Stritmatter's Statistical Problems
Terry Ross
to turn up. Wait -- it gets better. This imaginary Bible has a great
many marks and a few annotations, presumably in the owner's hand. What
would such a Bible be like? Roger Stritmatter thinks it would be like
this:
* It would not bear the name of Shakespeare or any of his friends, family,
relatives, associates, or acquaintances.
* It would not bear the names of any of his plays or poems.
* Nowhere in any of the annotations would there be so much as half a line
that we would recognize as Shakespeare's.
Well, OK -- that might be disappointing, but perhaps not surprising. We
do not find many traces of Shakespeare in the copy of *Archaionomia* that
bears his probable signature.
What of the marks and annotation in this imaginary Bible belonging to the
author of Shakespeare's works? What relation would they bear to biblical
passages alluded to in Shakespeare's works? The Stritmatter answer would
be that there would be very little overlap between the verses of the
imaginary Bible annotated by Shakespeare and the Biblical verses he
alludes to in his works. In fact, the overwhelming majority of verses
alluded to in Shakespeare's works would NOT be marked in his Bible; and
the overwhelming majority of verses marked in his Bible would NOT be
alluded to in his works. This, although hardly trumpeted by Roger, is the
key fact about Oxford's Bible -- its marked verses do not correspond
particularly well to the set of verses Shakespeare is thought to have
alluded to in his works.
At this point our imaginary Bible would be rather disappointing, and we
might have to revisit the assumption that this Bible had indeed been used
by the author of Shakespeare's plays. For a sample of what that a
reaction to that disappointment might be like, we could turn to Roger
Stritmatter's dissertation.
Roger is an Oxfordian -- one who believes that William Shakespeare of
Stratford did not and that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford DID
write the great bulk of the works generally attributed to Shakespeare.
Roger pretty much takes it for granted that there is good evidence for his
belief, although he does devote some space to outlining what Oxfordians
imagine is a "case" for their man. More about that "case" in future posts
(readers who want a preview of how such a "case" might be countered can
turn to the essays on the Shakespeare Authorship page, where much of what
Roger has to say is pre-rebutted for his convenience).
Back to this Bible that has nothing to do with Shakespeare. Roger
Stritmatter espouses the view that a Bible that belonged to Edward de Vere
is in fact the very Bible that belonged to the author of Shakespeare's
works, who was really not Shakespeare at all but de Vere himself. Since
there is so little overlap between the marked verses in the Earl of
Oxford's Bible and the set of Biblical verses Shakespeare is thought to
have alluded to, Roger has had to pump up that small area of overlap in
order to make it seem central. Part of his argument is statistical.
Roger has farmed out a statistical analysis to one Jim McGill, who wants
to show that a random sample of verses chosen from the set of verses
alluded to by Shakespeare would NOT match up very well when compared to
the set of verses marked in Oxford's Bible. Some of you may be thinking
that McGill should be trying to do just the opposite if he wishes to
bolster Roger's case; I thought so too, which is why I found McGill's
Appendix C so hard to follow. Let's look at some of what McGill set out
to do, and lets see what happens if we try variations on his project.
McGill gives counts for every Biblical verse alluded to by Shakespeare
X-number of times (X ranges from 0 to 18, though I have collapsed counts
for all verses alluded to 4 or more times, as McGill does). The numbers
are questionable for reasons I'll get to in later posts, but for now let's
assume most of them are rock-solid.
McGill assumes that only 10,000 of the more than 30,000 verses in the
Bible "might yield a usable reference." This is a rather odd assumption,
and it ignores the more than 6000 verses of the Apocrypha (Shakespeare
alluded to a number of verses in the Apocrypha, and many are also marked
in Oxford's Bible), but it means that McGill counts 9018 Biblical verses
to which Shakespeare does NOT allude rather than, say 36,000 (if all
verses are used) or 13,000 (if the Apocrypha "usable" verses are added to
those of the OT and NT on the basis that only a third of Bible verses
"might yield a useful reference"). It won't matter, ultimately, but it's
useful to note how mistake-prone almost every part of Roger's project is.
From Roger's numbers, McGill gives counts for all verses marked in
Oxford's Bible that correspond to verses alluded to X-times by Shakespeare
(remember, these are Roger's numbers, and we are only pretending for the
sake of argument that they are valid). Here is a table showing in column
1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
## Shax Ox
0 9018 864
1 450 60
2 310 75
3 160 35
4+ 62 29
Recall that the "9018" could reasonably be something like "36,000" and in
any event should be more like "13,000." This is the number of
(potentially "usable") Biblical verses NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
The corresponding column for Oxford's Bible has 864 -- that is, 864 verses
are marked in Oxford's Bible that are NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
I often find it convenient to think of random draws in terms of drawing
pieces of paper blindfolded from a hat (McGill doesn't use this metaphor,
but it is a fair comparison). McGill now, in effect, wants to cut out all
of the verses Shakespeare alludes to and 9018 of those he does NOT allude
to, and put them into a very large hat. He will make random draws from
the hat until he has removed 1063 of them (1063 being the number of marked
verses in Oxford's Bible). Verses that Shakespeare alludes to more than
once get placed into the hat extra times. For example, if Shakespeare
refers to Leviticus 12:8 fourteen times, then 14 copies of the verse are
put into McGill's hat. From the original total of 982 verses alluded to
by Shakespeare, McGill, though the use of "multiples," now has 1958 pieces
of paper in his thousand-gallon hat with verses that Shakespeare alludes
to, and 9018 pieces with "usable" verses that Shakespeare does not allude
to.
McGill want to do a Chi-Square calculation of significance. Using some
very questionable assumptions (and we can talk about what is wrong with
what he does if anyone is interested), he produces "expected value"
figures for the draws from his hat.
## EV OX Chi-Sq
0 873.4 864 0.10
1 43.6 60 6.18
2 60.0 75 3.72
3 46.5 35 2.83
4+ 39.5 29 2.79
TOTAL 15.65
The first column is the number of times a verse is alluded to by
Shakespeare, the second is McGill's "expected value" -- the number of
times that such verses would be selected in 1063 draws from the 10976
slips in his hat; the third column is the number of corresponding Oxford
Bible marked verses; the fourth column is the chi-square figure for each
Oxford Bible number (square the difference between the "expected value"
and the "observed" Oxford value, and divide the result by the expected
value); the total chi-square value for the table is the sum of the
chi-squares for each cell. McGill notes that "the probability of a
chi-square statistic with four degrees of freedom exceeding a value of
13.28 through random chance is .01." Since 15.65 is greater than 13.28,
McGill concludes that "based on the stated assumptions of this analysis,
the results provided in this paper clearly demonstrate that the hypothesis
of no more than a random connection between the de Vere and Shakespeare
verse sets must be rejected."
Is anybody still with me? Note that the "Shakespeare verse set" includes
982 verses Shakespeare alluded to, plus 976 extra copies of verses
Shakespeare alluded to more than once, plus 9018 "usable" verses that
Shakespeare did not allude to; these are the source of McGill's "expected
values." The "de Vere verse set" includes 1063 verses marked in some way
by Oxford. It does NOT include the 8937 "usable" verses that Oxford does
NOT mark. It does NOT give extra copies of verses that are marked more
than once.
Roger should have been unhappy with McGill's "results," but he managed to
find pleasure in them. This is odd, because if Oxford's Bible had somehow
matched Shakespeare's use of the Bible, and if McGill had been able to do
a proper analysis, the desired answer would be that the hypothesis of a
"random connection" should NOT be rejected. More about this seeming
paradox later on.
Let's plug a few more numbers in here and see what we can see. This one
is close to Roger's worst-case scenario -- an Oxford Bible in which very
few of the verses Shakespeare alludes to are marked:
## ExV Ox Chi-Sq
0 873.4 1058 39.03
1+ 789.6 5 179.76
TOTAL 218.8
McGill would conclude that "the hypothesis of no more than a random
connection between the de Vere and Shakespeare verse sets must be
rejected." This means that if Oxford's Bible had practically no overlap
with verses alluded to by Shakespeare, McGill's statistical argument would
be unchanged. Even if we change the 5 matches to zero (Roger's worst-case
scenario), McGill's statistical argument would be unchanged.
Now let's look at Roger's best-case scenario -- an Oxford Bible in which
every verse alluded to by Shakespeare is marked:
## ExV Ox Chi-Sq
0 873.4 81 718.88
1 43.6 450 3790.05
2 60.0 310 1040.48
3 46.5 160 277.18
4+ 39.5 62 12.80
TOTAL 5839.41
Since 5839.41 is larger than 13.28, McGill would conclude that "the
hypothesis of no more than a random connection between the de Vere and
Shakespeare verse sets must be rejected." This means that even if
Oxford's Bible had had a 100% overlap with verses alluded to by
Shakespeare, McGill's statistical conclusion would be unchanged, because
as far as he is concerned, the only important question is whether the
"randomness" hypothesis should be rejected.
McGill doesn't do the calculations, but using the same assumptions and
applying them to the biblical verses alluded to by Marlowe, Bacon, or
Spenser would lead it seems to exactly the same statistical conclusion:
"the hypothesis of no more than a random connection between the de Vere
and Bacon/Spenser/Marlowe verse sets must be rejected."
What sort of distribution would McGill have considered "random"?
Consider this one:
## ExV Ox Chi-Sq
0 873.4 855 0.39
1 43.6 43 0.01
2 60.0 59 0.02
3 46.5 45 0.05
4+ 39.5 61 11.68
TOTAL 12.14
Note that since the table's chi-square value is under 13.28, McGill would
not reject the "random connection" hypothesis (or would not with 99%
confidence). Yet this set of biblical verses would be much more along the
lines of what Roger wants than Oxford's Bible is. Of the 62 verses that
Shakespeare alludes to 4 or more times, 61 are in this set -- more than
twice as many as in the set Roger had him use. This set also has more
verses alluded to in Shakespeare three times, and more overall than are
found in Oxford's Bible -- yet this one McGill's analysis would NOT reject
as having "no more than a random connection" with the Shakespeare verse
set.
Well then, if we must reject the hypothesis of "no more than a random
connection" in Roger's best-case, worst-case, actual-case, Bacon-case,
Spenser-case, and Marlowe-case scenarios, what should we conclude? We
should conclude what by now must seem obvious: that neither Roger nor
McGill has any idea what he is trying to do or how to go about it. What
they should have wanted was a result that corresponded closely enough with
"expected values" that they would NOT have rejected the "random"
hypothesis.
This may sound paradoxical, so let us take a simpler case. Let us test
whether a pair of dice is honest by rolling them 1000 times and seeing how
well the results match up against the expected results of honest dice.
## EXP OBS CHI-SQ
2 27.8 10 11.38
3 55.6 25 16.81
4 83.3 84 0.01
5 111.1 105 0.34
6 138.9 130 0.57
7 166.7 300 106.67
8 138.9 133 0.25
9 111.1 104 0.46
10 83.3 85 0.03
11 55.6 9 39.01
12 27.8 15 5.88
TOTAL 181.39
The first column is the dice score, the second is the expected value for
that score out of 1000 rolls (that is, if I shoot dice 1000 times, I
should see snake-eyes about 28 times and boxcars about 28 times). The
third column is the observed count for each score in 1000 rolls, and
chi-square figures are given in the fourth column. We sum the chi-squares
and get a total chi-square value of 181.39 for the table. Our stats book
tells us that with 10 degrees of freedom, we would have 99% confidence
that the result of our 1000 rolls was a random distribution if the table's
chi-square value was less than 23.21. Since 181.39 is greater than 23.21,
we might well conclude that the dice are loaded -- why else would "7" show
up on 300 out of a thousand rolls, when it should only have happened about
167 times?
Here is a table for dice that we would probably think were honest enough
for a friendly game of craps:
## EXP OBS CHI-SQ
2 27.8 30 0.18
3 55.6 60 0.36
4 83.3 84 0.01
5 111.1 105 0.34
6 138.9 130 0.57
7 166.7 180 1.07
8 138.9 133 0.25
9 111.1 104 0.46
10 83.3 85 0.03
11 55.6 70 3.76
12 27.8 19 2.77
TOTAL 9.78
Since our chi-square sum of 9.78 is less than 23.21, we would NOT reject
the hypothesis that the results of 1000 rolls were random. Of course I'm
oversimplifying here somewhat, and ignoring various confidence levels one
might wish to consider, but the point is that the kind of analysis McGill
wants to do can work for dice.
Part of the problem is that neither Roger nor McGill understands the word
"random." When we say that the outcome in the second case is random (or
not convincingly non-random), we do not mean that it is unrelated to
anything else in the universe -- we mean that the observed outcome
corresponds well to the expected outcome.
Let's get a little bit tricky. If we KNEW we were using loaded dice, then
we could tell whether our results were "random" by seeing how well they
matched the expected outcome of using dice loaded in just that way. I'm
tired of shooting craps, so let's take just one die that is supposed to be
loaded in such a way that a 6 comes up twice as often as a 1. With an
honest die, the expected value for each possible score is the same:
167/1000; with our loaded die, the expected value is 111/1000 for 1;
167/1000 for 2, 3, 4, and 5; and 222/1000 for 6. If we rolled our loaded
die 1000 times with the following results, we would NOT reject the
"random" hypothesis:
# EXP OBS CHI-SQ
1 111 105 0.34
2 167 180 1.07
3 167 167 0.00
4 167 160 0.27
5 167 158 0.45
6 222 230 0.27
TOTAL 2.39
On the other hand, if we rolled our loaded die 1000 times and got the next
set of results, we WOULD reject the "random" hypothesis:
# EXP OBS CHI-SQ
1 111 167 28.11
2 167 166 0.00
3 167 167 0.00
4 167 167 0.00
5 167 166 0.00
6 222 167 13.72
TOTAL 41.84
To be "random" in these contexts simply means that the observed results
correspond well to the expected values, and the expected values for dice
known to be loaded are not the same as for dice thought to be honest. If
we get "random" results, then we do not go looking for other explanations.
If our supposedly honest dice give the "random" results we expect from
honest dice, then we consider them honest. On the other hand, if our
supposedly loaded dice give the results we would expect from honest dice,
then we suspect that somebody has failed to load our dice honestly, and we
will send over some of the tough boys to teach our dice-loaders not to
mess with us.
What does this dice digression have to do with Roger? Simply this: he
loaded the dice, but he still didn't get the results he should have been
looking for. Unfortunately, neither Roger nor McGill know enough to
realize that their loaded dice ain't loaded good enough. What they should
have wanted was a result such that they would NOT reject the "random"
hypothesis, because that would mean that Roger would NOT need to find an
explanation for why the Oxford values differed substantially from the
"loaded" expected values. Just as a "random" result in a test of loaded
dice suggests that the dice really are loaded, so a "random" result in a
test of the Oxford Bible against "expected values" from Shakespeare's
Biblical verses would mean that the two sets match up very well -- which
is exactly the point Roger wishes he could make.
McGill's analysis, however, concludes that the set of Oxford Bible verses
does NOT correspond well to the expected values derived from Shakespeare's
Biblical allusions. As we have seen, neither does Roger's best-case
scenario, nor his worst-case scenario, nor -- it would seem -- would the
verse sets of Bacon or Marlowe or Spenser. Since McGill proposes no
further analysis other than whether the results are "random," he and Roger
have no means to argue that the Oxford's Bible statistically resembles
what Shakespeare's Bible would be like if such a thing were found, or that
Oxford's Bible provides such a compellingly strong match for Shakespeare's
Biblical allusions that it should be considered evidence that Oxford was
the author of Shakespeare's works. In fact, the proud "statistical" claim
of both McGill and Roger is that Oxford's Bible is NOT a good match for
Shakespeare's Biblical allusions.
As I said earlier, I was trying to pretend that the numbers used in
McGill's analysis were reasonable ones, but they are, in fact, very
questionable, and the process by which they and Roger's other calculations
were derived was a corrupt one. More on this in a later post. For now,
it is enough that even accepting Roger's loaded numbers, McGill's analysis
not only does not support Roger's claim, it contradicts it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
john_baker
Yes. Do you like it when I am?
I might as well point out while we are together, that the application
of statistical methods to individual action is foolish. Humans are
volitional creatures and only in large numbers do their actions take
on any kind of statistical regularity...
In this case we are either dealing with the Bible the Author used or
we are not. Its a 50/50 proposition. If we were to argue that there
were 50,000 of these Bibles around at the time, the case still doesn't
become 49,999 to one against it, it remains 50/50. Either or.
Let us say that in all of the cases the relationship between the
underlined passages is vague and general, except for one, where
the relationship is so pronounced that it proves the case...where
would all the figures then be?
Yes...
>
>Part of the problem is that neither Roger nor McGill understands the word
>"random."
Doubtful...
Well that's what statistics is for...
> Unfortunately, neither Roger nor McGill know enough to
>realize that their loaded dice ain't loaded good enough. What they should
>have wanted was a result such that they would NOT reject the "random"
>hypothesis, because that would mean that Roger would NOT need to find an
>explanation for why the Oxford values differed substantially from the
>"loaded" expected values. Just as a "random" result in a test of loaded
>dice suggests that the dice really are loaded, so a "random" result in a
>test of the Oxford Bible against "expected values" from Shakespeare's
>Biblical verses would mean that the two sets match up very well -- which
>is exactly the point Roger wishes he could make.
>
>McGill's analysis, however, concludes that the set of Oxford Bible verses
>does NOT correspond well to the expected values derived from Shakespeare's
>Biblical allusions. As we have seen, neither does Roger's best-case
>scenario, nor his worst-case scenario, nor -- it would seem -- would the
>verse sets of Bacon or Marlowe or Spenser. Since McGill proposes no
>further analysis other than whether the results are "random," he and Roger
>have no means to argue that the Oxford's Bible statistically resembles
>what Shakespeare's Bible would be like if such a thing were found, or that
>Oxford's Bible provides such a compellingly strong match for Shakespeare's
>Biblical allusions that it should be considered evidence that Oxford was
>the author of Shakespeare's works. In fact, the proud "statistical" claim
>of both McGill and Roger is that Oxford's Bible is NOT a good match for
>Shakespeare's Biblical allusions.
Nor need they be...
>
>As I said earlier, I was trying to pretend that the numbers used in
>McGill's analysis were reasonable ones, but they are, in fact, very
>questionable, and the process by which they and Roger's other calculations
>were derived was a corrupt one. More on this in a later post. For now,
>it is enough that even accepting Roger's loaded numbers, McGill's analysis
>not only does not support Roger's claim, it contradicts it.
Again all of the verses could be vague or different and still only one
might prove the case conclusively....
Let's see, in English: "While 5,999 of the underlined verses are
different than anything quoted or alluded to in or by Shakespeare, one
verse, number 6,000 does match perfectly, more over a marginal note
that says "put this in the Tempest..." leads us to believe this was
the very same Bible hat Shakespeare used."
Where would your statistical analysis be then, Terry?
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
> http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
John Baker
Visit my Webpage:
http://www2.localaccess.com/marlowe
or e-mail me at: Mar...@localaccess.com
"The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood.
He who will be proved right in the end appears to be
wrong and harmful before it."
_Darkness at Noon_, Arthur Koestler
Terry Ross
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2001 11:55:47 -0500, Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote:
[Stat stuff]
> >
> >Is anybody still with me?
>
> Yes. Do you like it when I am?
I am never more alone than when you are with me.
>
> I might as well point out while we are together, that the application
> of statistical methods to individual action is foolish. Humans are
> volitional creatures and only in large numbers do their actions take
> on any kind of statistical regularity...
>
> In this case we are either dealing with the Bible the Author used or
> we are not. Its a 50/50 proposition. If we were to argue that there
> were 50,000 of these Bibles around at the time, the case still doesn't
> become 49,999 to one against it, it remains 50/50. Either or.
You're not thinking very clearly. If I buy a lottery ticket, the odds are
not 50-50 simply because there are, from my perspective, only two
important outcomes -- I win or I lose. I think Roger's statistical
arguments are irredeemably flawed, but even he would understand that much.
You also should not assume that there was one and only one object that was
a Bible Shakespeare "used" -- but that's another story.
Arthur Publius
> Imagine that a Bible belonging to the author of Shakespeare's works were
> to turn up. Wait -- it gets better. This imaginary Bible has a great
> many marks and a few annotations, presumably in the owner's hand. What
> would such a Bible be like? Roger Stritmatter thinks it would be like
> this:
Imagine that Terry Ross reinvented himself so completely that he
became honest. I know, its difficult to imagine. But they say hope
springs eternal.
>
Neuendorffer
> Here is a table showing in column
> 1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
> a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
> marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
>
> ## Shax Ox
> 0 9018 864
> 1 450 60
> 2 310 75
> 3 160 35
> 4+ 62 29
>
> Recall that the "9018" could reasonably be something like "36,000" and in
> any event should be more like "13,000." This is the number of
> (potentially "usable") Biblical verses NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> The corresponding column for Oxford's Bible has 864 -- that is, 864 verses
> are marked in Oxford's Bible that are NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Warning! Warning! Will Robinson!"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are going the *wrong* direction, Terry!!!
Anything *over* 6,000 is *detrimental* to your cause!
You need to argue that this number is much less than 9018 not more!!!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
18.7% of Oxford's 1063 marked bible verses
occur in Shakespeare *at least* once.
This is a very high percentage vis-a-vis bible verses in general:
Much higher than the 9.82% (for the 9018 number) or
7.0 % (for the 13,000 number) or
2.7 % (for the 36,000 number).
