be the last; it is a very noticeable feature of
| her book.
|
| > However, it is one thing to apply a double standard. It is another to
| > apply a consistent standard and thus arrive at a different conclusion.
| > I suggest that Mr. Ross has confused the one with the other.
|
| We shall see when we look at her remarks about my specific comments. Let
| me offer a more general observation about her attempt to use a "consistent
| standard." I have no doubt that she meant to approach her task as
| objectively and dispassionately as was possible, but the result is
| indistinguishable from the work of someone who had set out, Looney-like,
| to fashion a set of criteria, believing in advance that they did not apply
| particularly well to Shakespeare. The literary historian, on the other
| hand, is not in the business of stacking the deck.
|
| Price has devised a system to filter records so that those relating to
| Shakespeare do not pass through, but some of those relating to some other
| writers of the time do.
Mr. Ross is crediting me with an imagination and skill set that I can only
guess at. It would be difficult for me to conceive how anyone could
sufficiently manipulate the answers to two simple questions (does it relate
to literary activity or interest? is it personal?) in such a way as to
disqualify any contemporaneous evidence supporting Shakespeare's
literary biography, but nobody else's.
| It is known by all that there are no records of
| Shakespeare's education -- this is not particularly surprising, since
| Shakespeare almost certainly attended the Stratford school, from which no
| such records survive for anyone in his time, but most scholars doubt that
| he had any further formal education. Price therefore includes education
| records as part of a "literary paper trail." Why does she do this? The
| great majority of those for whom there IS an educational record made no
| contribution to the canon of English literature, yet if we applied her
| filter to all Elizabethan records, we would find that the number of
| non-authors for whom her filter would show what she calls a "literary
| paper trail" was far larger than the number of known authors.
The reason that I include evidence of education is that writing is usually
considered a field for which education is a pre-requisite. For authors who
show evidence of having learned languages and having read many books, the
question of educational records is relevant. I quote Mark Eccles on the
subject. Eccles was interested in tracing poet Thomas Watson's Continental
travels, in part because 'Watson's experience of foreign countries is a
matter of some interest in accounting for the unusual breadth of his reading
in Italian, French, and neo-Latin poetry." Eccles succeeded in finding some
fragments of Watson's training at the English College at Douai in France,
fragments that provide at least a smidgen of support for Watson's
multi-lingual skills (Marlowe, 129, 137-38). This reputable historian was
interested in Watson's education for the same reason I am interested in
Shakespeare's. No double standard there.
And of the 25 writers I surveyed, 17 left behind evidence of their
education. So it seems to have a reasonable expectation to find such
evidence.
| On the other hand, there are a great many title pages that bear
| Shakespeare's name as the author of his works. Since this kind of record
| exists for Shakespeare, her antistratfordian filter is set so that it
| rejects every one of them -- yet the correspondence between being named as
| the author on a title page and being a writer is far stronger than that
| between having left an educational record and having been a writer.
Title pages are by themselves not even reliable as evidence of authorship.
Nobody thinks "Yorkshire Tragedy" or "London Prodigal" were written by
Shakespeare, but his name appears on the title page. According to Jeffrey
Masten, "Title pages suggest that ... the notion of complete, 'accurate'
authorial ascription was not one to which the period necessarily subscribed"
("Playwrighting," in "New History of Early English Drama," p. 368). I do not
cite title pages as a personal literary paper trail for any of the writers
surveyed. No double standard there.
| While the presence of an author's name on the title page of the work is of
| no value to Price's filter whatsoever, she will allow certain sorts of
| front-matter that she knows in advance are not found in Shakespeare's
| works. If there are dedications that sound to her more personal than
| Shakespeare's dedications to Southampton, those dedications count. The
| filter seems designed to follow a *Lucrece* rule: any dedication more
| personal-sounding gets through; any dedication that is less personal does
| not count at all.
There is no agreement, even among the orthodox, as to what Shakespeare's
dedications tell us. I cite some of them (e.g., Taylor, Bentley). Taylor
thought that "one might as reasonably say that the dedications express a
desire/hope/expectation that the chosen patron" would take note of the
poems. He's using the same standard I am. And the same standard that Gaselee
uses when questioning whether William Burton's dedication to Southampton
showed that he gained patronage or knew Southampton; Burton wrote that he
was "assured your honor will well like of" the pamphlet. Burton failed the
"personal" test for Gaselee, who could not determine from the dedication
"whether Burton had any intimate relations with [Southampton], or whether he
merely chose him as the recipient of the Epistle Dedicatorie as one known to
receive favourably the efforts of young men of letters" The language in
impersonal dedications differ from those that explicitly attest to personal
or direct relationships, and I quote several examples in the book. I did not
have to invent any filter. Previous historians and biographers have
established the criteria for me.
| I cannot see why even an unsuccessful dedication should not count in any
| fairly-designed filter. Stephen Gosson dedicated his *School for Abuse*
| to Sidney and was, Harvey tells us, "scorned for his labors." Price would
| ignore the dedication but probably allow Harvey's comment -- yet to the
| literary historian both are of interest, and any reasonable attempt to
| collect evidence of a "literary paper trail" for Gosson should include
| both. A writer who seeks patronage is a writer, whether or not he is ever
| rewarded by a patron, and the very act of seeking such patronage in a
| dedication is not something that should be ignored -- unless, of course,
| one is operating with a filter that is designed expressly to reject
| Shakespearean records.
By this reasoning, one might suppose that Hadrian Dorrell was a real person.
He ostensibly wrote and signed the epistle to the reader for "Willobie His
Avisa," yet he is a ghost. Nor does G.B. Harrison (in his edition of
Willobie) trust the information in the epistle itself, including the
attribution to Willobie.
| Thus, while it might be possible to construct a filter that would block
| every Shakespeare record but allow some records for other writers, the
| mere fact that such a filter is possible to construct is not in itself
| sufficient reason to reject the standard attribution to Shakespeare of his
| works.
|
| Of course, as I have suggested, Price does not operate her filter fairly.
| Here is another example (the book is riddled with them). Price counts
| "evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given." Thus Marston
| gets credit because his father left him some law books. The same credit
| goes to every other Elizabethan whose father left him law books (or any
| other books), and whether the recipient of such paternal bounty ever wrote
| a single line of verse is a matter of supreme indifference to the filter.
|
| Again, it is difficult to see why the filter should ignore every title
| page that names the author of the work while it allows every book record.
Mr. Ross cannot himself suppose that "Yorkshire Tragedy" is reliable
evidence of Shakespeare's supposed literary career. However, books that can
be identified from a personal collection or evidencing personal ownership,
or evidence showing access to books, are another matter.
The biographer's interest in books owned by writers is evident in the letter
in the TLS last January about a newly identified book that once belonged to
Spenser. The writers says "it is uniquely valuable in offering us insights
into his literary interests." This book of Spenser's is both personal (now
that we know that he owned it once), and literary ("insights into his
literary interests"). Half of Stern's biography of Harvey is devoted to his
books, what his collection said about his methods, attitudes, views, and of
course what his copious marginalia in those books could reveal. Any book
known to have been owned and/or written in by an Elizabethan writers is of
interest to the biographer. Marston's or Fletcher's or Spenser's
biographical trails are not bookless. Biographers assume that Shakespeare
had access to and read books, and that is a reasonable assumption when
considering the development of a writer. But again, for Shakespeare, there
is no relevant evidence.
| The great majority of those who left "evidence of books owned, written in,
| borrowed, or given" made no contribution to the canon of Elizabethan
| literature. If we filtered the entire set of Elizabethan records for
| every bit of "evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given," we
| would have far more non-authors than authors for whom there was what Price
| calls a "literary paper trail."
Mr. Ross has this back-to-front. The majority of people who wrote letters
were not authors by vocation either, but that does not lessen the
evidentiary value to the literary biography of letters concerning literary
activity . It would make no sense to trawl through the general population
looking for people who owned books in order to identify possible authors. I
was trawling for documentation supporting literary activity for particular
individuals whose presumed vocation was writing. Most
professional/vocational activities can be documented by evidence peculiar to
the profession, and writing is not an exception.
| To be sure, there would be some authors among the great many book-evidence
| folk her filter allows, and one of them, if she applied her filter fairly,
| would be William Shakespeare -- yet Price does not mention Shakespeare's
| signature in *Archaionomia*, which certainly would constitute "evidence of
| books owned, written in, borrowed, or given" by or to Shakespeare IF she
| operated her filter fairly.
As I am sure Mr. Ross is aware, this signature has never been authenticated.
One would have to adopt a double standard to use as evidence a signature
that has not been accepted as genuine.
| Thus we can see two fundamental problems with her filter: it is designed
| to generate "literary paper trails" for a great many non-authors, while at
| the same time it is deliberately designed to ignore those kinds of
| evidence that Price knows apply in the case of Shakespeare and that are
| better determinants of whether a person is an author. Price's method
| therefore would not seem to be a useful tool for attribution studies even
| if it were applied without further prejudice, but Price, as we have seen,
| does not use even this inadequate filter fairly.
It may be helpful if I explain how I "designed" the categories. At the
beginning of the research process, I starte to read biographies in order to
identify the documentary evidence that supported them. I was looking for
contemporaneous documentation, and I always asked the same two questions (is
it personal? does it relate to literary interest or activity?) when I came
across documentary evidence. If the answer to both questions was "yes," the
evidence went into the "in" box, to be sorted later. After I had read
through most of the biographical material, I started to sort. Actually, the
evidence pretty much sorted itself.
I ended up with about 25 categories. That was unwieldy, so I gradually
merged them into the categories you see in the appendix. The 8th category
was the only one I "designed" deliberately. I defined the category broadly
enough to include evidence in the "in" box that did not otherwise fit into
any other category. It was a sort of catch-all for leftover evidence. Hence,
evidence of Chapman's literary career, found in a lawsuit, is included in
the survey.
| Here is another example. We know that Shakespeare's authorship of his
| works was recognized in a great many records of the time, but we also know
| that there is no record of the sort "William Shakespeare was paid X for
| writing *Hamlet*." Most of the records of that sort that we do have are
| found in Henslowe's diary, in which Shakespeare's name does not appear
| (Henslowe began noting playwright's names in 1597, by which time
| Shakespeare was well established as the playwright for a rival theater
| company).
|
| Since Henslowe doesn't mention Shakespeare, the filter is set up so that
| every writer whose name appears in Henslowe as being paid gets credit for
| a literary trail; thus Henslowe's reference to "maxton" counts for
| Marston, even though there is no first name for "maxton" and no play is
| named. Price's standards for writers other than Shakespeare do not compel
| her to ask how we know this "maxton" is the right John Marston or any
| particular "Marston" at all.
There is no double standard here. Professional writers got paid to write,
and not all the payment records in the survey are taken from Henslowe's
diary. Some writers were paid to write city entertainments. Some were paid
to write court masques. Some were commissioned to write poetry. Some sought
patronage, dedicated a book, and then received a reward for it. All these
types of payments are reflected in the survey. Some writers who were paid by
Henslowe were paid elsewhere as well. So claiming that Henslowe's stable of
paid writers are pre-selected for inclusion in a category designed just for
them, with the ulterior motive of excluding
Shakespeare, is nonsense.
| On the other hand, since Shakespeare's "Shaxberd" records in the Revels
| accounts do not mention money, they does not have to be considered by
| Price, even though the author "Shaxberd" is named for performances of
| "Measure for Measure" on December 26, 1604; "The Play of Errors" on
| December 28; and "The Merchant of Venice" on February 10 and 12, 1605 (of
| the latter performance we learn from the revels accounts that it was
| "Againe Comanded by the Kings Majestie"). In the same list of
| performances we find other authors named: Heywood for "How to Larne of a
| Woman to Wooe" and George Chapman for "All Foulles." Why is Price's
| filter set up to reject such evidence for Shakespeare, Chapman, and
| Heywood? Price cannot object to the spelling "Shaxberd" in the revels
| accounts if she accepts "maxton" for "Marston" in Henslowe.
It does not pass my test for "personal" evidence. It is equivalent to a
title page attribution. I do not rely on, or use the Revels accounts as
evidence for Shakespeare -- but I don't rely on it as personal evidence for
anyone else, either. I doubt that Mr. Ross will find biographers who do.
They use the Revels accounts to document performances, and establish play
chronology. They do not use them as personal evidence for Shakespeare, as
they do with, say, the 1595 court payment naming Shakespeare.
| > Mr. Ross begins by claiming that even if he thought my comparative
| > analysis of evidence fairly demonstrated that Shakespeare's
| > chroniclers have no personal literary paper trails on which to base
| > their literary biography, that such a deficiency "would not be
| > sufficient to cause us to reject the standard attribution to
| > Shakespeare of his works." I disagree.
|
| See my discussion above. I do not accept that Diana Price's filter is the
| appropriate means by which to determine whether there is a "literary paper
| trail." Her filter grants supposedly "literary" trails to more non-authors
| than to authors, and it is designed to reject many of the most important
| classes of evidence that we have, such as title pages and the Stationer's
| Register. Even if such an experimental means for filtering evidence were
| valuable, Price does not apply her filter fairly.
The Stationer's Register records information concerning publication, and
some personal information about the stationers themselves could undoubtedly
be gleaned from it, but it is not very useful as personal documentation for
authors. Moreover, the information in the Register can be just as unreliable
as title pages. A Yorkshire Tragedy was entered in the register as "written
by Wylliam Shakespere" (see Chambers, WS, 1:535), but we know that the
information is not trustworthy. It's not personal either. Nearly all titles
were registered by publishers and/or printers, not authors. some titles were
works by deceased authors, so it would be difficult to draw conclusions
about the biography of a particular author from an entry. The fact that two
non-Shakespeare plays were attributed to Shakespeare during his lifetime
(and other were subscribed with the initials W.S.) tells us that title pages
and stationers' entries do not provide an accurate picture. If all we had to
go on were title pages, we'd include some of the apocrypha in the canon. If
all we had to go on was the SR, we'd make the same mistake. While an entry
in the SR is useful in establishing chronology, its value for the biogapher
is limited.
| > Such a deficiency is surely at the core of questions that concern the
| > construction of Shakespeare's literary biography. Not the biography of
| > a doctor, for whom we would reasonably expect personal medical
| > records. Or a lawyer, for whom we would expect personal legal records,
| > but the life of a writer.
|
| Price's filter creates a "literary" paper trail for every Elizabethan who
| is known ever to have studied law or medicine; it does not ask whether the
| lawyers and doctors were ever listed as authors but whether there is a
| record that they were educated. It does not ask whether their names
| appear in the Stationer's Register as having written a book but whether
| they were ever described as having owned a book.
This is just as nonsensical as the objection to my inclusion of payments for
writing as literary evidence. I am not looking for, or creating any
"literary paper
trails" for doctors. In order to illustrate the concept of a personal and
professional record, I defined another type of professionally related
evidence, in this case the example of "personal medical paper trails," which
would constitute evidence for a physician. John Hall left his handwritten
medical case book behind. That case book is personal & medical evidence that
he treated patients, not that he wrote creative literature. He was a
physician and left behind personal evidence that proves it.
| > Readers are routinely assured that there is plenty of documentary
| > evidence to support Shakespeare's biography which is, ostensibly, a
| > literary biography. If there is no literary evidence to underpin his
| > biography, then it is, by definition, not a literary biography.
|
| Price, having constructed a filter that will reject Shakespeare while
| allowing what she calls "literary paper trails" for more non-writers than
| writers, now confuses her filter with "documentary evidence" of
| Shakespeare's "literary biography." The Stationer's Register, the title
| pages of Shakespeare's works, the front-matter of the First Folio, the
| Revels accounts -- none of this counts for Shakespeare, but the fact that
| a person is named on the buttery roles for Cambridge DOES count, even if
| that person never wrote a line of verse.
Mr. Ross is relying on posthumous and impersonal evidence to make his case.
The criteria that excludes such evidence for Shakespeare excludes comparable
evidence for all the writers surveyed. A double standard is one that is
applied selectively, so I again suggest that the criticism that I have
employed a double standard remains unjustified.
| >
| > The parameters of my comparative analysis of literary evidence were
| > simple and the criteria straightforward.
|
| It is impossible to tell from the design and operation of the filter that
| is was NOT designed specifically to exclude Shakespeare. Hence the very
| broad "criteria" in areas where she believes there are no Shakespeare
| records (education, "book" evidence); hence the very narrow "criteria"
| when Shakespeare's records are present (dedications must be more
| "personal" than Shakespeare's dedications; references to having written a
| play must be accompanied by a notation of payment).
I've already given an example of other critics who make the same
distinctions and apply the same criteria (re: personal vs. impersonal) to
dedications that I do. Please also see my response above concerning the
"design" of the survey. It would be equally impossible to construct a
"filter" to exclude personal literary documentation for Jonson or Spenser or
Heywood, etc. Suggestions that I could somehow rig any test to exclude
Shakespeare sound to me more like special pleading for Shakespeare. In an
earlier posting, I pointed out how Prof. Schoenbaum manufactured an affable
and well-liked Shakespeare from impersonal literary commentary; he attempted
to create personal literary records where none exist.
| > The evidence I analyzed was contemporaneous, ie, left during the
| > writer's lifetime (with the obvious exception of notice at death).
|
| Again, this has the appearance of a standard designed specifically to
| exclude Shakespeare -- especially the First Folio, and even more precisely
| Ben Jonson's remarks about his "beloved" Shakespeare both in the First
| Folio and elsewhere. The trick is how to get the timing just right. If
| Price makes death itself the cut-off point, then she loses too many
| non-Shakespearean writers, such as Marlowe. If she makes seven years the
| cut-off point, then she allows the First Folio. What then is the cut-off
| point?
Generally speaking, posthumous evidence is not going to be as reliable as
evidence created during the lifetime. However, if Mr. Ross's own criteria
for evidence extends without reservation to seven years after the subject
has died, then he will accept and use Jonson's ambiguous testimony with
complete confidence. But even then, a unique difficulty will remain.
Shakespeare will still be the only writer for whom he must rely on
posthumous evidence to make the case for him as a writer.
I'll continue as time permits.
Diana Price
Bob Grumman
on the Yorkshire Tragedy is DEFINITELY evidence that
he was a writer; that his name was written in the
*Archaionomia* is also EVIDENCE that the book was
his--all the is in question is how strong it is
as evidence.
Greg Reynolds
Diana Price wrote:
> Generally speaking, posthumous evidence is not going to be as reliable as
> evidence created during the lifetime.
Diana, doesn't this statement of yours damn all of Anti-Stratfordianism?
I think so and here is why:
As there is no shred from that era that suggests anyone other than
William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote Shakespeare, what makes
19th and 20th century anti-Strat "evidence" reliable?
Strats have many, many factual linkages (evidence) of the era.
Was there any such thing as Anti-Stratfordianism then?
Any reliable evidence?
Is there any record of any doubt anywhere from the era?
No, all anti-Stratfordian findings are indeed posthumous.
And in your words, "posthumous evidence is not going to be as
reliable as evidence created during the lifetime."
Then, can you show any reliable evidence of that era to show
someone else wrote the Shakespeare canon?
Would it match the evidence gathered during the lifetime that
the Strats present?
Without evidence of that era that William Shakespeare of Stratford
did NOT write the works, your claim above makes any antiStrat case
less reliable, as they are all made with posthumous evidence.
No book or line or mention before the 1700s doubts the authorship.
It is all posthumous, from strangers to the era, especially Delia Bacon,
the Looneys, the Ogburns, and dozens of whimsical detractors.
Only one authorship camp has details from that era.
You don't need to accept that evidence, but no other camp can
claim evidence to its contrary from that era.
A double standard is needed to rely on unreliable evidence. Your
statement shows there is no reliable anti-Stratfordian case, because
they are all created long after the era.
Greg Reynolds
Crows Dog
cheating, the same way Richard Kennedy used to cheat.
Richard Kennedy used to claim he was not an Oxfordian, he was just
anti-Stratfordian.
Both Kennedy and Price would claim there was not sufficient evidence to credit
Shakespeare of Stratford with the works. Therefore, because of the
insufficient evidence, someone else must have written the works, but there
wasn't enough evidence to say who really did write them.
Therefore, they are saying that Shakespeare couldn't be the author because
there isn't enough evidence for his authorship, so the works must have been
written by someone else FOR WHOM THERE IS EVEN LESS EVIDENCE!!!!
Diana Price
Greg Reynolds <eve...@core.com> wrote in message
news:3a8ccf21$0$35016$1dc9...@news.corecomm.net...
>
| > Generally speaking, posthumous evidence is not going to be as reliable
as
| > evidence created during the lifetime.
|
| Diana, doesn't this statement of yours damn all of Anti-Stratfordianism?
| I think so and here is why:
|
| As there is no shred from that era that suggests anyone other than
| William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote Shakespeare, what makes
| 19th and 20th century anti-Strat "evidence" reliable?
I am not arguing for the some other author. I have not seen any solid
documentary evidence of authorship for any of the candidates either.
| Strats have many, many factual linkages (evidence) of the era.
| Was there any such thing as Anti-Stratfordianism then?
| Any reliable evidence?
| Is there any record of any doubt anywhere from the era?
Yes. There is evidence of confusion over authorship in the 1590s. I discuss
it briefly in Chapter 12.
| No, all anti-Stratfordian findings are indeed posthumous.
| And in your words, "posthumous evidence is not going to be as
| reliable as evidence created during the lifetime."
|
| Then, can you show any reliable evidence of that era to show
| someone else wrote the Shakespeare canon?
| Would it match the evidence gathered during the lifetime that
| the Strats present?
My book is about Shakespeare's contemporaneous evidence, not evidence
for/against any of the candidates.
Diana Price
Diana Price
To respond to additional criticism by Mr. Ross:
| Again, this has the appearance of a standard designed specifically to
| exclude Shakespeare -- specifically the First Folio, and even more
| precisely Ben Jonson's remarks about his "beloved" Shakespeare both in the
| First Folio and elsewhere. The trick is how to get the timing just right.
| If she makes death itself the cut-off point, then she loses too many
| non-Shakespearean writers, such as Marlowe. If she makes seven years the
| cut-off point, then she allows the First Folio. What then is the cut-off
| point?
There is no "trick" involved. I am straightforward about the time frame I
adopted in the note introducing the chart and appendix. For the "notice at
death as a writer" category, I allowed one year from date of death "to allow
for eulogies or reports of death." This meant that a number of records for
other writers, not just Shakespeare, were excluded, such as Nashe, whose
exact death date is unknown, making it impossible to gauge the time that
elapsed between his death and the epitaph by Fitzgeffery. Nor did I include
the monument that the architect Inigo Jones arranged to commemorate George
Chapman, because its date of its installation is unknown. So this criteria
was applied across the boards. No double standard there.
| Beaumont get points for having been buried in Westminster Abbey,
| but no stone marks his grave, and the very first notice of Beaumont's
| death -- the first indication that the place of Beaumont's burial was a
| tribute to him as a writer -- is Basse's eulogy for Shakespeare. Price
| quotes the praise for Spenser on his monument, but that monument was
| erected in 1620; Spenser died in 1599. It seems that Price's "shortly
| after death rule" does not apply to Spenser, which again demonstrates her
| use of a double standard.
In the comparative analysis, I don't cite Spenser's epitaph. I cite
Chamberlain's letter reporting Spenser's death ("Spenser, our principal
poet, coming lately out of Ireland, died at Westminster on Saturday last").
In my chapter on Shakespeare's death and monument, I introduce the epitaphs
for Spenser and several others whose monuments went up too late for
inclusion in the comparative analysis. But here is what I say about them:
"Shakspere's epitaph also compares poorly with those for Edmund Spenser
("with thee our English verse was rais'd on high"), George Chapman ("a
Christian Philosopher and Homericall Poet"), Francis Beaumont ("He that can
write so well"), Drayton ("a Memorable Poet of his Age"), or John Taylor
("Here lies the Water Poet")." I am comparing the *language* of the
commemoration in the epitaphs for each individual. None of them
were written within 12 months of death, and none of them are in the
comparative chart. No double standard there.