Since 982 separate bible verses occur in Shakespeare the ideal
situation (in so far as *you* are concerned) would be that this 982
constituted about 18.7% of (~5252 potentially "usable") Biblical verses
[making for ~ 4270 (potentially "usable") Biblical verses
NOT alluded to by Shakespeare]:
Fisher's Exact Test
http://www.matforsk.no/ola/fisher.htm
------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 4270 , 864 , 982 , 199 ]
Left : p-value = .5265426856548887
Right : p-value = .5078360120026216
2-Tail : p-value = 1
------------------------------------------
Allowing for *more* than 6000 (potentially "usable") Biblical verses
makes Oxford's selection seem unusually 'Shakespeare rich.':
-----------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.matforsk.no/ola/fisher.htm
Bible verses Oxf. marked verses
---------------------------------------------------------
No Shakspeare ref. | 9018 864
|
One or more Shak. ref.| 982 199
-------------------------------------------------------
Fisher's Exact Test
http://www.matforsk.no/ola/fisher.htm
------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 9018 , 864 , 982 , 199 ]
Left : p-value = .9999999999999999
Right : p-value = 9.408210356287982e-17
2-Tail : p-value = 1.5399226227646542e-16
------------------------------------------
Fisher's Exact Test
------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 8018 , 864 , 982 , 199 ]
Left : p-value = .9999999999993024
Right : p-value = 1.328914975435586e-12
2-Tail : p-value = 2.357634542634111e-12
------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 7018 , 864 , 982 , 199 ]
Left : p-value = .9999999921854239
Right : p-value = 1.306577691629951e-8
2-Tail : p-value = 2.1207764512959366e-8
------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 6018 , 864 , 982 , 199 ]
Left : p-value = .9999635325181515
Right : p-value = 0.00005255505520626162
2-Tail : p-value = 0.00008953504202696629
------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 5018 , 864 , 982 , 199 ]
Left : p-value = .972714064835154
Right : p-value = 0.033234163916083595
2-Tail : p-value = 0.06106889436808608
------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
john_baker
>On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Baker bleated:
>
>> On Mon, 29 Oct 2001 11:55:47 -0500, Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote:
>
>[Stat stuff]
>
>> >
>> >Is anybody still with me?
>>
>> Yes. Do you like it when I am?
>
>I am never more alone than when you are with me.
Isn't is so!
>
>>
>> I might as well point out while we are together, that the application
>> of statistical methods to individual action is foolish. Humans are
>> volitional creatures and only in large numbers do their actions take
>> on any kind of statistical regularity...
>>
>> In this case we are either dealing with the Bible the Author used or
>> we are not. Its a 50/50 proposition. If we were to argue that there
>> were 50,000 of these Bibles around at the time, the case still doesn't
>> become 49,999 to one against it, it remains 50/50. Either or.
>
>You're not thinking very clearly.
Take it up with von Mises or Rothbard...
>If I buy a lottery ticket, the odds are
>not 50-50 simply because there are, from my perspective, only two
>important outcomes -- I win or I lose.
You are jumping from class to case probabilities here, Terry. The
class probabilities involve how many tickets were sold, the case
probabilities are win or loose. If I were running the lotto here I'll
advertise the case probabilities only.
Its why people play....they think the case probabilities give them a
real chance of winning...I'd say about as much chance as
Willy has of having written Shakespeare...
>I think Roger's statistical
>arguments are irredeemably flawed, but even he would understand that much.
Even I got that....but you're on the other side (as am I here)....
>
>You also should not assume that there was one and only one object that was
>a Bible Shakespeare "used" -- but that's another story.
Like like stories...they go good with Peter Rabbit and Willy...
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
> http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
John Baker
David Kathman
apub...@hotmail.com (Arthur Publius) wrote:
Roger! Is that you? Come out from behind that silly pseudonym!
Or, better yet, address the points Terry made rather than
just attacking his character. I know it's hard, but you can do it!
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
Bob Grumman
You're ahead of me, Janice. Part of my problem is that raw numbers
are enough for me to consider Stritmatter's thesis idiotic. Plus,
it's clear that there will be a non-random factor involved in any
comparison of marked Biblical passages with Biblical allusions in
Shakespeare: the fact that both were made by contemporaries (which,
for me, assures that any two persons of the time picking quotations
from the Bible will pick the same ones more than pure chance would
dictate). But I'll reread Terry's piece a few times, and maybe
start to get what the Stritistician is doing, and what Terry is.
--Bob G.
--
Posted from dunk01.nut-n-but.net [205.161.239.30]
via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Bob Grumman
> >Oxford's Bible that correspond to verses alluded to X-times by Shakespeare
> >(remember, these are Roger's numbers, and we are only pretending for the
> >sake of argument that they are valid). Here is a table showing in column
> >1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
> >a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
> >marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
> >
> > ## Shax Ox
> > 0 9018 864
> > 1 450 60
> > 2 310 75
> > 3 160 35
> > 4+ 62 29
The hell with chi squares, I say the raw data is exactly what you
would expect if Oxford were two different contemporaries: there's
little overlap between the allusions Shakespeare uses just once or
not at all and Oxford's choices because those are the unpopular ones;
there's a lot of overlap between the ones Shakespeare uses two or
three times and Oxford's choices because those were popular ones
any two people of the time would be moderately likely to connect with;
and there is a good deal of overlaps between the ones Shakespeare
uses four or more times and Oxford's choices because those were
the ones just about everyone used at one time or another.
It's obvious, apart from statistics, that Oxford's marking 864
passages that Shakespeare does not, and only 189 that Shakespeare
also uses, two-thirds of which are probably pretty much proverbial,
and that Shakespeare uses 783 (if my in-the-head math is right,
and it rarely is) that Oxford did not mark demonstrates a complete
absence of connection between Shakespeare as quoter and Oxford as
marker.
Bob Grumman
news:5dcf9f2e.0110...@posting.google.com...
Hmmm, is this Okay Fine echo Roger Stritmatter? Is Okay Fine
Stritmatter? I note not only the similarity in style but in
content: accusations of error or lies with no evidence presented,
nor the errors or lies even directly presented.
Tell us, Publius: which of Terry's statements is dishonest and why?
Erik Nielsen
I think you're overestinating him. Even if Roger Stritmatter had the
intellectual capacity, the learning, or the fairness necessary to
address these points, he'd likely be too busy massaging data to do so.
Neuendorffer
> Here is a table showing in column
> 1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
> a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
> marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
>
> ## Shax Ox
> 0 9018 864
> 1 450 60
> 2 310 75
> 3 160 35
> 4+ 62 29
>
> Recall that the "9018" could reasonably be something like "36,000" and
> in any event should be more like "13,000." This is the number of
> (potentially "usable") Biblical verses NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> are marked in Oxford's Bible that are NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Warning! Warning! Will Robinson!"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are going the *wrong* direction, Terry!!!
Anything *over* 5,000 is *detrimental* to your cause!
You need to argue that this number is much less than 9000 not more!!!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
13.1% of Oxford's 1063 marked bible verses
occur in Shakespeare two or more times!
This is a very high percentage!
These amount to 139 of the 532 separate bible verses that occur
in Shakespeare more than once.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Anything *over* 5,000 potentially "usable" Biblical verses
is *detrimental* to your cause:
Bible verses Oxf. marked verses
---------------------------------------------------------------
One or less Shak. ref.| 4468 924
|
Two or more Shak. ref.| 532 139
-------------------------------------------------------
5000 1063
-------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
(~5000 potentially "usable") Biblical verses
---------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 4468 , 924 , 532 , 139 ]
Left : p-value = .9897057595696916
Right : p-value = 0.013490864369238714
2-Tail : p-value = 0.02371146501187063
---------------------------------------------
(~6000 potentially "usable") Biblical verses
---------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 5468 , 924 , 532 , 139 ]
Left : p-value = .9999870064026584
Right : p-value = 0.00002057670138721092
2-Tail : p-value = 0.00003254015674751774
---------------------------------------------
(~7000 potentially "usable") Biblical verses
---------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 6468 , 924 , 532 , 139 ]
Left : p-value = .9999999950525936
Right : p-value = 9.21963609611961e-9
2-Tail : p-value = 1.6522190792438896e-8
---------------------------------------------
Bible verses Oxf. marked verses
---------------------------------------------------------
One or less Shak. ref.| 9468 924
|
Two or more Shak. ref.| 532 139
-------------------------------------------------------
10000 1063
(~10,000 potentially "usable") Biblical verses
----------------------------------------------------
TABLE = [ 9468 , 924 , 532 , 139 ]
Left : p-value = 1
Right : p-value = 2.2751401613822534e-19
2-Tail : p-value = 3.2452331229475467e-19
-------------------------------------------
I'd try 36,000 but it might break the computer.
Art Neuendorffer
Arthur Publius
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Baker bleated:
>
Nota bene. The bizarre combination of hysteria and scientism
characteristic of Mr. Ross's character structure as evidenced by his
many posts to this forum. The alternation of words which serve no
purpose other than to bully, put down, and belittle his
interlocutors. The epistmelogical canyon between Stritmatter's actual
dissertation and Mr. Ross's well-peddled parody of it. The slothful
clinging to tradition for tradition's sake, wrapping himself up in the
flag of the wounded Shakespeare scholar, coupled with the most
juvenile notions of public discourse which are conceivable in a
supposedly civilized culture. Imagine the level of intellectual
culture to which this world will be reduced should such minds actually
be given the right to tell others what they should and should not
think.
Congratulations, Mr. Baker. You fight a good fight. Keep right on
bleating, you old bull-headed ram. Some of you others could bleat,
too.
Bleat.
In fact, if you find Mr. Ross's habitual practice of pseudospeciation
when speaking with people he doesn't like to be even a tintsy bit
offensive, bleat. Just do it once.
If not, have a good day anyway.
Erik Nielsen
Arthur Publius wrote:
>
> Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message news:<Pine.GSO.4.33.0110291650280.1901-100000@mail>...
>
> > On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Baker bleated:
> >
>
> Nota bene. The bizarre combination of hysteria and scientism
> characteristic of Mr. Ross's character structure as evidenced by his
> many posts to this forum.
Gadzooks -- you mean that not only does he detect that Stritmatter's
thesis is flawed, but -- gasp -- he's ANGERED by it?
> The alternation of words which serve no
> purpose other than to bully, put down, and belittle his
> interlocutors.
Well, there is the purpose of exposing them as utter frauds... but I
think we can overlook that for a minute...
> The epistmelogical canyon between Stritmatter's actual
> dissertation and Mr. Ross's well-peddled parody of it.
Now, the canyon between the two Marys -- is that one epistemological?
Or paradigmatic? Or speciated? Or some other long word?
> The slothful
> clinging to tradition for tradition's sake, wrapping himself up in the
> flag of the wounded Shakespeare scholar, coupled with the most
> juvenile notions of public discourse which are conceivable in a
> supposedly civilized culture. Imagine the level of intellectual
> culture to which this world will be reduced should such minds actually
> be given the right to tell others what they should and should not
> think.
Yeah! Imagine, the nerve of that Ross, to point out what a sham and a
fraud Stritmatter's little book is, when he knows full well that
Stritmatter himself may be wandering about under an assumed name! For
shame, Terry, for shame! Going oout there berating this fellow with
nothing but fact on your side!
Okay Fine
like to discredit me after I made you look so pathetic. Fortunately you
admitted yourself that you lied. Are you trying to suggest today that
you didn't? If so, I'll regretfully and promptly repost your sad, sad
disgrace.
OF.
Elizabeth Weir
> Terry Ross wrote:
>
> 18.7% of Oxford's 1063 marked bible verses
> occur in Shakespeare *at least* once.
You have apparently not taken Kathman's list of verses and looked them
up in the Geneva Bible.
I suspect that Stritmatter and I are the only ones who have actually
read the verses.
If Burghley wanted Oxford to consider the lesson 'God commands the
Jews to leave the corners of their field uncut so the poor can glean
them' the conscientious scribe underlined every verse on that
subject--there might be a dozen. The verses on usery--there might be
fifty or more--are all underlined.
Burghley didn't have that many themes.
The Puritans thought the Second Covenant made them the New Jews, so to
speak, so they tried to live in compliance with Old Testament Jewish
law on practical matters like the treatment of bond servants, letting
the land lie fallow, the care of livestock, avoiding diseases and
plagues, rotating the fields for tillage, discharging debt every seven
years, etc.
This project was in part Burghley's book on husbandry for Oxford.
Burghley had three or four themes over all--a catalogue of Oxford's
'sinnes,' a list of punishments that Oxford would receive if he did
not repent and follow God's commandments, something about heroism in
battle--maybe Burghley found the plucked eyebrows unsettling--there's
a lot of hand to hand combat with the Philistines--and it culminates
with the optimistic Calvinist scheme of salvation.
And--I almost forgot--there's an odd theme about swearing an oath to
God and then breaking it. Obviously Oxford swore falsely when he
testified at the Thomas Bricknell trial since Burghley is on record of
having to suborn a panel of judges to save Oxford from a guilty
verdict.
The underlined verses have nothing to do the Shakespeare plays which
are hardly about compliance with Jewish law.
So of course Stritmatter has an artificially high score.
KQKnave
Grumman" <bobgr...@nut-n-but.net> writes:
>
>"Arthur Publius" <apub...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>news:5dcf9f2e.0110...@posting.google.com...
>
>> Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message
>news:<Pine.GSO.4.33.0110291046220.7640-100000@mail>...
>> > Imagine that a Bible belonging to the author of Shakespeare's works were
>> > to turn up. Wait -- it gets better. This imaginary Bible has a great
>> > many marks and a few annotations, presumably in the owner's hand. What
>> > would such a Bible be like? Roger Stritmatter thinks it would be like
>> > this:
>>
>>
>> Imagine that Terry Ross reinvented himself so completely that he
>> became honest. I know, its difficult to imagine. But they say hope
>> springs eternal.
>>
>
>Hmmm, is this Okay Fine echo Roger Stritmatter? Is Okay Fine
>Stritmatter? I note not only the similarity in style but in
>content: accusations of error or lies with no evidence presented,
>nor the errors or lies even directly presented.
>
>Tell us, Publius: which of Terry's statements is dishonest and why?
>
"Publius" is probably baker, since baker uses pseudonyms with
the hotmail domain name posted through Google, which allows
you to put any email address in the header (Alcibiades, Telemachos,
John_Padden etc). The poster is also as dumb as baker. However,
it could also be someone trying to look like him by taking on a
Latin-sounding name and posting through Google.
Jim
Fyodor
So who am I? Can anyone guess?
Fyodor
Terry Ross
> Terry Ross wrote:
>
> > Here is a table showing in column
> > 1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
> > a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
> > marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
> >
> > ## Shax Ox
> > 0 9018 864
> > 1 450 60
> > 2 310 75
> > 3 160 35
> > 4+ 62 29
> >
> > Recall that the "9018" could reasonably be something like "36,000" and in
> > any event should be more like "13,000." This is the number of
> > (potentially "usable") Biblical verses NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> > The corresponding column for Oxford's Bible has 864 -- that is, 864 verses
> > are marked in Oxford's Bible that are NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> "Warning! Warning! Will Robinson!"
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> You are going the *wrong* direction, Terry!!!
Art, you should not assume that I am loading the dice in order to force
some desired outcome. One of the many flaws of the McGill/Stritmatter
statistical analysis is that no clear account is given of why 2/3 of the
OT and NT and 3/3 of the Apocrypha are NOT included in their calculations.
Of course I know that increasing the number of total verses changes the
calculations. So what? I want to know how Roger determined that more
than 2/3 of the Bible was of no conceivable use to any writer. Does Roger
rule out entire books of the Bible? If so, which books, and on what
grounds? Has he done a survey of Biblical allusions for all poets in
English and determined that only 1/3 of the Biblical verses were ever
alluded to by any poet? If so, I'd like to see that survey. If there is
some set of "useful-to-a-poet" verses then why is Roger keeping it a
secret? Did Roger's committee ask him about this or any other part of his
procedures?
>
> Anything *over* 6,000 is *detrimental* to your cause!
Honesty, justice, a kind word to a stranger -- none of these things is
detrimental to my cause. Whether the "useful-to-a-poet" set is set at
2,000 or 37,000, Roger still owes his readers a justification of the
number.
>
> You need to argue that this number is much less than 9018 not more!!!
I "need" to argue no such thing. There is no reason to suppose that
Oxford's Bible has the least connection with the author of Shakespeare's
works. Roger's foolishly-accepted dissertation has advanced the Oxfordian
case not one iota, but the sloppiness of his effort may give some readers
the impression that Oxfordian arguments are even weaker than they seem.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 18.7% of Oxford's 1063 marked bible verses
> occur in Shakespeare *at least* once.
>
> This is a very high percentage vis-a-vis bible verses in general:
Is it? What is your standard of measurement? How do you know whether 18%
is a high number for a Bible that Roger wishes to believe is the one that
Shakespeare actually used?
Of course, you should not assume that marked verses in the Oxford Bible
are actually referenced by Shakespeare in his works. One of the many ways
Roger cheats is that he applies different standards for determining
whether a Biblical verse was alluded to by Shakespeare based on whether
such a verse is marked in Oxford's Bible. He applies different "different
standards" for determining whether a suggested allusion in Spenser or
Marlowe or Bacon corresponds to a verse in Oxford's Bible. He is
determined to increase the number of supposed correspondences between
Shakespeare and the Oxford Bible, and to decrease the number of
correspondences between other authors and the Oxford Bible. He then
wishes to use the results of this corrupt process to generate "expected
values" for Shakespeare's Biblical usage, and then to establish a
correlation between such corruptly "expected values" and the marks in
Oxford's Bible.
Having loaded the dice, he STILL fails to understand that the result
McGill extruded for him flatly contradicts the outcome that Roger should
have wanted.
>
> Much higher than the 9.82% (for the 9018 number) or
> 7.0 % (for the 13,000 number) or
> 2.7 % (for the 36,000 number).
And the significance of these numbers is exactly what? 18% is higher than
9%, but neither percentage means anything by itself. Why is it that such
a small percentage of the Oxford Bible verses are marked at all? Why is
it that such a small percentage of the small percentage that are marked
correspond to verses used by Spenser or Marlowe or Bacon or Shakespeare?
Remember, by the Stritmatter/McGill analysis, all that can be said is that
neither Oxford's Bible, nor the verses used by Marlowe, nor those used by
Spenser, nor those used by Bacon, nor the hypothetical Bible in which ALL
of Shakespeare's verses are marked, nor the hypothetical Bible in which
NONE of the verses alluded to by Shakespeare are marked -- none of these
sets corresponds well to the Shakespeare set (even if we allow Roger to
load the dice in his own favor).
>
> Since 982 separate bible verses occur in Shakespeare the ideal
> situation (in so far as *you* are concerned) would be that this 982
> constituted about 18.7% of (~5252 potentially "usable") Biblical verses
Now you're just being silly. I have no vested interest in Oxford's Bible;
I find the possibility that such a thing exists and that it belonged to
that minor poet a mildly interesting story, but I would be much more
interested in books marked by more interesting poets, such as Gascoigne.
Roger, however, DOES have a vested interest in Oxford's Bible, and for him
we can safely say that he would rather that every one of Shakespeare's
Biblical allusions matched a verse marked in Oxford's Bible.
>
> [making for ~ 4270 (potentially "usable") Biblical verses
> NOT alluded to by Shakespeare]:
>
> Fisher's Exact Test
> http://www.matforsk.no/ola/fisher.htm
Perhaps Roger will try this test in the next rewrite of his dissertation
-- oh, wait a minute; I forgot. There won't be a next version of his
dissertation. Roger's committee approved it as to style and content AS
IT NOW STANDS -- well, that's our assumption. I still haven't heard
whether the committee saw the self-congratulatory scrapbook that Roger
includes in his dissertation but denies those who buy a copy from him.
So while it might be fun to bandy alternative statistical arguments with
Art, that's not really the point. The point, I think, is that neither
Roger, nor McGill, nor the members of the committee understood that the
statistical argument contradicts Roger's core position -- even if we let
Roger load the dice, he loses money at the game. This raises the further
question of whether Roger or McGill or the members of the committee were
competent to judge the statistical argument. If they were not competent,
why did they not call on the impressive resources of the University of
Massachusetts and bring in somebody who WAS competent?
Neuendorffer
> > 18.7% of Oxford's 1063 marked bible verses
> > occur in Shakespeare *at least* once.
------------------------------------------------------------
You lost me there, Elizabeth.
If the underlined verses have nothing to do the Shakespeare plays
shouldn't Stritmatter have an artificially *low* score.
Even if you are correct about the purpose of the underlining
involving mandatory religious teaching from Burghley (or Golding) these
verses would have embedded themselves into Oxford's mind. One eight of
them (139) constitute one quarter of the (532) bible verses Shakespeare
uses more than once. This is highly statistically significant!
Art Neuendorffer
Okay Fine
>
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Neuendorffer wrote:
>
> > Terry Ross wrote:
> >
> > > Here is a table showing in column
> > > 1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
> > > a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
> > > marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
> > >
> > > ## Shax Ox
> > > 0 9018 864
> > > 1 450 60
> > > 2 310 75
> > > 3 160 35
> > > 4+ 62 29
> > >
> > > Recall that the "9018" could reasonably be something like "36,000" and in
> > > any event should be more like "13,000." This is the number of
> > > (potentially "usable") Biblical verses NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> > > The corresponding column for Oxford's Bible has 864 -- that is, 864 verses
> > > are marked in Oxford's Bible that are NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > "Warning! Warning! Will Robinson!"
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > You are going the *wrong* direction, Terry!!!