I might add that Spenser's epitaph was recorded well before Mr. Ross's date
of
1620. Camden published it, at the latest, by 1606. But in any case, I did
not include Spenser's monument (or Drayton's or Beaumont's) in the
comparative analysis, but for those three, there was other evidence of
notice at their death as writers.
| Basse's eulogy dates sometime between
| Shakespeare's and Beaumont's deaths and the First Folio (we cannot be more
| specific than that). The cut-off point, presumably, is just shorter than
| whatever the interval is between the deaths of those poets and the
| composition of Basse's poem, but without Basse Price has only the fact
| that Beaumont was buried without a monument as was the yet monumentless
| Spenser.
As I think I mentioned earlier, if Shakespeare had been given the honor of
burial next to Chaucer and Spenser, I doubt we'd be having this discussion.
Diana Price
Greg Reynolds
Diana Price wrote:
> Greg Reynolds <eve...@core.com> wrote in message
> news:3a8ccf21$0$35016$1dc9...@news.corecomm.net...
> >
> | > Generally speaking, posthumous evidence is not going to be as reliable
> | > as evidence created during the lifetime.
> |
> | Diana, doesn't this statement of yours damn all of Anti-Stratfordianism?
> | I think so and here is why:
> |
> | As there is no shred from that era that suggests anyone other than
> | William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote Shakespeare, what makes
> | 19th and 20th century anti-Strat "evidence" reliable?
>
> I am not arguing for the some other author. I have not seen any solid
> documentary evidence of authorship for any of the candidates either.
I wonder why this one issue is so beguiling to you.
And how you would spend time building a case against him.
Someone wrote the works, but you do not favor anyone.
If there were a pie chart of Diana Price's possible authors
of Shakespeare, would it be a blank circle?
Would Wm Shakespeare of Stratford get a sliver, say 1%?
Would Oxford get a sliver or maybe a little more?
Or is detracting from the historically accepted author the objective?
I'm just thinking that if your book is widely accepted, all of a sudden
we'll have these plays but no possible evidence someone wrote them.
> | Strats have many, many factual linkages (evidence) of the era.
> | Was there any such thing as Anti-Stratfordianism then?
> | Any reliable evidence?
>
> | Is there any record of any doubt anywhere from the era?
>
> Yes. There is evidence of confusion over authorship in the 1590s. I discuss
> it briefly in Chapter 12.
Did that confusion continue into the 1600s? and beyond?
Or was it settled in the 1590s?
Is the 1590s confusion over the same issues anti-Strats ponder today?
I won't ask for details if you feel that evidence is proprietary,
though you're freely here discussing the same issues we are.
> | No, all anti-Stratfordian findings are indeed posthumous.
>
> | And in your words, "posthumous evidence is not going to be as
> | reliable as evidence created during the lifetime."
> |
> | Then, can you show any reliable evidence of that era to show
> | someone else wrote the Shakespeare canon?
>
> | Would it match the evidence gathered during the lifetime that
> | the Strats present?
>
> My book is about Shakespeare's contemporaneous evidence, not evidence
> for/against any of the candidates.
I think you must yield here that you indeed provide evidence against one of
them, no?
Greg Reynolds
Pat Dooley
"Bob Grumman" <BobGr...@nut-n-but.net> wrote in message
news:3A8C7E...@nut-n-but.net...
> Just two small comments (for now): Shakespeare's name
> on the Yorkshire Tragedy is DEFINITELY evidence that
> he was a writer; that his name was written in the
> *Archaionomia* is also EVIDENCE that the book was
> his--all the is in question is how strong it is
> as evidence.
Homeopathic strength so far.
>
> --Bob G.
>
Pat Dooley
Diana Price
To further respond to Mr. Ross...
| The great majority of those who left "evidence of books owned, written in,
| borrowed, or given" made no contribution to the canon of Elizabethan
| literature. If we filtered the entire set of Elizabethan records for
| every bit of "evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given," we
| would have far more non-authors than authors for whom there was what Price
| calls a "literary paper trail."
snip
| DRAYTON-JONSON and DRAYTON-SHAKESPEARE
|
| Perhaps the Marston instance is tangential to Price's notion of what
| constitutes an acceptable "literary paper trail" by her ad-hoc lights.
Mr. Ross challenges the relevance of books in my analysis of "personal
literary paper trails", and more generally, criticizes my "ad hoc" approach.
I doubt that anyone would criticize Herford and Simpson's categorizations of
Ben Jonson's evidence as "ad hoc," and mine for Shakespeare are similar to
theirs for Jonson. One of their chapters and an appendix are titled "Books
in Jonson's Library."
Herford and Simpson gathered, grouped, and utilized literary evidence,
legal documents, letters, etc. Of course Herford and Simpson have hundreds
of documentary records with which to work. Biographers of poorly documented
writers, such as Peele, reconstruct what little they can of the man's life
and literary achievements in a preliminary chapter; the rest of the book is
about the works. These brief accounts also cite the types of evidence I
categorize in my comparative analysis. In Peele's case, his life is very
poorly documented, but the quality of his literary evidence is quite high :
among the documentary records are those of his participation in
entertainments at Oxford, an explicit payment to write for the earl of
Northumberland, an autograph letter to Burghley hoping to obtain patronage
and payment for a "history of Troy in 500 verses", and a fragment of a poem
in his handwriting. Such evidence is critical to Peele's literary biography.
If his biography was stripped of those documentary records particular to his
literary activity, his literary biography would not be credible. And Peele
is never considered an eminent writer. He's probably considered more of
third-stringer. But the quality of personal literary paper trails is very
high.
| The case of Michael Drayton is more important to her, as she devotes much
| more space to suggesting that while Drayton and Jonson were demonstrably
| friends, the same cannot be known of Jonson and Shakespeare or Jonson and
| Drayton. Again, however, Price employs the typical antistratfordian
| double standard of reading texts that concern Shakespeare cynically while
| taking texts that deal with other writers as if they were transparent
| expressions of immutable truths.
snip
| Of these comments, only the first might suggest that Jonson and Drayton
| knew each other personally, but both the "fear" and the lack of "esteem"
| could reflect a minor and entirely literary relationship -- in contrast to
| Jonson's relationship with Marston, which on Jonson's side included his
| having beaten the man and having stated that he was not the author of
| works attributed to him. Jonson's comment about Sir William Alexander
| (who was indeed Drayton's friend) suggests that there was some enmity
| between Jonson and Drayton that prevented Jonson's gaining Alexander's
| favor, but again there is no confirmation that Jonson and Drayton knew
| each other personally and that each knew the other was the author of the
| works attributed to him. There is nothing "clear-cut" in any of this, and
| if it concerned Shakespeare rather than Drayton, Price would not consider
| it acceptable evidence of a "literary paper trail."
If Jonson was snubbed by Alexander, by virtue of Drummond's and Alexander's
regard for Drayton, then Jonson regarded this particular man Drayton as the
poet. This is the same Drayton whom Jonson addressed as "Michael" in his
"Vision of Ben. Jonson, on the Muses of his Friend M. Drayton." Mr. Ross has
effectively traced the personal linkage required to connect the man from
Warwickshire, Drayton, to the man whom Alexander likes, with whom Drummond
corresponds. This Drayton is the "friend" addressed by Jonson. Had Jonson
addressed his verse "to the poet M. Drayton," omitting the personal
information, such as the salutation, the familiar use of "Michael" in the
first line, and reference to a past affront, I would consider the poem an
impersonal allusion.
| What of the relationship between Shakespeare and Drayton? We have nothing
| from Shakespeare one way or the other, but in the same poem in which he
| ambiguously praised Jonson, Drayton said this of Shakespeare:
|
| And be it said of thee,
| Shakespeare thou hadst as smooth a Comicke vaine,
| Fitting the socke, and in thy naturall braine,
| As strong conception, and as Cleere a rage,
| As any one that trafiqu'd with the stage.
|
| Price considers this "lukewarm praise"; well, okay, if we want to play
| that game we can always read any praise as "lukewarm" if we are determined
| to shape evidence to serve pre-determined ends. Price, however, sees
| nothing "lukewarm" in Drayton's lines on Jonson. She objects that
| "Drayton spoke of Jonson's sock and buskin, yet he associated Shakespeare
| only with the 'sock' of comedy, not with tragedy, history, or poetry."
|
| Price is wrong to say Drayton did not "associate" Shakespeare with
| "poetry" -- Drayton's entire poem concerns "poets and poesie."
And I make that point in my book (p. 213-14), first offering a traditional
interpretation, and specifically pointing out that "the passage is, after
all, taken from Drayton's assessment of writers."
| Nor is the praise "lukewarm": contrast the lines on Shakespeare with
| Drayton's lines on a pair of earlier Elizabethan poets --
|
| Gascoine and Churchyard after them againe
| In the beginning of Eliza's raine,
| Accoumpted were great Meterers many a day,
| But not inspired with brave fier, had they
| Liv'd but a little longer, they had seene,
| Their workes before them to have buried beene.
|
| Obviously Drayton was capable of "lukewarm" praise when he thought it
| appropriate; he said Gower "fell far short of [Chaucer's] store" and that
| Samuel Daniel's "maner beter fitted prose." What some of these poets
| lacked above all was "brave fire", the extraordinary quality of innate
| poetic genius or inspiration that Drayton saw in Marlowe (he speaks of the
| poet's "raptures" and "fine madness") and Shakespeare ("as Cleere a
| rage"). In fact, within the context of Drayton's poem, the praise of
| Shakespeare is much, much warmer than Price's antistratfordian double
| standard allows her to measure.
| Price further misleads the reader by complaining that Drayton did not
| praise Shakespeare's contributions to all the genres, only to comedy --
| yet Drayton does not mention any genres whatsoever for Chaucer or Marlowe,
Drayton writes of Chaucer's "rhymes", and "weighty numbers." That's praise
for Chaucer's poetry. Marlowe is "bathed in the Thespian springs." (Thespis
is the traditional father of Greek tragedy.) That's praise for a dramatist
who wrote tragedies.
As for Drayton's professed friends in the poem, in each case, we read of
particular affection ("my dear Drummond," "the two Beaumonts and my Browne
arose, / My dear companions, whom I freely chose / My bosom friends," "My
Alexander ... the love that was t'wixt us"). I would include also the
addressee of the poem "My Most Dearly Loved Friend Henry Reynolds." For all
but one of them, we also have other evidence of a personal nature.
Drayton wrote a verse "To His Friend the Author" William Browne. Sir John
Beaumont addressed a verse to "My Loving Friend, Master Michael Drayton."
We've already mentioned Drayton's correspondence with Drummond, and the link
to Alexander. Francis Beaumont is the only one of the professed friends for
whom there is nothing else of which I am aware that attests to their
friendship. However, Drayton's reference to Francis as one of his
freely-chosen "bosom friends" is explicit, while his use of the second
person in addressing Shakespeare falls short such explicit testimony. If
Shakespeare and Drayton were "dearly loved" or "bosom friends," one would
expect evidence of it, perhaps a comparable commendatory verse to or from
one of them. I might add that Drayton's poem is usually dated 1627. So to
sum up thus far, Drayton's use of "thee and thou" in posthumous testimony
about Shakespeare is not comparable to the other allusions. (I also note
that Drayton uses the impersonal third person to describe some of his
closest friends, such as Drummond and Chapman. We know that Drayton knew
Chapman, because he contributed a verse to "My Worthy Friend Mr. George
Chapman. So Drayton shifts between second and third person even when paying
tribute to those known to be his "bosom friends."
Mr. Ross's report of my analysis of Drayton's poem would mislead any reader.
I offer a traditional interpretation, and then explain why I think there's a
second level to be dealt with. My reasons include Drayton's choice of
language, similar language in other allusions, as well as the closing 16 or
17 lines. Mr. Ross has not commented on any of the analysis concerning
Drayton's choice of, for example, the word "traffick'd".
| Price notes that "two writers whom historians most closely associate with
| Shakespeare -- Jonson and Drayton -- never wrote about him by name during
| his lifetime" [293]. I am not sure of the significance of this: we have
| no record that Jonson ever wrote about Drayton by name or Drayton about
| Jonson by name during Shakespeare's lifetime either.
Jonson's poem to Drayton was written in 1627. Drayton died in 1631. Jonson's
comments to Drummond that Drayton feared him and did not like him were
recorded in 1619.
| Drayton was a year
| older than Shakespeare, but Jonson praised Shakespeare in print and by
| name four years before he wrote about Drayton. Moreover, while the
| question whether Jonson was indeed Drayton's friend is unresolved in
| Jonson's "Vision," he proclaims in the First Folio that William
| Shakespeare was his "beloved." and, as we have seen, Jonson professed his
| "love" for Shakespeare in *Timber* as well
Anyone who defends the traditional biography must rely on the Folio and
other posthumous evidence, because there is no cotemporaneous evidence. The
fact that Jonson wrote about Drayton four years after the Folio is
irrelevant to this discussion. Jonson wrote to Drayton during Drayton's
lifetime. Jonson never wrote to or about Shakespeare during Shakespeare's
lifetime. Neither did Drayton.
| A careful reader will observe that the kind of double standard we have
| observed in Price's treatment of the Jonson-Marston and Jonson-Drayton
| relationships, as contrasted with how she approaches the
| Jonson-Shakespeare and Drayton-Shakespeare relationships, is an essential
| characteristic of her project. We have here not "new evidence of an
| authorship problem" but a reconfirmation that antistratfordianism cannot
| exist without such double standards.
Among the new evidence is the fuller citation of Jonson's source for his
paragraph about Shakespeare in Timber. I have not seen the full passage that
he incorporated into that passage quoted by other biographers, but it is
important to any interpretation. I also have not seen other biographers
quoting the final section of Drayton's poem about poets. Drayton concluded
the poem by talking about aristocratic poets who had written for the stage,
but whose names he would not reveal.
Diana Price
Bob Grumman
quoting the final section of Drayton's poem
about poets. Drayton concluded the poem by
talking about aristocratic poets who had written
for the stage, but whose names he would not reveal."
I just looked at the passage in question in Diana's
book. I think she's misinterpreted it, but
need to study it further. One thing is sure:
Drayton refers to unpublished authors ("whose
poems, be they ne'er so rare,/ In private chambers,
that encloistered are," etc.) who are NOT Shakespeare.
John W. Kennedy
> Generally speaking, posthumous evidence is not going to be as reliable as
> evidence created during the lifetime.
As Dorothy L. Sayers points out anent the Gospels, this sort of thing is
swallowed readily only so long as we are discussing people that we don't
think of as "really real". "Real" people have their definitive
biographics written generations later....
The curse of bardolatry strikes again!
--
John W. Kennedy
(Working from my laptop)
KQKnave
>> during his lifetime (and other were subscribed with the initials W.S.)
>> tells us that title pages and stationers' entries do not provide an
>> accurate picture.
>There were a number of other writers with the initials "W.S." (see
>Foster's *Elegy by W.S.* for more information). The fact that there are
>occasional errors does not make the title pages or the Register completely
>valueless in determining whether a person is an author. Of course there
>is no kind of record that is 100% reliable, but title page attributions
>and the Register are far more useful indicators of whether a person is an
>author than some of the criteria used by Price's filter.
>Understand, I am not saying we should ignore educational records,
>Henslowe's accounts, literary letters, or any other evidence of a writer's
>life. By the same token, if we wish to determine whether a person is a
>writer we should not ignore all of the kinds of records that happen to
>exist for William Shakespeare and are of great value for most of the other
>writers of the time.
>> If all we had to go on were title pages, we'd include some of the
>> apocrypha in the canon. If all we had to go on was the SR, we'd make
>> the same mistake. While an entry in the SR is useful in establishing
>> chronology, its value for the biogapher is limited.
>The value of any kind of evidence is "limited" for a biographer, but for
>Price's filter the SR and title page attributions are completely
>worthless. If all we had to go on was Price's filter, we would consider
>thousands of non-writers to possess a "literary paper trail," which to
>Price's filter is the equivalent of saying a person was a writer. It is
>fortunate indeed that we possess more than the SR and title page
>attributions for many writers, but the fact that they are imperfect
>records is no reason to reject them entirely.
In general, the concept of "weight of evidence" seems to be foreign
to anti-stratfordians and many others, for instance those on both
sides who want to discredit Shakespeare's authorship of the Funeral
Elegy. Rather than consider all of the available evidence and come
to a reasoned judgement, they focus on one point, interpret that point
in their favor, when in fact it is ambiguous, and render the judgement
of whatever issue is in question to fall on their side. Price's evidence-of
education "filter" is worthless to begin with, since it does not distinguish
between non-writers and writers, but even if her filters had some value,
historical issues are not decided by "filters", they are decided on the
basis of weight of evidence. I should think that it would be obvious that
a name on a title page would be the first criterion to judge whether
or not a person was considered a writer. If 10 (say) title pages say
that author X wrote a work, and we know 2 to be false, the weight
of the evidence suggests that X was a writer, not that we should
discard the category of names on title pages altogether. If writer
X's name didn't appear at all on any title pages, we would not
arbitrarily reject the notion that he was a writer, we would consider
all of the evidence (such as whether or not others said that he was
a writer) and render a judgement based again on the weight of the evidence.
But as Terry points out, Price's filters are applied in one way to
some authors and another to records relating to Shakespeare, so
her "filters" are doubly worthless.
Jim
David Kathman
>
> Terry--
>
> Some comments on having read the first part of your long post (I
> especially liked the turtles and the seabirds):
>
> Your point about the actual effects of the criteria Price uses should
> probably be looked into. But as I pointed out in my earlier post, she is
> (as she states) using the objective, agreed-on criteria that have been
> developed by literary biographers over the past hundred years, or a little
> more.
No, she most emphatically does *not* do this; both the standards she
uses and her application of those standards will seem quite bizarre
to any real literary biographer dealing with Shakespeare's era.
The fact that Price asserts that she is "using the same objective,
agreed-upon criteria that have been developed by literary biographers
over the past hundred years" does not mean that she has actually done so.
A much better test is whether the scholars who use such standards
on a daily basis agree with Price's assertion, but with virtual
unanimity, they do not. The few Shakespeare scholars I have discussed
this with agree with me; for example, Alan Nelson, who is writing
biographies of both Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford, called Price's
book "pretty silly", and was "shocked" that his university library had
actually paid good money to buy it.
As I've pointed out before, I myself know a thing or two about
Elizabethan literary biography, too. I have compiled a Biographical
Dictionary of Elizabethan Theater (http://www.clark.net/tross/ws/bd/kathman.htm)
which catalogues virtually all the biographical information which
has been published over the past 70 years about people involved in
English theater between 1558 and 1642; I have read, and own copies of,
nearly all the journal articles catalogued there, as well as a good
number of the full-length books. I am also writing more than
30 articles for the New Dictionary of National Biography, mostly
on playwrights of roughly Shakespeare's era, and these have required
me to dig deeply into the records of a wide variety of writers.
As Terry Ross and others have pointed out, Price's standards are
arbitrary and exclude some of the most common and straightforward
evidence for people being writers, and her application of those
standards is not even consistent. Her ability to fool credulous
readers not familiar with the history of the era or the standards
of the profession does not change these facts.
I'm still swamped, as I have several projects with March 1 deadlines
which need to be finished, but I'm hoping I can squeeze in a little
time this weekend to respond to a few of the claims Diana Price
and Pat Dooley have made here, particularly their rather bizarre
treatment of posthumous evidence. I will not be able to respond
to everything they've been writing, and as usual, the fact that I don't
get around to responding to something should not be taken as meaning
that I agree with it.
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
Bob Grumman
her claim that she is doing what biographers do.
I have time to research the matter, but it certainly
is my strong impression that names on title-pages
count very heavily for biographers of writers, many
of whom would not even be writing about their subjects
if not for such names. I suspect that with many biographers,
names on title-pages are taken for granted--Bakeless
doesn't start off telling us Marlowe was a writer because
posthumous (gasp) title-pages said he was, he starts off
KNOWING Marlowe was a writer because of that, and knowing
his readers either know it, too, or will assume that such names on
title-pages exist.
What I'm saying is that Price's assumptions about biographers'
methods are as implausible as her assumptions about evidence
and about Shakespeare.
TOM REEDY
<snip>
> Price's filter works as if it were specifically designed to work against
> Shakespeare (while creating "literary paper trails" for such great
> Elizabethan writers as Stonley), and it is instructive to see how close
> Shakespeare comes to qualifying even by Price's filter, and how narrowly
> the criteria seem to be drawn against him. There is strong reason to
> believe that he signed his name to a book, which would make him a writer
> by the filter's standards. There is good reason to think Hand D in *Sir
> Thomas Moore* is his, which would make him a writer by the filter's
> standards. The dedication to *Lucrece* is consistent with approbation
> from Southampton for *Venus and Adonis*, which would make him a writer by
> the filter's standards. Scoloker's reference certainly sounds (and may
> well be) "personal," which would make him a writer by the filter's
> standards. His monument praises him for having the art of a Virgil -- a
> fitting tribute to one who is considered one of the greatest writers in
> his language -- and praises "all that he hath writ." I'm not sure why the
> filter rejects the monument, but had the same praise been offered of any
> other writer, it would have gotten through. Jonson's sometimes ambiguous
> praise of other writers is allowed, but not his sometimes ambiguous praise
> of Shakespeare -- yet if any of that were allowed, the filter would call
> him a writer.
<snip>
Yet other evidence that would get through the "filter" as constructed by
Price is the inscription in the Folger Shakespeare Library copy of George a
Greene, in the hand of George Buc (1560-1622), Master of the Revels from
1610 to 1622, and the official censor of Shakespeare's late plays:
Written by ............ a minister, who ac[ted]
the pin{n}ers part in it himself. Teste W. Shakespea[re]
The inscription clearly reveals that George Buc was personally acquainted
with Shakespeare and considered him a reliable informant on the authorship
of George a Greene, which was performed on five occasions in December 1593
and January 1594.
This evidence is both personal and literary, although it does not refer to
Shakespeare as a writer. That Buc licensed plays written by Shakespeare
would seem to indicate he considered him a writer, though.
Alan Nelson says the evidence is strong for a couple of Shakespeare quartos
being inscribed by Buc.
On his website (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/index.html) he gives
these references:
Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2 (1600: STC 22288a): British Library C.34.k.12.
A faint cursive "E" characteristic of many of Buc's inscribed play quartos
may be just visible beneath the word "Shakespeare" on the title-page.
Shakespeare, Henry V (1600: STC 22289): Huntington Library RB 69321;
reproduced in Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto: A facsimile of Copies Primarily
from the Henry E. Huntington Library, ed. Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth
Muir (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981); also
on Reel 353 of the University Microfilm series. Among the numerous
inscriptions on the title-page, the one which reads:
much ye same w{i}th y{a}t in Shakespeare
may be in Buc's hand.
TR
Terry Ross
> Terry--
>
> Some comments on having read the first part of your long post (I
> especially liked the turtles and the seabirds):
Thanks; it's the kind of thing that would interest almost nobody on this
newsgroup (I think Volker would be happy to see the Razorbill, which is
still lingering by the OC Inlet).
I made an error in my latest post. I said that Price credited Spenser
under category 6: "Handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc.
touching on literary matters." In fact, her chart does not give him a
"Yes" in this category. In the "documentation" section that follows the
chart, Price usually says "no evidence" for a category if the writer
fails her filter on that point; she does not say "no evidence" in that
section for Spenser, and I therefore took her comment as suggesting that
Spenser was given credit. It would have been better to point out that
Harvey gets credit in category 2 for letters to Burghley that do not
concern literary matters.
>
> Your point about the actual effects of the criteria Price uses should
> probably be looked into.
It might have made sense for Price to have done that before publishing her
book. I think it would have been very helpful for her to have tried out
some of her arguments on this newsgroup.