>
> Art, you should not assume that I am loading the dice in order to force
> some desired outcome.
Clearly we should be aware that you'll load the dice. It's entirely
expected that you will use any misreading possible to attack Roger's
conclusion. After all, if his dissertation shows that Oxford's Bible is
Shakespeare's Bible, you might have to admit that you were wrong about
something.
> One of the many flaws of the McGill/Stritmatter
> statistical analysis is that no clear account is given of why 2/3 of the
> OT and NT and 3/3 of the Apocrypha are NOT included in their calculations.
> Of course I know that increasing the number of total verses changes the
> calculations. So what? I want to know how Roger determined that more
> than 2/3 of the Bible was of no conceivable use to any writer. Does Roger
> rule out entire books of the Bible? If so, which books, and on what
> grounds? Has he done a survey of Biblical allusions for all poets in
> English and determined that only 1/3 of the Biblical verses were ever
> alluded to by any poet? If so, I'd like to see that survey. If there is
> some set of "useful-to-a-poet" verses then why is Roger keeping it a
> secret? Did Roger's committee ask him about this or any other part of his
> procedures?
This issue strikes me as completely irrelevant. That you'd waste our
time asking what the committee did is even worse. However, it's useful
to notice that you're arguing nonsense already.
> > Anything *over* 6,000 is *detrimental* to your cause!
>
> Honesty, justice, a kind word to a stranger -- none of these things is
> detrimental to my cause. Whether the "useful-to-a-poet" set is set at
> 2,000 or 37,000, Roger still owes his readers a justification of the
> number.
>
> >
> > You need to argue that this number is much less than 9018 not more!!!
>
> I "need" to argue no such thing. There is no reason to suppose that
> Oxford's Bible has the least connection with the author of Shakespeare's
> works.
I wonder if this remark reveals a bias in your thinking. Some might say
you've started with your result and argued backward from it. And your
talent for misreading is again on view. A rare double, Terry: you make
a mistake and reveal your weakness for sophistry simultaneously.
Could you reference your argument on this? I can't find it.
An interesting diversion, Terry. Well, no, not really interesting.
That you would deny that you have a vested interest in the results of
this analysis is hilariously absurd. Everyone knows you'll read the
dissertation as a failure no matter what it says.
> > [making for ~ 4270 (potentially "usable") Biblical verses
> > NOT alluded to by Shakespeare]:
> >
> > Fisher's Exact Test
> > http://www.matforsk.no/ola/fisher.htm
>
> Perhaps Roger will try this test in the next rewrite of his dissertation
> -- oh, wait a minute; I forgot. There won't be a next version of his
> dissertation. Roger's committee approved it as to style and content AS
> IT NOW STANDS -- well, that's our assumption. I still haven't heard
> whether the committee saw the self-congratulatory scrapbook that Roger
> includes in his dissertation but denies those who buy a copy from him.
>
> So while it might be fun to bandy alternative statistical arguments with
> Art, that's not really the point. The point, I think, is that neither
> Roger, nor McGill, nor the members of the committee understood that the
> statistical argument contradicts Roger's core position
You keep saying this but I haven't found your argument.
OF.
Terry Ross
I expect some Oxfordians to be suspicious of my motives, but a search of
usenet posts over the last six years would show that I am much less likely
than, say, Roger Stritmatter to indulge in such "misreadings."
> After all, if his dissertation shows that Oxford's Bible is
> Shakespeare's Bible, you might have to admit that you were wrong about
> something.
Eric, if you have a copy of Roger's dissertation, then read or re-read
Appendix C, and then come back here and post your correction (if you have
any correction to make) to my discussion of McGill's chi-square analysis.
>
> > One of the many flaws of the McGill/Stritmatter
> > statistical analysis is that no clear account is given of why 2/3 of the
> > OT and NT and 3/3 of the Apocrypha are NOT included in their calculations.
> > Of course I know that increasing the number of total verses changes the
> > calculations. So what? I want to know how Roger determined that more
> > than 2/3 of the Bible was of no conceivable use to any writer. Does Roger
> > rule out entire books of the Bible? If so, which books, and on what
> > grounds? Has he done a survey of Biblical allusions for all poets in
> > English and determined that only 1/3 of the Biblical verses were ever
> > alluded to by any poet? If so, I'd like to see that survey. If there is
> > some set of "useful-to-a-poet" verses then why is Roger keeping it a
> > secret? Did Roger's committee ask him about this or any other part of his
> > procedures?
>
> This issue strikes me as completely irrelevant.
Part of Roger's and McGill's methodology is to declare that 27,000 verses
of the Bible are of no possible use to any author of any literary work.
You may find the issue irrelevant, but perhaps that is because you don't
understand the matter.
> That you'd waste our time asking what the committee did is even worse.
William Moebius, James Freeman, Edwin Gentzler, Elizabeth Petroff, and
Daniel Wright -- the members of the panel for Roger's dissertation defense
-- have attested that the dissertation is "Approved as to style and
content." It is legitimate to ask whether they knew what they were
doing.
> However, it's useful to notice that you're arguing nonsense already.
You may not be as sound a judge of nonsense as you would like to think.
To take one tiny example, you have several times posed the following
poser:
Let's posit a document that contains the information, unequivocally and
unambiguously, that the proposition PPP is true, where PPP is:
'Shakspere = Shakespeare is false.'
Did you mean that PPP should equal this:
"Shakspere = Shakespeare" is false.
Did you mean this:
"'Shakspere' = 'Shakespeare'" is false.
Did you mean this:
"Shakspere" = "Shakespeare is false."
Did you mean this:
"Shakspere" = "'Shakespeare' is false."
Do you even understand the differences among these various PPPs?
>
> > > Anything *over* 6,000 is *detrimental* to your cause!
> >
> > Honesty, justice, a kind word to a stranger -- none of these things is
> > detrimental to my cause. Whether the "useful-to-a-poet" set is set at
> > 2,000 or 37,000, Roger still owes his readers a justification of the
> > number.
> >
> > >
> > > You need to argue that this number is much less than 9018 not more!!!
> >
> > I "need" to argue no such thing. There is no reason to suppose that
> > Oxford's Bible has the least connection with the author of Shakespeare's
> > works.
>
> I wonder if this remark reveals a bias in your thinking. Some might say
> you've started with your result and argued backward from it. And your
> talent for misreading is again on view. A rare double, Terry: you make
> a mistake and reveal your weakness for sophistry simultaneously.
To demonstrate that I have misread Roger's argument, you must first show
that YOU have read and understood it, and then show how my reading differs
from any plausible one. Have you read Roger's dissertation?
Do you not know that Roger hopes to show (and thinks he has shown) that
the marked verses in Oxford's Bible correspond so closely to Shakespeare's
usage of the Bible that it must be a (or "the") Bible owned and used by
the author of Shakespeare's works?
I detailed McGill's methods and I quoted McGill's conclusion: "Based on
the stated assumptions of this analysis, the results provided in this
paper clearly demonstrate the hypothesis of no more than a random
connection between the de Vere and Shakespeare verse sets must be
rejected" (442).
Unfortunately, neither Roger nor McGill nor the members of Roger's
committee understand what "random" means in the kind of significance test
McGill is attempting. If McGill HAD found a "random connection," that
would have suggested that the de Vere verse set strongly corresponded to
the expected values McGill derived from the Shakespeare verse set -- but
this is the point Roger hoped to make and thinks he has made.
Clear?
Nobody knows any such thing. When I heard that Roger had defended his
dissertation successfully, I congratulated him both privately and on this
newsgroup. You will find my congratulations in the dissertation itself,
if you ever read it. I posted nothing whatsoever about the contents of
the dissertation until I had had a chance to read it. I can tell you that
I had hoped that the dissertation process would impose a useful discipline
on Roger's style of argument and presentation; I had hoped that he would
provide a substantial original contribution in the field of Comparative
Literature; I had hoped that he would be more careful in his use of
evidence than I have known him to be in the past, and more sophisticated
in his approach to literary history. I did not expect a dissertation
whose "nits" worth the picking number in the hundreds if not thousands; I
did not expect that Roger would slip his scrapbook into the dissertation;
I did not expect that Roger would use his dissertation to make personal
attacks (more on this in later posts); I did not expect a dissertation
that is so internally contradictory. I trusted the dissertation process,
which means I trusted the University of Massachusetts; I trusted William
Moebius, James Freeman, Edwin Gentzler, Elizabeth Petroff, and Daniel
Wright; I trusted Roger himself to perform responsibly. I am not happy
that Roger's dissertation is so weak; I am disappointed.
>
> > > [making for ~ 4270 (potentially "usable") Biblical verses
> > > NOT alluded to by Shakespeare]:
> > >
> > > Fisher's Exact Test
> > > http://www.matforsk.no/ola/fisher.htm
> >
> > Perhaps Roger will try this test in the next rewrite of his dissertation
> > -- oh, wait a minute; I forgot. There won't be a next version of his
> > dissertation. Roger's committee approved it as to style and content AS
> > IT NOW STANDS -- well, that's our assumption. I still haven't heard
> > whether the committee saw the self-congratulatory scrapbook that Roger
> > includes in his dissertation but denies those who buy a copy from him.
> >
> > So while it might be fun to bandy alternative statistical arguments with
> > Art, that's not really the point. The point, I think, is that neither
> > Roger, nor McGill, nor the members of the committee understood that the
> > statistical argument contradicts Roger's core position
>
> You keep saying this but I haven't found your argument.
Then here it is again.
that a random sample of verses chosen from the set of verses alluded to by
Shakespeare would NOT match up very well when compared to the set of
verses marked in Oxford's Bible. Some of you may be thinking that McGill
should be trying to do just the opposite if he wishes to bolster Roger's
case; I thought so too, which is why I found McGill's Appendix C so hard
to follow. Let's look at some of what McGill set out to do, and lets see
what happens if we try variations on his project.
McGill gives counts for every Biblical verse alluded to by Shakespeare
X-number of times (X ranges from 0 to 18, though I have collapsed counts
for all verses alluded to 4 or more times, as McGill does). The numbers
are questionable for reasons I'll get to in later posts, but for now let's
assume most of them are rock-solid.
McGill assumes that only 10,000 of the more than 30,000 verses in the
Bible "might yield a usable reference." This is a rather odd assumption,
and it ignores the more than 6000 verses of the Apocrypha (Shakespeare
alluded to a number of verses in the Apocrypha, and many are also marked
in Oxford's Bible), but it means that McGill counts 9018 Biblical verses
to which Shakespeare does NOT allude rather than, say 36,000 (if all
verses are used) or 13,000 (if the Apocrypha "usable" verses are added to
those of the OT and NT on the basis that only a third of Bible verses
"might yield a useful reference"). It won't matter, ultimately, but it's
useful to note how mistake-prone almost every part of Roger's project is.
From Roger's numbers, McGill gives counts for all verses marked in
Oxford's Bible that correspond to verses alluded to X-times by Shakespeare
(remember, these are Roger's numbers, and we are only pretending for the
sake of argument that they are valid). Here is a table showing in column
1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
## Shax Ox
0 9018 864
1 450 60
2 310 75
3 160 35
4+ 62 29
Recall that the "9018" could reasonably be something like "36,000" and in
any event should be more like "13,000." This is the number of
(potentially "usable") Biblical verses NOT alluded to by Shakespeare. The
corresponding column for Oxford's Bible has 864 -- that is, 864 verses are
marked in Oxford's Bible that are NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
I often find it convenient to think of random draws in terms of drawing
looking for. Unfortunately, neither Roger nor McGill knows enough to
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Neuendorffer
> >
> > > Here is a table showing in column
> > > 1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
> > > a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
> > > marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
> > >
> > > ## Shax Ox
> > > 0 9018 864
> > > 1 450 60
> > > 2 310 75
> > > 3 160 35
> > > 4+ 62 29
> > >
> > > Recall that the "9018" could reasonably be something like "36,000" and in
> > > any event should be more like "13,000." This is the number of
> > > (potentially "usable") Biblical verses NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> > > The corresponding column for Oxford's Bible has 864 -- that is, 864 verses
> > > are marked in Oxford's Bible that are NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Neuendorffer wrote:
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > "Warning! Warning! Will Robinson!"
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > You are going the *wrong* direction, Terry!!!
Terry Ross wrote:
>
> Art, you should not assume that I am loading the dice in order to force
> some desired outcome.
You always have before, Terry.
> One of the many flaws of the McGill/Stritmatter
> statistical analysis is that no clear account is given of why 2/3 of the
> OT and NT and 3/3 of the Apocrypha are NOT included in their calculations.
> Of course I know that increasing the number of total verses changes the
> calculations. So what?
You are implying that the number should be larger and a larger number
only strengths Roger's argument.
If you object to Roger's conservative estimate of (potentially
"usable") Biblical verses then suggest a more reasonable number and
we'll do the calculation with that.
> I want to know how Roger determined that more
> than 2/3 of the Bible was of no conceivable use to any writer. Does Roger
> rule out entire books of the Bible? If so, which books, and on what
> grounds? Has he done a survey of Biblical allusions for all poets in
> English and determined that only 1/3 of the Biblical verses were ever
> alluded to by any poet? If so, I'd like to see that survey. If there is
> some set of "useful-to-a-poet" verses then why is Roger keeping it a
> secret? Did Roger's committee ask him about this or any other part of his
> procedures?
Speaking of keeping secrets why won't you answer the question of
whether you agree or disagree with Kathman's assessment of Polonius
being Burghley?
> > Anything *over* 6,000 is *detrimental* to your cause!
>
> Honesty, justice, a kind word to a stranger -- none of these things is
> detrimental to my cause.
I'm not so sure about the "kind word."
> Whether the "useful-to-a-poet" set is set at
> 2,000 or 37,000, Roger still owes his readers a justification of the
> number.
It is a low conservative number.
Roger should be commended for not straining our credulity with an
overly high number (such as you have suggested) when it is unnecessary
to make his case.
> > You need to argue that this number is much less than 9018 not more!!!
>
> I "need" to argue no such thing. There is no reason to suppose that
> Oxford's Bible has the least connection with the author of Shakespeare's
> works.
One eighth (i.e., 139) of Oxford's marked bible verses constitute over
one quarter of the (532) bible verses that Shakespeare uses more than
once. This is highly statistically significant any way you wish to
figure it!
> Roger's foolishly-accepted dissertation has advanced
> the Oxfordian case not one iota,
HORATIO Not a jot more, my lord.
HAMLET No, faith, not a jot;
OTHELLO Not a jot, not a jot.
This nor hurts him nor profits you a jot;
Forbear it therefore; give your cause to heaven.
Mark what I say, which you shall find
By EVERY syllable a faithful VERITY:
MATTHEW 5:18 For VERILY I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one
jot
or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be
fulfilled.
> but the sloppiness of his effort may give some readers the impression
> that Oxfordian arguments are even weaker than they seem.
Love's Labour's Lost Act 4, Scene 3
BIRON Disfigure not his slop.
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > 18.7% of Oxford's 1063 marked bible verses
> > occur in Shakespeare *at least* once.
> >
> > This is a very high percentage vis-a-vis bible verses in general:
>
> Is it? What is your standard of measurement? How do you know whether 18%
> is a high number for a Bible that Roger wishes to believe is the one that
> Shakespeare actually used?
Because I did the statistics.
> Of course, you should not assume that marked verses in the Oxford Bible
> are actually referenced by Shakespeare in his works.
Thus far that is what you have done.
> One of the many ways
> Roger cheats is that he applies different standards for determining
> whether a Biblical verse was alluded to by Shakespeare based on whether
> such a verse is marked in Oxford's Bible. He applies different "different
> standards" for determining whether a suggested allusion in Spenser or
> Marlowe or Bacon corresponds to a verse in Oxford's Bible. He is
> determined to increase the number of supposed correspondences between
> Shakespeare and the Oxford Bible, and to decrease the number of
> correspondences between other authors and the Oxford Bible. He then
> wishes to use the results of this corrupt process to generate "expected
> values" for Shakespeare's Biblical usage, and then to establish a
> correlation between such corruptly "expected values" and the marks in
> Oxford's Bible.
Perhaps, everyone has a bias. I'll wait until you can give some
specifics.
> Having loaded the dice, he STILL fails to understand that the result
> McGill extruded for him flatly contradicts the outcome that Roger should
> have wanted.
Perhaps you can suggest a more reasonable table:
## Bible Ox
0 9018 864
1 450 60
2 310 75
3 160 35
4+ 62 29
> > 18.7% of Oxford's 1063 marked bible verses
> > occur in Shakespeare *at least* once.
> > Much higher than the 9.82% (for the 9018 number) or
> > 7.0 % (for the 13,000 number) or
> > 2.7 % (for the 36,000 number).
>
> And the significance of these numbers is exactly what? 18% is higher than
> 9%, but neither percentage means anything by itself.
Perhaps. That is why they are combined to do the statistics.
> Why is it that such
> a small percentage of the Oxford Bible verses are marked at all?
Oxford never much cared for the verses he was required to memorize.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Weir wrote:
> If Burghley wanted Oxford to consider the lesson 'God commands the
> Jews to leave the corners of their field uncut so the poor can glean
> them' the conscientious scribe underlined every verse on that
> subject--there might be a dozen. The verses on usery--there might be
> fifty or more--are all underlined.
>
> Burghley didn't have that many themes.
> Burghley had three or four themes over all--a catalogue of Oxford's
> 'sinnes,' a list of punishments that Oxford would receive if he did
> not repent and follow God's commandments, something about heroism in
> battle--maybe Burghley found the plucked eyebrows unsettling--there's
> a lot of hand to hand combat with the Philistines--and it culminates
> with the optimistic Calvinist scheme of salvation.
----------------------------------------------------------------
> Why is
> it that such a small percentage of the small percentage that are marked
> correspond to verses used by Spenser or Marlowe or Bacon or Shakespeare?
If this was mandatory school memorization for young de Vere then he
probably didn't much care for them in particular. (They were embedding
in his subconscious none-the-less.)
> Remember, by the Stritmatter/McGill analysis, all that can be said is that
> neither Oxford's Bible, nor the verses used by Marlowe, nor those used by
> Spenser, nor those used by Bacon, nor the hypothetical Bible in which ALL
> of Shakespeare's verses are marked, nor the hypothetical Bible in which
> NONE of the verses alluded to by Shakespeare are marked -- none of these
> sets corresponds well to the Shakespeare set (even if we allow Roger to
> load the dice in his own favor).
One eighth (i.e., 139) of Oxford's marked bible verses constitute over
one quarter of the (532) bible verses that Shakespeare uses more than
once. This is highly statistically significant any way you wish to
figure it! Memorized childhood versed embedded in the subconscious.
> > Since 982 separate bible verses occur in Shakespeare the ideal
> > situation (in so far as *you* are concerned) would be that this 982
> > constituted about 18.7% of (~5252 potentially "usable") Biblical verses
>
> Now you're just being silly. I have no vested interest in Oxford's Bible;
The Folger does. No why would that be?
> I find the possibility that such a thing exists and that it belonged to
> that minor poet a mildly interesting story, but I would be much more
> interested in books marked by more interesting poets, such as Gascoigne.
> Roger, however, DOES have a vested interest in Oxford's Bible, and for him
> we can safely say that he would rather that every one of Shakespeare's
> Biblical allusions matched a verse marked in Oxford's Bible.
It would certainly make it easier to explain to those with little
mathematics & less statistics.
> > [making for ~ 4270 (potentially "usable") Biblical verses
> > NOT alluded to by Shakespeare]:
> >
> > Fisher's Exact Test
> > http://www.matforsk.no/ola/fisher.htm
>
> Perhaps Roger will try this test in the next rewrite of his dissertation
> -- oh, wait a minute; I forgot. There won't be a next version of his
> dissertation.
And you can't take Roger's PHD away from him.
-- oh, wait a minute; I forgot: you still can keep him from
publishing, winning grants & gaining tenure.
Well, life has never been easy for anti-Strats.
> Roger's committee approved it as to style and content AS
> IT NOW STANDS -- well, that's our assumption. I still haven't heard
> whether the committee saw the self-congratulatory scrapbook that Roger
> includes in his dissertation but denies those who buy a copy from him.
Do you begrudge Roger his scrapbook?
> So while it might be fun to bandy alternative statistical arguments with
> Art, that's not really the point.
Is it fun, Terry, or are you just being polite?
> The point, I think, is that neither
> Roger, nor McGill, nor the members of the committee understood that the
> statistical argument contradicts Roger's core position
Even a mediocre statistical argument favors Roger's core position.
> -- even if we let
> Roger load the dice, he loses money at the game.
No one has ever made money being an anti-Strat and yet it retains
it's popularity.
Now why is that?
> This raises the further
> question of whether Roger or McGill or the members of the committee were
> competent to judge the statistical argument.
One eighth (i.e., 139) of Oxford's marked bible verses constitute over
one quarter of the (532) bible verses that Shakespeare uses more than
once. This is highly statistically significant any way you wish to
figure it!
> If they were not competent,
> why did they not call on the impressive resources of the University of
> Massachusetts and bring in somebody who WAS competent?
Say . . .we have mathematics right here on HLAS. Why does one of them
calculate the chances that:
One eighth (i.e., 139) of Oxford's marked bible verses would constitute
over one quarter of the (532) bible verses that Shakespeare uses more
than once.