> But as I pointed out in my earlier post, she is (as she states) using
> the objective, agreed-on criteria that have been developed by literary
> biographers over the past hundred years, or a little more.
No she is not; for a much better example of the kinds of evidence and
reasoning used by literary historians, see Tom Reedy's and Dave Kathman's
"How We Know that Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare" at
http://www.clark.net/tross/ws/howdowe.html
Is there any literary historian who believes that the presence of an
author's name on a title page is absolutely worthless in determining
whether that person was a writer? I know of none, but Price's filter
rejects such evidence entirely.
Is there any literary historian who believes that the presence of an
author's name in the Stationers' Register is absolutely worthless in
determining whether that person was a writer? I know of none, but Price's
filter rejects such evidence entirely.
Is there any literary historian who accepts "posthumous evidence" for up
to twelve months after an author's death but who believes that anything
that appeared from the thirteenth month on is absolutely worthless in
determining whether that person was an author? I know of no literary
historian who follows such a rule, but Price's filter is set up to reject
all evidence that appeared more than twelve months after a person's death.
On the other hand, is there any literary historian who believes that EVERY
person who left any kind of educational record was a writer? I know of
none, but Price's filter declares them all to be writers.
Is there any literary historian who believes that EVERY person who ever
wrote his name in a book was a writer? I know of none, but Price's filter
declares them all to be writers.
In short, it is not true that Price uses the standards and methods that
are current in the field. She has designed her own standards and methods,
which seem to be specifically designed to reject evidence of Shakespeare's
career as a writer, and (as I have explained in detail) she does not even
apply those standards and methods fairly.
> From what I see (what's been posted here, the articles at her website
> and at the Elizabethan Review), Price tracks her predecessors'
> analyses of the data pretty closely, and she gives us no reason to
> think she disagrees with them.
That is, of course, what Price would have you believe.
>
> There are, of course, questions raised by her choices, as you point
> out: why print the data for this exact set of 27 writers, why not test
> the criteria on non-writers, and so on? I would guess, again, that
> Price's choices in this area were influenced by the evidence that was
> available to he, by the kinds of things previous workers in the field
> of literary biography had been interested in, and the kinds of things
> they had thought important.
Your guess is a very charitable one. I consider Price to be about the
most reasonable antistratfordian extant, and I had hoped that her book
would be at the least a fair statement of an antistratfordian "case."
>
> Perhaps, as you argue, Price's method of arguing from the evidence
> produces results that are absurd. If that's the case, she'll be
> refuted. Exactly as much ink will be spilled as is necessary to
> examine all the evidence she's produced, to refute what can't be
> accepted and assimilate the rest to orthodox scholarship; and if her
> selection criteria have been faulty, if every point she makes is
> proved to be false, her book will be exploded and nobody will ever
> read it again. I don't see the problem with that.
I have never suggested of any book that it would be a good thing if nobody
ever read it again. I don't think Price's book offers a serious challenge
to Elizabethan scholarship; I think it will be ignored by most literary
historians but will give considerable comfort to antistratfordians (they
certainly could use some). Price's article on Shakespeare's monument is a
genuine contribution to scholarship, but her additional remarks on the
monument in the book are not. I'll have more to say about Price's odd
take on the monument later.
>
> If irrefutable arguments really show that a writer, named William
> Shakespeare, never existed, then the fact that he never existed is
> irrefutable.
If you nudge this just a bit further into the realm of absolute tautology,
then I will certainly agree. In fact, change the name "William
Shakespeare" to "Charles Dickens" or "Janice Miller" and I would also
agree.
> If you abandon that hypothesis and nothing changes, how can
> you argue it one way or the other?
You've lost me here; what is the "hypothesis" you want me to abandon?
> In any case, the fact that you do not like Price's result does not
> give you grounds to reject her argument or her evidence.
To tell the truth, I'm amused by the results of Price's filter: she has
designed a preposterous contraption whose results even she would term
"ridiculous." I stand by my earlier judgment: We have here not "new
evidence of an authorship problem" but a reconfirmation that
antistratfordianism cannot exist without such double standards as Price
uses throughout her book.
Pat Dooley
> Another problem I have with Price's position is
> her claim that she is doing what biographers do.
> I have time to research the matter, but it certainly
> is my strong impression that names on title-pages
> count very heavily for biographers of writers, many
> of whom would not even be writing about their subjects
> if not for such names. I suspect that with many biographers,
> names on title-pages are taken for granted--Bakeless
> doesn't start off telling us Marlowe was a writer because
> posthumous (gasp) title-pages said he was, he starts off
> KNOWING Marlowe was a writer because of that, and knowing
> his readers either know it, too, or will assume that such names on
> title-pages exist.
>
> What I'm saying is that Price's assumptions about biographers'
> methods are as implausible as her assumptions about evidence
> and about Shakespeare.
>
> --Bob G.
>
Locrine from the title-page attributions alone. You don't need any
corroborating evidence.
We know Marlowe was a writer because a fellow writer, Kyd, leaves a personal
literary paper trail that tells us he was a writer. The title page
attribution corroborates Kyd's evidence.
Pat Dooley
Neuendorffer
> Having just come back from a week of birding and other Winter delights
> of the mid-Atlantic coast (the best bird was a Razorbill in the
> Ocean City Inlet),
Was Rozanne (of the class Avis) your second best bird?
> There will be some birds, however,
> that will be impossible to identify in the field; about them we may be
> able to say no more than that they are Canadas of some species --
> but we almost certainly will not mistake them for turtles.
One can tell a Canadian Ernie from a Canadian Birt:
http://www.cyberbeach.net/~solonyka/LCRA/turtle.htm
<<blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven>>
-- Finnegans Wake
> Price never offers the distinguishing characteristics that would allow us
> to separate writers from doctors, actors, or financiers; a complicating
> factor is that one may be a writer and a doctor, a writer and an actor,
> even a writer and a financier,
> but no creature is both a bird and a turtle.
Although many lawyers are 'turds'.
> > | While the presence of an author's name on the title page of the work is of
> > | no value to Price's filter whatsoever, she will allow certain sorts of
> > | front-matter that she knows in advance are not found in Shakespeare's
> > | works. If there are dedications that sound to her more personal than
> > | Shakespeare's dedications to Southampton, those dedications count. The
> > | filter seems designed to follow a *Lucrece* rule: any dedication more
> > | personal-sounding gets through; any dedication that is less personal does
> > | not count at all.
> >
> > There is no agreement, even among the orthodox, as to what
> > Shakespeare's dedications tell us.
>
> Perhaps the Conservative and Reformed should be consulted. There is
> widespread agreement among even gentile scholars that William Shakespeare,
> the author of *Venus and Adonis*, dedicated the work to Southampton.
So where does a meshugeh nishtikeit like Shakspere get the chutzpeh to
dedicate traifeneh bicher to a balebatisheh yiden like Southampton.
Ahzes ponim! A mentsh on glik is a toyter mensh! (More likely it was a
choshEVER mentsh.)
Groisser gornisht Art Neuendorffer
Thomas C Lay
<Pine.GSO.4.33.0102250723310.3880-100000@mail>
<jbmiller-250...@ppp0a126.std.com>
Distribution:
Janice Miller (jbmi...@world.std.com) wrote:
<snip>
: Price contends, I think, that she has correctly construed her
: predecessors' work and is following in their footsteps. I wouldn't go so
: far as to say that we must follow Price, in her analyses of their work,
: but surely we can't reject her work out of hand
Terry didn't dismiss her work out of hand - he examined it closely and
gave a number of convincing reasons to reject it.
: -- any person who manages
: to get herself published must have _something_ worth listening to, right?
Please tell me you're kidding.
<snip>
: > > If you abandon that hypothesis and nothing changes, how can
: > > you argue it one way or the other?
: >
: > You've lost me here; what is the "hypothesis" you want me to abandon?
: Sorry, I may have crossed the mental line into arguing about
: tautologies there.
: This doesn't really answer your question, but I'm trying to say something
: like: If a particular kind of evidence has been shown, in actual
: experience, to have no value whatsoever because it turns out, invariably,
: to be ambiguous and thus puts anyone who uses it at risk of being accused
: of using a double standard, then every effort should be made to remove
: evidence of that kind from consideration
And would you contend that names on title pages and entries in the
Stationers' Register and posthumous remembrances "have no value
whatsoever" and "[turn] out, invariably, to be ambiguous"?
Tom
: -- short of destroying the
: evidence outright. Arguments from clear and distinct evidence have
: precedence over arguments that mix in what's ambiguous, so these can be
: safely set aside -- and should be set aside, if they keep messing up the
: former sort.
: -- Janice
: >
: > > In any case, the fact that you do not like Price's result does not
: > > give you grounds to reject her argument or her evidence.
: >
: > To tell the truth, I'm amused by the results of Price's filter: she has
: > designed a preposterous contraption whose results even she would term
: > "ridiculous." I stand by my earlier judgment: We have here not "new
: > evidence of an authorship problem" but a reconfirmation that
: > antistratfordianism cannot exist without such double standards as Price
: > uses throughout her book.
: >
: > -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pat Dooley
TOM REEDY <txr...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:ZJXl6.1526$ju2.1...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
Your postings indicates that you are attempting to make some distinctions
between personal and impersonal literary records. I've reviewed the other
records in earlier posts, but not that in your final example. The George A
Greene annotation does not indicate that Buc thought Shakespeare was a
writer.
You neglected to quote the additional annotation by Buc, probably made at a
different time, that reads:
"Ed. Iuby saith that this play was made by Ro. Greene."
Edward Juby is recorded on a number of occasions making payments and
receiving money for his company, the Admiral's Men. Juby wasn't a writer. It
appears that Buc is questioning representatives of acting companies to tell
him who the author is, and they give conflicting answers.
I would ask some additional questions about the annotation:
Why did Buc question Shakespeare and Juby about the authorship of an play
performed in 1593 by Sussex's Men? Juby's first known theatrical association
dates from 1594, but both Juby and Shakespeare are known to have handled
business affairs for their companies.
Buc left space for the author's name. Why did Shakespeare fail to name the
minister? He seems to have taken the fifth, as he did in the Mountjoy suit.
<< snip >>
Collier is involved in the provenance of these inscriptions but most
scholars accept the annotations as genuine (See Alan Nelson's article in the
Sh. Quarterly, spring 1998).
Pat Dooley
Bob Grumman
attributions alone. You don't need any corroborating
evidence."
You can always tell when an anti-Stratfordian has
lost an argument by his making absurd middleless
continuum statements like Pat's above. Where did
I state or imply that names on title-pages should
be taken as CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE of authorship? Of
COURSE, corrobarating evidence is required. We reject
A Yorkshire Tragedy and Locrine because Heminges and
Condell failed to corroborate them, and because no
writer of the time, so far as we know, claimed that
Shakespeare wrote them the way Meres claimed he wrote
Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Harvey that he wrote
Hamlet, etc. And because their style does not seem
similar enough to the style of plays known to be
Shakespeare's.
"We know Marlowe was a writer because a fellow
writer, Kyd, leaves a personal literary paper trail
that tells us he was a writer. The title page
attribution corroborates Kyd's evidence."
You have it backwards, Pat. Or at least incompletely
in forward gear. If we had no title-pages with
Marlowe's name on them, Kyd's testimony would
be argued about by two or three Kyd specialists.
Writers are know by names on their works. Their
identity is confirmed by all kinds of evidence--
Price-certified and Price-rejected. It is also
confirmed by the absence of expected evidence of
others' having written the works their names are on.
--Bob G.
>
> Pat Dooley
Tom Reedy
"Pat Dooley" <patd...@nospam.allowed.nls.net> wrote in message
news:S5cm6.50826$9u3.6...@news1.onlynews.com...
>
> TOM REEDY <txr...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
> news:ZJXl6.1526$ju2.1...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
Congratulations for being able to read my post. I specifically said it did
not refer to Shakespeare as a writer.
I also wrote that Buc clearly believed Shakespeare to be a writer, however,
since he gave him writer's credit for plays he licensed in the performance
of his official duties as Master of Revels.
> You neglected to quote the additional annotation by Buc, probably made at
a
> different time, that reads:
>
> "Ed. Iuby saith that this play was made by Ro. Greene."
>
> Edward Juby is recorded on a number of occasions making payments and
> receiving money for his company, the Admiral's Men. Juby wasn't a writer.
It
> appears that Buc is questioning representatives of acting companies to
tell
> him who the author is, and they give conflicting answers.
I did not "neglect;" the additional inscription is irrelevant to my point,
which seems too subtle for you to grasp.
Both inscriptions indicate that Buc personally talked to both Shakespeare
and Juby. IOW, they were real, living human beings whom Buc knew and had at
least one conversation with.
I'll spell it out: these are both PERSONAL records, one of the categories of
Price's pseudo-scholarly "filter."
They are also LITERARY records, since they concern LITERATURE, in this case,
a play.
> I would ask some additional questions about the annotation:
>
> Why did Buc question Shakespeare and Juby about the authorship of an play
> performed in 1593 by Sussex's Men? Juby's first known theatrical
association
> dates from 1594, but both Juby and Shakespeare are known to have handled
> business affairs for their companies.
Umm, because they might know? That would be my best guess.
Juby, like Shakespeare, was both an actor and sharer.
> Buc left space for the author's name. Why did Shakespeare fail to name the
> minister? He seems to have taken the fifth, as he did in the Mountjoy
suit.
It is obvious that Shakespeare did not know the author's name, but told Buc
what he knew, which was that it was written by a minister who acted in it.
Perhaps Shakespeare said he would get back to him, and never did or couldn't
find out the name.
Regardless, the inscription proves that Buc knew Shakespeare personally and
sought his opinion on the authorship of an anonymous play. It's also obvious
that Buc believed Shakespeare to be a writer, for the reason previously
explained.
TR
Pat Dooley
David Kathman <dj...@popd.ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:3A9814F3...@popd.ix.netcom.com...
I apologize for the length of this response. It is not obvious to me from
Dave Kathman's response what he considers bizarre so I have gone through
Diana's categories in some detail so those who do not have access to her
book can get some indication of the types of evidence that are under
discussion.
> Janice Miller wrote:
> >
> > Terry--
> >
> > Some comments on having read the first part of your long post (I
> > especially liked the turtles and the seabirds):
> >
> > Your point about the actual effects of the criteria Price uses should
> > probably be looked into. But as I pointed out in my earlier post, she
is
> > (as she states) using the objective, agreed-on criteria that have been
> > developed by literary biographers over the past hundred years, or a
little
> > more.
>
> No, she most emphatically does *not* do this; both the standards she
> uses and her application of those standards will seem quite bizarre
> to any real literary biographer dealing with Shakespeare's era.
The standards are only "bizarre" to Shakespearean biographers.
A literary biography is about a writer. Writers leave evidence of their
profession. Literary biographers use that evidence when they write about a
writer. Does David Kathman really think it is bizarre to:
1. Enquire about a writer's education.
A writer's education influences his literary development. Many of
Shakespeare's literary contemporaries left records that showed they were
educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Some of them are grouped together as
the"university wits". Jonson paid tribute to his educational mentor, William
Camden. Shakespeare is a man of no recorded education.
2. Examine any letters the writer wrote or received, particularly when they
pertain to literary matters.
Nashe wrote to William Cotten referring to "an after harvest I expected by
writing for the stage and for the press". Daniel wrote a letter concerning
his play "Philotas . . . first I told the Lordes I had written 3 Acts of
this tragedie the Christmas before my L. of Essex troubles." The closest
record we have for Shakespeare is the letter by Richard Quiney hoping to
borrow money from "Mr. Shakspere."
3. Check for records of who paid them for their work
Henslowe payments to numerous dramatists, and the Earl of Northumberland's
payment to one Geo. Peele, a poett, as my Lord's liberality 3Ł" are
typical records in this category. The closest record we have for Shakespeare
is the Impresa record. However, there is no first name in the record, and,
unlike Burbage, we are not told what Shakespeare was paid for. He may have
been paid, as Stopes proposed, in the capacity of agent for someone else, or
he may have contributed lines from his player's memory. The record provides
inadequate information. The Northumberland payment is explicit.
4. Look for evidence of a relationship with a literary patron in an era
where patronage was important to a writer's success
Drayton wrote to his "muche honored ffrend the worthy Sr Henry willoughby
one of the selected Patrons of thes my latest Poems". The closest
Shakespeare record we have are the dedications to the two narrative poems.
These are impersonal dedications, couched in language typical of those used
by Elizabethan writers trying to obtain patronage. Many patrons had works
dedicated to them by people they never met, who hoped for reward. Diana
compares and contrasts the language in Shakespeare's and other dedications
to demonstrate the difference between those written on spec, and those
demonstrating that patron and writer knew each other.
5. Look for any extant autograph manuscripts
The hands of Chettle, Munday, Dekker, and Heywood have all been positively
identified in the manuscript of "The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore". Some of the
others left manuscript poems or plays. Jonson left a complete masque. The
claim that Hand D in 'More' is Shakespeare's has never been proved, and
earlier I cited an article by Paul Werstine which explains why the
attribution arguments cannot be sustained. Further, Werstine showed that the
claim was first made in an attempt to manufacture evidence to counter the
anti-strafordians.
6. Search for other handwritten scraps of evidence, such as inscriptions,
receipts and letters touching on literary matters
Munday's handwritten dedicatory epistle and verse for 'Heaven of the Mind'
to John Swinnerton, sheriff of London is a typical record in this category.
Munday's been caught in the act of writing. The closest such records for
Shakespeare are the six signatures. Unfortunately, they are all attached to
legal documents, not poems.
7. Study any commendatory verses written to or by the author, looking for
personal salutations and evidence of interaction.
A verse from the obscure John Webster "To his beloved friend Maister Thomas
Heywod" for 'Apology for Actors' is typical. The first such record for
Shakespeare is in the 1623 First Folio.
8. Look at any evidence about any books they owned, lent or borrowed.
Over 120 books have been catalogued from Ben Jonson's library. Gabriel
Harvey's copious marginalia give literary biographers a lot of information
about Harvey's literary interests as well as the literary milieu of the day.
Shakespeare's name appears on a few flyleaves of books, but most are
forgeries, and none has been authenticated.
9. Check any other contemporaneous records that are personal and literary
Testators in a 1617 lawsuit stated that "George Chapman doth professe
Poetrie" and "hath made dyvers plays and written other books". Shakespeare
turns up in records that explicitly prove he was a player and shareholder,
but never a writer.
10. See what the literary community said when the writer died
In this category we can count George Peele's tribute to Marlowe written
about three weeks after Marlowe's death: "unhappy in thine end, / Marley,
the Muses darling, for thy verse". The first tributes to Shakespeare appear
seven years after he died.
Is it bizarre to ask whether the records left by other writers of the period
can be compared, and to ask how other biographers have considered such
evidence? It turns out that the types and quality of records left by
Shakespeare's contemporaries are comparable. And Shakespearean biographers
are reduced to special pleading to explain why such records do not exist for
Shakespeare?
Shakespearean biographers take one of two approaches to this problem.
Approach number one is to claim that Shakespeare is better documented than
his contemporaries, and cite the 70 odd records he left, with special
emphasis on the theatrical records. The following statement illustrates this
approach:
"We know more about the life of Shakespeare, both in terms of facts and of
rational conclusions that they suggest, than of any other Elizabethan
dramatist. . . . Documents relating to Shakespeare's activities, including
letters to him and material relating to his family, are extant in quantity
in the Shakespeare Centre records office at Stratford upon Avon. Few could
reasonably remain sceptical if they examined these.
-Gareth and Barbara Lloyd Evans, Companion to Shakespeare (17)"
We are still waiting to find out about the second and subsequent letters.
The statement that we know more about Shakespeare than any other dramatist
of his day suggests to most readers that his career as a writer is likewise
well-documented and therefore not in question. It is that gap in
Shakespeare's documentation with which we are concerned.
Approach number two is to claim everybody was poorly documented, since it
was all so long ago.
James G. McManaway defended Shakspere's literary credentials in part by
arguing that fewer biographical records have survived for most other writers
of the day, such as Marlowe, Peele, Dekker, and Daniel. He makes an
exception for Marlowe and Jonson, claiming "there are special reasons why so
much is recorded about them". (Diana's analysis shows that Marlowe is one of
the most poorly documented writers, so one really has to wonder what records
McManaway had in mind). But McManaway used faulty logic to defend
Shakespeare's literary credentials vs. those of his contemporaries. He
claimed that there wasn't much literary evidence for any of them. For this
one, just a scrap of verse for this one, just an autograph letter for
another. From Diana's book: "When McManaway argued that only a fragment of
poetry in Samuel Daniel's handwriting survives, he was arguing the case for
the anti-Stratfordian. A literary fragment survives for Daniel. No such
literary fragment survives for Shakspere." McManaway is citing a personal
literary paper trail for Daniel, comments that such records are very scarce,
and that's explains why there is nothing comparable for Shakespeare. But his
logic is flawed. For Daniel there is a personal literary paper trail. He
just cited it. Diana cites comparable evidence for Shakespeare's
contemporaries, even those who are poorly documented. And such evidence is
not scarce. That's the point here. There's solid (contemporaneous, explicit,
personal) documentary evidence of literary activity for everyone but
Shakespeare.
Perhaps one reason why Diana Price's categories appear so bizarre is that
nobody has done the analysis before. Every literary biographer, except
Shakespeare's, uses evidence in these categories in the normal course of
creating a literary biography.
> The fact that Price asserts that she is "using the same objective,
> agreed-upon criteria that have been developed by literary biographers
> over the past hundred years" does not mean that she has actually done so.
Diana first started to analyze other biographies in order to question the
anti-Stratfordian assertion that Shakespeare was well-documented, but not as
a writer. She did not know whether Shakespeare was any better or any worse
documented as a writer than others, and if the evidence that survived for
him was qualitatively about the same as everyone else's, there wouldn't be
much point in arguing that there was an authorship question. She went
through these other biographies, one by one, looking specifically for
documentary evidence that was personal, and that related to the vocation of
writing. Later, she sorted it. It was the high quality of literary records
for other writers that was the big surprise. Even for the obscure ones like
Peele or Webster or Watson. Nor is that type of evidence as scarce as
McManaway would have his readers believe.
I can assure HLAS readers that literary biographers of Jonson, Nashe,
Harvey, Spenser, Marlowe and the rest actually use records from Diana's
categories to construct their literary bios, and such records are essential
to those biographies; they are the records of the professional activities of
the subject individual. Better yet, I would strongly suggest HLAS readers
actually read some other biographers and see how much weight the biographers
attach to such records.
> A much better test is whether the scholars who use such standards
> on a daily basis agree with Price's assertion, but with virtual
> unanimity, they do not. The few Shakespeare scholars I have discussed
> this with agree with me; for example, Alan Nelson, who is writing
> biographies of both Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford, called Price's
> book "pretty silly", and was "shocked" that his university library had
> actually paid good money to buy it.
When Alan Nelson writes his biography of the Earl of Oxford, he will not
ignore the letters or prefatory material that Oxford wrote or received, and
the books he owned. None of which proves Oxford was Shakespeare, but there
is enough to tag him as a courtier poet and a patron with literary
interests.
I note also that Alan Nelson lists "Eight Witnesses to Shakespeare (seven
new)" on his web site. Not one of his witnesses provides evidence that is
personal and literary. The fact that John Rous bought "Venus and Adonis by
Wm Shakespear Lond. 1602" and "The rape of Lucrece by Wm Shakespear" tells
us that people bought published poetry with the name William Shakespeare on
title page. We all agree the name is on the title page. But as we have
pointed out, names on title pages are not necessarily good evidence of
authorship, or even of the author's real name.
The only personal piece of evidence he cites is the Buc annotation. This is
a fascinating document, but it doesn't catch Shakespeare in the act of
writing. He is one of two acting company representatives questioned about
the authorship of a play performed years ago at Henslowe's theatre. The
other is actor Edward Juby, who often received and disbursed funds on behalf
of his company, the Admiral's Men. I mention this evidence in another
posting.