Art Neuendorffer
Neuendorffer
> >
> > > Here is a table showing in column
> > > 1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
> > > a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
> > > marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
> > >
> > > ## Shax Ox
> > > 0 9018 864
> > > 1 450 60
> > > 2 310 75
> > > 3 160 35
> > > 4+ 62 29
> > >
> > > Recall that the "9018" could reasonably be something like "36,000" and in
> > > any event should be more like "13,000." This is the number of
> > > (potentially "usable") Biblical verses NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> > > The corresponding column for Oxford's Bible has 864 -- that is, 864 verses
> > > are marked in Oxford's Bible that are NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Neuendorffer wrote:
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > "Warning! Warning! Will Robinson!"
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > You are going the *wrong* direction, Terry!!!
Terry Ross wrote:
>
> Art, you should not assume that I am loading the dice in order to force
> some desired outcome.
You always have before, Terry.
> One of the many flaws of the McGill/Stritmatter
> statistical analysis is that no clear account is given of why 2/3 of the
> OT and NT and 3/3 of the Apocrypha are NOT included in their calculations.
> Of course I know that increasing the number of total verses changes the
> calculations. So what?
You are implying that the number should be larger and a larger number
only strengthens Roger's argument.
If you object to Roger's conservative estimate of
10,000 (potentially "usable") Biblical verses:
## Bible Ox
0 9018 864
1 450 60
2 310 75
3 160 35
4+ 62 29
then suggest a more reasonable number and we'll calculate with that.
> I want to know how Roger determined that more
> than 2/3 of the Bible was of no conceivable use to any writer. Does Roger
> rule out entire books of the Bible? If so, which books, and on what
> grounds? Has he done a survey of Biblical allusions for all poets in
> English and determined that only 1/3 of the Biblical verses were ever
> alluded to by any poet? If so, I'd like to see that survey. If there is
> some set of "useful-to-a-poet" verses then why is Roger keeping it a
> secret? Did Roger's committee ask him about this or any other part of his
> procedures?
Speaking of keeping secrets why won't you answer the question of
whether you agree or disagree with Kathman's assessment of Polonius
most likely being Burghley?
> > Anything *over* 6,000 is *detrimental* to your cause!
>
> Honesty, justice, a kind word to a stranger -- none of these things is
> detrimental to my cause.
I'm not so sure about the "kind word" part.
> Whether the "useful-to-a-poet" set is set at
> 2,000 or 37,000, Roger still owes his readers a justification of the
> number.
10,000 (potentially "usable") Biblical verses is a low conservative
number (as you imply yourself).
Roger should be commended for not straining our credulity with an
overly high number (such as you have suggested) when such a move would
be unnecessary to make his case.
> > You need to argue that this number is much less than 9018 not more!!!
>
> I "need" to argue no such thing. There is no reason to suppose that
> Oxford's Bible has the least connection with the author of Shakespeare's
> works.
One eighth (i.e., 139) of Oxford's marked bible verses constitute over
one quarter of the (532) bible verses that Shakespeare uses more than
once. This is *highly* statistically significant any way you wish to
figure it!
> Roger's foolishly-accepted dissertation has advanced
> the Oxfordian case not one iota,
HORATIO Not a jot more, my lord.
HAMLET No, faith, not a jot;
OTHELLO Not a jot, not a jot.
This nor hurts him nor profits you a jot;
Forbear it therefore; give your cause to heaven.
Mark what I say, which you shall find
By EVERY syllable a faithful VERITY:
MATTHEW 5:18 For VERILY I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass,
one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law,
till all be fulfilled.
> but the sloppiness of his effort may give some readers the impression
> that Oxfordian arguments are even weaker than they seem.
Love's Labour's Lost Act 4, Scene 3
BIRON Disfigure not his slop.
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > 18.7% of Oxford's 1063 marked bible verses
> > occur in Shakespeare *at least* once.
> >
> > This is a very high percentage vis-a-vis bible verses in general:
>
> Is it? What is your standard of measurement? How do you know whether 18%
> is a high number for a Bible that Roger wishes to believe is the one that
> Shakespeare actually used?
Because I did the statistics.
> Of course, you should not assume that marked verses in the Oxford Bible
> are actually referenced by Shakespeare in his works.
Thus far that is what you have done.
> One of the many ways
> Roger cheats is that he applies different standards for determining
> whether a Biblical verse was alluded to by Shakespeare based on whether
> such a verse is marked in Oxford's Bible. He applies different "different
> standards" for determining whether a suggested allusion in Spenser or
> Marlowe or Bacon corresponds to a verse in Oxford's Bible. He is
> determined to increase the number of supposed correspondences between
> Shakespeare and the Oxford Bible, and to decrease the number of
> correspondences between other authors and the Oxford Bible. He then
> wishes to use the results of this corrupt process to generate "expected
> values" for Shakespeare's Biblical usage, and then to establish a
> correlation between such corruptly "expected values" and the marks in
> Oxford's Bible.
Perhaps, everyone has a bias. I'll wait until you can give some
specifics.
> Having loaded the dice, he STILL fails to understand that the result
> McGill extruded for him flatly contradicts the outcome that Roger should
> have wanted.
Perhaps you can suggest a more reasonable table:
## Bible Ox
0 9018 864
1 450 60
2 310 75
3 160 35
4+ 62 29
> > 18.7% of Oxford's 1063 marked bible verses
> > occur in Shakespeare *at least* once.
> > Much higher than the 9.82% (for the 9018 number) or
> > 7.0 % (for the 13,000 number) or
> > 2.7 % (for the 36,000 number).
>
> And the significance of these numbers is exactly what? 18% is higher than
> 9%, but neither percentage means anything by itself.
Perhaps. That is why they are combined to do the statistics.
> Why is it that such
> a small percentage of the Oxford Bible verses are marked at all?
Oxford never much cared for the verses he was required to memorize.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Weir wrote:
> If Burghley wanted Oxford to consider the lesson 'God commands the
> Jews to leave the corners of their field uncut so the poor can glean
> them' the conscientious scribe underlined every verse on that
> subject--there might be a dozen. The verses on usery--there might be
> fifty or more--are all underlined.
>
> Burghley didn't have that many themes.
> Burghley had three or four themes over all--a catalogue of Oxford's
> 'sinnes,' a list of punishments that Oxford would receive if he did
> not repent and follow God's commandments, something about heroism in
> battle--maybe Burghley found the plucked eyebrows unsettling--there's
> a lot of hand to hand combat with the Philistines--and it culminates
> with the optimistic Calvinist scheme of salvation.
----------------------------------------------------------------
> Why is
> it that such a small percentage of the small percentage that are marked
> correspond to verses used by Spenser or Marlowe or Bacon or Shakespeare?
If this was mandatory school memorization for young de Vere then he
probably didn't much care for them in particular. (They were embedding
in his subconscious none-the-less.)
> Remember, by the Stritmatter/McGill analysis, all that can be said is that
> neither Oxford's Bible, nor the verses used by Marlowe, nor those used by
> Spenser, nor those used by Bacon, nor the hypothetical Bible in which ALL
> of Shakespeare's verses are marked, nor the hypothetical Bible in which
> NONE of the verses alluded to by Shakespeare are marked -- none of these
> sets corresponds well to the Shakespeare set (even if we allow Roger to
> load the dice in his own favor).
One eighth (i.e., 139) of Oxford's marked bible verses constitute over
one quarter of the (532) bible verses that Shakespeare uses more than
once. This is highly statistically significant any way you wish to
figure it! Memorized childhood versed embedded in the subconscious.
> > Since 982 separate bible verses occur in Shakespeare the ideal
> > situation (in so far as *you* are concerned) would be that this 982
> > constituted about 18.7% of (~5252 potentially "usable") Biblical verses
>
> Now you're just being silly. I have no vested interest in Oxford's Bible;
The Folger does. No why would that be?
> I find the possibility that such a thing exists and that it belonged to
> that minor poet a mildly interesting story, but I would be much more
> interested in books marked by more interesting poets, such as Gascoigne.
> Roger, however, DOES have a vested interest in Oxford's Bible, and for him
> we can safely say that he would rather that every one of Shakespeare's
> Biblical allusions matched a verse marked in Oxford's Bible.
It would certainly make it easier to explain to those with little
mathematics & less statistics.
> > [making for ~ 4270 (potentially "usable") Biblical verses
> > NOT alluded to by Shakespeare]:
> >
> > Fisher's Exact Test
> > http://www.matforsk.no/ola/fisher.htm
>
> Perhaps Roger will try this test in the next rewrite of his dissertation
> -- oh, wait a minute; I forgot. There won't be a next version of his
> dissertation.
And you can't take Roger's PHD away from him.
-- oh, wait a minute; I forgot: you still can keep him from
publishing, winning grants & gaining tenure.
Well, life has never been easy for anti-Strats.
> Roger's committee approved it as to style and content AS
> IT NOW STANDS -- well, that's our assumption. I still haven't heard
> whether the committee saw the self-congratulatory scrapbook that Roger
> includes in his dissertation but denies those who buy a copy from him.
Do you begrudge Roger his scrapbook?
> So while it might be fun to bandy alternative statistical arguments with
> Art, that's not really the point.
Is it fun, Terry, or are you just being polite?
> The point, I think, is that neither
> Roger, nor McGill, nor the members of the committee understood that the
> statistical argument contradicts Roger's core position
Even a mediocre statistical argument favors Roger's core position.
> -- even if we let
> Roger load the dice, he loses money at the game.
No one has ever made money being an anti-Strat and yet it retains
it's popularity.
Now why is that?
> This raises the further
> question of whether Roger or McGill or the members of the committee were
> competent to judge the statistical argument.
One eighth (i.e., 139) of Oxford's marked bible verses constitute over
one quarter of the (532) bible verses that Shakespeare uses more than
once. This is highly statistically significant any way you wish to
figure it!
> If they were not competent,
> why did they not call on the impressive resources of the University of
> Massachusetts and bring in somebody who WAS competent?
Say . . .we have mathematics right here on HLAS.
Why doesn't one of them calculate the chances that:
Thomas C Lay
: Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message news:<Pine.GSO.4.33.0110291650280.1901-100000@mail>...
: Bleat.
So explain to me: Do you have any clue how Baker's blather about
fifty-fifty chances is relevant to anything? I don't.
Tom
Okay Fine
Shakespeare's, the likelihood of a verse marking should ascend as the
frequency of its usage by the author. If it is not Shakespeare's, the
likelihood should appear random. In the case of the Oxford Bible, the
pattern is consistent with usage by the author of Shakespeare's works:
the more usage by Shakespeare, the more likely that it's marked by
Oxford.
OF.
Thomas C Lay
: The number of usable Bible verses is irrelevant. If the Bible is
So can you show me the statistics that back up this assertion? And by
the way, wouldn't we expect at least a weak correlation simply because
people at the same time are likely to emphasize at least some of the same
verses and because even across times, some verses are more familiar than
others?
Okay Fine
You're right, there could be some of what you describe. To get a handle
on that, we'd have to use as a control a Bible marked by an Oxfordian
contemporary who knew nothing of Shakespeare's plays. That would fall
victim, though, to the complaint that someone who knew nothing of
Shakespeare's plays would be too different from Oxford to act as a
useful control.
However, prima facie the Oxfordians have it:
1 450 60 13%
2 310 75 24%
3 160 35 22%
4 62 29 47%
The right hand column should not trend up as we read down if you want to
maintain orthodoxy. The more citations by Shakespeare, the more likely
that Oxford annotated it.
OF.
Erik Nielsen
I don't think so... this is an incisive, penetrating, magisterial
stupidity, a completely humorless stupidity. Baker is unintentionally
amusing, but if this were Baker, he'd be supplementing that with
attempts at intentional amusement.
Neuendorffer
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/ox5.html
<<Oxfordians have made much of the fact that some of the verses marked
in this Bible are alluded to by Shakespeare, but this looks like nothing
more than a random overlap of two fairly large sets. There are roughly
1000 verses marked in the de Vere Bible, and based on my estimates from
the lists in Naseeb Shaheen's books, Shakespeare alluded to at least
2000 Bible verses in his works. Roughly 80 of the marked verses have
parallels to Shakespeare which are noted by the leading
Bible-Shakespeare scholars, Shaheen and Richmond Noble. There are
another 120-plus which Roger Stritmatter claims are parallels which
previous commentators have overlooked; I have only seen a few of these
and find them unimpressive, but for the sake of argument let's accept
them. This means that even giving Stritmatter the benefit of the doubt,
only about 10 percent of Shakespeare's Biblical allusions are marked in
the Bible, and only about 20 percent of the verses marked in the Bible
are alluded to in Shakespeare. That doesn't seem like anything more than
a random overlap to me, and this impression is confirmed by the fact
that you can find a similar overlap with other contemporary authors. I
went through Naseeb Shaheen's book on Biblical references in The Faerie
Queene and found 35 verses marked in the de Vere Bible which Spenser
alludes to; I'm sure that I could add considerably to that number by
loosening the standards for what counts as an allusion, as Stritmatter
has. So we have 35 marked verses in The Faerie Queene vs. 80 in
Shakespeare, using Shaheen's standards; that's not bad, considering
that The Faerie Queene is about one third the length of Shakespeare's
complete works. It's harder to do comparisons for other authors
whose Biblical allusions have not been catalogued as thoroughly as
Shakespeare's have, but a quick look through R. M. Cornelius' book
Christopher Marlowe's Use of the Bible suggest a comparable rate
of overlap with the marked verses.>> - Dave Kathman
-------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.webcom.com/wboyle/bibl1996.htm
by Roger Stritmatter and Mark Anderson
<<Contrary to Kathman's claims, Stritmatter reports that a study of
biblical references in Bacon, Marlowe, and Spenser's Fairie Queene (the
only authors and texts, unfortunately, for which comparable data is
easily available) suggests that the correspondences between the de Vere
Bible and Shakespeare are anything but random. While nearly half of
Shakespeare's top verses can be found marked in the Earl of Oxford's
Bible, the overlap between marked Bible verses and those favored by
other authors approaches zero.
In a few critical cases, the answers supplied by the "quiz key" actually
allow us to correct and fine-tune previous work done by other scholars.
For example, since Carter (1905) it has been generally accepted that
Portia's stirring message in Merchant of Venice about the power of a
tiny candle to cast a blazing light of moral truth in this dark and
"naughty world" -"How far this little candle throws his beam! So shines
a good deed in a naughty world" (MV, V, ii, 61-2)- is a paraphrase of
the New Testament proverb about not hiding your light under a bushel.
Carter and Noble (1935) both associated the image, incorrectly it
transpires, with Matthew 5:16: "Let your light so shine before men that
they may see your good works and glorify your father which is in
heaven."
Matthew 5.16 is not marked in de Vere's Bible. However, the preferred
source of Portia's moral (Philippians 2:15) is marked. We know this is
the preferred source, because both Portia's utterance and Philippians
2:15 include the peculiar collocation of the words, "naughty... world",
and in a footnote to the verse, "candle".
"Now, who said you can't learn by peeking at the answers?" quipped
Anderson.
And, as Stritmatter revealed in his lecture, Portia's moral could not be
more apt. For, as he explained, he had communicated this particular
discovery to Professor Naseeb Shaheen, author of several important books
on Shakespeare and the Bible, during the spring of 1993. When Shaheen's
third book, Biblical References in Shakespepare's Comedies, was
published five months later, it claimed -correctly, but for the first
time in print- that Portia's "naughty world" was a reference to - lo and
behold! - Philippians 2:15. Just how Professor Shaheen "discovered" this
correction, however, remains unpublished.>>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.webcom.com/wboyle/shaheen.htm
by Roger Stritmatter
<<Shaheen prefaces each of his books with a chapter on variant Bibles
("Which Version Shakespeare Used") which summarizes and evaluates the
evidence for Shakespeare's knowledge of each of the major English
Translations. In order of roughly declining influence, these include
The Geneva (f.p. 1560),
The Bishop's (f.p.1568),
Thomson's New Testament (f.p.1576),
The Great Bible (f.p.1539),
The Coverdale (f.p.1529,1535),
The Matthew, largely a reprint of Tyndale and Coverdale (f.p.
1537),
Taverner's (f.p. 1539),
and Tyndale's (f.p.1526,1530) New Testament.
In his previous books, Shaheen found a clear preference for readings
from the Geneva translation: 10 Geneva readings in the Histories and 14
in the Tragedies, with only 11 from all other translations combined in
both genres. In the Comedies, the Geneva is, perhaps, not quite so
preponderant: Shaheen finds four readings from the Geneva, four from the
Bishop's, three of them to Romans 13:10, and five from other
translations combined. The Geneva still seems to predominate,
particularly if all three references to the Bishop's Romans 13:10 are
treated, as they well might be for comparative purposes, as a single
reference. More significantly, Shaheen omits, as I shall demonstrate,
one vital Geneva reading which decisively tips the balance in favor of
the predominance of that translation for the Comedies as well as the
Tragedies and Histories.>>
-------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.webcom.com/wboyle/bible.htm
by Mark Anderson
<<Within the context of Hamlet, Edward de Vere's Bible presents some
compelling evidence. For instance, in Act 3 Scene 3, as Hamlet happens
upon a praying King Claudius, the prince notices that he can revenge his
father's murder. But Hamlet quickly realizes that Claudius' soul will go
to heaven if the king is killed at the altar. Hamlet contrasts this
situation with that of his father's murder: "He took my father grossly,
full of bread." The words "full of bread" have long been recognized by
Shakespeare scholars of all persuasions as a reference to the Bible
--specifically to Ezekiel chapter 16, verse 49. And over a span of more
than 300 verses in the book of Ezekiel, Edward de Vere marks only one:
Ezekiel 16:49.
The Shakespeare character Falstaff brings to light further curious
examples of parallels between de Vere and his Bible. In King Henry IV,
Part Two, Falstaff spits out the insult "whoreson Achitophel!"-- a
direct reference to II Samuel 16:23, which de Vere underlined. In The
Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff brags, "I fear not Golliath with a
weaver's beam." Not only has de Vere underlined the scriptural source
(II Samuel 21:19) for these words, but he even underlined "weaver's
beam" within the biblical verse itself.
An important dramatic centerpiece in The Merchant of Venice is a loan
from the Jewish banker Shylock. Like any other character in Shakespeare,
Shylock has no discernable real-life inspiration. Supposedly. Yet during
his Italian travels, the young Edward de Vere came up short on money in
Venice and had to borrow from a Jewish banker named Pasquino Spinola. De
Vere wrote home to have his father-in-law sell off an estate to pay for
his loan: "I understand the greatness of my debt and greediness of my
creditors grows so dishonourable and troublesome..." Or in the words of
the play's debtor, "My creditors grow cruel, my estate is very low."
Later in Merchant Shylock finds the loan in default, and wants to exact
his revenge. The Duke of Venice intervenes, and they debate each other
by citing two contrasting biblical passages, both of which de Vere
underlined in his Bible (and one of which Stritmatter was the first
scholar to discover).
In Henry V one of the French noblemen asks of the Constable of France,
"The armour that I see in your tent tonight, are those stars or suns
upon it?" This Shakespearean non sequitor is actually a clever reference
to another event fifty years after the time of Henry V. That is, a
battle from the War of the Roses was lost in part because Lancastrian
archers accidentally fired on an allied division under the command of
the 13th Earl of Oxford --through the afternoon fog the star insignia
borne by John de Vere's troops was confused for the emblem of the enemy
forces: a sun. (Whoever he was, Shakespeare certainly could toss off his
share of de Vere family in-jokes.) Later in the play as the victorious
King Henry V approaches, Exeter apostrophizes his monarch by referring
to several apocryphal verses that de Vere underlined in his Bible.
Edward de Vere's writings before he was "suffered to publishe without
his owne name to it" also strike harmonies with the writings of
Shakespeare. One study published last year finds that even obscure words
from Shakespeare prove to be favorites of de Vere as well, and in
general the vocabulary displayed in the letters and peoms from Edward de
Vere overlap with Shakespere by 98 percent. (Although he commanded the
greatest vocabulary of any English writer, all the words Shakespeare
ever used are still only six percent of the Oxford English Disctionary.)
Finally, God's words from the Burning Bush ("I am that I am") have been
found only twice in Elizabethan writings where the author had the
audacity to speak of himself as if he were God --in a personal letter by
Edward de Vere which upbraids his nosy father-in-law for spying and in
Shakespeare's Sonnet 121 which rails at "frailer spies" who have
"adulterate eyes.">>
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.webcom.com/wboyle/bible.htm
http://www.webcom.com/wboyle/bible4.htm
----------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
David Kathman
Nah, I agree, "Publius" definitely isn't Baker. Both the style and
the lack of punctuation errors militate against it being him.
I'm pretty sure it's either Roger Stritmatter or Dan Wright, both
of whose styles I'm pretty familiar with. These posts would fit
either of them like a glove. If it's neither Stritmatter nor
Wright, it's some Oxfordian doing a damn good imitation of them.
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
Elizabeth Weir
I meant that Stritmatter has an artificially high score because in the
eighth year of his struggle with the two most difficult works in the
English language, Stritmatter abandoned his earlier claim that the
verses in the Geneva Bible were 'a match' for verses in the
Shakespeare plays and embraced the 'cluster' theory.
On the Oxfordian website's history of Stritmatter's disseration it
states that Stritmatter had to give up trying to find direct literary
parallels because he wasn't finding them or words to that effect.
Exact or close literary parallels are evidence if the correlation is
beyond statistical chance as it is in Bacon's commonplace book but no
Baconian would ever suggest that the lines in Bacon's notebook be
organized into 'clusters' and matched against lines or 'clusters' of
lines in the plays.
Bacon's notebook would lose all value as empirical evidence.
Burghley, and certainly not Oxford, did not organize the verses into
clusters. The underlined verses make a surprisingly coherent text
that runs from Genesis to Revelation. That could be the result of the
intent of the original editors of the Bible or it could be Burghley's
choice of verses. Probably some of both.
Presuming that Oxford was the annotator, Stritmatter has the
additional burden of proving that Oxford intended to use the verses in
clusters.
Otherwise it's 'Stritmatter's Shakespeare Bible,' because
'cluster-making' is purely subjective.
Vardaman
So I don't get it. Where in the results posted by Ross
does Stritmooter(?) demonstrate that?
Fyodor
So how do you know that's true? Did Stritmatter say that in
the part that Ross posted? If you have a copy of the thing,
I wish you would post some examples.
Fyoder
Tom Reedy
news:9rktoh$tvk$1...@slb0.atl.mindspring.net...
> >news:<Pine.GSO.4.33.0110291046220.7640-100000@mail>...
were
> >> to turn up. Wait -- it gets better. This imaginary Bible has a great
> >> many marks and a few annotations, presumably in the owner's hand. What
> >> would such a Bible be like? Roger Stritmatter thinks it would be like
> >> this:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >Imagine that Terry Ross reinvented himself so completely that he
> >became honest. I know, its difficult to imagine. But they say hope
> >springs eternal.
>
> Or, better yet, address the points Terry made rather than
> just attacking his character. I know it's hard, but you can do it!
>
> dj...@ix.netcom.com
>
Roger can't spell as good as Arthur Publius, even though his debating
methods are the same. Or perhaps he's finally learned how to use Spelchek?
TR
Neuendorffer
> I meant that Stritmatter has an artificially high score because in the
> eighth year of his struggle with the two most difficult works in the
> English language, Stritmatter abandoned his earlier claim that the
> verses in the Geneva Bible were 'a match' for verses in the
> Shakespeare plays and embraced the 'cluster' theory.
>
> On the Oxfordian website's history of Stritmatter's disseration it
> states that Stritmatter had to give up trying to find direct literary
> parallels because he wasn't finding them or words to that effect.
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/everne15.htm#Stritmatter_defense
<<Stritmatter's presentation demonstrated its strength as he moved from
the authorship debate itself into his analysis of the Bible--an analysis
that made comparisons with both Shakespeare's known Bible use, and with
other English and Continental writers. There had been one recent,
significant change made in his approach to this project, a change that
had evolved from working on this thesis over the years and consulting
with his advisors. Whereas his earlier analysis of the Bible annotations
had compiled side by side lists of particular verses annotated and
whether they also appeared in Shakespeare, the thesis in its final form
took the analysis to a new and more enlightening level, namely to a
closer look at the subset of about eighty Biblical passages to which
Shakespeare makes frequent and repeated reference.
This analysis of the annotations broken down into thematic
groups--identified as "image clusters"--are the centerpiece of
Stritmatter's final version of his dissertation. In brief, this analysis
has found that annotator's notes were not random, but in fact kept
returning to a handful of themes scattered throughout the Bible, themes
that, it turns out, clearly resonate with the Shakespeare canon itself,
and even more importantly, with the dynamics of the authorship debate
itself. For these clusters reveal an individual concerned not only with
such familiar matters as usury, almgiving, or the anointment of the
monarch by God, but
also with other, more esoteric matters such as "good works," and, in
particular, "good works" performed in secret, known only to God.
It is this last such insight about the annotator's concerns that clearly
lends strength to the proposition that this Bible--if it is indeed
Shakespeare's--is the Bible of a Shakespeare concerned with doing good
works in secret, which is, of course, exactly the underlying premise of
the entire authorship debate itself--i.e, that the identity of the true
author is secret, and, further, that the true author--like the
annotator--was acutely aware of it (as expressed over and over in the
Sonnets: "And I, once gone, to all the world must die" (81) and "My name
be buried where my body is" (72)).>>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Exact or close literary parallels are evidence if the correlation is
> beyond statistical chance as it is in Bacon's commonplace book but no
> Baconian would ever suggest that the lines in Bacon's notebook be
> organized into 'clusters' and matched against lines or 'clusters' of
> lines in the plays.
>
> Bacon's notebook would lose all value as empirical evidence.
> Burghley, and certainly not Oxford, did not organize the verses into
> clusters. The underlined verses make a surprisingly coherent text
> that runs from Genesis to Revelation. That could be the result of the
> intent of the original editors of the Bible or it could be Burghley's
> choice of verses. Probably some of both.
>
> Presuming that Oxford was the annotator, Stritmatter has the
> additional burden of proving that Oxford intended to use the
> verses in clusters.
>
> Otherwise it's 'Stritmatter's Shakespeare Bible,'
> because 'cluster-making' is purely subjective.
Stating that "'cluster-making' is purely subjective" is purely
subjective
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Which of the following quotes is due to Shakespeare
and which is due to Cervantes (as translated by Shelton)? :
-------------------------------------------------------------------
a) What put you in this pickle? b) How cam'st thou in this pickle?
Time out of mind. Time out of mind.
Without a wink of sleep I have not slept one wink.
At night all cats are grey. The cat is gray.
God and St. George! God and St. George!
Murder will out Murder will speak
Know thyself. Know thyself.
through narrow chinkes and Cranyes day through every cranny spies.
Strike while the iron is hot. Heat me these irons hot.
the naked truth the naked truth
All comparisons are odious. Comparisons are odorous:
The weakest go to the walls. The weakest goes to the wall.
------------------------------------------------------------
The answer at:
http://www.sirbacon.org/links/carrtable1.html
http://www.sirbacon.org/links/carrtable2.html
----------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Okay Fine
I've answered this elsewhere.
1 450 60 13%
2 310 75 24%
3 160 35 22%
4 62 29 47%
Orthodoxy would predict a random relationship. The percentages should
be the same. Instead, Shakespeare's most-cited are Oxford's most-noted.
Prima facie Oxfordianism takes the point.
OF.
Okay Fine
I haven't read the thesis, I looked at the numbers.
1 450 60 13%
2 310 75 24%
3 160 35 22%
4+ 62 29 47%
Orthodoxy predicts that the percentages are the same, heterodoxy
predicts that as Shakespeare's citations increase, Oxford's annotations
should increase. Et le voila, that's how it is.
My Strat friend looked at the evidence and suggested that Shakespeare
had borrowed Oxford's Bible!
OF.
David Kathman
Reedy" <txr...@earthlink.net> wrote:
I'm pretty sure I remember seeing some stuff by Roger which shows
that he has indeed learned to use a spellchecker. Or this could
be Dan Wright, as I said in another post.
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
Vardaman
>Here is a table showing in column
> 1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
> a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
> marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
>
> ## Shax Ox
> 0 9018 864
> 1 450 60
> 2 310 75
> 3 160 35
> 4+ 62 29
>
> Recall that the "9018" could reasonably be something like "36,000" and in
> any event should be more like "13,000." This is the number of
> (potentially "usable") Biblical verses NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> The corresponding column for Oxford's Bible has 864 -- that is, 864 verses
> are marked in Oxford's Bible that are NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
This is nuttier than a coon on coke. There are 36,000 verses to choose
from, and Shakespeare used 450 of them once, but what you should really
do is see what those verses are, not whether they are used once or
twice or whatever, and see if they are underlined in Oxy's bible. Then
you say something like "If the number is a lot more than 20 percent, then
it isn't by chance". Instead he's comparing apples to grape shot. If
Shakespeare uses 450 verses once, 310 verses twice, 160 verses three times,
and 62 verses 4 or more times, then there should be at least close
to 982 underlined in the bible, and what I see is 199. The bible that
Shakespeare had to choose from and the bible that Oxfurd had to choose
from are the same one, right? And who
determined the percentage of verses that are underlined to those that
are just memorized or remembered without underlining?
Vard
Terry Ross
>
> Roger can't spell as good as Arthur Publius, even though his debating
> methods are the same. Or perhaps he's finally learned how to use Spelchek?
You will find "its" for "it's" in the first Arthur Publius post, while the
second has "epistmelogical" for "epistemological," as well as the odd form
"tintsy." I don't think Roger can be ruled out on the basis of Arthur
Publius's superior proof-reading skills.
There are other grounds that would contribute to an identification of
Arthur Publius with Roger:
"Arthur" posts from a hotmail account, and (as has been noted) it is very
easy to create hotmail pseudonyms. Roger also has a hotmail account.
Roger e-mailed me as himself after he read my post. Nine minutes later,
"Arthur Publius" first posted to HLAS.
When Roger is mad at me (and not just mad at me, of course), he typically
attacks me as being dishonest, and he uses words that begin "pseudo," and
he accuses me of trying to intimidate or silence people. I don't
particularly care to post a series of Roger's insults (anyone can verify
his tendencies by searching the usenet archives), but among the "pseudo"
words he has used in previous posts critical of me are "pseudoscholarly,"
"pseudo-scientific," "pseudo-discourse," and "pseudo-innocent"; in the
second Arthur Publius post we find "pseudospeciation." Roger's earlier
use of "pseudo-scientific" may find a further echo in Arthur Publius's
charge of "scientism."
Roger is also quite fond of the word "supposedly," and the hearty
backslapping encouragement offered to Baker is the kind of thing that we
can find in posts by Roger.
Arthur Publius seems a better match for Roger than for Dan Wright or Eric
Ingman or John Baker or anyone else I can think of. Of course it's
possible that Arthur Publius is someone new to the newsgroup, or someone
other than Roger, but at this point I don't see how Roger can be ruled
out. Naturally, if Roger himself denied being the author of the "Arthur
Publius" posts, I would believe him.
Bob Grumman
> the way, wouldn't we expect at least a weak correlation simply because
> people at the same time are likely to emphasize at least some of the same
> verses and because even across times, some verses are more familiar than
> others?
I made the same point somewhere. Can anyone post the 62 Biblical
allusions that Shakespeare used four or more times, and mark which
of them Oxford is supposed to have used? I'll bet at least twenty
of the latter are Very Common Biblical passages.
--Bob G.
Okay Fine
You've invented this number out of the air.
> and what I see is 199. The bible that
> Shakespeare had to choose from and the bible that Oxfurd had to choose
> from are the same one, right? And who
> determined the percentage of verses that are underlined to those that
> are just memorized or remembered without underlining?
>
> Vard
As the citations by Shakespeare rise, the likelihood of a marking in the
Bible also rises.
1 450 60 13%
2 310 75 24%
3 160 35 22%
4+ 62 29 47%
When a verse is not much noticed by Shakespeare (cited only once) it is
also not very likely to be noticed by the owner of the Bible (13%).
When a verse is a Shakespearean favorite (cited at least four times),
the markings are quite common (47%).
That's prima facie evidence that this Geneva Bible was owned by
Shakespeare.
OF.
Okay Fine
The prima facie evidence is that this Bible was owned by Shakespeare and
it was in Oxford's possession. While some discounting for familiarity
might be expected, that does not account for the sparse markings on the
passages Shakespeare cited only once. Shakespeare's taste and the
Bible owner's taste were consistent.
Obviously you have no facts to support your contention that anyone would
mark the passages that Shakespeare cited often. Oh, well....
OF.
Neuendorffer
One often deals with two overlapping fuzzy sets:
one (S) associated with Shakespeare and
the other (X) with candidate-X.
Is a strong overlap (SX) primarily due to
the fact that Shakespeare is, in fact, candidate X.
or to one or more of the following problems:
0) pure coincidence
1) bias in defining the fuzzy sets (particularly the degree of overlap)
2) the small size of the fuzzy super set (F) to which they both belong
3) some sort of causal 'influence' relationship between (S) & (X).
-----------------------------------------------------------------
For example:
-----------------------------------------------------
Sb = Shakespeare bible verses.
Xb = Oxford marked bible verses.
Fb = viable bible verses.
Main problems: 1) possible bias in defining fuzzy sets
-----------------------------------------------------
Sa = Shakespeare aphorisms.
Xa = Baconian aphorisms (in Promus).
Fa = viable Elizabethan aphorisms.
Main problems: 2) the small size of fuzzy super set (Fa)
3) causal relationship between (Sa) & (Xa)
-----------------------------------------------------
Sp = Shakespeare poetic allusions.
Xp = Emariculfe poetic allusions.
Fp = Elizabethan poetic allusions.
Main problems: any or all of the above
-----------------------------------------------------
Sl = Shakespeare word length distribution.
Xl = Marlowe word length distribution.
Fl = Elizabethan word length distribution.
Main problems: any or all of the above
-----------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
> Elizabeth Weir wrote:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Exact or close literary parallels are evidence if the correlation is
> > beyond statistical chance as it is in Bacon's commonplace book but no
> > Baconian would ever suggest that the lines in Bacon's notebook be
> > organized into 'clusters' and matched against lines or 'clusters' of
> > lines in the plays.
> >
> > Bacon's notebook would lose all value as empirical evidence.
>
> > Burghley, and certainly not Oxford, did not organize the verses into
> > clusters. The underlined verses make a surprisingly coherent text
> > that runs from Genesis to Revelation. That could be the result of the
> > intent of the original editors of the Bible or it could be Burghley's
> > choice of verses. Probably some of both.
> >
> > Presuming that Oxford was the annotator, Stritmatter has the
> > additional burden of proving that Oxford intended to use the
> > verses in clusters.
> >
> > Otherwise it's 'Stritmatter's Shakespeare Bible,'
> > because 'cluster-making' is purely subjective.
Druiddandy
popularity. Now why is that?>>
Answer: The lust to own the <Hidden Truth>, and be one of the selected few,
outweighs other concerns. No one ever makes money by joining the Scientologists
(you have to pay and pay), but it will remain popular as long as the individual
gets to resonate with ideas that are not known to ordinary mortals. This fills
a hidden need which the person is totally unaware of, a need that if mentioned
(by a therapist, for example) is violently denied and resisted.
Okay Fine
You spin an intelligent fantasy, but the truth isn't hidden. The Oxford
Bible apparently confirms the anti-Strat position. Instead of another
Strat ad hominem invention, maybe you'd like to deal with the visible.
OF.
MakBane
>[sic]
>popularity. Now why is that?>>
Druiddandy:
>Answer: The lust to own the <Hidden Truth>, and be one of the selected few,
>outweighs other concerns. No one ever makes money by joining the
>Scientologists
>(you have to pay and pay), but it will remain popular as long as the
>individual
>gets to resonate with ideas that are not known to ordinary mortals. This
>fills
>a hidden need which the person is totally unaware of, a need that if
>mentioned
>(by a therapist, for example) is violently denied and resisted.
What a curiosity! A Strat-symp who believes that his opponents are mentally ill
and that he himself is qualified to make the diagnosis. The real problem with
the cast of Stratfordian blow-up dolls in HLAS is that they are envious of the
dynamism of Oxfordian belief. Their own system is so moribund and full of
dissatisfying supposition that they have become mortally frustrated. Well,
guess what. It's going to get worse.
Toby Petzold
American
Thomas C Lay
<snip>
: As the citations by Shakespeare rise, the likelihood of a marking in the
: Bible also rises.
: 1 450 60 13%
: 2 310 75 24%
: 3 160 35 22%
: 4+ 62 29 47%
: When a verse is not much noticed by Shakespeare (cited only once) it is
: also not very likely to be noticed by the owner of the Bible (13%).
But surely the verses "not much noticed by Shakespeare" will tend to be
the 35000 or so that he never cites once - not the ones that he does cite
at one point or another.
Tom
: When a verse is a Shakespearean favorite (cited at least four times),
Bob Grumman
news:41505ec0.01103...@posting.google.com...
It seems nutty to me, too--so far as I follow it. And your discussion
made me think of something that is perhaps obvious: if the Bible Were
Shakespeare's, you would expect just about ALL the texts he used in
his writing to be underlined, and many more that he did not use. I
went through Price's book, for instance, and marked a bunch of
passages that I intended to discuss in a critique of her book I never
got around to writing. But I did make some posts on it, and quoted
various of the marked passages, and quoted NO unmarked passage. Okay,
different circumstance: a critical essay versus a creative work of
drama, but I think my experience with the Price book supports my
point pretty well, anyway.
Jump to another thought:
What Oxfordians need is an annotated copy of Holingshed or Hall, not
of the Bible, really. Anybody of the time could have annotated a
Bible, and most would have annotated many similar passages.
--Bob G.
--
Posted from dunk06.nut-n-but.net [205.161.239.35]
via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Bob Grumman
> > from, and Shakespeare used 450 of them once, but what you should really
> > do is see what those verses are, not whether they are used once or
> > twice or whatever, and see if they are underlined in Oxy's bible. Then
> > you say something like "If the number is a lot more than 20 percent, then
> > it isn't by chance". Instead he's comparing apples to grape shot. If
> > Shakespeare uses 450 verses once, 310 verses twice, 160 verses three times,
> > and 62 verses 4 or more times, then there should be at least close
> > to 982 underlined in the bible,
>
> You've invented this number out of the air.
I know you can't read, Okay, but I must admit that your inability
to add surprised me.
Hermione Winterstale
(Fyodor) wrote in message:
> So who am I? Can anyone guess?
> Fyodor
Do you mean in addition to being Vardaman?
Are you perhaps Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?
Fyodor
Which number? You don't really have a rebuttal do you? Just
vague comments that appear to be a rebuttal.
>
> > and what I see is 199. The bible that
> > Shakespeare had to choose from and the bible that Oxfurd had to choose
> > from are the same one, right? And who
> > determined the percentage of verses that are underlined to those that
> > are just memorized or remembered without underlining?
> >
> > Vard
>
> As the citations by Shakespeare rise, the likelihood of a marking in the
> Bible also rises.
>
> 1 450 60 13%
> 2 310 75 24%
> 3 160 35 22%
> 4+ 62 29 47%
>
> When a verse is not much noticed by Shakespeare (cited only once) it is
> also not very likely to be noticed by the owner of the Bible (13%).
> When a verse is a Shakespearean favorite (cited at least four times),
> the markings are quite common (47%).
>
> That's prima facie evidence that this Geneva Bible was owned by
> Shakespeare.
>
> OF.
This is prima facie evidence that you don't have a clue. Your 13%
for example, comes from dividing 60 by 450. But why on earth
would you do that? Answer: because it gives you a numerical
pattern that by chance appears to be what you want, but doesn't mean
anything. Of the 450 marked verses that occur once in Shakespeare,
only 60 of them are underlined in Oxford's bible, in other words,
less than 20%, so the correspondence is purely by chance. On the
other hand, there are 864 verses underlined in Oxford's bible
that don't appear in Shakespeare, which is far greater than the
number of verses in Oxford's bible that do (199). So there is
no correlation whatsoever between Oxford's bible and Shakespeare's
works.
Fyodor
Ken Kaplan
Ross hasn't dealt with that topic yet. He has tackled James McGill's
statistical analysis of the raw numbers to determine randomness or
not. These are the approximately 200 marked verses that correspond to
the approximately 1000 unique regferences used by Shakespeare using
Shaheen, Noble, etc. as reference guides. Some of these may be
disputed. Terry claims the statistical analysis is flawed.
OK is talking about the 81 "preferred" verses or "Shakespeare
Diagnostics", as Roger termed them. These, I'm sure will be looked at
closely and probably with contention. These 81 verses, according to
Stritmatter, constitute 25% (Appx 500) of ALL the verse usage of
Shakespeare (appx 2000). The *directly* marked verses in the Devere
Bible of what seems to be a very important subset is 33(with Oxford's
letter-a few verse references) or appx 41%. This in itself is a very
high number. The overlap for Marlowe and Shakespeare's preferred
verses is 5%. Bacon is lower, as is Spencer, near 2%.
However, according to Stritmatter, another 13 verses are *indirectly*
marked or cross referenced. If these were included, the percentage
climbs to near 57%. Nearly 25% of these overall "diagnostics" are
from the book of Matthew, which are mostly not marked. Here I disagree
with David Kathman who claims that Devere showed little interest in
Matthew. Matythew is such a well known book, and drilled into the mind
from an early age, it is quite possible that it existed in memory. I
could cite about twenty passages from Matthew off the top of my head
in about 5-10 minutes and I haven't assiduously stidied it. There is
extant evidence in the annotations of a strong aural memory.
To indicate the possible importance of all this, let's look at an
artist like Bob Dylan, certainly one of the most important influences
on popular culture in the second half of the twentieth century. The
image of "rain" has a particular significance to Dylan. He returns to
it again and again especially in some of his greatest songs.
"Tonight as I stand inside the rain"-Just Like a Woman
"The harmonica plays the skeleton keys in the rain"- end of Visions of
Johanna
"And I'm back in the rain"- You're a Big Girl Now"
"the Rainman gave me two cures, and he said "jump right in"
These are off the top of my head. Rain mostly means to Dylan sorrow,
loneliness,
loss. Its a favorite image. It gets repeated in many key places.
Simiarly, certain Biblical themes are more important to Shakespeare
than others.
Therefore Stritmatter claims raw numbers alone don't tell the entire
story. Repetitions of the name of Eve, for example, from Genesis tell
us little about core philosophy (although referencing the fall does).
Should the flight from the Garden be marked? Is there "negligence" if
it isn't?
Devere seemed, according to Stritmatter, to concentrate-in this Bible-
on more obscure, yet important images, mostly from the Old Testament.
The seeming high correlation between marked Devere verses and
Shakespeare "preferred verses" is very important in my opinion.
I think Terry is right in the regard that the Bible study is a
starting point to thoroughly examine usage patterns of others in that
age, among many other points of departure. I'm sure there will be a
more thorough look at the three time verse citations as well as the
"diagnostics" in general. But to dismiss them out of hand is absurd.