>
> As I've pointed out before, I myself know a thing or two about
> Elizabethan literary biography, too. I have compiled a Biographical
> Dictionary of Elizabethan Theater
(http://www.clark.net/tross/ws/bd/kathman.htm)
> which catalogues virtually all the biographical information which
> has been published over the past 70 years about people involved in
> English theater between 1558 and 1642; I have read, and own copies of,
> nearly all the journal articles catalogued there, as well as a good
> number of the full-length books. I am also writing more than
> 30 articles for the New Dictionary of National Biography, mostly
> on playwrights of roughly Shakespeare's era, and these have required
> me to dig deeply into the records of a wide variety of writers.
I assume that in your articles about actors, you accept and use personal
evidence of their professional acting activities. I assume that in your
articles about writers, you accept personal literary records that fit
Diana's categories. I would further venture that literary biographers place
great emphasis on those records.
> As Terry Ross and others have pointed out, Price's standards are
> arbitrary and exclude some of the most common and straightforward
> evidence for people being writers, and her application of those
> standards is not even consistent. Her ability to fool credulous
> readers not familiar with the history of the era or the standards
> of the profession does not change these facts.
The standards are not arbitrary. The three simple questions she asks are:
Is it literary? Is it personal? Is it contemporaneous?
There is a fourth question that is implicit in her approach.
Is the evidence reliable? That, of course, is the reason why she does not
accept the Sir Thomas More attribution for Shakespeare, and the reason why
she rejects the multitude of forgeries perpetrated by Ireland and Collier,
amongst others. And it is why she rejects hearsay, such as the "rumor" that
Greene sold Orlando Furioso to two rival companies simultaneously.
Perhaps Dave Kathman can point out the inconsistencies. I presume he is not
challenging the evidence that she has cited for all of Shakespeare's
contemporaries, but perhaps there is some Shakespeare record she has
overlooked.
>
> I'm still swamped, as I have several projects with March 1 deadlines
> which need to be finished, but I'm hoping I can squeeze in a little
> time this weekend to respond to a few of the claims Diana Price
> and Pat Dooley have made here, particularly their rather bizarre
> treatment of posthumous evidence.
Diana's treatment of posthumous evidence is not bizarre. Her point is that
the only writer for whom you have to rely on posthumous evidence to "prove"
they were writers is Shakespeare. That is what is bizarre. Tabulating and
categorizing undisputed contemporaneous personal literary records for his
contemporaries simply shows how bizarre that is.
Terry Ross
> In article <Pine.GSO.4.33.0102250723310.3880-100000@mail>, Terry Ross
> <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 24 Feb 2001, Janice Miller wrote:
> >
> > > Your point about the actual effects of the criteria Price uses should
> > > probably be looked into.
> >
> > It might have made sense for Price to have done that before publishing her
> > book. I think it would have been very helpful for her to have tried out
> > some of her arguments on this newsgroup.
>
> Well, yes, or any number of other places.
Yes; it would have helped the book if Price's points had been subjected to
more rigorous scrutiny beforehand. One completely amazing blunder is that
she thinks Jonson's epigram 77 "To One that Desired Me Not to Name Him" is
"complimentary" and is addressed to a "professional writer ... whom he
admired." I was frankly embarrassed for Price when I read that. Here is
the entire poem:
Be safe, nor fear thy self so good a fame,
That, any way, my book should speak thy name:
For, if thou shame, rank'd with my friends to go,
I am more ashamed to have thee thought my foe.
Now, Jonson's wit can be subtle, but that Price would completely miss the
point and wit of this epigram is almost as astonishing as her fantasy that
it is addressed to a "professional writer." If we cannot trust Price as
our guide to a relatively simple epigram such as this, why should we rely
on her readings of more involved texts?
>
> >...
> > In short, it is not true that Price uses the standards and methods that
> > are current in the field. She has designed her own standards and methods,
> > which seem to be specifically designed to reject evidence of Shakespeare's
> > career as a writer, and (as I have explained in detail) she does not even
> > apply those standards and methods fairly.
>
> Price contends, I think, that she has correctly construed her
> predecessors' work and is following in their footsteps.
She is following in the footsteps of a long line of antistratfordians;
those are her true predecessors.
> I wouldn't go so far as to say that we must follow Price, in her
> analyses of their work, but surely we can't reject her work out of
> hand -- any person who manages to get herself published must have
> _something_ worth listening to, right?
I have not rejected her work out of hand. I said nothing about her book
until I read it, and I have made no comments about it without backing up
what I have said. Of course, a great deal of tosh manages to get printed,
so the mere fact of publication creates no particular demands on our
attention.
>
> > > From what I see (what's been posted here, the articles at her website
> > > and at the Elizabethan Review), Price tracks her predecessors'
> > > analyses of the data pretty closely, and she gives us no reason to
> > > think she disagrees with them.
> >
> > That is, of course, what Price would have you believe.
> >
> > >
> > > There are, of course, questions raised by her choices, as you point
> > > out: why print the data for this exact set of 27 writers, why not test
> > > the criteria on non-writers, and so on? I would guess, again, that
> > > Price's choices in this area were influenced by the evidence that was
> > > available to he, by the kinds of things previous workers in the field
> > > of literary biography had been interested in, and the kinds of things
> > > they had thought important.
> >
> > Your guess is a very charitable one. I consider Price to be about the
> > most reasonable antistratfordian extant, and I had hoped that her book
> > would be at the least a fair statement of an antistratfordian "case."
>
> "Guess" may be overstating my certainty. Call it a hunch.
Then it is a very charitable hunch.
>
> >...
> > > If irrefutable arguments really show that a writer, named William
> > > Shakespeare, never existed, then the fact that he never existed is
> > > irrefutable.
> >
> > If you nudge this just a bit further into the realm of absolute tautology,
> > then I will certainly agree. In fact, change the name "William
> > Shakespeare" to "Charles Dickens" or "Janice Miller" and I would also
> > agree.
>
> Okay.
>
> But if we agreed, even temporarily for the sake of argument, that "Janice
> Miller" never existed, I'd have a hard time cashing checks.
That's odd -- all the checks I've signed "Janice Miller" have been
honored.
>
> >
> > > If you abandon that hypothesis and nothing changes, how can
> > > you argue it one way or the other?
> >
> > You've lost me here; what is the "hypothesis" you want me to abandon?
>
> Sorry, I may have crossed the mental line into arguing about
> tautologies there.
>
> This doesn't really answer your question, but I'm trying to say
> something like: If a particular kind of evidence has been shown, in
> actual experience, to have no value whatsoever because it turns out,
> invariably, to be ambiguous and thus puts anyone who uses it at risk
> of being accused of using a double standard, then every effort should
> be made to remove evidence of that kind from consideration -- short of
> destroying the evidence outright.
If it has no value whatsoever, then it isn't really evidence, is it? For
instance, Ruth Loyd Miller's assignment of some of Gascoigne's poems to
Oxford is entirely without merit, but not because it is ambiguous.
> Arguments from clear and distinct evidence have precedence over
> arguments that mix in what's ambiguous, so these can be safely set
> aside -- and should be set aside, if they keep messing up the former
> sort.
The fact that antistratfordians happen to label a text "ambiguous" is no
reason for literary historians to throw that text out, any more than the
fact that creationists insist that the fossil record is ambiguous would be
a reason for scientists to ignore that evidence. It is not enough for
someone to used the word "ambiguous" as a bugbear. The fact that Jonson's
praise of Shakespeare is thoughtful and measured does not mean that he
doubted that William Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him, or
that he did not (as he tell us) love the man and honor his memory this
side idolatry.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
http://www.clark.net/pub/tross/ws/will.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> -- Janice
Bob Grumman
I thank you for the additional information, which
was new to me--and kept me from reading as much
into the Buc notation as I would have liked. I
continue to think it shows that Buc personally
testified that Shakespeare was a writer by
showing in one place that he knew him and in
another that he considered him a writer I
know that you would claim Buc thought there were
two William Shakespeares, which--I suppose--is
possible. Meanwhile, why would you think Buc
would consult a sleazy usurer/plagiarist on
any matter?
--Bob G.
Neuendorffer
> The fact that antistratfordians happen to label a text "ambiguous" is no
> reason for literary historians to throw that text out, any more than the
> fact that creationists insist that the fossil record is ambiguous would be
> a reason for scientists to ignore that evidence. It is not enough for
> someone to used the word "ambiguous" as a bugbear. The fact that Jonson's
> praise of Shakespeare is thoughtful and measured does not mean that he
> doubted that William Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him, or
> that he did not (as he tell us) love the man and honor his memory this
> side idolatry.
-------------------------------------------------------
To the memory of my beloved,
The Author
MR. W I L L I A M S H A K E S P E A R E :
A N D
what he hath left us.
----------------------------------------------------------
"(To the m)emory of my beloved "
(To the m)[-eMOry of my beloVED]
(To them) [my OM, by fo(DEVere)ol-]
" To them, my OM, by fo(DEVere)ol- "
------------------------------------------------------------
A shuffle permutation of 10 objects in five decks:
only 10!/(3!*1!*1!*4!*1!) = 25,200 possibilities.
--------------------------------------------------------------
[my OM, by fo(DEVere)ol-] => [-eMOry of my beloved]
[m-y-OM-by-fo-DEV-e-r-e-ol-] => [-e-MO-r-y-of-m-yb-e-lo-VED]
--------------------------------------------------------------
m-y-OM- => -MO -y -m
by- => -yb
fo- => -of
DEV-e-r-e- => -e -r -e -VED
ol- => -lo
--------------------------------------------------------------
[m-y-OM-by-fo-DEV-e-r-e-ol-] => [-e-MO-r-y-of-m-yb-e-lo-VED]
---------------------------------------------------------------
Ptolemy the EVER-LIVING,
beloved of {P T E H}
-------------------------------------------------------------------
T O T H E O N L I E B 'raw' probabilities:
E G E T T E R O F T H
E S E I N S V I N G S TIBIAL: 1 in 11,600
O N N E T S M r W{H}A EMEPH: 1 in 300
L H A P I N{E}S STORG: 1 in 199
N D T A{T}E PHEON: 1 in 127
|L] T I [P] {P}R [S|
[E|A] Y [H] V [T|E]
[N|I] [E] [O|M]
R [D|B] [O] [R|E] I
S E [V|I][N][G|P] V E
R L I [E||T||H] O E T
W I S H T H E W
E L L W I [S] H I N G A
D V E N T [U] R E R I N
S E T T I [N] G F O R T H
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Zeus, son of the SUN,
Ptolemy the EVER-LIVING, beloved of {P T E H}
----------------------------------------------------------------
Philip/Mary Sydney's P H E O N azure crest:
http://www.renaissance.dm.net/heraldry/blazons3.html
http://www.geocities.co.jp/Milano/8947/m455a.gif
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.gospeltruth.net/1840skeletons/sk_lecture17.htm
http://theosophy.org/tlodocs/teachers/Iamblichus.htm
<<Jamblichus, a Platonic Philosopher, arranges the god EMEPH (Kneph?)
prior to and as leader of the celestial gods. And he says that this
god is an intellect, itself intellectually perceiving itself and
converting intellections to itself.>>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Translation of the Greek Section of the Rosetta Stone
http://www.cpasib.com/ancient/translation_of_the_greek_section.htm
"In the reign of the young one--who was received his royalty from his
father--lord of crowns, glorious, who has established Egypt, and is
pious towards the gods, superior to his foes, who has restored the
civilized life of men, lord of the Thirty Years Feasts, even as
Hephaistos the Great; a king, like the SUN, the great king of upper
and lower regions; offspring of the Gods Philopatores, one whom
Hephaistos has approved, to whom the SUN has given the victory,
the living image of Zeus, son of the SUN,
PTOLEMY the EVER-LIVING, BELOVED OF PTAH,
. . . even that of Ptolemy,
THE EVER-LIVING, THE BELOVED OF PTAH, THE GOD EPIPHANES EUCHARISTOS,
which he received from his father, being assembled in the temple
in Memphis on this day, declared: Since king Ptolemy,
THE EVER-LIVING, THE BELOVED OF PTAH, THE GOD EPIPHANES EUCHARISTOS, the
son of king Ptolemy and queen Arsinoe, Gods Philopatores, has much
benefited both the temples and those that dwell in them, as well as
all those that are his subjects, being a god sprung from a god and a
goddess (like Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, who avenged his
father Osiris), <and> being benevolently disposed towards the gods,
has dedicated to the temples revenues in money and corn, and has
undertaken much outlay to bring Egypt into prosperity, and to
establish the temples, and has been generous with all his own means,
"WITH PROPITIOUS FORTUNE: It seemed good to the priests
of all the temples in the land to increase greatly
the existing honours of king Ptolemy, THE EVER-LIVING,
THE BELOVED OF PTAH, THE GOD EPIPHANES EUCHARISTOS,
likewise those of his parent, the Gods Philopatores, and of his
ancestors, the Gods Euergetes and the Gods Adelphoi and the Gods
Soteres, and to set up of the EVER-LIVING king Ptolemy, THE BELOVED OF
PTAH, THE GOD EPIPHANES EUCHARISTOS, an image in the most prominent
place of every temple, which shall be called that of "Ptolemy, the
avenger of Egypt,' . . . And a feast shall be kept for
king Ptolemy, THE EVERLASTING, THE BELOVED OF PTAH, THE GOD EPIPHANES
EUCHARISTOS, yearly (also) in all the temples of the land from the
first of Thoth for 5 days; in which they shall wear garlands, and
perform sacrifices, and the other usual honours; and the priests <of
the other gods> shall be called priests of the God Epiphanes
Eucharistos in addition to the names of the other gods whom they
serve; and his priesthood shall be entered upon all formal documents
<AND ENGRAVED ON THE RINGS WHICH THEY WEAR> and private individuals
shall also be allowed to keep the feast and set up the aforementioned
shrine, and have it in their houses, performing the customary honours
at the feasts, both monthly and yearly, in order that it may be known
to all that the men of Egypt magnify and honour the God Epiphanes
Eucharistos the king, according to the law. This decree shall be set
up on a stele of hard stone, in sacred and native Greek letters, and
set up in each of the first, second, and third (rank) temples at the
image of the EVER-LIVING king."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Inscriptions upon the Tablet under Shakespere's Bust,
in the Chancel-north-wall of Stratford Church:
GENIO SOCRATEM,
READ IF THOV CANST,
QVICK NATVRE DIDE: WHOSE NAME DOTH DECK Ys TOMBE
FAR MORE THEN COST: SIEH ALL, Yt HE HATH WRITT,
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THESE SONNETS ALL BY EVER THE FORTH
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SOCRATES. One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is THE FOURTH
of those who were yesterday my guests
and are to be my ENTERTAINERS today?
Timaeus. He has been taken ill, Socrates; for he would not willingly
have been absent from this gathering.
SOCRATES. Then, if he is not coming, you and the two others
must supply his place.
---------------------------------------------
TIMAEUS by Plato
<<Tell us, said the other, the whole story, and how
and from whom Solon heard this veritable tradition.
He replied: In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river NILE
divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of
SAIS, and the great city of the district is also called SAIS, and is the
city from which King Amasis came. . . And they did in fact at that time
create a very great and mighty movement; uniting with the EVER-FLOWING
stream in stirring up and violently SHAKING the courses of the soul,>>
---------------------------------------------
CRATYLUS by Plato
<<[SOCRATES to Hermogenes]: ARETE will be the opposite of it, signifying
in the first place ease of motion, then that the stream of the good soul
is unimpeded,and has therefore the attribute of EVER FLOWING without let
or hindrance, and is therefore called ARETE,
or, more correctly, aeireite (EVER-FLOWING),>>
---------------------------------------------------------------
It is clear that "OUR EVER-LIVING"
signifies Oxford's motto: "VERO NIL VERIU(s)"
----------------------------------------------------------------
T O T H E O [N] L I E B E G E T T E R O
F T H E S E [I] n S U I N G S O N N E T
S M R W h a [L] L H A] P P I [N] E S S E A
N D t h a t [E] T [e|R] N I T [I] E P R O M
I S E D B Y O U[r|E] V E R [L] I V I N G
P O E t W I S H[e|T] H T H [E] W E L L W
I S h I N G A [d V E] N T U R E R I N S
E t T I N G F O R T H
---------------------------------------------------------------
.W.H,.oS .E S I e H
r e a
i n r
o r l
t y . . . ALL, Yt HE HATH WRITT,
h
--------------------------------------------------------------
: W H o S E name doth deck ys tombe
: S I e H all, yt he hath writt,
---------------------------------------------------------------
<<[SOCRATES to Hermogenes]: Artemis is named from her healthy (ARTEMES),
well-ordered nature, and because of her love of virginity, perhaps
because she is a proficient in virtue (ARETE), and perhaps also as
hating intercourse of the sexes (ton aroton miseasa). He who gave the
Goddess her name may have had any or all of these reasons. . .I should
like to consider the meaning of the two words ARETE (virtue) and kakia
(vice) ARETE I do not as yet understand, but kakia is transparent,
Then the word kakia appears to mean kakos ienai, or going badly,
or limping and halting; of which the consequence is, that the soul
becomes filled with vice. And if kakia is the name of this sort of
thing, ARETE will be the opposite of it, signifying in the first place
ease of motion, then that the stream of the good soul is unimpeded, and
has therefore the attribute of ever flowing without let or hindrance,
and is therefore called ARETE, or, more correctly, aeireite
(EVER-FLOWING), and may perhaps have had another form, airete
(eligible), indicating that nothing is more eligible than virtue, and
this has been hammered into ARETE. I daresay that you will deem this
to be another invention of mine, but I think that if the previous
word kakia was right, then ARETE is also right.>> - Plato (CRATYLUS)
---------------------------------------------------------------
ARETE (aeireite) = "EVER-FLOWING"
--------------------------------------------------------------
T O T H E O [N] L i E B E G E T T E R O
F T H E S E [I] n S U I N G S O N N E T
S M R W h a [L] L H A] P P I [N] E S S E A
N D t h a t [E] T [e|R] N I T [I] E P R O M
I S E D B Y O U [r|E] V E R [L] I V I N G
P O E t W I S H [e|T] H T H [E] W E L L W
I S h I N G A [d V E] N T U R E R I N S
E t T I N G F O R T H
---------------------------------------------------------------
PROVERBS 18:4 The words of a man's mouth are as deep waters,
and the wellspring of wisdom as a flowing brook.
18:5 It is not good to accept the person of the wicked,
to overthrow the righteous in judgment.
18:6 A fool's lips enter into contention,
and his mouth calleth for strokes.
18:7 A fool's mouth is his destruction,
and his lips are the snare of his soul.
18:8 The words of a talebearer are as wounds,
and they go down into the innermost parts of the belly.
18:9 He also that is slothful in his work is brother
to him that is a great WASTER.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
T O.T H E.
O N L I E.
B E G E T
T E R.O F.
T H E S E.
I N S V I
N G.S O N
N E T S Mr
[W]H A L L. W{H}
H[A]P P I {H}A
N E[S]S E. S
A N D[T]H T
A T.E T[E] E
R N I T I
E P R O M
I S E D.B
Y.O V R.E
V E R-L I
V I N G.P
O E T.W I
S H E T H.
T H E.W E
L L-W I S
H I N G.A
D V E N T
V R E R I
N.S E T T
I N G.F O
R T H.T.T.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Procopius of Caesarea: The Secret History
http://www.reptilianagenda.com/hist/h073000b.html
<<What [Justinian] illegally confiscated and WASTED during his lifetime,
no tale, no reckoning, no count could ever make manifest. For like an
EVER FLOWING river swallowing more each day he pillaged his subjects, to
disgorge it straightway on the barbarians.>>
---------------------------------------------------------------
T O T H E O [N] L i E B E G E T T E R O
F T H E S E [I] n S U I N G S O N N E T
S M R W h a [L] L H A] P P I [N] E S S E A
N D t h a t [E] T [e|R] N I T [I] E P R O M
I S E D B Y O U [r|E] V E R [L] I V I N G
P O E t W I S H [e|T] H T H [E] W E L L W
I S h I N G A [d V E] N T U R E R I N S
E t T I N G F O R T H
---------------------------------------------------------------
ARETE = Elizabeth/Anne?
---------------------------------------------------------------
Odyssey - Homer (tr. Samuel Butler) ** ( BOOK VII )
<<. . when they reached the king's house Minerva said [to Ulysses]:
"This is the house, father stranger, which you would have me show
you. You will find a number of great people sitting at table, but do
not be afraid; go straight in, for the bolder a man is the more likely
he is to carry his point, even though he is a stranger. First find the
queen. Her name is ARETE, and she comes of the same family as her
husband Alcinous.
There he found all the chief people among
the Phaecians making their drink-offerings to Mercury, which they
always did the last thing before going away for the night. He went
straight through the court, still hidden by the cloak of darkness in
which Minerva had enveloped him, till he reached ARETE and King
Alcinous; then he laid his hands upon the knees of the queen, and at
that moment the miraculous darkness fell away from him and he became
visible. Every one was speechless with surprise at seeing a man there,
but Ulysses began at once with his petition.
"Queen ARETE," he exclaimed, "daughter of great Rhexenor, in my
distress I humbly pray you, as also your husband and these your guests
(whom may heaven prosper with long life and happiness, and may they
leave their possessions to their children, and all the honours
conferred upon them by the state) to help me home to my own country as
soon as possible; for I have been long in trouble and away from my
friends.">>
<<Then ARETE told her maids to set a large tripod upon the fire as
fast as they could, whereon they set a tripod full of bath water on to
a clear fire; they threw on sticks to make it blaze, and the water
became hot as the flame played about the belly of the tripod.
Meanwhile ARETE brought a magnificent chest her own room, and inside
it she packed all the beautiful presents of gold and raiment which the
Phaeacians had brought. Lastly she added a cloak and a good shirt from
Alcinous, and said to Ulysses:
"See to the lid yourself, and have the whole bound round at once,
for fear any one should rob you by the way when you are asleep in
your ship.">>
<<Pontonous mixed the wine and handed it to every one in turn; the
others each from his own seat made a drink-offering to the blessed
gods that live in heaven, but Ulysses rose and placed the double cup
in the hands of queen ARETE.
"Farewell, queen," said he, "henceforward and for ever, till age and
death, the common lot of mankind, lay their hands upon you. I now take
my leave; be happy in this house with your children, your people,
and with king Alcinous."
As he spoke he crossed the threshold, and Alcinous sent a man to
conduct him to his ship and to the sea shore. ARETE also sent some
maid servants with him--one with a clean shirt and cloak, another to
carry his strong-box, and a third with corn and wine.>>
---------------------------------------------------------------
Alcinous & ARETE
---------------------------------------------------------------
Alcinous was King of the Phaeacians in the
island of Corcyra. He received the
ARGONAUTS and protected Medea from
her compatriots the Colchians who demanded
of Alcinous that he should give her up for the
theft of the Golden Fleece and the murder of
her brother. Alcinous answered that if she
already knew Jason, he would give her to
him, but that if she were still a maid he would
send her away to her father. However Queen
ARETE anticipated matters by marrying Medea
to Jason. It was later that Alcinous entertained
Odysseus, and after bestowing gifts on him
sent him away to his native Ithaca.
---------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Bob Grumman
stopped after seeing he was trying to "refute"
the idea that his wife's categories are not used
by biographers. Pat, who in the world is saying
that? Her categories are fine for working up a
complete biography of a writer. We are saying,
however, that SO ARE THE MANY RECORDS that Diana
junks. In many cases, they are much better. The
records from Marlowe's lifetime about him would
be 99% worthless if not for such posthumous records
as his name on title-pages. Etc.
Pat Dooley
"Thomas C Lay" <tl...@mail2.sas.upenn.edu> wrote in message
news:97bidl$9kr$1...@netnews.upenn.edu...
> 4020114...@ppp0a110.std.com>
> <Pine.GSO.4.33.0102250723310.3880-100000@mail>
> <jbmiller-250...@ppp0a126.std.com>
< snip >
>
> And would you contend that names on title pages and entries in the
> Stationers' Register and posthumous remembrances "have no value
> whatsoever" and "[turn] out, invariably, to be ambiguous"?
It would be appreciated if our position was not mis-represented. We have
never said the evidence you mention - title page attributions, entries in
the Stationers Register, and posthumous evidence - has no value whatsoever.
The point is that that evidence is not contemporaneous personal literary
evidence of the sort typically left by writers of the day and
normally used by biographers. It is that lack of personal literary evidence
in Shakespeare's otherwise well-documented life raises an authorship
problem. Title pages are valuable for many purposes, but they are not
necessarily reliable evidence for biographers.
We would happily retreat from our position if someone could find records for
Shakespeare comparable to those for his contemporaries. Those debating us
have pointed to the Impresa record, the Buc inscriptions, Hand D in the
manuscript of "The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore", Davies's Ambiguous poems,
Meres's impersonal reference to Shakespeare's sonnets, and that's about it.
We have responded to each of these in other posts to show why they are
impersonal or ambiguous, and therefore not personal literary paper trails.
Each of these records has some evidentiary value, but they do not document
Shakespeare's vocation as a writer.
Pat Dooley
Pat Dooley
I apologize for the length of this response. It is not obvious to me from
Dave Kathman's response what he considers bizarre so I have gone through
Diana's categories in some detail so those who do not have access to her
book can get some indication of the types of evidence that are under
discussion.
> Janice Miller wrote:
> >
> > Terry--
> >
> > Some comments on having read the first part of your long post (I
> > especially liked the turtles and the seabirds):
> >
> > Your point about the actual effects of the criteria Price uses should
> > probably be looked into. But as I pointed out in my earlier post, she
is
> > (as she states) using the objective, agreed-on criteria that have been
> > developed by literary biographers over the past hundred years, or a
little
> > more.
>
> No, she most emphatically does *not* do this; both the standards she
> uses and her application of those standards will seem quite bizarre
> to any real literary biographer dealing with Shakespeare's era.
The standards are only "bizarre" to Shakespearean biographers.
A literary biography is about a writer. Writers leave evidence of their
profession. Literary biographers use that evidence when they write about a
writer. Does David Kathman really think it is bizarre to:
1. Enquire about a writer's education.
A writer's education influences his literary development. Many of
Shakespeare's literary contemporaries left records that showed they were
educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Some of them are grouped together as
the"university wits". Jonson paid tribute to his educational mentor, William
Camden. Shakespeare is a man of no recorded education.
2. Examine any letters the writer wrote or received, particularly when they
pertain to literary matters.
Nashe wrote to William Cotten referring to "an after harvest I expected by
writing for the stage and for the press". Daniel wrote a letter concerning
his play "Philotas . . . first I told the Lordes I had written 3 Acts of
this tragedie the Christmas before my L. of Essex troubles." The closest
record we have for Shakespeare is the letter by Richard Quiney hoping to
borrow money from "Mr. Shakspere."
3. Check for records of who paid them for their work
Henslowe payments to numerous dramatists, and the Earl of Northumberland's
payment to one Geo. Peele, a poett, as my Lord's liberality 3£" are
> The fact that Price asserts that she is "using the same objective,
> agreed-upon criteria that have been developed by literary biographers
> over the past hundred years" does not mean that she has actually done so.
Diana first started to analyze other biographies in order to question the
anti-Stratfordian assertion that Shakespeare was well-documented, but not as
a writer. She did not know whether Shakespeare was any better or any worse
documented as a writer than others, and if the evidence that survived for
him was qualitatively about the same as everyone else's, there wouldn't be
much point in arguing that there was an authorship question. She went
through these other biographies, one by one, looking specifically for
documentary evidence that was personal, and that related to the vocation of
writing. Later, she sorted it. It was the high quality of literary records
for other writers that was the big surprise. Even for the obscure ones like
Peele or Webster or Watson. Nor is that type of evidence as scarce as
McManaway would have his readers believe.
I can assure HLAS readers that literary biographers of Jonson, Nashe,
Harvey, Spenser, Marlowe and the rest actually use records from Diana's
categories to construct their literary bios, and such records are essential
to those biographies; they are the records of the professional activities of
the subject individual. Better yet, I would strongly suggest HLAS readers
actually read some other biographers and see how much weight the biographers
attach to such records.
> A much better test is whether the scholars who use such standards
> on a daily basis agree with Price's assertion, but with virtual
> unanimity, they do not. The few Shakespeare scholars I have discussed
> this with agree with me; for example, Alan Nelson, who is writing
> biographies of both Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford, called Price's
> book "pretty silly", and was "shocked" that his university library had
> actually paid good money to buy it.
When Alan Nelson writes his biography of the Earl of Oxford, he will not
ignore the letters or prefatory material that Oxford wrote or received, and
the books he owned. None of which proves Oxford was Shakespeare, but there
is enough to tag him as a courtier poet and a patron with literary
interests.
I note also that Alan Nelson lists "Eight Witnesses to Shakespeare (seven
new)" on his web site. Not one of his witnesses provides evidence that is
personal and literary. The fact that John Rous bought "Venus and Adonis by
Wm Shakespear Lond. 1602" and "The rape of Lucrece by Wm Shakespear" tells
us that people bought published poetry with the name William Shakespeare on
title page. We all agree the name is on the title page. But as we have
pointed out, names on title pages are not necessarily good evidence of
authorship, or even of the author's real name.
The only personal piece of evidence he cites is the Buc annotation. This is
a fascinating document, but it doesn't catch Shakespeare in the act of
writing. He is one of two acting company representatives questioned about
the authorship of a play performed years ago at Henslowe's theatre. The
other is actor Edward Juby, who often received and disbursed funds on behalf
of his company, the Admiral's Men. I mention this evidence in another
posting.
>
> As I've pointed out before, I myself know a thing or two about
> Elizabethan literary biography, too. I have compiled a Biographical
> Dictionary of Elizabethan Theater
(http://www.clark.net/tross/ws/bd/kathman.htm)
> which catalogues virtually all the biographical information which
> has been published over the past 70 years about people involved in
> English theater between 1558 and 1642; I have read, and own copies of,
> nearly all the journal articles catalogued there, as well as a good
> number of the full-length books. I am also writing more than
> 30 articles for the New Dictionary of National Biography, mostly
> on playwrights of roughly Shakespeare's era, and these have required
> me to dig deeply into the records of a wide variety of writers.
I assume that in your articles about actors, you accept and use personal
evidence of their professional acting activities. I assume that in your
articles about writers, you accept personal literary records that fit
Diana's categories. I would further venture that literary biographers place
great emphasis on those records.
> As Terry Ross and others have pointed out, Price's standards are
> arbitrary and exclude some of the most common and straightforward
> evidence for people being writers, and her application of those
> standards is not even consistent. Her ability to fool credulous
> readers not familiar with the history of the era or the standards
> of the profession does not change these facts.
The standards are not arbitrary. The three simple questions she asks are:
Is it literary? Is it personal? Is it contemporaneous?
There is a fourth question that is implicit in her approach.
Is the evidence reliable? That, of course, is the reason why she does not
accept the Sir Thomas More attribution for Shakespeare, and the reason why
she rejects the multitude of forgeries perpetrated by Ireland and Collier,
amongst others. And it is why she rejects hearsay, such as the "rumor" that
Greene sold Orlando Furioso to two rival companies simultaneously.
Perhaps Dave Kathman can point out the inconsistencies. I presume he is not
challenging the evidence that she has cited for all of Shakespeare's
contemporaries, but perhaps there is some Shakespeare record she has
overlooked.
>
> I'm still swamped, as I have several projects with March 1 deadlines
> which need to be finished, but I'm hoping I can squeeze in a little
> time this weekend to respond to a few of the claims Diana Price
> and Pat Dooley have made here, particularly their rather bizarre
> treatment of posthumous evidence.
Diana's treatment of posthumous evidence is not bizarre. Her point is that
the only writer for whom you have to rely on posthumous evidence to "prove"
they were writers is Shakespeare. That is what is bizarre. Tabulating and
categorizing undisputed contemporaneous personal literary records for his
contemporaries simply shows how bizarre that is.
> I will not be able to respond
Pat Dooley
<snip>
>
> The fact that antistratfordians happen to label a text "ambiguous" is no
> reason for literary historians to throw that text out, any more than the
> fact that creationists insist that the fossil record is ambiguous would be
> a reason for scientists to ignore that evidence. It is not enough for
> someone to used the word "ambiguous" as a bugbear. The fact that Jonson's
> praise of Shakespeare is thoughtful and measured does not mean that he
> doubted that William Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him, or
> that he did not (as he tell us) love the man and honor his memory this
> side idolatry.
Perhaps you have not read Diana's bibliography or checked her citations,
almost all of which are to orthodox scholars. In her examination of Jonson's
testimony she cites Jonsonian critics. Once again, I'll quote:
<quote>
Jonson's First Folio eulogy to "William Shakespeare" is generally accepted
by biographers as a fitting tribute requiring little comment, although it
contains critical information used to prove the traditional authorship
attribution. While the title itself suggests that Jonson personally knew
Shakespeare, one critic has remarked that "subsequently we learn very little
about Shakespeare either as a man [emphasis added] . . . or as a poet"
(Lipking, 142). Moreover, according to Alexander Leggatt, it is "one of
Jonson's best known, most puzzling, and most hotly debated poems" (227).
</quote>
and again:
<quote>
Most important, Jonson's testimony is neither consistent nor
self-explanatory nor accurate. One Jonsonian critic discusses "the debate
over the sincerity of Jonson's praise," while another thinks the poem
conveys an "ambiguity of attitude" (Peterson, 158; Trimpi, 148; see also
Lipking, 140). Various Jonsonian commentators have grappled at length with
that ambiguity. Many quote the seventeenth century poet John Dryden who
regarded Jonson's eulogy as "an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric"
(2:75), but rarely is Jonson's eulogy the subject of an extended critical
analysis in the Shakespearean biography. However, Dryden's opinion alone
should prompt a thorough dissection of this most critical of testimony, and
it certainly proves that Jonson's eulogy is capable of more than one
interpretation. In other words, Dryden's opinion proves, if any further
proof were needed, that Jonson's eulogy is ambiguous. It cannot be taken at
face value, a point on which at least the Jonsonian scholars agree.
</quote>
It would be incorrect to categorize the Jonsonian sources that Diana cites
as anti-stratfordians, as you suggest.
Pat Dooley
Pat Dooley
<< Snip >>
> Yes; it would have helped the book if Price's points had been subjected to
> more rigorous scrutiny beforehand. One completely amazing blunder is that
> she thinks Jonson's epigram 77 "To One that Desired Me Not to Name Him" is
> "complimentary" and is addressed to a "professional writer ... whom he
> admired." I was frankly embarrassed for Price when I read that. Here is
> the entire poem:
>
> Be safe, nor fear thy self so good a fame,
> That, any way, my book should speak thy name:
> For, if thou shame, rank'd with my friends to go,
> I am more ashamed to have thee thought my foe.
>
> Now, Jonson's wit can be subtle, but that Price would completely miss the
> point and wit of this epigram is almost as astonishing as her fantasy that
> it is addressed to a "professional writer." If we cannot trust Price as
> our guide to a relatively simple epigram such as this, why should we rely
> on her readings of more involved texts?
Here is what Diana wrote:
<quote>
Jonson seems to be protecting the anonymity of someone who would be
disgraced by an overt association with him, a professional writer. Jonson
did not want to embarrass this friend with any explicit praise. That friend
may or may not be Shakespeare, but the epigram shows that Jonson took care
for some reason not to identify in print a person whom he admired.
</quote>
The professional writer is Jonson, not the subject of the epigram. It
appears you misread what Diana has written.
Pat Dooley
Pat Dooley
<snip>
>
> I have not rejected her work out of hand. I said nothing about her book
> until I read it, and I have made no comments about it without backing up
> what I have said. Of course, a great deal of tosh manages to get printed,
> so the mere fact of publication creates no particular demands on our
> attention.
<snip>
The book was published by Greenwood press in their academic series
"Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies Number 94". It went through
their academic review process.
Pat Dooley
Pat Dooley
<snip >
>
> If it has no value whatsoever, then it isn't really evidence, is it? For
> instance, Ruth Loyd Miller's assignment of some of Gascoigne's poems to
> Oxford is entirely without merit, but not because it is ambiguous.
>
We never did see your reply to Diana's response to your Gascoigne /
Oxfordianism criticism. If you missed her response while you were on
vacation, she will re-post
<snip>
Pat Dooley
Pat Dooley
> I didn't more than scan Pat's latest effusion. I
> stopped after seeing he was trying to "refute"
> the idea that his wife's categories are not used
> by biographers. Pat, who in the world is saying
> that?
Dave Kathman. He calls them bizarre.
> Her categories are fine for working up a
> complete biography of a writer. We are saying,
> however, that SO ARE THE MANY RECORDS that Diana
> junks.
If she excludes records, it is because they are not contemporaneous,
personal, literary or reliable. She applied the same standards to all the
writers she surveyed and she junked far more of their records.
> In many cases, they are much better. The
> records from Marlowe's lifetime about him would
> be 99% worthless if not for such posthumous records
> as his name on title-pages. Etc.
But the records from his lifetime, scanty as they are, do corroborate the
title pages. I don't know that there is much posthumous evidence of the same
sort as the First Folio. He does get immediate posthumous recognition from
Peele.
>
> --Bob G.
>
Pat Dooley
Diana Price
>
> "This chart compares *personal* and *literary* records left by Elizabethan
> and Jacobean writers during their lifetimes, with at least one record
> extant for each category checked. Category 10 includes evidence dating up
> to twelve months following death, to allow for eulogies or reports of
> death" (301).
>
> Price gives Shakespeare a goose-egg on the chart, which presumably makes
> him a turtle rather than a bird since he does not have any "literary paper
> trail" at all according to the filter. How do doctors, actors,
> financiers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers who were not writers
> score? Price did not use her filter on them, but as we have seen, every
> doctor for whom there is an educational record would be awarded a
> "literary paper trail" as would every financier who wrote his name in a
> book.
>
> How then does the filter distinguish writers from doctors, lawyers, and
> ministers who were not writers? It cannot: any person with either a
> record of education or a book-possession record would be classified by her
> filter as a writer with a "literary paper trail."
| Price gives Shakespeare a goose-egg on the chart, which presumably makes
| him a turtle rather than a bird since he does not have any "literary paper
| trail" at all according to the filter. How do doctors, actors,
| financiers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers who were not writers
| score? Price did not use her filter on them, but as we have seen, every
| doctor for whom there is an educational record would be awarded a
| "literary paper trail" as would every financier who wrote his name in a
| book.
The above paragraphs present faulty logic. If I were attempting to track the
professional records of a physician, I would be looking for personal
*medical* paper trails. Evidence of medical education and training would be
one category. Instead of evidence of having been paid to write, I'd look for
evidence of having been paid for medical services rendered. Instead of
written records of a literary sort, I'd look for written records about the
physician's professional medical activities. And I would find John Hall's
handwritten medical case book. I would learn that his father bequeathed "all
my bookes of phisicke" to him, with instructions for his son's training in
"the said Arte". I would find John Hall's epitaph of 1635 that reads, from
the Latin, "most celebrated in the medical arts." I would find the burial
register that described him as the "most skillful of physicians."
Diana Price
Pat Dooley
Tom Reedy <txr...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:Xudm6.947$cg5....@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
Again, title pages and entries in the Stationer's Register are not
necessarily reliable evidence of authorship. Buc's interaction with a play
text need not extend beyond reading the manuscript book itself. The
Stationer's entry in 1608 reads "A Yorkshire Tragedy written by Wylliam
Shakespere."
>
> > You neglected to quote the additional annotation by Buc, probably made
at
> a
> > different time, that reads:
> >
> > "Ed. Iuby saith that this play was made by Ro. Greene."
> >
> > Edward Juby is recorded on a number of occasions making payments and
> > receiving money for his company, the Admiral's Men. Juby wasn't a
writer.
> It
> > appears that Buc is questioning representatives of acting companies to
> tell
> > him who the author is, and they give conflicting answers.
>
> I did not "neglect;" the additional inscription is irrelevant to my point,
> which seems too subtle for you to grasp.
>
> Both inscriptions indicate that Buc personally talked to both Shakespeare
> and Juby. IOW, they were real, living human beings whom Buc knew and had
at
> least one conversation with.
>
> I'll spell it out: these are both PERSONAL records, one of the categories
of
> Price's pseudo-scholarly "filter."
>
> They are also LITERARY records, since they concern LITERATURE, in this
case,
> a play.
But, as you admit they are not records of Shakespeare writing. They show
that Shakespeare, along with Juby, what he knew about the authorship of
George a Greene. Following your line of reasoning, we must now conclude that
Edward Juby was a writer.
>
> > I would ask some additional questions about the annotation:
> >
> > Why did Buc question Shakespeare and Juby about the authorship of an
play
> > performed in 1593 by Sussex's Men? Juby's first known theatrical
> association
> > dates from 1594, but both Juby and Shakespeare are known to have handled
> > business affairs for their companies.
>
> Umm, because they might know? That would be my best guess.
>
> Juby, like Shakespeare, was both an actor and sharer.
Well, we can agree on that. Lots of personal documentary evidence to support
that for both of them.
The reason why Buc thought Juby might know is because Juby was an actor who
could have been on the scene when George a Greene was performed in 1593,
although Juby first surfaces in the records the following year. The same
reason likely applies to Shakespeare. There is no indication in this
document that Buc though Shakespeare was a writer. You would have a better
circumstantial case if Buc had asked another writer after Shakespeare
failed to provide the answer.
>
> > Buc left space for the author's name. Why did Shakespeare fail to name
the
> > minister? He seems to have taken the fifth, as he did in the Mountjoy
> suit.
>
> It is obvious that Shakespeare did not know the author's name, but told
Buc
> what he knew, which was that it was written by a minister who acted in it.
> Perhaps Shakespeare said he would get back to him, and never did or
couldn't
> find out the name.
>
> Regardless, the inscription proves that Buc knew Shakespeare personally
and
> sought his opinion on the authorship of an anonymous play. It's also
obvious
> that Buc believed Shakespeare to be a writer, for the reason previously
> explained.
Yes, Buc met Shakespeare personally, although even Nelson describes it as a
presumed interview. Buc provided no information that could tell you he
thought Shakespeare was a writer. Any more than Juby.
>
> TR
>
> > << snip >>
> >
Pat Dooley
Tom Reedy
"Pat Dooley" <patd...@donotincludethis.nls.net> wrote in message
news:Btjm6.51361$9u3.7...@news1.onlynews.com...
>
> "Bob Grumman" <BobGr...@nut-n-but.net> wrote in message
> news:3A998F...@nut-n-but.net...
> > I didn't more than scan Pat's latest effusion. I
> > stopped after seeing he was trying to "refute"
> > the idea that his wife's categories are not used
> > by biographers. Pat, who in the world is saying
> > that?
>
> Dave Kathman. He calls them bizarre.
Here is yet another example of the willful misreading that riddles the
antistratfordian world.
What Dave wrote was this: "No, she most emphatically does *not* do this;
both the standards she uses and her application of those standards will seem
quite bizarre to any real literary biographer dealing with Shakespeare's
era."
The standards she uses.
Her application of those standards.
Both would seem quite bizarre to any REAL (i.e. one with no ax to grind)
literary biographer DEALING WITH SHAKESPEARE'S ERA.
Both the number and quality of extant records FROM SHAKESPEARE'S ERA are
quite different than the number and quality of records from almost any
period afterward.
As a matter of fact, you could almost make a generalization that the further
back you go, the less records you'll be able to find!
As another matter of fact, Price's own work proves the generality true. How
many records does she parade for her "literary paper trail" of Elizabethan
writers?
Thousands? Hundreds?
No, in most cases the number is less than double digits. I daresay you could
put the entire stock of them in a medium-size cupboard, and still have room
left over, yet she and Dooley seem to think that such a small sampling can
prove Shakespeare was never a writer.
What they're trying to do is the equivalent of trying to prove there were no
roads in Elizabethan times because no one can find any gasoline credit card
receipts.
If you set your standards arbitrarily enough, you can claim anything, but
that doesn't mean every sane person is obligated to believe it.
You can try to refute every post on HLAS, but you're wasting your time,
Dooley. I don't know exactly what the payoff is for you, but it won't be
acceptance of a set of bizarre ideas.
Question: Does Price really believe that real literary biographers are going
to change their standards of evidence because of anything she's done or
written? Does she really believe they should start throwing out posthumous
references from friends and colleagues?
Does she really believe any serious person will take her contentions
seriously?
I doubt if she has ever really faced the truth about this type of
"scholarly" effort.
The truth is, nothing has ever changed and nothing is going to change as a
result of antistratfordian activity. It's a complete waste of time, except
for the fact that it makes the cash register ring.
Don't believe me? Point something out. List them all right here. You can't
do it, because nothing has changed.
Yes, her standards and her application of those standards are quite bizarre
and useless to real literary biographers.
They are quite useful, however, if your intention is to disqualify William
Shakespeare as a writer, but your problem is really much larger than that,
isn't it?
Your problem is getting the real world to accept your bizarre standards, and
nobody is going to do that, and that's too bad.
TR
Tom Reedy
"Pat Dooley" <patd...@donotincludethis.nls.net> wrote in message
news:Btjm6.51361$9u3.7...@news1.onlynews.com...
>
> news:3A998F...@nut-n-but.net...
> > I didn't more than scan Pat's latest effusion. I
> > stopped after seeing he was trying to "refute"
> > the idea that his wife's categories are not used
> > by biographers. Pat, who in the world is saying
> > that?
>
> Dave Kathman. He calls them bizarre.
Here is yet another example of the willful misreading that riddles the
antistratfordian world.
What Dave wrote was this: "No, she most emphatically does *not* do this;
both the standards she uses and her application of those standards will seem
quite bizarre to any real literary biographer dealing with Shakespeare's
era."
The standards she uses.
KQKnave
<patd...@donotincludethis.nls.net> writes:
>We would happily retreat from our position if someone could find records for
>Shakespeare comparable to those for his contemporaries.
Maybe you should be looking for evidence for his contemporaries that
is comparable to what we have for Shakespeare, for example, how many
writers received a tribute like the one Jonson gave to him in his poem in
the folio: "He was not of an age, but for all time!".
>Those debating us
>have pointed to the Impresa record, the Buc inscriptions, Hand D in the
>manuscript of "The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore", Davies's Ambiguous poems,
>Meres's impersonal reference to Shakespeare's sonnets, and that's about it.
You have no idea how personal or impersonal Mere's reference was.
Those debating you have pointed out the double standard you use when
assigning evidence to the writers in your list, for example,
accepting "Maxton" for "Marston", but not "Shaxberd" for "Shakespeare",
or assuming that Jonson's "Poet-Ape" is Shakespeare, even though
his name does not appear in the poem, while not accepting title
pages *with* his name on them as evidence that he was a writer.
Jim
KQKnave
<patd...@donotincludethis.nls.net> writes:
>The point is that that evidence is not contemporaneous personal literary
>evidence of the sort typically left by writers of the day and
>normally used by biographers. It is that lack of personal literary evidence
>in Shakespeare's otherwise well-documented life raises an authorship
>problem. Title pages are valuable for many purposes, but they are not
>necessarily reliable evidence for biographers.
>
No single piece of evidence is "reliable" by itself. If a man's name
appears many times on the title page of a work, taken together they
are evidence that that man was a writer. If some of the title pages
are mistaken, that does not eliminate the value of the others, it forces
us to look more closely at the criteria by which we accept whether
or not the title page attribution is correct. The very fact that some
publishers *wanted* a man named Shakespeare to be the author of
what they printed is evidence itself that Shakespeare was a writer.