Part of Stritmatter's contribution has been to lay the foundation for
Shakespeare's core theology through the examination of his preferred
references.
The entire diagnostics, as well as all the near 1000 verses cited by
Shakespeare are included in Stritmatter's dissertation.
Again I disagree with Terry about this being the "one source". A
"Rosetta Stone" can be an object that highly illuminates an issue, but
it is quite likely Devere had other sources to draw from. Therefore to
make claims about what is *NOT* present or what *SHOULD BE* present,
in my opinion, miss the mark.
Ken Kaplan
Okay Fine
>
> Okay Fine (ein...@qwest.net) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : As the citations by Shakespeare rise, the likelihood of a marking in the
> : Bible also rises.
>
> : 1 450 60 13%
> : 2 310 75 24%
> : 3 160 35 22%
> : 4+ 62 29 47%
>
> : When a verse is not much noticed by Shakespeare (cited only once) it is
> : also not very likely to be noticed by the owner of the Bible (13%).
>
> But surely the verses "not much noticed by Shakespeare" will tend to be
> the 35000 or so that he never cites once - not the ones that he does cite
> at one point or another.
Not much noticed is more noticed than never noticed, so apparently my
remark was perfectly apt and your objection is not. You let stand the
point. The Bible was Oxford's, the Bible was Shakespeare's.
OF.
Okay Fine
Which addition produced the number 36,000?
OF.
Okay Fine
What is the magic that makes 20% the dividing line between chance and
meaning? I stated the precise number: 13%.
As it happens, if it's true as you say that more than 20% confers
meaning on the annotations, you have confirmed my conclusion very
nicely: the verses most-cited by Shakespeare are marked more than 20% by
Oxford. Voila! We agree that it's significant.
> On the
> other hand, there are 864 verses underlined in Oxford's bible
> that don't appear in Shakespeare, which is far greater than the
> number of verses in Oxford's bible that do (199). So there is
> no correlation whatsoever between Oxford's bible and Shakespeare's
> works.
>
> Fyodor
False. You seem to suggest that you won't accept that a Bible was owned
by Shakespeare unless all of his cited verses are noted in the Bible or
perhaps not unless there are more verses cited than noted. Obviously,
either standard is silly.
Anyone can see the pattern: the more often cited by Shakespeare, the
more often annotated by Oxford. Prime facie it's Shakespeare's Bible.
OF.
Hermione Summerfresh
Are you perhaps Peter Farey? You seem to like
him a lot.
Okay Fine
Sorry, Bob, it's too late. The Bible was Oxford's and the Bible was
apparently Shakespeare's.
OF.
Bob Grumman
> >
> > > > This is nuttier than a coon on coke. There are 36,000 verses to choose
> > > > from, and Shakespeare used 450 of them once, but what you should really
> > > > do is see what those verses are, not whether they are used once or
> > > > twice or whatever, and see if they are underlined in Oxy's bible. Then
> > > > you say something like "If the number is a lot more than 20 percent, then
> > > > it isn't by chance". Instead he's comparing apples to grape shot. If
> > > > Shakespeare uses 450 verses once, 310 verses twice, 160 verses three times,
> > > > and 62 verses 4 or more times, then there should be at least close
> > > > to 982 underlined in the bible,
> > >
> > > You've invented this number out of the air.
> >
> > I know you can't read, Okay, but I must admit that your inability
> > to add surprised me.
> >
>
>
Dang, you caught me in yet another error: because you broke into a
sentence right after a mention of "982 underlined in the bible" to
claim that "this number" was invented out of the air," I foolishly
thought you were referring to "982" rather than to the "36,000"
mentioned nine lines before. Verily, you are impregnable, Eric.
I knew I shouldn't have gone up against you again.
--Bob G.
--
Posted from dunk17.nut-n-but.net [205.161.239.46]
Xr...@pxcr8.pxcr.com
On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Okay Fine wrote:
> Thomas C Lay wrote:
> >
> > Okay Fine (ein...@qwest.net) wrote:
> > : The number of usable Bible verses is irrelevant. If the Bible is
> > : Shakespeare's, the likelihood of a verse marking should ascend as the
> > : frequency of its usage by the author. If it is not Shakespeare's, the
> > : likelihood should appear random. In the case of the Oxford Bible, the
> > : pattern is consistent with usage by the author of Shakespeare's works:
> > : the more usage by Shakespeare, the more likely that it's marked by
> > : Oxford.
> >
> > So can you show me the statistics that back up this assertion? And by
> > the way, wouldn't we expect at least a weak correlation simply because
> > people at the same time are likely to emphasize at least some of the same
> > verses and because even across times, some verses are more familiar than
> > others?
>
> You're right, there could be some of what you describe. To get a handle
> on that, we'd have to use as a control a Bible marked by an Oxfordian
> contemporary who knew nothing of Shakespeare's plays.
The most reasonable guess would be that most Elizabethan bible
annotators were very little influenced by Shakespeare's allusions.
If Oxford's bible contained a statistically significantly larger
than average set of parallels to Shakespeare's allusions, we'd
know that at the very least the connection between Shakespeare
and Oxford is stronger than that between Shakespeare and
the average Elizabethan bible annotator.
Four years ago, I suggested to Roger that he "calibrate" his
instrument by crosschecking against other annotated Elizabethan
bibles. For some reason, he apparently decided that he could do
without calibration.
> That would fall
> victim, though, to the complaint that someone who knew nothing of
> Shakespeare's plays would be too different from Oxford to act as a
> useful control.
Personally, I'd have been perfectly happy if Roger had
crosschecked against the bible of someone who knew little
or nothing of Shakespeare's plays. After all, there isn't
much reason to suppose that Oxford knew much about Shakespeare's
work. We'd still have to consider whether he was as diligent
at finding "parallels" in his crosscheck as he was in his
search through Shakespeare looking for matches to annotations
in Oxford's bible, but at least we'd have some sort of a
comparison.
Actually, To do the job right, Roger should have examined
a number of contemporary annotated bibles. Then, if he did
keep his standards for what was a genuine parallel consistent,
he could have obtained an approximate value for the number
of expected parallels between annotations in the average
Elizabethan annotated bible and Shakespeare. Obviously, he
could have also gotten some handle on the size of the
variance one should expect to see in the data.
Without some sort of benchmark for comparison, only
fools will place any credence in arguments based upon
the number of parallels found by Roger. (In fact,
without some verification of the parallels Roger has
claimed, only fools would place credence in his
raw numbers.)
> However, prima facie the Oxfordians have it:
>
> 1 450 60 13%
> 2 310 75 24%
> 3 160 35 22%
> 4 62 29 47%
>
> The right hand column should not trend up as we read down if you want to
> maintain orthodoxy.
>
> The more citations by Shakespeare, the more likely
> that Oxford annotated it.
Actually, the trend is just what I would expect
to see concerning parallels between the annotations
of any Elizabethan bible annotator and Shakespeare.
(The more popular the verse, the more likely Shakespeare
would be to use it more than once and the more popular
the verse, the more likely any annotator would be
to mark it.) You may *claim* that size of the
trend means something but unitl you know the
expected size of the trend, your claim is
based upon nothing but hopeful thinking.
As Tom pointed out, we know that there should be
*some* correlation between any annotated Elizabethan
Bible and Shakespeare and obviously, we don't yet
know what values to expect. Nevertheless, we have
been a number of times treated to you making declarations
logically equivalent to a statement saying that the
count of parallels between Oxford's Bible and Shakespeare
are larger than what would be expected. Apparently, you
think that without a knowledge of the values of both A and
B, one can safely say that A>B. Very very few other
adults think that that's the case.
Rob
Okay Fine
So the 36,000 is actually invented? To what purpose?
OF.
Okay Fine
You're claiming that Shakespeare more likely cited "popular" verses.
That's a big assumption that has to be tested. Maybe they are popular,
maybe not. To get a handle on that, we'd have to look at other
writers. You haven't done that.
The statistics on the Bible are good evidence. That there is room for
skepticism does not consign the obvious conclusions to merely hopeful
thinking. If a very small sample was found, your point would have some
force. For now, the evidence is quite clear: the more often Shakespeare
cited, the more likely Oxford noted. That supports the idea that
Shakespeare used this particular Bible -- not beyond dispute, but
presumptively. It seems clear enough that the hand is Oxford's as well.
> As Tom pointed out, we know that there should be
> *some* correlation between any annotated Elizabethan
> Bible and Shakespeare and obviously, we don't yet
> know what values to expect. Nevertheless, we have
> been a number of times treated to you making declarations
> logically equivalent to a statement saying that the
> count of parallels between Oxford's Bible and Shakespeare
> are larger than what would be expected. Apparently, you
> think that without a knowledge of the values of both A and
> B, one can safely say that A>B. Very very few other
> adults think that that's the case.
I have said the same thing consistently: the more often a verse is
cited, the more likely Oxford noted. That's not what Stratfordianism
would predict. It is what Oxfordianism would predict. Naturally it's
always possible to do more research and efforts will be made to explain
it away, but it's a simple fact with implications that are obvious.
Prime facie, that Bible was used by Shakespeare.
OF.
Xr...@pxcr8.pxcr.com
I'm not the one making the claim that the trend is significant,
so I really don't have to show anything. I merely have to
point out that without benchmarks, we don't know the significance
of the raw values.
> The statistics on the Bible are good evidence. That there is room for
> skepticism does not consign the obvious conclusions to merely hopeful
> thinking.
Without a benchmark, you can't say anything significant about
size of the raw values. Therefore, your calling them significant
is merely a reflection of how you'd like to see them.
> If a very small sample was found, your point would have some
> force.
Here you've simply *assumed* that any benchmark would probably
consist of small numbers.
> For now, the evidence is quite clear: the more often Shakespeare
> cited, the more likely Oxford noted. That supports the idea that
> Shakespeare used this particular Bible -- not beyond dispute, but
> presumptively.
Not unless one is willing to presume, without any knowledge
concerning the value of B, that A is greater than B.
> It seems clear enough that the hand is Oxford's as well.
Actually, I don't think one can detect easily whose
hand it is when the annotation consists of a
line or an arrow or a pointing hand. (It's my
understanding, perhaps mistaken, that the majority
of the annotations are along those lines.) The
bible probably passed through many hands over the
centuries and it is perhaps a bit too much to
expect that only one person ever made marks in
it. (My guess is that this will eventually be
used as the Oxfordian escape route from a bible
which does not particularly match up well with
Shakespeare.)
> > As Tom pointed out, we know that there should be
> > *some* correlation between any annotated Elizabethan
> > Bible and Shakespeare and obviously, we don't yet
> > know what values to expect. Nevertheless, we have
> > been a number of times treated to you making declarations
> > logically equivalent to a statement saying that the
> > count of parallels between Oxford's Bible and Shakespeare
> > are larger than what would be expected. Apparently, you
> > think that without a knowledge of the values of both A and
> > B, one can safely say that A>B. Very very few other
> > adults think that that's the case.
>
> I have said the same thing consistently: the more often a verse is
> cited, the more likely Oxford noted. That's not what Stratfordianism
> would predict.
We may reasonably believe, I think, that all Elizabethans
would be more likely to mark a verse they had a considerable
interest in than they would be to mark one they didn't have
so much interest in. The probability of a mark is likely
significantly correlated with the degree of interest. The
exact same point can be made about Shakespeare. The likelihood
of Shakespeare reusing a verse is probably correlated with
his interest in the verse.
A basic fact is that Shakespeare was Elizabethan. He probably
shared, to a large degree, many of the biblical enthusiasms of his
fellow Elizabethans. Therefore, the set of verses Shakespeare
was most likely to have used more than once is likely very similar
to the set of verses his fellows would have been most likely to
annotate in a bible.
The end result is that for any annotated Elizabethan bible, we'd
predict that the more often Shakespeare used a verse, the more
likely it would be that the verse would be annotated.
The only way we wouldn't expect to predict such a tendency
would be if we knew that Shakespeare's set of verse interests
didn't match up well with the verse interests of most other
Elizabethans. So far as I know, nobody has ever shown that
Shakespeare's interest in bible verses was somewhat odd in
comparison with the interests of more ordinary contemporaries.
> It is what Oxfordianism would predict. Naturally it's
> always possible to do more research and efforts will be made to explain
> it away, but it's a simple fact with implications that are obvious.
> Prime facie, that Bible was used by Shakespeare.
Wrong. You've assumed that Shakespeare's interests in the
bible differ greatly from those of the average Elizabethan
annotator. That's a huge assumption.
Rob
Hermione Winterstale
>
> "Publius" is probably baker, since baker uses pseudonyms with
> the hotmail domain name posted through Google, which allows
> you to put any email address in the header (Alcibiades, Telemachos,
> John_Padden etc). The poster is also as dumb as baker. However,
> it could also be someone trying to look like him by taking on a
> Latin-sounding name and posting through Google.
> Jim
He appears to be awfully busy being 'Vardaman' and 'Fyodor' at the moment.
Bob Grumman
> >
> > Dang, you caught me in yet another error: because you broke into a
> > sentence right after a mention of "982 underlined in the bible" to
> > claim that "this number" was invented out of the air," I foolishly
> > thought you were referring to "982" rather than to the "36,000"
> > mentioned nine lines before. Verily, you are impregnable, Eric.
> > I knew I shouldn't have gone up against you again.
> >
> > --Bob G.
>
> So the 36,000 is actually invented? To what purpose?
>
> OF.
Read and think for once in your life, you silly moron. What I have
agreed to is that YOU claimed that 36,000 rather than 982 was
invented. If you were referring to 36,000, then I was wrong to
say you could not add, since that number was not given as a sum
of other numbers.
This kind of misreading of yours to find miniscule off-to-the-side
trip-ups by your opponents is typical of your stupidity. This one
is so flagrant that I am bringing it to your attention in hopes that
maybe even you will recognize it and perhaps, as a result, lower
your arrogance a notch or two.
--Bob G.
--
Posted from dunk74.nut-n-but.net [205.161.239.103]
Elizabeth Weir
> apub...@hotmail.com (Arthur Publius) wrote in message news:<5dcf9f2e.0110...@posting.google.com>...
> > Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message news:<Pine.GSO.4.33.0110291046220.7640-100000@mail>...
> > > to turn up. Wait -- it gets better. This imaginary Bible has a great
> > > many marks and a few annotations, presumably in the owner's hand. What
> > > would such a Bible be like? Roger Stritmatter thinks it would be like
> > > this:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Imagine that Terry Ross reinvented himself so completely that he
> > became honest. I know, its difficult to imagine. But they say hope
> > springs eternal.
>
> So who am I? Can anyone guess?
>
> Fyodor
You're Webb, of course. Congratulations for getting pseud from a book
I haven't read and never will read.
Re: On Character, Tame Cats and Merchant Actors
... preclude some dregs of pity for Humbert. By analogy, Fyodor
Godunov-Cherdyntsev's
savage biography of Chernyshevskii in _Dar_ reflects Nabokov's
loathing and ...
humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare - 02 Oct 2001 by David L. Webb -
View Thread (11 articles)
Re: Was the Stationers' Registery Open on Sunday?
... many of his own interests and traits. He gives his character
Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev
his passion for lepidoptera, not to mention something of the pain of
...
humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare - 30 Jul 2001 by David L. Webb -
View Thread (46 articles)
Re: Are Straffordians Fully Conscious of What Shakespeare Was ...
... Oxfordian anagram). Indeed, were I to choose a pseudonym referring
explicitly to
a Nabokov work, I would certainly have selected Godunov-Cherdyntsev.
David ...
humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare - 18 Sep 2001 by David L. Webb -
View Thread (86 articles)
Re: Literature About Work Satisfaction?
... spanned by the novel, although, as Nabokov notes in his Foreword,
Godunov-Cherdyntsev's
contempt for "Karmania" (or "the Fetterland" in the English) reflects
...
rec.arts.books - 18 Mar 1999 by David L. Webb - View Thread (29
articles)
Re: Help! Books that Never Were
... re perhaps less intriguing than Knight's books. In _The Gift_,
Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev's
fictional biography of Chernyshevsky is reproduced in full, as are ...
rec.arts.books - 03 May 1998 by David L. Webb - View Thread (27
articles)
Re: "278 Books You Should Have Read by Now"
... Somewhere in _The Gift_ by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Feodor
Konstantinovich
Godunov-Cherdyntsev mentions five Russian modern poets on B, never
naming them ...
rec.arts.books - 13 Aug 1996 by belka - View Thread (81 articles)
Re: I'm Sick Of This Oxfordian Bull About John Gielgud
... his chances of an avidly-sought position there; Nabokov's
character Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev
attacked the philosophy of the almost sacrosanct liberal Russian ...
humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare - 08 Jul 2000 by David L. Webb -
View Thread (14 articles)
KQKnave
Grumman" <bobgr...@nut-n-but.net> writes:
>This kind of misreading of yours to find miniscule off-to-the-side
>trip-ups by your opponents is typical of your stupidity. This one
>is so flagrant that I am bringing it to your attention in hopes that
>maybe even you will recognize it and perhaps, as a result, lower
>your arrogance a notch or two.
>
I don't think he is misreading. I think he deliberately phrases his
response to be ambiguous, so that no matter what you reply he
can say it's something else.
Jim
David L. Webb
Weir <elizabe...@mail.com> wrote:
[...]
You're quite wrong -- as you have been in virtually all the
attributions I've seen you attempt in this newsgroup. If I *had*
adopted a pseudonym from a Nabokov novel, I would certainly have
selected Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, as I noted earlier. However, I
have not done so, and someone else whose evident good taste I heartily
approve has already beaten me to it.
In fact, I have never posted anything to h.l.a.s. pseudonymously.
(Several of my posts last year appeared under the name "Courier" thanks
to the kindness of a friend, who posted them for me when I was in South
America and unable to post myself, but even those posts were clearly
signed by me.) Your paranoia is showing.
It's a pity, though, that you "haven't read and never will read"
_Dar_; it is in my opinion the masterpiece of Nabokov's Russian period,
surpassing even _Zashchita Luzhina_.
David Webb
john_baker
wrote:
>
>
>
>So explain to me: Do you have any clue how Baker's blather about
>fifty-fifty chances is relevant to anything? I don't.
>
>Tom
Tom,
Let's see if I can help!!!
There is a huge school of thought about this and you will find it in
Economics.
There simply isn't a real connection between statistics that apply to
classes and/or large numbers and to particular cases.
No connection.
This Bible was either used by Shakespeare or it wasn't.
Only one example would be need to prove this. Or a no example, such
as a "fingerprint."
Like those on da Vinci's paintings....
The statistics Roger uses and TR kicks about and Art takes exception
to...are only for fun and games.
Even if they "proved" that this Bible wasn't used by Shakespeare, it
still either was or wasn't. The proof has nothing to do with the
fact.
So the use of statistics in a particular case isn't of much
importance.
This was either the Bible Shakespeare used or it wasn't.
baker
John Baker
Visit my Webpage:
http://www2.localaccess.com/marlowe
or e-mail me at: Mar...@localaccess.com
"The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood.
He who will be proved right in the end appears to be
wrong and harmful before it."
_Darkness at Noon_, Arthur Koestler
john_baker
<dj...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>In article <3BDF1724...@bu.edu>, Erik Nielsen <enie...@bu.edu> wrote:
>>
>>
>>KQKnave wrote:
>>>
>>> In article <7b369ddfe88e9b98451...@mygate.mailgate.org>, "Bob
>>> Grumman" <bobgr...@nut-n-but.net> writes:
>>>
>>> >
>>> >"Arthur Publius" <apub...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>>> >news:5dcf9f2e.0110...@posting.google.com...
>>> >
>>> >> Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message
>>> >news:<Pine.GSO.4.33.0110291046220.7640-100000@mail>...
>>> >> > Imagine that a Bible belonging to the author of Shakespeare's works were
>>> >> > to turn up. Wait -- it gets better. This imaginary Bible has a great
>>> >> > many marks and a few annotations, presumably in the owner's hand. What
>>> >> > would such a Bible be like? Roger Stritmatter thinks it would be like
>>> >> > this:
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >> Imagine that Terry Ross reinvented himself so completely that he
>>> >> became honest. I know, its difficult to imagine. But they say hope
>>> >> springs eternal.
>>> >>
>>> >
>>> >Hmmm, is this Okay Fine echo Roger Stritmatter? Is Okay Fine
>>> >Stritmatter? I note not only the similarity in style but in
>>> >content: accusations of error or lies with no evidence presented,
>>> >nor the errors or lies even directly presented.
>>> >
>>> >Tell us, Publius: which of Terry's statements is dishonest and why?
>>> >
>>>
>>> "Publius" is probably baker, since baker uses pseudonyms with
>>> the hotmail domain name posted through Google, which allows
>>> you to put any email address in the header (Alcibiades, Telemachos,
>>> John_Padden etc). The poster is also as dumb as baker. However,
>>> it could also be someone trying to look like him by taking on a
>>> Latin-sounding name and posting through Google.
>>>
>>I don't think so... this is an incisive, penetrating, magisterial
>>stupidity, a completely humorless stupidity. Baker is unintentionally
>>amusing, but if this were Baker, he'd be supplementing that with
>>attempts at intentional amusement.
>
>Nah, I agree, "Publius" definitely isn't Baker. Both the style and
>the lack of punctuation errors militate against it being him.
>I'm pretty sure it's either Roger Stritmatter or Dan Wright, both
>of whose styles I'm pretty familiar with. These posts would fit
>either of them like a glove. If it's neither Stritmatter nor
>Wright, it's some Oxfordian doing a damn good imitation of them.
>
>Dave Kathman
>dj...@ix.netcom.com
Well I know its not me...
But I think its Alki....
john
Ken Kaplan
be followed by someone. But I'm not so sure about your contention
about "popular" passages being marked that would be of interest to
most Elizabethans. From reading the dissertation, I gather that one of
Devere's main interests was not the most well known passages but
certain images and themes from the Old Testament, many of them more
obscure, but many having bearing on Shakespeare's philosophy. To
Grumman. The list you want is in the dissertation. All 982 unique
Shakespeare references are listed as well as where they appear in the
canon. To Weir. Usury 50 times? Guess that has no bearing on
Shakespeare. Oops. Forgot a little play called Merchant of Venice
starring a JEW, and all that other stuff about material ambition. No
relevance. Nah.
Ken Kaplan
Xr...@pXcr8.pXcr.com wrote in message news:<Pine.A41.4.20.011101...@pcr8.pcr.com>...
Elizabeth Weir
> -------------------------------------------------
> One often deals with two overlapping fuzzy sets:
>
> one (S) associated with Shakespeare and
> the other (X) with candidate-X.
>
> Is a strong overlap (SX) primarily due to
> the fact that Shakespeare is, in fact, candidate X.
>
> or to one or more of the following problems:
>
> 0) pure coincidence
> 1) bias in defining the fuzzy sets (particularly the degree of overlap)
Here's your problem, Art. Shakespeare's or rather Bacon's 'fuzzy set'
is a given. Oxford's or rather Stritmatter's 'fuzzy set' was
constructed by Stritmatter.
Since his first thesis failed--Stritmatter couldn't find a
statistically significant number of matches between verses and lines,
Stritmatter injected the human factor by taking it on himself to
'assemble clusters.' That's not only purely subjective but
Stritmatter is assuming that he knows what Oxford would have
'clustered' had Oxford 'clustered.'
I don't see how you can defend any of this.
> 2) the small size of the fuzzy super set (F) to which they both belong
> 3) some sort of causal 'influence' relationship between (S) & (X).
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> For example:
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Sb = Shakespeare bible verses.
> Xb = Oxford marked bible verses.
> Fb = viable bible verses.
Excuse me but collection and classification of evidence is a science
in itself. Even disserations in literary criticism are supposed to be
scientific. There are *rules.* Stritmatter has made his own rules.
Stritmatter has altered the evidence.
> Main problems: 1) possible bias in defining fuzzy sets
Add to that Stritmatter's bias in *creating* fuzzy sets.
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Sa = Shakespeare aphorisms.
> Xa = Baconian aphorisms (in Promus).
> Fa = viable Elizabethan aphorisms.
>
>
> Main problems: 2) the small size of fuzzy super set (Fa)
> 3) causal relationship between (Sa) & (Xa)
The Main Problem for Oxfordians is that there *is* a 'causal
relationship between Sa and Xa.
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Sp = Shakespeare poetic allusions.
> Xp = Emariculfe poetic allusions.
> Fp = Elizabethan poetic allusions.
>
> Main problems: any or all of the above
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Sl = Shakespeare word length distribution.
> Xl = Marlowe word length distribution.
> Fl = Elizabethan word length distribution.
>
> Main problems: any or all of the above
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Art Neuendorffer
>
> > Elizabeth Weir wrote:
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > Exact or close literary parallels are evidence if the correlation is
> > > beyond statistical chance as it is in Bacon's commonplace book but no
> > > Baconian would ever suggest that the lines in Bacon's notebook be
> > > organized into 'clusters' and matched against lines or 'clusters' of
> > > lines in the plays.
> > >
> > > Bacon's notebook would lose all value as empirical evidence.
>
> > > Burghley, and certainly not Oxford, did not organize the verses into
> > > clusters. The underlined verses make a surprisingly coherent text
> > > that runs from Genesis to Revelation. That could be the result of the
> > > intent of the original editors of the Bible or it could be Burghley's
> > > choice of verses. Probably some of both.
> > >
> > > Presuming that Oxford was the annotator, Stritmatter has the
> > > additional burden of proving that Oxford intended to use the
> > > verses in clusters.
> > >
> > > Otherwise it's 'Stritmatter's Shakespeare Bible,'
> > > because 'cluster-making' is purely subjective.
>
> Neuendorffer wrote:
> >
> > Stating that "'cluster-making' is purely subjective" is purely
> > subjective.
See my remarks on Stritmatter's unscientific approach to his evidence
above.
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Which of the following quotes is due to Shakespeare
> > and which is due to Cervantes (as translated by Shelton)? :
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------
> > a) What put you in this pickle? b) How cam'st thou in this pickle?
> > Time out of mind. Time out of mind.
> > Without a wink of sleep I have not slept one wink.
> > At night all cats are grey. The cat is gray.
> > God and St. George! God and St. George!
> > Murder will out Murder will speak
> > Know thyself. Know thyself.
> > through narrow chinkes and Cranyes day through every cranny spies.
> > Strike while the iron is hot. Heat me these irons hot.
> > the naked truth the naked truth
> > All comparisons are odious. Comparisons are odorous:
> > The weakest go to the walls. The weakest goes to the wall.
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The answer at:
> >
> > http://www.sirbacon.org/links/carrtable1.html
> > http://www.sirbacon.org/links/carrtable2.html
> > ----------------------------------------------------------
Hermione Summerfresh
Did I miss something? Where is the correlation between the bible and
Shakespeare?
Vardaman
What in the name of God are you babbling about? I knew a retarded
bucktoothed blind banjo player that sat all day on a cracker barrel who
made more sense than you do.
Charles Maitland
I'm confused by your response but I think I have to agree with Vardaman
and Bob. There is no correlation to the numbers presented by Stritmatter.
Charles Maitland
Fyodor
Do you ever have an argument or do you just post willy-nilly the
opposite of what the last person said? You've been made to look silly
by Ross, Vardaman and Bob, yet you just continue in the same vein.
Fyodor
Erik Nielsen
> There is a huge school of thought about this and you will find it in
> Economics.
This sentence ought to be framed and hung somewhere. The mellifluous
words of Baker at their "finest".
Okay Fine
The more often we find a biblical passage in Shakespeare, the more
likely that Oxford marked the same passage.
OF.
Okay Fine
I'm way past your mock insult and back to trying to get you to explain
why you made up that number. But maybe you copied it...? Anyway, the
point is old.
Are you saying that your choice of the number 36,000 was adventitious of
your argument? I might have gotten that part wrong.
OF.
Okay Fine
False. You made a claim without any basis. You have to show it's valid
and you haven't.
> > The statistics on the Bible are good evidence. That there is room for
> > skepticism does not consign the obvious conclusions to merely hopeful
> > thinking.
>
> Without a benchmark, you can't say anything significant about
> size of the raw values. Therefore, your calling them significant
> is merely a reflection of how you'd like to see them.
False. If the trend was reversed or haphazard, the stats would not
indicate that Shakespeare used the Bible. Instead, they give us a prima
facie correlation the supports Oxfordianism.
> > If a very small sample was found, your point would have some
> > force.
>
> Here you've simply *assumed* that any benchmark would probably
> consist of small numbers.
I've assumed nothing and made a cogent point.
> > For now, the evidence is quite clear: the more often Shakespeare
> > cited, the more likely Oxford noted. That supports the idea that
> > Shakespeare used this particular Bible -- not beyond dispute, but
> > presumptively.
>
> Not unless one is willing to presume, without any knowledge
> concerning the value of B, that A is greater than B.
False. We have data from two sources. The pattern is clear. If you
have some other data that shows my sound prima facie conclusion is
unsound, present your data. Until then, you're a skeptic without
supporting evidence.
> > It seems clear enough that the hand is Oxford's as well.
>
> Actually, I don't think one can detect easily whose
> hand it is when the annotation consists of a
> line or an arrow or a pointing hand. (It's my
> understanding, perhaps mistaken, that the majority
> of the annotations are along those lines.)
> > > As Tom pointed out, we know that there should be
Sure, but the correlation in this case is quite strong. It makes a
prima facie case for Oxfordianism that you can only reverse with
evidence.
> The only way we wouldn't expect to predict such a tendency
> would be if we knew that Shakespeare's set of verse interests
> didn't match up well with the verse interests of most other
> Elizabethans. So far as I know, nobody has ever shown that
> Shakespeare's interest in bible verses was somewhat odd in
> comparison with the interests of more ordinary contemporaries.
Until you demonstrate the above with evidence your argument lacks
force. Elizabethan interests in the bible surely varied widely from one
person to another. The data before us indicate considerable congruence
between two texts that offer large samples.
> > It is what Oxfordianism would predict. Naturally it's
> > always possible to do more research and efforts will be made to explain
> > it away, but it's a simple fact with implications that are obvious.
> > Prime facie, that Bible was used by Shakespeare.
>
> Wrong. You've assumed that Shakespeare's interests in the
> bible differ greatly from those of the average Elizabethan
> annotator. That's a huge assumption.
Naturally you'd like to argue that the correlation should be greater.
If you didn't, you'd have to admit that your position is damaged. To
borrow some of your logic, Shakespeare's life was different from
Elizabethans -- he wasn't average -- so his bible interests would likely
be different as well. Unless you can show evidence to make his life
look normal.
OF.
Okay Fine
That's kind of amusing, because you tried to counter my argument and I
made you look silly.
OF.
KQKnave
>> Do you ever have an argument or do you just post willy-nilly the
>> opposite of what the last person said? You've been made to look silly
>> by Ross, Vardaman and Bob, yet you just continue in the same vein.
>>
>> Fyodor
>
>That's kind of amusing, because you tried to counter my argument and I
>made you look silly.
>
>OF.
>
That's amusing, because you tried to counter their arguments and they
made you look silly.
Jim
Paul Crowley
[to OK Fine}
> The only way we wouldn't expect to predict such a tendency
> would be if we knew that Shakespeare's set of verse interests
> didn't match up well with the verse interests of most other
> Elizabethans. So far as I know, nobody has ever shown that
> Shakespeare's interest in bible verses was somewhat odd in
> comparison with the interests of more ordinary contemporaries.
You have a point -- but not much of one IMHO.
Think of it like this -- suppose you and I were to
read the Bible very carefully. What is the likelihood
that we'd find the same verses interesting or
remarkable, and mark them? (And we would,
I suggest, represent a highly biased selection,
being from a most peculiar, irreligious age,
with values far removed from both those of the
Elizabethans and the Israelites -- so, for example,
we would be struck by passages where wife-
beating was approved, whereas they'd have
found them unremarkable.)
In reality, it would not be hard to check -- we don't
have to find another bible with about the same
number of underlinings -- we simply have to go
through a selection of Elizabethan texts, from a
wide variety of authors, and mark the biblical
verses to which they refer, keeping count of the
frequency. That will give us a measure of their
popularity. We could stop after a 1,000 or so
verses have been marked-- for the sake of this
exercise.
Or we could go on, tabulating the differences
between authors, to appreciate the degree of
variance.
But, I would have thought that any good scholar, well
up on both Elizabethan literature and biblical studies,
could give us a fairly sound opinion from little more
than a glance at the markings in De Vere's bible.
Paul.
--
Email: pebj...@ubgznvy.pbz (apply ROT13)
john_baker
wrote:
If you don't like my suff...don't read it.
And if you don't understand this thought in Economics...it is only
proof of your ignorance of the subject.
john
john_baker
wrote:
>Quoth Baker:
If you don't like my suff...don't read it.
And if you don't understand this thought in Economics...it is only
proof of your ignorance of the subject.
john
Erik Nielsen
john, baker wrote:
>
> On Fri, 02 Nov 2001 00:35:58 -0500, Erik Nielsen <enie...@bu.edu>
> wrote:
>
> >Quoth Baker:
> >
> >> There is a huge school of thought about this and you will find it in
> >> Economics.
>
> >This sentence ought to be framed and hung somewhere. The mellifluous
> >words of Baker at their "finest".
>
> If you don't like my suff...don't read it.
>
> And if you don't understand this thought in Economics...it is only
> proof of your ignorance of the subject.
I wasn't laughing at your "thought" (this time); I was laughing at that
exceedingly unfortunate sentence.
And as for not liking your "suff": have you ever considered taking it
somewhere where it wasn't cluttering up the newsgroup? Or not posting
it at all? I can't imagine that anyone with any kind of intelligence
particularly likes it... unless they have a cruel sense of humor.
Xr...@pxcr8.pxcr.com
You're just trying to shift the burden of proof.
However, it is true that I did say that I would
expect to see some degree of correlation between
the popularity of a verse in Elizabethan culture
and the likelihood of Shakespeare's using that
verse more than once. Even though the basis
for that statement is perfectly obvious, what
the hell...
#1. All humans are more likely to write or make notes on
things they find interesting than they are to refer to
things they do not find interesting. Generally, they
will most frequently refer to the things they find
most interesting.
#2. The basis of a culture is the shared likes and dislikes
of its members.
#3. The most reasonable supposition about any member of a
culture is that he shares most of the interests of
that culture. Therefore, any member of a society will
likely frequently refer to some of the ideas other
members of the society frequently refer to.
Substitute in bible verses for ideas, some particular
bible annotator for the former member of Elizabethan
society and Shakespeare for the latter member, and we're
led directly to expect something along the lines of what
we see for the Oxford bible annotation/Shakespeare allusion
counts. (ie. What you've been calling a "trend.")
A careful examination of a set of example statistics
would possibly be instructive, but I really don't have the
time to go through it now. Maybe later.
> > > The statistics on the Bible are good evidence. That there is room for
> > > skepticism does not consign the obvious conclusions to merely hopeful
> > > thinking.
> >
> > Without a benchmark, you can't say anything significant about
> > size of the raw values. Therefore, your calling them significant
> > is merely a reflection of how you'd like to see them.
>
> False. If the trend was reversed or haphazard, the stats would not
> indicate that Shakespeare used the Bible. Instead, they give us a prima
> facie correlation the supports Oxfordianism.
Since the direction of the trend is what we would expect to
see in any study concerning the biblical annotations and
allusions of any two Elizabethans, your statement is
logically equivalent to a statement saying that the
fact that Oxford was an Elizabethan is prima facie evidence
that he was Shakespeare.
> > > If a very small sample was found, your point would have some
> > > force.
> >
> > Here you've simply *assumed* that any benchmark would probably
> > consist of small numbers.
>
> I've assumed nothing and made a cogent point.
You certainly *did* assume something and in any case,
for you to have made a cogent point, you'd have had
to used your organ of reason for something other than
simply reformulating your basic statement.
Here's what you wrote: "If a very small sample was found,
your point would have some force." There is some question
about what you meant by the word "sample," but we'll
disregard that. The basic assumption behind your statement
is that you already *know* that if someday another study
using another annotated bible is conducted, the sample
(whatever that is) discovered will be small.
Do you think anyone has noticed that you told us,
yet again, that even when we don't yet know the value
of B, it is safest to assume that A > B?
> > > For now, the evidence is quite clear: the more often Shakespeare
> > > cited, the more likely Oxford noted. That supports the idea that
> > > Shakespeare used this particular Bible -- not beyond dispute, but
> > > presumptively.
> >
> > Not unless one is willing to presume, without any knowledge
> > concerning the value of B, that A is greater than B.
>
> False. We have data from two sources.
To show what you'd like to show, you'd need data from at
least three sources before you could even begin to make
any logical statements about the connection you wish to see.
> The pattern is clear. If you
> have some other data that shows my sound prima facie conclusion is
> unsound, present your data. Until then, you're a skeptic without
> supporting evidence.
The person with supporting evidence is supposed to be the
person making the assertion and since you are claiming
some sort of *special* connection, that's you.
Suppose I decided to look at the relative frequency of
a few function words in a set of texts. In the first
two texts I look at, I see that both texts
employ the words 'and', 'or', 'from', and 'to' in
decreasing frequency. I've got data from two sources.
I've got a clear pattern. Is that prima facie
evidence that the two texts were written by the
same man?
I think not.
And how do you know that the correlation is stronger than what
would be expected? Revealed wisdom?
> > The only way we wouldn't expect to predict such a tendency
> > would be if we knew that Shakespeare's set of verse interests
> > didn't match up well with the verse interests of most other
> > Elizabethans. So far as I know, nobody has ever shown that
> > Shakespeare's interest in bible verses was somewhat odd in
> > comparison with the interests of more ordinary contemporaries.
>
> Until you demonstrate the above with evidence your argument lacks
> force. Elizabethan interests in the bible surely varied widely from one
> person to another.
It's certainly true that interests would have varied.
How widely is a subject that needs to be studied.
That's why I suggested that Roger should have tried
to look at a number of annotated bibles.
> The data before us indicate considerable congruence
> between two texts that offer large samples.
What you have is "one" data point. You claim that it is
higher than expected, but I have no idea why you expect
*anyone* to believe your claim. You *think* the correlation
is high, but you have presented absolutely no evidence to
show that that is so. It's almost as if you wished
to come across as logically incompetent. If that's
the case, here's an opportunity you won't want to miss:
Tell me, do you think that the statement "1000 > x" is
more likely to be true than the statement "1 > x"?
> > > It is what Oxfordianism would predict. Naturally it's
> > > always possible to do more research and efforts will be made to explain
> > > it away, but it's a simple fact with implications that are obvious.
> > > Prime facie, that Bible was used by Shakespeare.
> >
> > Wrong. You've assumed that Shakespeare's interests in the
> > bible differ greatly from those of the average Elizabethan
> > annotator. That's a huge assumption.
>
> Naturally you'd like to argue that the correlation should be greater.
> If you didn't, you'd have to admit that your position is damaged.
You think your questioning my motivations is going to do what?
Provoke me into questioning yours?
You'll notice that I have not been arguing that the correlation should
be greater. I've simply been arguing that without first establishing
some sort of scale, we can't say anything about the significance of the
size of the correlation.
> To
> borrow some of your logic, Shakespeare's life was different from
> Elizabethans -- he wasn't average -- so his bible interests would likely
> be different as well.
Borrowing my logic? I have no idea what you are talking about.
I'm quite sure that Shakespeare was not the average Elizabethan,
but I have no idea why anyone would think that someone's being
non-average necessarily implies that their interests differ
greatly from their neighbors. (It is certainly not a logical
deduction.)
> Unless you can show evidence to make his life
> look normal.
So you are now saying that, unless we can show otherwise,
it is safest to assume that Shakespeare's likes and
dislikes were quite different from those of his fellow
Elizabethans? It's essentially a claim that Shakespeare
wasn't an Elizabethan.
Rob
Bob Grumman
news:74ff36b5.01110...@posting.google.com...
I suppose Baker is closer to being those two than Oxford or Marlowe
is to being Shakespeare, but he is incapable of understanding
Stratfordianism well enough to pose as any kind of intelligent
Stratfordian, as both Vardaman and Fyodor are. By the way, where
has ol' ALcibiades gotten to?
--Bob G.
--
Posted from dunk06.nut-n-but.net [205.161.239.35]
Bob Grumman
> >trip-ups by your opponents is typical of your stupidity. This one
> >is so flagrant that I am bringing it to your attention in hopes that
> >maybe even you will recognize it and perhaps, as a result, lower
> >your arrogance a notch or two.
> >
>
> I don't think he is misreading. I think he deliberately phrases his
> response to be ambiguous, so that no matter what you reply he
> can say it's something else.
>
>
> Jim
Now that I think about it, I think you're right, Jim. But I think
he accidentally goes from ambiguous to wrong at times.
--Bob G.
--
Posted from dunk06.nut-n-but.net [205.161.239.35]
john_baker
>On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Tom Reedy wrote:
>
>>
>> Roger can't spell as good as Arthur Publius, even though his debating
>> methods are the same. Or perhaps he's finally learned how to use Spelchek?
>
>
>You will find "its" for "it's" in the first Arthur Publius post, while the
>second has "epistmelogical" for "epistemological," as well as the odd form
>"tintsy." I don't think Roger can be ruled out on the basis of Arthur
>Publius's superior proof-reading skills.
>
>There are other grounds that would contribute to an identification of
>Arthur Publius with Roger:
>
>"Arthur" posts from a hotmail account, and (as has been noted) it is very
>easy to create hotmail pseudonyms. Roger also has a hotmail account.
>
>Roger e-mailed me as himself after he read my post. Nine minutes later,
>"Arthur Publius" first posted to HLAS.
>
>When Roger is mad at me (and not just mad at me, of course), he typically
>attacks me as being dishonest, and he uses words that begin "pseudo," and
>he accuses me of trying to intimidate or silence people. I don't
>particularly care to post a series of Roger's insults (anyone can verify
>his tendencies by searching the usenet archives), but among the "pseudo"
>words he has used in previous posts critical of me are "pseudoscholarly,"
>"pseudo-scientific," "pseudo-discourse," and "pseudo-innocent"; in the
>second Arthur Publius post we find "pseudospeciation." Roger's earlier
>use of "pseudo-scientific" may find a further echo in Arthur Publius's
>charge of "scientism."
>
>Roger is also quite fond of the word "supposedly," and the hearty
>backslapping encouragement offered to Baker is the kind of thing that we
>can find in posts by Roger.
>
>Arthur Publius seems a better match for Roger than for Dan Wright or Eric
>Ingman or John Baker or anyone else I can think of. Of course it's
>possible that Arthur Publius is someone new to the newsgroup, or someone
>other than Roger, but at this point I don't see how Roger can be ruled
>out. Naturally, if Roger himself denied being the author of the "Arthur
>Publius" posts, I would believe him.
>
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
> http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
Naaaa, its gotta be Jim or Kathman...