The evidence of the title pages, together with other evidence, such as
his contemporaries telling us that he was a writer, as Jonson does for
Shakespeare, are what establish the man as a writer. It's called "weight
of evidence", a concept that you appear not to understand. If you arbitrarily
exclude all of the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship based on your silly
rules, then of course there is no evidence for Shakespeare's authorship.
I don't expect this post to get through to you, since you've ignored
essentially the same points in the posts of others, but I think I should
at least try to set the record straight.
Jim
Terry Ross
I concede the ambiguity of Price's prose: "a professional writer" could
refer either to "him" (Jonson) or to "someone" (the subject of the poem).
Now please explain in what sense the poem is complimentary, and why anyone
should think the subject of the poem is "admired" by Jonson, or is
Jonson's "friend." Of course, if Jonson had referred to this person as his
"beloved" or said of the person that he loved him this side idolatry, one
might fairly believe that Jonson was his friend.
Bob Grumman
comments on Shakespeare and other records "do not document
Shakespeare's vocation as a writer." I can only shake my head
in wonder. If you said they do not document that
vocation CONCLUSIVELY, it'd be a different story, but not
document it? Come on.
Bob Grumman
> Dave Kathman. He calls them bizarre.
No, I am fairly certain he calls their exclusive
use to determine authorship bizarre.
Terry Ross
I saw it, and found it entertaining but unresponsive. I meant to answer
it when I got a chance, but one part I needn't answer is Price's
justification of Miller's attempted theft from Gascoigne of the "Ever or
Never" poems. Miller gave no reason, and neither did Price. Let me say
again that Miller's attribution of the "Ever or Never" poems is entirely
without merit -- yet Price, for reasons we have yet to hear, found
Miller's fanciful attribution "probable." Price did snip the part of my
post where I discussed the introduction to and titles of Gascoigne's "Ever
or Never" poems, so I will repost it:
===
If she had looked at the titles of some of the "Ever or Never" poems,
Miller might have been able to guess who their probable author was. The
first one bears this introductory note in the 1575 edition:
"I will now deliver unto you so many more of Master Gascoignes Poems as
have come into my hands, who hath never beene dayntie of his doings, and
therefore I conceale not his name: but his word or posie he hath changed
often and therefore will I deliver his verses with such sundrie posies as
I received them. And first I will begin with Gascoignes Anatomie."
Here are other titles of Gascoigne poems that bear the posy "Ever or
Never":
"Gascoignes Arraignment,"
"Gascoignes Prayse of Bridges, nowe Ladie sandes,"
"Gascoignes prayse of Zouche late the Lady greye of Wilton,"
"Gascoignes Passion,"
"Gascoignes Lullabie,"
"Gascoignes glose upon this text 'Dominus iis opus babet,'"
"Gascoignes 'De profundis,'"
"Gascoignes councell to Douglas Dive."
All of these poems bear the motto or posy "Ever or Never," and every one
of them was written by George Gascoigne.
Yet Diana Price in *Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography* tells us that
"Ever or Never" was Oxford's "probable posie." I have no idea what
reasoning lies behind this judgment, or by what Oxfordian calculus she
estimates such a probability, since Price never explains her comment,
never offers a whit of evidence for it, never refers the reader to a
further discussion of the matter. In fact, it is not at all clear to me
that Price herself knows why she believes such a thing. It seems a
vestige of the kind of Oxfordianism she tries with considerable but
imperfect success to avoid in her book.
======
Price, as I said, did not answer the above, but snipped it.
Price has cited no scholar who believes the "Ever or Never" poems were
written by anybody other than Gascoigne. The poems are explicitly
assigned to Gascoigne in *Hundreth Sundrie Flowres*. Ward thought they
were Gascoigne's. Miller (who may be unorthodox but is certainly no
scholar) gives no reason for her reassignment -- and even gives the
mendacious impression that Ward thought the question was open to doubt.
Price has given no reason for her belief that Gascoigne's "Ever or Never"
poems were "probably" Oxford's. This is what she says on the question:
> Mr. Ross is correct to point out that the identification of Oxford as
> "Ever or Never" is in Ruth Loyd Miller's edition of Ward. It's not much
> of a stretch from "De Vere" to "Ever or Never."
It's "not much of a stretch" if one is an Oxfordian, I suppose, but Price
tells us that she is not. The most ridiculous of Oxfordians are those who
hallucinate an Oxfordian signature every time they come across the word
"ever" or the word "never." Price is attempting a work of scholarship,
yet she has so internalized this Oxfordian whim that she does not even
think a source is required.
Price goes on,
> However, I'll take his point, and if I ever have the opportunity to
> revise the book, I will say instead that that the author of the
> "Troilus" epistle brings to mind the posey of "Ever of Never" in the
> anonymously published Hundredth Sundry Flowres. Perhaps that posey was
> Oxford's, perhaps it was somebody else's. It was not necessarily
> Gascoigne's posey.
The posy "Ever or Never" is explicitly labeled Gascoigne's in *Hundreth
Sundry Flowres*. The poems bearing that posy are entitled "Gascoigne's"
Something-or-other. All of the "Ever or Never" poems follow the section
"Divers excellent devises of sundry Gentlemen" and begin in the section
listed in the book's contents as "certayne devises of master Gascoyne,
contayning his anathomie, his arragnmente, his prayse of mistresses
Bridges now Lady Sands, then his praise of Zouch late the Lady Grey of
Wilton." The contents then list other poems, including the other "Ever or
Never" poems (all of which are titled "Gascoigne's").
Now, while it may be worth looking into the question whether any of the
"Divers excellent devises of sundry Gentlemen" were written by people
other than Gascoigne (and if Price wishes to, we can set up a separate
thread for that discussion), NONE of the "Ever or Never" poems are in that
section, and ALL of them are labeled Gascoigne's in *Hundreth Sundrie
Flowres*.
Yet Price, for some reason that she has not yet advanced, believes that
the authorship of the "Ever or Never" poems is an open question, and, what
is more striking yet, seems to believe they may as well be assigned to
Oxford as to anyone else. Could anyone but an Oxfordian harbor such a
belief?
John W. Kennedy
> So you know William Shakespeare wrote A Yorkshire Tragedy and WS wrote
> Locrine from the title-page attributions alone. You don't need any
> corroborating evidence.
No, we know from the title-page attributions that the assertions that
Shakespeare wrote "A Yorkshire Tragedy" and "Locrine" are possibilities
that must be looked into. As they have been.
--
John W. Kennedy
(Working from my laptop)
John W. Kennedy
> -- any person who manages
> to get herself published must have _something_ worth listening to, right?
Please tell me you didn't really mean that!
> Arguments from clear and distinct evidence have
> precedence over arguments that mix in what's ambiguous, so these can be
> safely set aside -- and should be set aside, if they keep messing up the
> former sort.
But there is no _kind_ of evidence that cannot be ambiguous. (And well
over half the "ambiguity" referred to in classical anti-Stratfordianism
consists of unsupported pronunciamentos that "There's a double meaning
in that.")
John W. Kennedy
> What constitutes a species is a complicated question. At the moment, the
> Canada Goose is considered one species by the American Ornithologists'
> Union (in North America, a bird species is what the AOU says is a
> species), but it is likely that Canadas will be split into several species
> within the next few years.
Will one of them be named the "New Jersey Giant Pigeon"?
> ...but no creature is both a bird and a turtle.
Insert obvious "turtle" quibble here. (And the fact that Price chose an
example with a trap obvious even to my unlearned eyes is suggestive in
itself.)
> For Price, a great many of the books that the author of Shakespeare's
> works may have read could NOT have been read as part of his formal
> education. To be sure, some of the names on Price's list have raised
> interesting questions about Shakespeare's reading. The major source for
> *Othello*, for example, is a tale from Cinthio's *Hecatommithi*, which was
> published in 1565 and appeared in a French translation in 1583. The oldest
> surviving English translation dates from the Eighteenth Century.
> Therefore it is reasonable to believe either that Shakespeare could read
> Italian (or French) or that Shakespeare had access to an English version
> that has not survived. I'm not aware that *Hecatommithi* was part of any
> English curriculum in Shakespeare's day.
In any case, it is entirely probable that Shakespeare knew Latin, and
not unreasonable to believe that he had a smattering of French, and any
English speaker with those qualifications can read literary Italian with
some little effort. (I rather suspect the playwright was not fluent in
Italian -- he seems too easily to confuse it with Spanish -- but that is
not the same thing as being able to read Italian at need.)
Diana Price
The title tells us that Jonson wrote this epigram because the unnamed person
"Desired [Jonson] Not to Name Him", which tells me that Jonson has some
individual in mind. He is respecting that person's wishes to remain
unidentified in anything Jonson might write, even if it were praise. Jonson
does not want to make a friend into a foe by disrespecting the individual's
wishes and disclosing his identity.
Diana Price
Diana Price
| A word more about Shakespeare's supposed lack of education. On pages
| 243-47 Price lists the names of writers that, it has been argued,
| Shakespeare might have read. Price introduces her list thus: "But various
| scholars have also proposed that Shakespeare read the following authors,
| none of whom was included in a provincial grammar school curriculum."
|
| Now, any reader coming upon such a list would reasonably expect that all
| the names on it were of those authors who were known to have been used by
| Shakespeare AND who were known to have been part of that superior
| education that Price believes the author of Shakespeare's should have
| enjoyed. The list is specious on both counts. First, it includes such
| names as that of Homer. If Price means to suggest that the author of
| Shakespeare's plays was demonstrably familiar with Homer in Greek, then
| she should present the evidence.
Proposals that Shakespeare read Homer have come from many scholars, and are
cited in, e.g., the Arden 2 edition of "Troilus and Cressida" or Bullough.
The point in offering this list is to indicate the sheer breadth of
Shakespeare's reading list that fell outside any grammar school curriculum,
which is the only formal educational training that biographers presume
Shakespeare had. I deal with evidence of Shakespeare's fluency in languages
in another section.
| Second, and much more silly, the list includes a great many writers whose
| works are not known to have been taught in any school at the time
| Shakespeare (or Price's fancied "real author") was undergoing his formal
| education. Price does not name her favored candidate (in fact, she denies
| having any particular candidate in mind), but a careful reading suggests
| that she leans toward the seventeenth earl of Oxford. Price believes that
| most of Shakespeare's plays were written earlier than most scholars would
| date them, and she believes for reasons of what I call "background
| radiation Oxfordianism" that the author of the sonnets died before 1609.
| I think it's fair to say that Price's Shakespeare must have completed his
| formal education no later than 1580.
Please do not put words in my mouth. I do not favor any particular
candidate, and if I did, I'd have said so in my book. In my bibliography, I
include works by authors who argue for Oxford, Dyer, Derby, Bacon, Rutland,
and several others who are, like myself, uncommitted.
Mr. Ross describes my list of authors who are not known to have been taught
at grammar school as "silly." That suggests that it is "silly" to ask just
where, how, and when Shakespeare accessed the books by all these authors and
learned enough languages to read them all. These sorts of questions interest
other
biographers when writing about the lives of writers. I quoted Mark Eccles,
to which Mr. Ross replied:
| Eccles, unlike Price's filter, does not claim that every person who left
| any kind of educational record was a writer, yet this is the outcome of
| the filter Price has designed.
This is nonsense. I can't think of anyone who would claim that "every person
who left any kind of educational record was a writer." Eccles was
researching the life of a writer and trying to track down the evidence that
could shed light on Watson's development as a writer. Eccles was not casting
through the population base of France, dubbing every graduate a professional
writer. Likewise, my "filter" is not a test to identify possible writers
among the population base in England. It is a test of the evidence left
behind by the subject in question, specifically the evidence that
biographers use to
support statements about the subject's vocation, in this case, the literary
biographies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
| On the other hand, Eccles would not ignore
| attributions on title pages or the Stationers' Register, as Price's filter
| does.
I do not ignore this evidence either. I just do not accept these records as
"personal" evidence. There's a section on title pages in the book explaining
why I consider them to be impersonal literary records.
| Now, as Price should know full well, nobody in Shakespeare's time took
| courses in contemporary English poetry, yet she pads the list with such
| names as Barnabe Barnes, George Chapman, Henry Constable, Thomas Kyd,
| Thomas Lodge, John Lyly, Anthony Munday, Thomas Nashe, and so on, giving
| the entirely misleading impression that such writers were part of the
| curriculum in the better (as opposed to Stratford's "provincial") grammar
| schools or the universities. Moreover, even if there had been such
| courses, the works of many of the writers on Price's list could not have
| been included because they had not written anything yet. William
| Shakespeare was born the same year as Marlowe and Drayton; he was older
| than Ben Jonson; yet Price pretends to be puzzled that Shakespeare didn't
| read the works of these writers while he was in school!
No, I am considering Shakespeare's reading throughout his life, and listing
those authors whom orthodox authorities propose that he read sometime during
his life. All of the authors named above have been cited by orthodox
authorities
as having been read by Shakespeare. Let's assume Shakespeare had some
grammar school education. That education can account for only a fraction of
Shakespeare's reading. I am asking why we cannot account at all for any of
the rest of his reading.
Biographers don't think it's a "silly" question to inquire into
Shakespeare's education. The reason most biographers of Shakespeare spend so
many pages considering what he would have been taught at the grammar school
demonstrates the validity of the question. Biographers try to account for
Shakespeare's educational opportunities. I don't think they have succeeded.
The bibliographers who have concerned themselves with Shakespeare's sources
evidently don't think it's "silly" to compile lists of writers whose works
Shakespeare read. I'm just summarizing their findings.
| If Price understood her own argument, she would know that whoever she
| thinks wrote the works of Shakespeare, that person must have read a great
| deal AFTER his formal education ended. It is therefore NOT an argument
| against Shakespeare's authorship of his works to say that the author must
| have read Samuel Daniel's poetry and must have read those works outside of
| any curriculum that existed at the time, because that would be true not
| only of William Shakespeare but also of Oxford, of Derby, and of every
| other "candidate."
I agree that Shakespeare, whoever he was, was an avid reader throughout his
life. The problem is that one cannot account for Shakespeare's reading or
educational opportunities, as we can for other writers'. For some writers,
there are educational
records. Eccles found evidence of Watson's education in France. For others,
there are books. Gabriel Harvey's marginalia in one of his extant books
refers to John Florio and John Eliot as "mie new
London Companions for Italian & French." So there's some evidence of
Harvey's exposure to foreign languages, as well as evidence that he owned
the book in question. Shakespeare was obviously a voracious reader, but
there's no documentary evidence to account for his formal or continuing
educational opportunities, whether at grammar school, university, stately
home, or foreign institution.
Diana Price
Pat J Dooley
>In article <tIgm6.51340$9u3.6...@news1.onlynews.com>, "Pat Dooley"
><patd...@donotincludethis.nls.net> writes:
>
>>The point is that that evidence is not contemporaneous personal literary
>>evidence of the sort typically left by writers of the day and
>>normally used by biographers. It is that lack of personal literary evidence
>>in Shakespeare's otherwise well-documented life raises an authorship
>>problem. Title pages are valuable for many purposes, but they are not
>>necessarily reliable evidence for biographers.
>>
>
>No single piece of evidence is "reliable" by itself. If a man's name
>appears many times on the title page of a work, taken together they
>are evidence that that man was a writer. If some of the title pages
>are mistaken, that does not eliminate the value of the others, it forces
>us to look more closely at the criteria by which we accept whether
>or not the title page attribution is correct. The very fact that some
>publishers *wanted* a man named Shakespeare to be the author of
>what they printed is evidence itself that Shakespeare was a writer.
Not necessarily. The very fact that publishers put the
name or initials on plays that were not by Shakespeare
tells us that people recognized the name and
associated it with good stuff. Title page information
and literary criticism confined to comment on the works
are impersonal literary records. You cannot use a description
of Shakespeare's "sweet" poetry to conclude that the person
who wrote the poem was a sweet individual. You cannot
use a reference to Shakespeare's "fine filed phrase" to assume
the writer was fine. These terms describe the verse and they can
be written by anyone with access to the verse. Or in the words
of biographer Harold Jenkins, who was considering a verse
supposedly written by Chettle about Shakespeare, the lines
"are of a purely literary character and necessitate no
personal knowledge."
Jenkins is making the same distinction between personal and
impersonal, whatever else one may decide about his
biography of Chettle.
You propose the man from Stratford was the same Shakespeare on the title
page.
There are three other possibilities:
(1) Shakespeare was a pen-name, or
(2) Shakespeare was a Battillus, or
(3) Shakespeare put his name on works that he pirated.
To exclude those three possibilities you need to look for corroborating
evidence that establishes beyond a doubt that he was a writer.
The usual approach on HLAS is to say that the first folio front matter
confirms the title page attributions and gives us proof positive by linking
Shakespeare to Stratford and his moniment in Holy Trinity Church. Diana
accepts the Folio attribution as personal literary evidence in several
places
in the book. She also spends many pages analysing why it is questionable as
reliable evidence of authorship.
As we all know, that evidence comes seven years after he died and that
evidence has its problems. Firstly, many orthodox scholars believe Ben
Jonson
ghost wrote the letter from the actors. And Jonson tells us later in Timber
that he had pulled a fast one on them with the blots. Secondly, many
Jonsonian
critics find Jonson's eulogy ambiguous or a puzzling mixture or praise and
insults. I gave the citations in another post. Thirdly, while Shakespeare
was
alive, Jonson never once names him. He obviously knows about Shakespeare
because he alludes to Shakespeare's works in his own, and because he
parodies
Shakespeare in Every Man Out Of His Humour.
So, those who would exclude the three anti-Stratfordian possibilities are
entirely dependent on Jonson's posthumous testimony. If we think Jonson is
talking out of both sides of his mouth, and given his silence before 1623,
and
his ambiguity in and after 1623, then a skeptic is right to ask for
contemporaneous evidence to establish that the man from Stratford was a
writer.
Which leads to the next question which sems to be befuddling so many on this
newsgroup. What contemporaneous evidence can be used to prove that an
Elizabethan writer was a writer? If we analyse the biographies of all of
Shakespeare's major contemporaries we can determine what sort of evidence
established their writing credentials. It was by this process that Diana
Price
ended up with her 10 categories of literary paper trails.
Of the 25 writers she surveyed, 24 left evidence in three or more
categories.
Ben Jonson left evidence in every category. Shakespeare left none. No matter
how hard you squeeze the lemon, you still can't find reliable,
contemporaneous, personal, literary records that prove Shakespeare was a
writer. You cannot catch him in the act of writing.
If John Davies had addressed an epigram "To my well-loved friend, M. Will:
Shake-speare: our finest dramatist", then we'd have a personal literary
allusion. But he didn't. Nor did anybody else.
So, that leaves us with the three anti-Stratfordian possibilities wide open.
>The evidence of the title pages, together with other evidence, such as
>his contemporaries telling us that he was a writer, as Jonson does for
>Shakespeare, are what establish the man as a writer. It's called "weight
>of evidence", a concept that you appear not to understand.
But his contemporaries never told us he was a writer while he was alive.
What
was the matter with Jonson and Drayton and Nashe and Greene and Munday and
the
rest of them? Were they too scared of Shakespeare to never once pen a verse
that said "my dear friend Will Shakespeare"?
All the personal evidence that exists for Shakespeare -- and there is plenty
of it -- tells us he was involved in activities other than writing. Quiney
addresses his letter to his "loveing good ffrend and contreymann, Mr. Wm
Shackespere" but says nothing about Shakespeare as a writer. He just wants
to
borrow money. You've got the personal criteria met, but not the iterary. Or
consider the letters patent for the King's Men with Shakespeare listed;
you've
got the personal criteria met, but it's evidence of Shakespeare's role as a
member of the King's Men. not as a writer.
All we get are impersonal allusions that are no more personal than book
reviews, or ambiguous poetry such as Davies epigram "To Our English
Tewrence".
We do understand the term "weight of evidence". We just can't find any where
it should be.
Try to visualize this. Draw a circle. Draw a horizontal line through it.
Label
the top half "Posthumous Evidence". Label the bottom half "Contemporaneous
Evidence". Now draw a vertical line through the circle. Label the left hand
side "Impersonal Records" and the right hand side "Personal Records". So now
we have four qudarants. Now go through every literary record for Shakespeare
and put a dot in the appropriate quadrant. For example, Jonson's eulogy in
the
First Folio gets a dot in the upper right hand qudrant. Mere's reference to
Shakespeare's sonnets gets a dot in the bottom left hand quadrant. Acting
and
sharer records get ignored (obviously, this is about writing evidence).
Unreliable records, such as Hand D, get ignored (or put in a special spot
labelled "Desperation Measures").
Would you call this process arbitrary? It accounts for every record and the
rules are specified up front. This is a simplified version of Diana's
analysis.
>If you arbitrarily
>exclude all of the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship based on your silly
>rules, then of course there is no evidence for Shakespeare's authorship.
>I don't expect this post to get through to you, since you've ignored
>essentially the same points in the posts of others, but I think I should
>at least try to set the record straight.
>
>
>Jim
As you may have guessed, you will not be finding dots for Shakespeare in
that
pesky bottom right quadrant.
If we repeat the exercise for each of Shakespeare's literary contemporaries
we
get fewer dots (except for Jonson), but we always get dots in the bottom
right
quadrant. This validation procedure tells me that Shakespeare should have
some
dots in the bottom right quadrant. It also tells me the exercise is *NOT*
arbitrary and that Shakespeare is the odd man out.
That is the evidentiary problem. Shakespeare doesn't get any dots in the
bottom right quadrant. He gets lots of dots in every other quadrant,
probably
more than any other Elizabethen writer, except Jonson.
So, why don't you try this exercise for a few Elizabethan writers. You will
obviously have to read their biographies and check their bilbiographies to
get
as close as possible to the source documents on which they base their
statements. Once you have some experience with the procedure, repeat it for
Shakespeare.
If you put any dots in the bottom right quadrant, just be prepared to defend
them, so they don't go the way of the Hand D attribution.
Pat Dooley
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Terry Ross
I would say rather that they expose some of the faulty reasoning behind
Price's filter.
> If I were attempting to track the professional records of a physician,
> I would be looking for personal *medical* paper trails.
The purpose of the filter Price DID create is to determine whether a
person is a writer. As we have seen, the filter is fundamentally flawed
on multiple grounds, including the fact that it would declare far more
non-writers than writers to have "literary paper trails" and ipso facto to
be "writers," and that it rejects a great deal of information that is of
considerable value in determining whether a person is, in fact, a writer.
That the filter is poorly designed and was not well tested should not give
anyone confidence that OTHER filters yet to be created by Price would
prove any more useful.
I have also pointed out numerous instances of the use of double standards
in the application of the filter (e.g., that "posthumous evidence" --
even 7-years-posthumous evidence -- is allowed if it does not refer to
Shakespeare), but even if Price applied her filter fairly, the results
would be of little value in determining whether a person was a writer.
> Evidence of medical education and training would be one category.
> Instead of evidence of having been paid to write, I'd look for
> evidence of having been paid for medical services rendered. Instead of
> written records of a literary sort, I'd look for written records about
> the physician's professional medical activities. And I would find John
> Hall's handwritten medical case book. I would learn that his father
> bequeathed "all my bookes of phisicke" to him, with instructions for
> his son's training in "the said Arte". I would find John Hall's
> epitaph of 1635 that reads, from the Latin, "most celebrated in the
> medical arts." I would find the burial register that described him as
> the "most skillful of physicians."
Yet the filter that Price created to identify writers not named William
Shakespeare assigns the same John Hall points in four different categories
as a writer. As I said later in the same post,
===
Price's filter is NOT designed to determine whether a person wrote
"creative literature." There are no points awarded for having written
poems or plays rather than medical case books or treatises on astronomy.
So far as Price's filter concerned, all writers are writers simpliciter,
and everybody who ever owned (or even touched) a book was a writer.
Price's filter would award John Hall as many or even more points than many
writers on her list. Hall was educated (filter criterion 1). He had
books (9). He made comments about writers, including Drayton (6). He
left a manuscript (5). Even if we only awarded him four points, Price's
filter would rank him with Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Kyd, and above
Webster and Shakespeare.
===
I agree that the results of Price's filter are "ridiculous" and expose
"faulty logic," but the design of the filter is her handiwork, not mine.
Pat J Dooley
< snip >
>
>Price's filter is NOT designed to determine whether a person wrote
>"creative literature." There are no points awarded for having written
>poems or plays rather than medical case books or treatises on astronomy.
>So far as Price's filter concerned, all writers are writers simpliciter,
>and everybody who ever owned (or even touched) a book was a writer.
>Price's filter would award John Hall as many or even more points than many
>writers on her list. Hall was educated (filter criterion 1). He had
>books (9). He made comments about writers, including Drayton (6). He
>left a manuscript (5). Even if we only awarded him four points, Price's
>filter would rank him with Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Kyd, and above
>Webster and Shakespeare.
>
Hall wouldn't count for leaving a manuscript because the manuscript,
although
beautifully written, is medical, not literary.
You have just proven Diana's point. Even people who were not professional
writers can pass through the filter. They can't score in many categories
because almost all of the categories are expressly literary but they can do
better than Shakespeare.
On the one hand you complain the filter has been designed to exclude the
greatest writer of all time, and on the other hand you complain because it
lets through just about any literate person. You can't have it both ways.
John W. Kennedy
> No, I am considering Shakespeare's reading throughout his life, and listing
> those authors whom orthodox authorities propose that he read sometime during
> his life. All of the authors named above have been cited by orthodox
> authorities
> as having been read by Shakespeare. Let's assume Shakespeare had some
> grammar school education. That education can account for only a fraction of
> Shakespeare's reading. I am asking why we cannot account at all for any of
> the rest of his reading.
Are you even aware of what an Elizabethan "Grammar School" was?
In any case, virtually all the material demonstrably used by
Shakespeare, except for Ovid and Plutarch, was not taught in any
Elizabethan school of any kind at any level. And Ovid would probably
have been taught at the Stratford Grammar School (and, even if not,
sufficient Latin to handle Ovid definitely was), and Plutarch was
available in translation by the time he needed it (and was probably
accessible in Latin even earlier).
John W. Kennedy
> > The above paragraphs present faulty logic.
>
> I would say rather that they expose some of the faulty reasoning behind
> Price's filter.
It's Leary and "Hiawatha" all over again. A common trait among
anti-Strats seems to be an utter inability to assimilate the objection:
"This method, consistently applied, demonstrably 'proves' things known
to be false; therefore, it is a flawed method."
John W. Kennedy
> The truth is, nothing has ever changed and nothing is going to change as a
> result of antistratfordian activity. It's a complete waste of time, except
> for the fact that it makes the cash register ring.
Not altogether true. A dedicated anti-Strat _could_ hit on a hitherto
unnoticed document (and then probably interpret it wrongly, of course).
> Yes, her standards and her application of those standards are quite bizarre
> and useless to real literary biographers.
Of course, once she finally becomes convinced of that, she'll only cry
"conspiracy!"
John W. Kennedy
> The title tells us that Jonson wrote this epigram because the unnamed person
> "Desired [Jonson] Not to Name Him", which tells me that Jonson has some
> individual in mind. He is respecting that person's wishes to remain
> unidentified in anything Jonson might write, even if it were praise. Jonson
> does not want to make a friend into a foe by disrespecting the individual's
> wishes and disclosing his identity.
That is simply not a possible reading of the text as it stands.
Terry Ross
> >===== Original Message From Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> =====
>
> < snip >
>
> >
> >Price's filter is NOT designed to determine whether a person wrote
> >"creative literature." There are no points awarded for having written
> >poems or plays rather than medical case books or treatises on astronomy.
> >So far as Price's filter concerned, all writers are writers simpliciter,
> >and everybody who ever owned (or even touched) a book was a writer.
> >Price's filter would award John Hall as many or even more points than many
> >writers on her list. Hall was educated (filter criterion 1). He had
> >books (9). He made comments about writers, including Drayton (6). He
> >left a manuscript (5). Even if we only awarded him four points, Price's
> >filter would rank him with Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Kyd, and above
> >Webster and Shakespeare.
> >
>
> Hall wouldn't count for leaving a manuscript because the manuscript,
> although beautifully written, is medical, not literary.
Price's filter does not ask whether the manuscript is literary:
"5. Extant original manuscript" (Price, page 302).
Hall, as I said, therefore gets four points, which ranks him with Marlowe,
Beaumont, Fletcher, and Kyd, and above Webster and Shakespeare.
>
> You have just proven Diana's point. Even people who were not professional
> writers can pass through the filter.
This seems to be an admission that the filter is not good at the only job
it was supposedly designed to do: to distinguish writers from nonwriters
as one would distinguish birds from turtles.
> They can't score in many categories because almost all of the
> categories are expressly literary but they can do better than
> Shakespeare.
Price's filter does not care how a person gets points. Everybody who gets
any points in any category is declared to have a "literary paper trail"
and thus is considered a writer. As we have seen, everybody for whom
there is ANY educational record whatsoever is awarded a "literary paper
trail." Everybody for whom there is ANY "book record" is awarded a
"literary paper trail." The filter would declare more non-writers than
writers to have "literary paper trails," and therefore to be writers.
On the other hand, the filter is expressly designed to reject some of the
best evidence we have that a person was an writer, such as title page
attributions and entries in the Stationers' Register. Moreover, in its
application, the operation of the filter is marred by the persistent use
of double standards: for example, the filter accepts some "posthumous"
records so long as they do not concern Shakespeare (including one for
Spenser that dates seven years after his death) yet it rejects ALL
"posthumous" records for Shakespeare, even those that are under seven
years. The filter, both as designed and as applied by Price, is not a
useful means for determining whether a person was a writer.
> On the one hand you complain the filter has been designed to exclude
> the greatest writer of all time,
I have observed that the filter seems designed expressly to exclude
William Shakespeare. I take Price at her word that she did not intend for
this to happen, but the effect is the same as if she had set out with that
object in mind.
> and on the other hand you complain because it lets through just about
> any literate person.
The filter lets through far too many people who are not known to have been
writers; in fact, if it were generally applied, it would declare more
non-writers than writers to be writers.
> You can't have it both ways.
I wouldn't have it either way if the filter were a wise idea in the first
place, if it had been well designed and tested in the second place, and if
it had been fairly applied in the third place. I have suggested that if
the filter, as poor as it is, were fairly applied, it would allow
Shakespeare through, even though it appears to have been designed
expressly to reject all of his records. As for whether I can "have it
both ways" -- I don't particularly care to have it at all. Price's filter
clearly fails simultaneously in multiple dimensions as a means to
determine whether a person was a writer (which is the only thing it was
designed to do), and is therefore not a useful tool for literary history.
KQKnave
<patjd...@MailAndNews.com> writes:
>
>>===== Original Message From kqk...@aol.comspamslam (KQKnave) =====
>>In article <tIgm6.51340$9u3.6...@news1.onlynews.com>, "Pat Dooley"
>><patd...@donotincludethis.nls.net> writes:
>>
>>>The point is that that evidence is not contemporaneous personal literary
>>>evidence of the sort typically left by writers of the day and
>>>normally used by biographers. It is that lack of personal literary evidence
>>>in Shakespeare's otherwise well-documented life raises an authorship
>>>problem. Title pages are valuable for many purposes, but they are not
>>>necessarily reliable evidence for biographers.
>>>
>>
>>No single piece of evidence is "reliable" by itself. If a man's name
>>appears many times on the title page of a work, taken together they
>>are evidence that that man was a writer. If some of the title pages
>>are mistaken, that does not eliminate the value of the others, it forces
>>us to look more closely at the criteria by which we accept whether
>>or not the title page attribution is correct. The very fact that some
>>publishers *wanted* a man named Shakespeare to be the author of
>>what they printed is evidence itself that Shakespeare was a writer.
>
>Not necessarily.
Not necessarily what? It could turn out to be true that a particular
writer was not in fact the author, or was using a pen name, but
it is certainly evidence that could be used to support the argument
that the person in question was the author.
>The very fact that publishers put the
>name or initials on plays that were not by Shakespeare
>tells us that people recognized the name and
>associated it with good stuff.
And that is evidence that the name Shakespeare was
associated with a writer.
>Title page information
>and literary criticism confined to comment on the works
>are impersonal literary records. You cannot use a description
>of Shakespeare's "sweet" poetry to conclude that the person
>who wrote the poem was a sweet individual.
Please explain the connection between your first sentence above
and the second. Title page information and literary criticism are
primary records of a person having been a writer. That seems
to be obvious to everyone but you and Price. You are correct that you
cannot use a description of "sweet" poetry to assume that
the writer himself was sweet, that should be obvious, but no
one is doing that. You *can* say that if the person who wrote
"sweet poetry" was describe as being named William Shakespeare,
that that is direct evidence that William Shakespeare was a writer.
>You cannot
>use a reference to Shakespeare's "fine filed phrase" to assume
>the writer was fine.
Obvious, and avoiding the point entirely. See above.
>These terms describe the verse and they can
>be written by anyone with access to the verse.
So what? We are not talking about the quality of the verse
and the quality of the person, we are talking about the IDENTITY
OF THE PERSON! You seem to miss the fact that you and Price
are using a double standard: a poem by Jonson in which Shakespeare's
name is never mentioned is assumed to be about Shakespeare, yet
a work with Shakespeare's name on it is not counted as evidence
that it was written by Shakespeare! I'm afraid that it will never sink in.
Jim
KQKnave
<patjd...@MailAndNews.com> writes:
>You propose the man from Stratford was the same Shakespeare on the title
>page.
>There are three other possibilities:
>
>(1) Shakespeare was a pen-name, or
>
>(2) Shakespeare was a Battillus, or
>
>(3) Shakespeare put his name on works that he pirated.
>
>To exclude those three possibilities you need to look for corroborating
>evidence that establishes beyond a doubt that he was a writer.
Wrong. Most sane people would consider the utter absence of evidence
that it was a pen-name, that he was a Batillus or that he put his name
on works that he pirated enough to assume that he was indeed the
writer.
>
>The usual approach on HLAS is to say that the first folio front matter
>confirms the title page attributions and gives us proof positive by linking
>Shakespeare to Stratford and his moniment in Holy Trinity Church. Diana
>accepts the Folio attribution as personal literary evidence in several
>places
>in the book. She also spends many pages analysing why it is questionable as
>reliable evidence of authorship.
>
>As we all know, that evidence comes seven years after he died and that
>evidence has its problems. Firstly, many orthodox scholars believe Ben
>Jonson
>ghost wrote the letter from the actors. And Jonson tells us later in Timber
>that he had pulled a fast one on them with the blots. Secondly, many
>Jonsonian
>critics find Jonson's eulogy ambiguous or a puzzling mixture or praise and
>insults. I gave the citations in another post. Thirdly, while Shakespeare
>was
>alive, Jonson never once names him. He obviously knows about Shakespeare
>because he alludes to Shakespeare's works in his own, and because he
>parodies
>Shakespeare in Every Man Out Of His Humour.
Jonson speaks positively of Shakespeare in his private notes in "Timber",
much less than seven years after he died. The eulogy in the Folio is quite
clearly praise, no matter what quibbles your sources may have with it. Why is
is that today's critics carry more weight with you than Shakespeare's
contemporaries, who were in a position to know? After all, your critics are
writing 400 years after the fact, not just seven. Just your usual
double standard. I know you guys hate to deal with the actual
documents in question, instead relying on vague 3rd party
interpretations, so here is the eulogy in full for everyone to judge:
"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."
Now please explain in your own words exactly what is insulting
about this?
>
>
>So, those who would exclude the three anti-Stratfordian possibilities are
>entirely dependent on Jonson's posthumous testimony.
How do you figure that? What about the stationer's register, and Meres,
and the Parnassus plays, etc?
>If we think Jonson is
>talking out of both sides of his mouth, and given his silence before 1623,
>and
>his ambiguity in and after 1623, then a skeptic is right to ask for
>contemporaneous evidence to establish that the man from Stratford was a
>writer.
But what contemporary personal evidence do you have that Jonson was
talking out of both sides of his mouth or that he was in any way ambiguous
about the documents in question? I don't want to hear what a (very) few
critics have today have to say about it; please give us a quote from someone
saying that Jonson was just making up his praise in the eulogy, from someone
who said it not more than (what is it? 7.2 months? 1 year? 2.3 years?) after
he died.
>
>Which leads to the next question which sems to be befuddling so many on this
>newsgroup. What contemporaneous evidence can be used to prove that an
>Elizabethan writer was a writer? If we analyse the biographies of all of
>Shakespeare's major contemporaries we can determine what sort of evidence
>established their writing credentials. It was by this process that Diana
>Price
>ended up with her 10 categories of literary paper trails.
>
>Of the 25 writers she surveyed, 24 left evidence in three or more
>categories.
>Ben Jonson left evidence in every category. Shakespeare left none. No matter
>how hard you squeeze the lemon, you still can't find reliable,
>contemporaneous, personal, literary records that prove Shakespeare was a
>writer. You cannot catch him in the act of writing.
Only if you use a double standard for the evidence, which has been repeatedly
pointed out to you to no avail.
>
>If John Davies had addressed an epigram "To my well-loved friend, M. Will:
>Shake-speare: our finest dramatist", then we'd have a personal literary
>allusion. But he didn't. Nor did anybody else.
But how would you judge that Davies was telling the truth, and not just
ass-kissing? Wouldn't we need another contemporary personal document
from someone saying "To my dear beloved John Davies, who never told
a lie or ass-kissed in any way in print"?
>
>So, that leaves us with the three anti-Stratfordian possibilities wide open.
Not for the sane it doesn't. See above.
>
>
>>The evidence of the title pages, together with other evidence, such as
>>his contemporaries telling us that he was a writer, as Jonson does for
>>Shakespeare, are what establish the man as a writer. It's called "weight
>>of evidence", a concept that you appear not to understand.
>
>But his contemporaries never told us he was a writer while he was alive.
Yes they did,. numerous times. Remember Meres mentioning "Shakespeare's
Sugared Sonnets?"
>What
>was the matter with Jonson and Drayton and Nashe and Greene and Munday and
>the
>rest of them? Were they too scared of Shakespeare to never once pen a verse
>that said "my dear friend Will Shakespeare"?
Now you are getting ridiculous. Such evidence exists for almost no one of
that time.
>
>All the personal evidence that exists for Shakespeare -- and there is plenty
>of it -- tells us he was involved in activities other than writing. Quiney
>addresses his letter to his "loveing good ffrend and contreymann, Mr. Wm
>Shackespere" but says nothing about Shakespeare as a writer. He just wants
>to
>borrow money. You've got the personal criteria met, but not the iterary. Or
>consider the letters patent for the King's Men with Shakespeare listed;
>you've
>got the personal criteria met, but it's evidence of Shakespeare's role as a
>member of the King's Men. not as a writer.
>
>All we get are impersonal allusions that are no more personal than book
>reviews, or ambiguous poetry such as Davies epigram "To Our English
>Tewrence".
Exactly the same as for his contemporaries.
>
>We do understand the term "weight of evidence". We just can't find any where
>it should be.
>
>Try to visualize this. Draw a circle. Draw a horizontal line through it.
>Label
>the top half "Posthumous Evidence". Label the bottom half "Contemporaneous
>Evidence". Now draw a vertical line through the circle. Label the left hand
>side "Impersonal Records" and the right hand side "Personal Records". So now
>we have four qudarants. Now go through every literary record for Shakespeare
>and put a dot in the appropriate quadrant. For example, Jonson's eulogy in
>the
>First Folio gets a dot in the upper right hand qudrant. Mere's reference to
>Shakespeare's sonnets gets a dot in the bottom left hand quadrant. Acting
>and
>sharer records get ignored (obviously, this is about writing evidence).
>Unreliable records, such as Hand D, get ignored (or put in a special spot
>labelled "Desperation Measures").
Try to visualize this: take *all* the evidence for Shakespeare as a writer, and
compare it with *all* the evidence for other persons as writers during that
time period, and weigh *all* the evidence, not evidence excluded by
your arbitrary categories and double standards.
>
>Would you call this process arbitrary?
Yes.
There is nothing wrong witht the Hand D attribution. And all of your hot air
above does nothing, because you've created arbitrary categories for evidence,
and used a double standard to judge what evidence belongs and what
doesn't (you count "Maxton" for Marston, and don't count "Shaxberd"
for Shakespeare, you assume poet-ape is Shakespeare, even though
his name is never mentioned, but you don't count his name on a
title page....) It's all nonsense.
Jim
Xr...@pxcr8.pxcr.com
Nope. _Timber_ dates to sometime after the 1623 fire that destroyed most
of Jonson's papers.
<snip>
Rob
Pat Dooley
Bob Grumman <BobGr...@nut-n-but.net> wrote in message
news:3A9A38...@nut-n-but.net...
> Have I read you right, Pat? Are you really saying that Meres's
> comments on Shakespeare and other records "do not document
> Shakespeare's vocation as a writer." I can only shake my head
> in wonder. If you said they do not document that
> vocation CONCLUSIVELY, it'd be a different story, but not
> document it? Come on.
>
> --Bob G.
>
they do not document that Meres knew who Shakespeare was. Meres is repeating
the impersonal attribution. His comments are on the literary output
attributed to Shakespeare, and have the evidentiary weight of a book review
since they give no indication that Meres knew Shakespeare personally.
Meres impersonal comments do not rule out the possibility that Shakespeare
was a Batillus, or a play broker publishing under his own name, or a play
pirate publishing under his own name, or just a pseudonym. One cannot be
sure just by reading Meres's comments. That's why they are impersonal.
The impersonal references document somebody's vocation as a writer. You say
it can only be William Shakespeare's. I say, in light of there being no
personal records to corroborate Meres comments, that there are further
possibilities that can't be ruled out. My best guess is that Shakespeare was
a Batillus able to bombast out enough lines to convince the unwary that he
really was the author.
It is that lack of interaction with other writers that bothers me. He does
not share in their literary interaction, yet he must be closely associated
with them through his participation in the theatre business. Why is he the
odd man out?
And the poet-ape character keeps turning up in various guises in pamphlets,
plays and epigrams written by the very guys he should have been interacting
with.
Pat Dooley
Diana Price
Tom Reedy <txr...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:V8lm6.23$N4....@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
>
> As a matter of fact, you could almost make a generalization that the
further
> back you go, the less records you'll be able to find!
>
> As another matter of fact, Price's own work proves the generality true.
How
> many records does she parade for her "literary paper trail" of Elizabethan
> writers?
>
> Thousands? Hundreds?
>
> No, in most cases the number is less than double digits. I daresay you
could
> put the entire stock of them in a medium-size cupboard, and still have
room
> left over, yet she and Dooley seem to think that such a small sampling can
> prove Shakespeare was never a writer.
The documentary records that I would describe as personal and literary are
more plentiful than you suggest. I had originally planned on doing a
quantitative as well as qualitative comparison, but as I got into the
project, there did not seem to be much point, for example, in quantifying
the Henslowe papers. Had I done so, Dekker would score over 50 entries in
the "paid to write" category," and Drayton and Mundy would each score over a
dozen entries. It also did not seem productive to count books. Had I done
so, Jonson would score over 120 books; Harvey would score over 60. In
addition, there was no way to quantify the books bequeathed to Fletcher or
Marston. Then there are books known to have been owned (more of Harvey's,
those belonging to Lodge), but not located as of today, or known to have
perished (as Jonson's first library did in a fire).
The commendatory verses with personal salutations probably number at least a
hundred for the writers I surveyed, but I did not see much point in counting
them all up. Over 50 poems were written on Jonson alone, most of them with
personal information. There were always going to be questions about how to
count. An example is in the "notice at death" category. Do the poems in
'Jonsonus Virbius' count as 30+ records or just one?
I have not added up the records attesting to patronage obtained, or
handwritten epistles, or other misc. documentation, but the total of all the
personal literary paper trails is certainly in the hundreds. In the end, the
qualitative analysis was in every way preferable.
W.W. Greg reproduces and transcribes handwriting samples in his "English
Literary Autographs" -- all left by over 50 writers. For most writers, there
are at least two samples. For some, there are as many as four, and those are
just the ones Greg chose to reproduce. He refers to more specimens that, for
one reason or another, he omitted. Only part of the extant handwritten
evidence is reflected in my chart and notes. There are at least a dozen
manuscripts (of verse, plays, masques), many of which are in Greg, for the
writers in my comparison. I also found over a dozen letters.
Since compiling the chart, I have learned of evidence that could have been
considered, such as two books identified as having belonged to Spenser, and
a payment to Samuel Daniel "the Poet".
If anything, my numbers are conservative. Finally, I am counting here only
personal literary paper trails. There are, of course, more records of a
non-literary character for each writer, as well as impersonal literary
allusions.
Diana Price
Diana Price
> On Sat, 24 Feb 2001, Janice Miller wrote:
>
> I made an error in my latest post. I said that Price credited Spenser
> under category 6: "Handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc.
> touching on literary matters." In fact, her chart does not give him a
> "Yes" in this category. In the "documentation" section that follows the
> chart, Price usually says "no evidence" for a category if the writer
> fails her filter on that point; she does not say "no evidence" in that
> section for Spenser, and I therefore took her comment as suggesting that
> Spenser was given credit. It would have been better to point out that
> Harvey gets credit in category 2 for letters to Burghley that do not
> concern literary matters.
Actually, I wish to thank Mr. Ross for pointing this out. The checkmark
stands, but the citation in my
book is indeed in error. I regret it particularly since there are several
Harvey letters that qualify in this category, and I inadvertently cited the
wrong one.
The corrected citation that I have already posted on my website is to
Harvey's letter to Cecil in May 1598, in which he refers to works being
readied for publication, among them "sundrie royal Cantos, ... some of
them devised many years past." Those "Cantos" are probably
Harvey's "Anticosmopolita" (Stern, 51).
Diana Price
Pat Dooley
> On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Pat J Dooley wrote:
>
> > >===== Original Message From Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> =====
> >
> > < snip >
> >
> > >
> > >Price's filter is NOT designed to determine whether a person wrote
> > >"creative literature." There are no points awarded for having written
> > >poems or plays rather than medical case books or treatises on
astronomy.
> > >So far as Price's filter concerned, all writers are writers
simpliciter,
> > >and everybody who ever owned (or even touched) a book was a writer.
> > >Price's filter would award John Hall as many or even more points than
many
>
> > >writers on her list. Hall was educated (filter criterion 1). He had
> > >books (9). He made comments about writers, including Drayton (6). He
> > >left a manuscript (5). Even if we only awarded him four points, Price's
> > >filter would rank him with Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Kyd, and
above
> > >Webster and Shakespeare.
> > >
> >
> > Hall wouldn't count for leaving a manuscript because the manuscript,
> > although beautifully written, is medical, not literary.
>
> Price's filter does not ask whether the manuscript is literary:
>
> "5. Extant original manuscript" (Price, page 302).
The analysis applied to writers, so it is a reasonable presumption that the
manuscript should relate to the writer's literary activities. I believe
Diana responded to this more fully.
>
> Hall, as I said, therefore gets four points, which ranks him with Marlowe,
> Beaumont, Fletcher, and Kyd, and above Webster and Shakespeare.
>
> >
> > You have just proven Diana's point. Even people who were not
professional
> > writers can pass through the filter.
>
> This seems to be an admission that the filter is not good at the only job
> it was supposedly designed to do: to distinguish writers from nonwriters
> as one would distinguish birds from turtles.
No. Read the qualification I gave (see below).
>
> > They can't score in many categories because almost all of the
> > categories are expressly literary but they can do better than
> > Shakespeare.
>
> Price's filter does not care how a person gets points. Everybody who gets
> any points in any category is declared to have a "literary paper trail"
> and thus is considered a writer. As we have seen, everybody for whom
> there is ANY educational record whatsoever is awarded a "literary paper
> trail." Everybody for whom there is ANY "book record" is awarded a
> "literary paper trail." The filter would declare more non-writers than
> writers to have "literary paper trails," and therefore to be writers.
As we have seen, these tests are being applied only to evidence supporting
literary biogrpahies, so evidence for the doctor and cnadletsick makers are
not not at issue here. These two categories would obviously pass literate
people. However, the test was designed to be applied to the evidence left by
presumed writers, not the general population.
>
> On the other hand, the filter is expressly designed to reject some of the
> best evidence we have that a person was an writer, such as title page
> attributions and entries in the Stationers' Register.
You persist in failing to distinguish between impersonal and personal
records. You probably approve of the way Schoenbaum transforms impersonal
references to create a personality profile for Shakespeare.
>Moreover, in its
> application, the operation of the filter is marred by the persistent use
> of double standards: for example, the filter accepts some "posthumous"
> records so long as they do not concern Shakespeare (including one for
> Spenser that dates seven years after his death) yet it rejects ALL
> "posthumous" records for Shakespeare, even those that are under seven
> years. The filter, both as designed and as applied by Price, is not a
> useful means for determining whether a person was a writer.
I presume you are referring to Lodowick Bryskett report, which was first
published in 1606, but written before 1589.
You persist in failing to recognize that having to rely solely on posthumous
records makes Shakespeare unique. But then, you can't seem to distinguish
personal from impersonal records. Diana is not ignoring evidence; she is
systematically classifying it. There are four broad categories of literary
records:
Impersonal posthumous records
Personal posthumous records
Impersonal contemporaneous records
Personal contemporaneous records
Since the last category is the one in which Shakespeare is deficient. Diana
subdivided it into 10 sub-categories to allow further analysis and to
determine whether or not the absence of Shakespearean records was unusual in
comparison with his contemporaries.
>
> > On the one hand you complain the filter has been designed to exclude
> > the greatest writer of all time,
>
> I have observed that the filter seems designed expressly to exclude
> William Shakespeare. I take Price at her word that she did not intend for
> this to happen, but the effect is the same as if she had set out with that
> object in mind.
So, within the broad category of personal contemporaneous literary records,
what criteria did she build in that would deliberately exclude Shakespeare?
Which Shakespeare records did she miss that should have been there?
As always, your response will be that she should have included the
posthumous and impersonal records. Which will indicate that you see no point
in making any distinction between personal and impersonal records and
between contemporaneous and posthumous records.
>
> > and on the other hand you complain because it lets through just about
> > any literate person.
>
> The filter lets through far too many people who are not known to have been
> writers; in fact, if it were generally applied, it would declare more
> non-writers than writers to be writers.
>
> > You can't have it both ways.
>
> I wouldn't have it either way if the filter were a wise idea in the first
> place, if it had been well designed and tested in the second place, and if
> it had been fairly applied in the third place. I have suggested that if
> the filter, as poor as it is, were fairly applied, it would allow
> Shakespeare through, even though it appears to have been designed
> expressly to reject all of his records. As for whether I can "have it
> both ways" -- I don't particularly care to have it at all. Price's filter
> clearly fails simultaneously in multiple dimensions as a means to
> determine whether a person was a writer (which is the only thing it was
> designed to do), and is therefore not a useful tool for literary history.
So, to make matters simpler for you, why don't you limit the categories to
these four literary categories:
Impersonal posthumous records
Personal posthumous records
Impersonal contemporaneous records
Personal contemporaneous records
You will obviously find lots of records for every writer in every category,
but you will still be left with the problem that Shakespeare will have no
records in the last category unless you resort to counting impersonal
records as personal or bringing in unreliable evidence such as Hand D.
Pat Dooley
Greg Reynolds
"John W. Kennedy" wrote:
Let's keep in mind that The Church of the Holy Trinity itself was
already a 200-year -old institution, served by priests of the College
that had been dissolved only twenty years prior to Shakespeare's
birth, and the building then occupied by the Combe family.
[This according to FE Halliday's "Shakespeare."]
The town was not hurting for education.
Greg Reynolds
KQKnave
Xr...@pXcr8.pXcr.com writes:
>
>Nope. _Timber_ dates to sometime after the 1623 fire that destroyed most
>of Jonson's papers.
>
It's not known if Timber was destroyed in the fire. My biography on
Jonson by Riggs states that the notes were compiled over a period of thirty
years. One part appears to date to 1633. I made that statement
because I thought someone like Kathman or Ross in replying to
one of these threads gave a date just a few years after Sh.
death, and based on my memory of it being compiled over a
long period led me to believe it.
Jim
volker
> On Sat, 24 Feb 2001, Janice Miller wrote:
> > especially liked the turtles and the seabirds):
> Thanks; it's the kind of thing that would interest almost nobody on this
> newsgroup (I think Volker would be happy to see the Razorbill, which is
> still lingering by the OC Inlet).
Indeed, I would love to. Unfortunately, I'm too busy nowadays to get
away for a quick bird trip-- or even read all the posts going up in
hlas.
--Volker
Bob Grumman
document Shakespeare's having been a writer?
--Bob G.
--
Posted from nut-n-but.net [205.161.239.5]
via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Paul Crowley
> Terry Ross wrote:
>
> > Thanks; it's the kind of thing that would interest almost nobody on this
> > newsgroup (I think Volker would be happy to see the Razorbill, which is
> > still lingering by the OC Inlet).
I've never really got this aspect of birders. One of God's poor
innocent creatures gets blown to the wrong side of the Atlantic,
where it's quite lost, has no fellows which it can mate, and
where it can only eke out a pathetic existence before an early
death -- and they jump up and down with glee as they make
another tick in their list.
You can come to this side of the pond and see them anytime.
Colonies of Razorbills will shortly be 'nesting' on ledges around
the bay. I think you can see them from the cross-city commuter
train. In any case, the sites are only a short walk from the station.
> Indeed, I would love to. Unfortunately, I'm too busy nowadays to get
> away for a quick bird trip-- or even read all the posts going up in
> hlas.
You're missing a lot of fun. The Slaying of the Strats. Someday
it will make a blockbuster film. I see Russell Crowe in the part
of Pat Dooley, maybe Cameron Diaz as Diana Price, and a
few evil-looking well-past-it-character-actors as Terry Ross,
Dave Kathman and their acolytes -- maybe including John Voigt
and Gene Hackman.
Paul.
--
Email: pebj...@ubgznvy.pbz (apply ROT13)
Bob Grumman
Mere's reference to Shakespeare's poetry proves
Shakespeare of Stratford was a writer."
Mr. Grumman does no such thing. Mr. Grumman
insists that Meres's Testimony is EVIDENCE that
William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote plays.
Pat goes on: "The usual approach on HLAS
is to say that the first folio front matter
confirms the title page attributions and gives
us proof positive by linking Shakespeare to
Stratford and his moniment in Holy Trinity Church."
Few (if any) use the phrase, "proof positive."
I have always maintained that such evidence as
the First Folio's texts, the monument, and much
else, make it certain beyond reasonable doubt
that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, but do not prove it.
> The Jonsonian critics generally find
> Jonson's eulogy to be less than fulsome praise
So what?? We all know that Jonson had mixed feelings
about Shakespeare--AS A WRITER. And he was honest.
I'll get to Diana Price's arguments as I reach them in
her book.
Pat Dooley
> Tom Reedy has answered you on the Buc record, but
> I thank you for the additional information, which
> was new to me--and kept me from reading as much
> into the Buc notation as I would have liked. I
> continue to think it shows that Buc personally
> testified that Shakespeare was a writer by
> showing in one place that he knew him and in
> another that he considered him a writer I
> know that you would claim Buc thought there were
> two William Shakespeares, which--I suppose--is
> possible. Meanwhile, why would you think Buc
> would consult a sleazy usurer/plagiarist on
> any matter?
>
Because he suspects Shakespeare has brokered an old Robert Greene play
(shades of the Roberto fable in GGW). He calls Shakespeare in to find out
who wrote it and Shakespeare gives him the run-around. Buc then calls in
Juby, and asks him.
Remember that Locrine came out under the initials WS?
According to another annotation, made by Sir George Buc, Charles Tilney had
written a tragedy on the subject of Locrine some years previously. Buck
thought that Locrine was the same play and that "some fellow hath published
it." Samuel Tannenbaum judged Buck's annotation a forgery, but others
including W. W. Greg, Mark Eccles, R. C. Bald, and more recently, Alan H.
Nelson, have accepted it as genuine.
I suspect that "fellow" was William Shakespeare up to his old tricks.
Pat Dooley
Pat Dooley
> Yes or no, Pat: do Meres's comments on Shakespeare
> document Shakespeare's having been a writer?
>
> --Bob G.
>
> question, Pat? If you ask me if I still beat my wife,
> I would say (assuming I had a wife, and assuming I
> hadn't ever beaten her): "I do not now beat my wife
> nor did I ever."
>
> (Note: what you keep repeating about Meres is more or less
> true--except that what he says does not necessarily show
> that he does NOT know Shakespeare.)
>
> --Bob G.
>
Meres thought the poems were written by Shakespeare, whoever he was. If you
conclude that Meres personally knew the man, and would recognize the
individual who was the author of the plays on the basis of Palladis Tamia,
then you must also conclude that Meres was personally acquainted with
Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, George Chapman, Lord
Buckhurst, Thomas Dekker,
Thomas Nashe, Thomas Heywood, Sir Edward Dyer, Sir Walter Raleigh, etc etc.,
all of whom are named by Meres. Nobody thinks Meres actually knew all these
writers. One can suppose Meres knew the poet Barnfield, whom he names as "my
friend master Richard Barnfielde."
Consider this reference:
"He who writeth the Art of English Poesy praiseth much Rawleigh and Dyer;
but their Works are so few that are come to my Hands, I cannot well say any
thing of them. The last we have are Sir William Alexander and Shakespear,
who have lately published their Works."
This is another *impersonal* allusion to Shakespere. We can be sure the man
who wrote this, William Drummond, never met Shakespeare. As far as we know,
Drummond was never in London, and Shakespeare, whoever he was, was never in
Scotland.
Perhaps these example will help everyone to distinguish between a personal
and impersonal allusion. For a good example of mistaking an impersonal
allusion for a personal one, see Schoenbaum's "Compact Documentary Life," p.
255, or his essay "The Life of Shakespeare" in *A New Companion to
Shakespeare Studies (1971, reprinted 1974), p.14.
Pat Dooley
Terry Ross
> volker <vol...@erols.com> wrote in message news:3A9B75CE...@erols.com...
>
> > Terry Ross wrote:
> >
> > > Thanks; it's the kind of thing that would interest almost nobody on this
> > > newsgroup (I think Volker would be happy to see the Razorbill, which is
> > > still lingering by the OC Inlet).
>
> I've never really got this aspect of birders. One of God's poor
> innocent creatures gets blown to the wrong side of the Atlantic,
> where it's quite lost, has no fellows which it can mate, and
> where it can only eke out a pathetic existence before an early
> death -- and they jump up and down with glee as they make
> another tick in their list.
Crowley's knowledge of ornithology is just as impressive as his knowledge
of Elizabethan literature. Razorbills are found in large numbers on the
American side of the Atlantic, though it is quite rare to see them from
the shore in Maryland. The particular Razorbill I saw was one of three
that have been seen in the Ocean City Inlet in the last few weeks. I
don't know how one identifies pathos in a Razorbill, but the one I saw
didn't appear particularly glum.
>
> You can come to this side of the pond and see them anytime.
> Colonies of Razorbills will shortly be 'nesting' on ledges around
> the bay. I think you can see them from the cross-city commuter
> train. In any case, the sites are only a short walk from the station.
Next time I'm in the neighborhood I'll be sure to drop by.
>
> > Indeed, I would love to. Unfortunately, I'm too busy nowadays to get
> > away for a quick bird trip-- or even read all the posts going up in
> > hlas.
>
> You're missing a lot of fun. The Slaying of the Strats. Someday it
> will make a blockbuster film. I see Russell Crowe in the part of Pat
> Dooley, maybe Cameron Diaz as Diana Price, and a few evil-looking
> well-past-it-character-actors as Terry Ross, Dave Kathman and their
> acolytes -- maybe including John Voigt and Gene Hackman.
The part of the Razorbill "eking out a pathetic existence before an early
death" will be played by Crowley. It's type-casting, I know, but
Hollywood believes in giving the people what they want to see. The part
of Price's filter proved impossible to cast, so it was going to be done by
the special effects people, but George Lucas says that even the wizards of
Industrial Light and Magic can't get the thing to work.
Greg Reynolds
Bob Grumman wrote:
> Yes or no, Pat: do Meres's comments on Shakespeare
> document Shakespeare's having been a writer?
>
> --Bob G.
>
> Why do you refuse to answer a simple, straightforward
> question, Pat? If you ask me if I still beat my wife,
> I would say (assuming I had a wife, and assuming I
> hadn't ever beaten her): "I do not now beat my wife
> nor did I ever."
Pat beats his wife in typos and hastiness.
MakBane
>until recently scholars believed Robert Greene wrote Greene's
>Groatsworth of Wit based solely on the title-page attribution. They have now
>figured out that it was written by Chettle.
Is it true that even Stratfordians and the Orthodox believe this? And that
those who cannot bring themselves to admit that they do instead call the author
of the Groatsworth the Groatsworth-Author? That really is something! (if you'll
permit a bit of pom-pom shaking from this uninformed and blonde-haired
cheerleader: "Go, Eddie!") I mean, isn't this same Sacred Pamphlet the One that
First Names Him? If Stratfordians will cop to that, what will be next?
>For every other writer of the period we can find contemporaneous personal
>evidence that corroborates their title-page attributions.
Mr. Dooley, you mean you're not moved by such amiable nicknames as "that famous
English poet, Mr. William Shakespeere"? When I think of the "survivability of
manuscripts" argument, I also wonder for the number of those manuscripts we
lost which laughed in the face of this fraudulence.
Toby Petzold
Pat Dooley
Janice Miller <jbmi...@world.std.com> wrote in message
news:jbmiller-270...@ppp0a118.std.com...
> Pat J Dooley wrote:
>
> >...
> >
> > >>These terms describe the verse and they can
> > >>be written by anyone with access to the verse.
> > >
> > >So what? We are not talking about the quality of the verse
> > >and the quality of the person, we are talking about the IDENTITY
> > >OF THE PERSON! You seem to miss the fact that you and Price
> > >are using a double standard: a poem by Jonson in which Shakespeare's
> > >name is never mentioned is assumed to be about Shakespeare, yet
> > >a work with Shakespeare's name on it is not counted as evidence
> > >that it was written by Shakespeare! I'm afraid that it will never sink
in.
> > >
> >
> > Shakespeare. You seem to miss the fact that title page attributions are
> > impersonal records and not always reliable. They do nothing to protect
you
> > from confusing a Batillus with a writer, or a pen name with a real name,
or
> > other forms of literary fraud.
>
> Pat, I pretty much accept your and Diana's distinction between personal
> and impersonal evidence, but I'm not sure you've answered the objection
> made the other day (I think it was by Jim, whom you're responding to now),
> that the presumption simply is in favor of the accuracy of any given title
> page. Sane people don't question the accuracy of the name at the front of
> the book -- not until they've seen good reason to question it. Once you
> start questioning that _at the beginning_, the quantity of evidence you
> can trust is very close to nil.
The title page gives you a name. In many other cases in Elizabethan
literature, the title page was followed by corroborating information in the
form of commendatory verses written by other known writers. That doesn't
happen for Shakrspeare until the First Folio. You always need corroboration
between personal and impersonal evidence. Once you have that you can place
more reliance on title page attributions.
>
> > For example, until recently scholars believed Robert Greene wrote
Greene's
> > Groatsworth of Wit based solely on the title-page attribution. They have
now
> > figured out that it was written by Chettle.
>
> I'm curious: how did they figure this out?
Stylistic tests by Warren Austin showed that the author of GGW used
vocabulary and sentence structures that were used by Chettle far more than
Greene. Sanders came to the same conclusion from the bibliographical and
circumstantial evidence.
>
> > For every other writer of the period we can find contemporaneous
personal
> > evidence that corroborates their title-page attributions. That is what
isn't
> > sinking in. Shakespeare's title page attributions and "book reviews"
lack
> > the
> > same corroboration.
>
> It's strange that the conspiracy theorists are silent on this point, isn't
> it? Of course there are other explanations; it's just that they have such
> a good one. Perhaps the late-Victorian terror of biographers overcame the
> Shakespeare family a little early. The thing I don't understand is why
> the situation for posthumous evidence should be different. What happens
> when a writer dies that makes it possible to talk about him? Maybe this
> is just difficult for us to understand today, with all the gossip and
> biographies of still-living celebrities -- a former President's wife has
> published facsimiles of his love letters to her, for G-d's sake. And then
> I still don't see any explanation for why evidence of Shakespeare's life
> should be different in this respect.
>
Posthumous is less reliable because the subject has died and the living are
freer to lie about him.
The First Folio was a purely commercial venture inspired by the success of
Ben Jonson's Folio of 1616.
Since many of the plays had already been published under Shakespeare's name,
the publishers would be fools not to continue the tradition. The name sold
well. Who is going to buy the collected works of Eric Blair, for example?
The front matter subtly points to William Shakespeare in a way that allows
personal identification. Nobody is going to ask William and his monument in
Stratford is suffiently impressive to convince the occasional visitor that
it commemorates a great poet.
> > The Poet=Ape epigram is corroborated by Davies "Our English Terence".
But
> > you
> > are right. These are impersonal records. They turn up where we might
expect
> > to
> > see personal verse that clearly shows Davies and Jonson knew Shakespeare
as
> > a
> > fellow writer. You can get a sense of this by looking at the epigrams
that
> > surround both these epigrams.
>
> So you're saying, in a place where most writers would have published a
> poem or epigram acknowledging their personal knowledge of a writer as
> himself, in every case where the writer is Shakespeare, you find something
> accusing a writer of actually being a Batillus, instead?
That's the gist of it. Look at this list of Davies epigrams:
155. To my worthily-disposed friend Mr. Sam. Daniel.
156. To my well-accomplish'd friend Mr. Ben Johnson.
157. To my much esteemed Mr. Inego Jones, our English Zeuxis and Vitruvius.
158. To my worthy kind friend Mr. Isacke Simonds.
159. To our English Terence Mr. Will: Shake-speare.
160. To his most constant, though most unknown friend; No-body.
161. To my near-dear well-known friend; Some-body.
162. To my much-regarded and approved good friend Thomas Marbery, Esquire
[followed by others to his dear pupil, his beloved friend, etc.]
Ben Jonson doesn't provide such an obvious list because there are many more
satirical epigrams and many of the personal epigrams are obviously directed
at patrons. But he does have epigrams titled:
To Francis Beaumont
To William Camden
To John Donne
And then there is his copious commendatory verse.
Pat Dooley
Bob Grumman
are in the ascendant, how is it that Pat Dooley
is the only anti-Stratfordian who has critiqued
my second chapter, which I put up in segments
over a week ago? And he agreed with much of it
that you've disputed in the past. He and everyone
else on your side has stayed away from my sections
of the chapter on Greene and Chettle, though.
Warning, you won't be able to claim I didn't give
you a chance to shoot down my arguments if you could before
publishing.
Bob Grumman
would consult a sleazy usurer/plagiarist on
any matter?
Pat: "Because he suspects Shakespeare has
brokered an old Robert Greene play (shades
of the Roberto fable in GGW). He calls
Shakespeare in to find out who wrote it
and Shakespeare gives him the run-around."
No, as I said in another post, Shakespeare
gives him very specific information as to
the play's author, except for his name. Why
would Shakespeare lie in a case where it
would be very easy to check his story? Why not
claim ignorance, or make up a better story?
> Buc then calls in Juby, and asks him.
> Remember that Locrine came out under the
> initials WS? According to another annotation,
> made by Sir George Buc, Charles Tilney had
> written a tragedy on the subject of Locrine
> some years previously. Buck thought that
> Locrine was the same play and that "some fellow
> hath published it." Samuel Tannenbaum judged
> Buck's annotation a forgery, but others
> including W. W. Greg, Mark Eccles, R. C. Bald,
> and more recently, Alan H. Nelson, have accepted
> it as genuine.
Ah, so W.S. on a title-page means William Shakespeare
when you think it indicates a plagiarist, but the full
name on a title-page is near-worthless as evidence
of authorship.
Why didn't Buc say some fellow had published the
play under his name rather than its author's
name if that was what happened? What does publishing
a play have to do with plagiarizing it? Surely,
Shakespeare was not the publisher of any play.
Another question occurs to me: if Shakespeare was
making money on the side by calling some
noble's plays his own and selling them to
publishers, why didn't he do this with more
of them?
Pat: "I suspect that 'fellow' was William
Shakespeare up to his old tricks."
Old tricks for which you have no evidence at
all of the kind you count for writers. Where
are Diana's ten categories for identifying plagiarists?
--Bob G.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Mailgate References:
> Re: Diana Price on some of Jonson's "fri, Pat Dooley
> Re: Re: Diana Price on some of Jonson's , Bob Grumman
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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Bob Grumman
indicates. I KNOW it does not indicate that Meres knew
Shakespeare personally. What I want to know from you is
Yes or no, Pat: do Meres's comments on Shakespeare
can't I get a straight answer on this? Do you really
think that if you avoid answering, no one's going
to realize that Meres's comments on Shakespeare,
whether he knew Shakespeare or not, document that
Shakespeare was a writer?
--Bob G.
Neuendorffer
> > >
> > > > Thanks; it's the kind of thing that would interest almost nobody on this
> > > > newsgroup (I think Volker would be happy to see the Razorbill, which is
> > > > still lingering by the OC Inlet).
> >
>
> > I've never really got this aspect of birders. One of God's poor
> > innocent creatures gets blown to the wrong side of the Atlantic,
> > where it's quite lost, has no fellows which it can mate, and
> > where it can only eke out a pathetic existence before an early
> > death -- and they jump up and down with glee as they make
> > another tick in their list.
Whether birders jump up and down with glee or not makes but little
difference. What is important is that birders (and duck hunters)
probably do more than the rest of us to assure that innocent creatures
that get blown to the wrong side of the Atlantic have a clean place to
stay.
Terry Ross wrote:
> Crowley's knowledge of ornithology is just as impressive as his knowledge
> of Elizabethan literature. Razorbills are found in large numbers on the
> American side of the Atlantic, though it is quite rare to see them from
> the shore in Maryland. The particular Razorbill I saw was one of three
> that have been seen in the Ocean City Inlet in the last few weeks. I
> don't know how one identifies pathos in a Razorbill, but the one I saw
> didn't appear particularly glum.
How does one tell when a Razorbill is glum?
> > volker <vol...@erols.com> wrote in message news:3A9B75CE...@erols.com...
> >
> > > Indeed, I would love to. Unfortunately, I'm too busy nowadays to get
> > > away for a quick bird trip-- or even read all the posts going up in
> > > hlas.
> >
> > You're missing a lot of fun. The Slaying of the Strats. Someday it
> > will make a blockbuster film. I see Russell Crowe in the part of Pat
> > Dooley, maybe Cameron Diaz as Diana Price, and a few evil-looking
> > well-past-it-character-actors as Terry Ross, Dave Kathman and their
> > acolytes -- maybe including John Voigt and Gene Hackman.
My officemate was a Catholic University classmate of John Voight -
is that who you would choose to play you, Terry?
> The part of the Razorbill "eking out a pathetic existence before an early
> death" will be played by Crowley. It's type-casting, I know, but
> Hollywood believes in giving the people what they want to see. The part
> of Price's filter proved impossible to cast, so it was going to be done by
> the special effects people, but George Lucas says that even the wizards of
> Industrial Light and Magic can't get the thing to work.
Can you design a more reasonable filter?
Art Neuendorffer