Ken Kaplan
McGill's analysis which focused on the chi square evaluations. You
bypassed or ignored the first set of statistics which dealt with the
possibility of random correlation for the base set of approximately
200 Devere marked verses in relation to the unique set of
approximately 1000 recognized Shakespeare verses.
On the first pass, there was a less than 1% chance of random
association, according to McGill. On the second pass, using more
conservative figures, the chance of random association still was
close to 2%.
By the way, imagine that someone was credited with writing the
greatest set of literary works in the history of Western Civilization.
Yet not one letter could be found from the person and the only
surviving letter addressed to him was about a substantial loan of
money. His family was either completely or nearly completely
illiterate. There is no uncontested surviving evidence of any books he
owned or used, including the Bible, even though his works reflect
intimate knowledge of hundreds of sources, or any surviving
manuscripts. Not one contemporary unequivocably in his lifetime refers
to him as a writer, much less the author of the works to which he has
been given credit. His signature reflects a person who could barely
hold a pen, much less write fluently. There is not one piece of
information from any source that reveals how this most gifted of men
acquired his general knowledge or facility with language. There is not
one scintilla of evidence of any of his juvenalia and virtually no
tradition or evidence in any meaningful way from his place of origin
as to some recognition of his emerging ggenius. Moreover, there is not
one piece of information that reveals his motives or thoughts about
anything, leaving critics free rein to be all over the map in
attempting to understand him. His most intimate poems are such a
mystery that scholars are undecided as to whether they are "fictive
devices" or not. His greatest biographer laments his "elusiveness" and
yearns for one small scrap of information that would definitively show
us some glimpse of the man. One of his latest biographers throws up
her hands in disgust at the whole enterprise at the end of her work.
We could go on, couldn't we....but we've been there, done that ad
nauseum.
Ken Kaplan
Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message news:<Pine.GSO.4.33.0110291046220.7640-100000@mail>...
> Imagine that a Bible belonging to the author of Shakespeare's works were
> to turn up. Wait -- it gets better. This imaginary Bible has a great
> many marks and a few annotations, presumably in the owner's hand. What
> would such a Bible be like? Roger Stritmatter thinks it would be like
> this:
>
> * It would not bear the name of Shakespeare or any of his friends, family,
> relatives, associates, or acquaintances.
>
> * It would not bear the names of any of his plays or poems.
>
> * Nowhere in any of the annotations would there be so much as half a line
> that we would recognize as Shakespeare's.
>
> Well, OK -- that might be disappointing, but perhaps not surprising. We
> do not find many traces of Shakespeare in the copy of *Archaionomia* that
> bears his probable signature.
>
> What of the marks and annotation in this imaginary Bible belonging to the
> author of Shakespeare's works? What relation would they bear to biblical
> passages alluded to in Shakespeare's works? The Stritmatter answer would
> be that there would be very little overlap between the verses of the
> imaginary Bible annotated by Shakespeare and the Biblical verses he
> alludes to in his works. In fact, the overwhelming majority of verses
> alluded to in Shakespeare's works would NOT be marked in his Bible; and
> the overwhelming majority of verses marked in his Bible would NOT be
> alluded to in his works. This, although hardly trumpeted by Roger, is the
> key fact about Oxford's Bible -- its marked verses do not correspond
> particularly well to the set of verses Shakespeare is thought to have
> alluded to in his works.
>
> At this point our imaginary Bible would be rather disappointing, and we
> might have to revisit the assumption that this Bible had indeed been used
> by the author of Shakespeare's plays. For a sample of what that a
> reaction to that disappointment might be like, we could turn to Roger
> Stritmatter's dissertation.
>
> Roger is an Oxfordian -- one who believes that William Shakespeare of
> Stratford did not and that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford DID
> write the great bulk of the works generally attributed to Shakespeare.
> Roger pretty much takes it for granted that there is good evidence for his
> belief, although he does devote some space to outlining what Oxfordians
> imagine is a "case" for their man. More about that "case" in future posts
> (readers who want a preview of how such a "case" might be countered can
> turn to the essays on the Shakespeare Authorship page, where much of what
> Roger has to say is pre-rebutted for his convenience).
>
> Back to this Bible that has nothing to do with Shakespeare. Roger
> Stritmatter espouses the view that a Bible that belonged to Edward de Vere
> is in fact the very Bible that belonged to the author of Shakespeare's
> works, who was really not Shakespeare at all but de Vere himself. Since
> there is so little overlap between the marked verses in the Earl of
> Oxford's Bible and the set of Biblical verses Shakespeare is thought to
> have alluded to, Roger has had to pump up that small area of overlap in
> order to make it seem central. Part of his argument is statistical.
> Roger has farmed out a statistical analysis to one Jim McGill, who wants
> to show that a random sample of verses chosen from the set of verses
> alluded to by Shakespeare would NOT match up very well when compared to
> the set of verses marked in Oxford's Bible. Some of you may be thinking
> that McGill should be trying to do just the opposite if he wishes to
> bolster Roger's case; I thought so too, which is why I found McGill's
> Appendix C so hard to follow. Let's look at some of what McGill set out
> to do, and lets see what happens if we try variations on his project.
>
> McGill gives counts for every Biblical verse alluded to by Shakespeare
> X-number of times (X ranges from 0 to 18, though I have collapsed counts
> for all verses alluded to 4 or more times, as McGill does). The numbers
> are questionable for reasons I'll get to in later posts, but for now let's
> assume most of them are rock-solid.
>
> McGill assumes that only 10,000 of the more than 30,000 verses in the
> Bible "might yield a usable reference." This is a rather odd assumption,
> and it ignores the more than 6000 verses of the Apocrypha (Shakespeare
> alluded to a number of verses in the Apocrypha, and many are also marked
> in Oxford's Bible), but it means that McGill counts 9018 Biblical verses
> to which Shakespeare does NOT allude rather than, say 36,000 (if all
> verses are used) or 13,000 (if the Apocrypha "usable" verses are added to
> those of the OT and NT on the basis that only a third of Bible verses
> "might yield a useful reference"). It won't matter, ultimately, but it's
> useful to note how mistake-prone almost every part of Roger's project is.
>
> From Roger's numbers, McGill gives counts for all verses marked in
> Oxford's Bible that correspond to verses alluded to X-times by Shakespeare
> (remember, these are Roger's numbers, and we are only pretending for the
> sake of argument that they are valid). Here is a table showing in column
> 1 the number of times a verse is alluded to by Shakespeare, in column two
> a count of those verses, and in column three the number of corresponding
> marked Oxford Bible verses that are alluded to by Shakespeare:
>
> ## Shax Ox
> 0 9018 864
> 1 450 60
> 2 310 75
> 3 160 35
> 4+ 62 29
>
> Recall that the "9018" could reasonably be something like "36,000" and in
> any event should be more like "13,000." This is the number of
> (potentially "usable") Biblical verses NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
> The corresponding column for Oxford's Bible has 864 -- that is, 864 verses
> are marked in Oxford's Bible that are NOT alluded to by Shakespeare.
>
> I often find it convenient to think of random draws in terms of drawing
> pieces of paper blindfolded from a hat (McGill doesn't use this metaphor,
> but it is a fair comparison). McGill now, in effect, wants to cut out all
> of the verses Shakespeare alludes to and 9018 of those he does NOT allude
> to, and put them into a very large hat. He will make random draws from
> the hat until he has removed 1063 of them (1063 being the number of marked
> verses in Oxford's Bible). Verses that Shakespeare alludes to more than
> once get placed into the hat extra times. For example, if Shakespeare
> refers to Leviticus 12:8 fourteen times, then 14 copies of the verse are
> put into McGill's hat. From the original total of 982 verses alluded to
> by Shakespeare, McGill, though the use of "multiples," now has 1958 pieces
> of paper in his thousand-gallon hat with verses that Shakespeare alludes
> to, and 9018 pieces with "usable" verses that Shakespeare does not allude
> to.
>
> McGill want to do a Chi-Square calculation of significance. Using some
> very questionable assumptions (and we can talk about what is wrong with
> what he does if anyone is interested), he produces "expected value"
> figures for the draws from his hat.
>
> ## EV OX Chi-Sq
> 0 873.4 864 0.10
> 1 43.6 60 6.18
> 2 60.0 75 3.72
> 3 46.5 35 2.83
> 4+ 39.5 29 2.79
> TOTAL 15.65
>
> The first column is the number of times a verse is alluded to by
> Shakespeare, the second is McGill's "expected value" -- the number of
> times that such verses would be selected in 1063 draws from the 10976
> slips in his hat; the third column is the number of corresponding Oxford
> Bible marked verses; the fourth column is the chi-square figure for each
> Oxford Bible number (square the difference between the "expected value"
> and the "observed" Oxford value, and divide the result by the expected
> value); the total chi-square value for the table is the sum of the
> chi-squares for each cell. McGill notes that "the probability of a
> chi-square statistic with four degrees of freedom exceeding a value of
> 13.28 through random chance is .01." Since 15.65 is greater than 13.28,
> McGill concludes that "based on the stated assumptions of this analysis,
> the results provided in this paper clearly demonstrate that the hypothesis
> of no more than a random connection between the de Vere and Shakespeare
> verse sets must be rejected."
>
> Is anybody still with me? Note that the "Shakespeare verse set" includes
> 982 verses Shakespeare alluded to, plus 976 extra copies of verses
> Shakespeare alluded to more than once, plus 9018 "usable" verses that
> Shakespeare did not allude to; these are the source of McGill's "expected
> values." The "de Vere verse set" includes 1063 verses marked in some way
> by Oxford. It does NOT include the 8937 "usable" verses that Oxford does
> NOT mark. It does NOT give extra copies of verses that are marked more
> than once.
>
> Roger should have been unhappy with McGill's "results," but he managed to
> find pleasure in them. This is odd, because if Oxford's Bible had somehow
> matched Shakespeare's use of the Bible, and if McGill had been able to do
> a proper analysis, the desired answer would be that the hypothesis of a
> "random connection" should NOT be rejected. More about this seeming
> paradox later on.
>
> Let's plug a few more numbers in here and see what we can see. This one
> is close to Roger's worst-case scenario -- an Oxford Bible in which very
> few of the verses Shakespeare alludes to are marked:
>
> ## ExV Ox Chi-Sq
> 0 873.4 1058 39.03
> 1+ 789.6 5 179.76
> TOTAL 218.8
>
> McGill would conclude that "the hypothesis of no more than a random
> connection between the de Vere and Shakespeare verse sets must be
> rejected." This means that if Oxford's Bible had practically no overlap
> with verses alluded to by Shakespeare, McGill's statistical argument would
> be unchanged. Even if we change the 5 matches to zero (Roger's worst-case
> scenario), McGill's statistical argument would be unchanged.
>
> Now let's look at Roger's best-case scenario -- an Oxford Bible in which
> every verse alluded to by Shakespeare is marked:
>
> ## ExV Ox Chi-Sq
> 0 873.4 81 718.88
> 1 43.6 450 3790.05
> 2 60.0 310 1040.48
> 3 46.5 160 277.18
> 4+ 39.5 62 12.80
> TOTAL 5839.41
>
> Since 5839.41 is larger than 13.28, McGill would conclude that "the
> hypothesis of no more than a random connection between the de Vere and
> Shakespeare verse sets must be rejected." This means that even if
> Oxford's Bible had had a 100% overlap with verses alluded to by
> Shakespeare, McGill's statistical conclusion would be unchanged, because
> as far as he is concerned, the only important question is whether the
> "randomness" hypothesis should be rejected.
>
> McGill doesn't do the calculations, but using the same assumptions and
> applying them to the biblical verses alluded to by Marlowe, Bacon, or
> Spenser would lead it seems to exactly the same statistical conclusion:
> "the hypothesis of no more than a random connection between the de Vere
> and Bacon/Spenser/Marlowe verse sets must be rejected."
>
> What sort of distribution would McGill have considered "random"?
> Consider this one:
>
> ## ExV Ox Chi-Sq
> 0 873.4 855 0.39
> 1 43.6 43 0.01
> 2 60.0 59 0.02
> 3 46.5 45 0.05
> 4+ 39.5 61 11.68
> TOTAL 12.14
>
> Note that since the table's chi-square value is under 13.28, McGill would
> not reject the "random connection" hypothesis (or would not with 99%
> confidence). Yet this set of biblical verses would be much more along the
> lines of what Roger wants than Oxford's Bible is. Of the 62 verses that
> Shakespeare alludes to 4 or more times, 61 are in this set -- more than
> twice as many as in the set Roger had him use. This set also has more
> verses alluded to in Shakespeare three times, and more overall than are
> found in Oxford's Bible -- yet this one McGill's analysis would NOT reject
> as having "no more than a random connection" with the Shakespeare verse
> set.
>
> Well then, if we must reject the hypothesis of "no more than a random
> connection" in Roger's best-case, worst-case, actual-case, Bacon-case,
> Spenser-case, and Marlowe-case scenarios, what should we conclude? We
> should conclude what by now must seem obvious: that neither Roger nor
> McGill has any idea what he is trying to do or how to go about it. What
> they should have wanted was a result that corresponded closely enough with
> "expected values" that they would NOT have rejected the "random"
> hypothesis.
>
> This may sound paradoxical, so let us take a simpler case. Let us test
> whether a pair of dice is honest by rolling them 1000 times and seeing how
> well the results match up against the expected results of honest dice.
>
> ## EXP OBS CHI-SQ
> 2 27.8 10 11.38
> 3 55.6 25 16.81
> 4 83.3 84 0.01
> 5 111.1 105 0.34
> 6 138.9 130 0.57
> 7 166.7 300 106.67
> 8 138.9 133 0.25
> 9 111.1 104 0.46
> 10 83.3 85 0.03
> 11 55.6 9 39.01
> 12 27.8 15 5.88
> TOTAL 181.39
>
> The first column is the dice score, the second is the expected value for
> that score out of 1000 rolls (that is, if I shoot dice 1000 times, I
> should see snake-eyes about 28 times and boxcars about 28 times). The
> third column is the observed count for each score in 1000 rolls, and
> chi-square figures are given in the fourth column. We sum the chi-squares
> and get a total chi-square value of 181.39 for the table. Our stats book
> tells us that with 10 degrees of freedom, we would have 99% confidence
> that the result of our 1000 rolls was a random distribution if the table's
> chi-square value was less than 23.21. Since 181.39 is greater than 23.21,
> we might well conclude that the dice are loaded -- why else would "7" show
> up on 300 out of a thousand rolls, when it should only have happened about
> 167 times?
>
> Here is a table for dice that we would probably think were honest enough
> for a friendly game of craps:
>
> ## EXP OBS CHI-SQ
> 2 27.8 30 0.18
> 3 55.6 60 0.36
> 4 83.3 84 0.01
> 5 111.1 105 0.34
> 6 138.9 130 0.57
> 7 166.7 180 1.07
> 8 138.9 133 0.25
> 9 111.1 104 0.46
> 10 83.3 85 0.03
> 11 55.6 70 3.76
> 12 27.8 19 2.77
> TOTAL 9.78
>
> Since our chi-square sum of 9.78 is less than 23.21, we would NOT reject
> the hypothesis that the results of 1000 rolls were random. Of course I'm
> oversimplifying here somewhat, and ignoring various confidence levels one
> might wish to consider, but the point is that the kind of analysis McGill
> wants to do can work for dice.
>
> Part of the problem is that neither Roger nor McGill understands the word
> "random." When we say that the outcome in the second case is random (or
> not convincingly non-random), we do not mean that it is unrelated to
> anything else in the universe -- we mean that the observed outcome
> corresponds well to the expected outcome.
>
> Let's get a little bit tricky. If we KNEW we were using loaded dice, then
> we could tell whether our results were "random" by seeing how well they
> matched the expected outcome of using dice loaded in just that way. I'm
> tired of shooting craps, so let's take just one die that is supposed to be
> loaded in such a way that a 6 comes up twice as often as a 1. With an
> honest die, the expected value for each possible score is the same:
> 167/1000; with our loaded die, the expected value is 111/1000 for 1;
> 167/1000 for 2, 3, 4, and 5; and 222/1000 for 6. If we rolled our loaded
> die 1000 times with the following results, we would NOT reject the
> "random" hypothesis:
>
> # EXP OBS CHI-SQ
> 1 111 105 0.34
> 2 167 180 1.07
> 3 167 167 0.00
> 4 167 160 0.27
> 5 167 158 0.45
> 6 222 230 0.27
> TOTAL 2.39
>
> On the other hand, if we rolled our loaded die 1000 times and got the next
> set of results, we WOULD reject the "random" hypothesis:
>
> # EXP OBS CHI-SQ
> 1 111 167 28.11
> 2 167 166 0.00
> 3 167 167 0.00
> 4 167 167 0.00
> 5 167 166 0.00
> 6 222 167 13.72
> TOTAL 41.84
>
> To be "random" in these contexts simply means that the observed results
> correspond well to the expected values, and the expected values for dice
> known to be loaded are not the same as for dice thought to be honest. If
> we get "random" results, then we do not go looking for other explanations.
> If our supposedly honest dice give the "random" results we expect from
> honest dice, then we consider them honest. On the other hand, if our
> supposedly loaded dice give the results we would expect from honest dice,
> then we suspect that somebody has failed to load our dice honestly, and we
> will send over some of the tough boys to teach our dice-loaders not to
> mess with us.
>
> What does this dice digression have to do with Roger? Simply this: he
> loaded the dice, but he still didn't get the results he should have been
> looking for. Unfortunately, neither Roger nor McGill know enough to
> realize that their loaded dice ain't loaded good enough. What they should
> have wanted was a result such that they would NOT reject the "random"
> hypothesis, because that would mean that Roger would NOT need to find an
> explanation for why the Oxford values differed substantially from the
> "loaded" expected values. Just as a "random" result in a test of loaded
> dice suggests that the dice really are loaded, so a "random" result in a
> test of the Oxford Bible against "expected values" from Shakespeare's
> Biblical verses would mean that the two sets match up very well -- which
> is exactly the point Roger wishes he could make.
>
> McGill's analysis, however, concludes that the set of Oxford Bible verses
> does NOT correspond well to the expected values derived from Shakespeare's
> Biblical allusions. As we have seen, neither does Roger's best-case
> scenario, nor his worst-case scenario, nor -- it would seem -- would the
> verse sets of Bacon or Marlowe or Spenser. Since McGill proposes no
> further analysis other than whether the results are "random," he and Roger
> have no means to argue that the Oxford's Bible statistically resembles
> what Shakespeare's Bible would be like if such a thing were found, or that
> Oxford's Bible provides such a compellingly strong match for Shakespeare's
> Biblical allusions that it should be considered evidence that Oxford was
> the author of Shakespeare's works. In fact, the proud "statistical" claim
> of both McGill and Roger is that Oxford's Bible is NOT a good match for
> Shakespeare's Biblical allusions.
>
> As I said earlier, I was trying to pretend that the numbers used in
> McGill's analysis were reasonable ones, but they are, in fact, very
> questionable, and the process by which they and Roger's other calculations
> were derived was a corrupt one. More on this in a later post. For now,
> it is enough that even accepting Roger's loaded numbers, McGill's analysis
> not only does not support Roger's claim, it contradicts it.
David L. Webb
<tr...@bcpl.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Tom Reedy wrote:
>
> >
> > Roger can't spell as good as Arthur Publius, even though his debating
> > methods are the same. Or perhaps he's finally learned how to use Spelchek?
>
>
> You will find "its" for "it's" in the first Arthur Publius post, while the
> second has "epistmelogical" for "epistemological," as well as the odd form
> "tintsy." I don't think Roger can be ruled out on the basis of Arthur
> Publius's superior proof-reading skills.
Indeed, in view of Dr. Stritmatter's use of the remarkable word
"unequivocable" [sic] in his online review of Shaheen's study of
Biblical references in Shakespeare, one cannot rule out the surmise
that Dr. Stritmatter is actually George Bush.
Moreover, the _Ever Reader_ coyly informs its readers that "Mr.
Strimatter [sic] is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst," leaving open the possibility
that the Mr. Strimatter whom it identifies as a U. Mass. doctoral
candidate differs from the Roger Stritmatter who ostensibly wrote the
review. (Of course, if the name were spelled "Strit-matter," one could
be certain that the review was written pseudonymously.)
john_baker
Ok, I think I've thought of another way to illustrate why a
statistical analysis of a real event lacks merit.
Consider the lotto.
The odds assure us that NO individual has any statistical chance of
winning, but in each draw ONE individual does win.
So even though the odds were a million to one against it, there is a
real winner. Always.
So it doesn't matter how long the actual odds are against this Bible
being the one used by Shakespeare.
It either was or it wasn't.
If it was, the odds against it are meaningless.
Even long, long, long ones don't count.
Is that clear?
Baker
Druiddandy
statistical chance of
YOU are assured. But no lover of numbers could be. Every player has a
statistical chance of winning.
Okay Fine
You vaguely remind me of a certain mindset (is that one word now?) that
comes into play sometimes in human endeavors. The family who does not
know the fate of a soldier at war, someone awaiting the results of a
blood test, etcc, where one must be fully prepared for either outcome no
matter how good or bad the odds. But that's different.
The probabilities matter when we choose our beliefs, e.g., I don't think
it's likely that the lone literate member of a family would enjoy the
reputation of Shakespeare.
Stratfordians acknowledge the wisdom of this approach by their vehement
arguments against it. If it simply did not matter, they would ignore
it. But even if it were 99% likely that Shakspere's parents and
children could not even recognize their own names they would not abandon
Stratfordianism.
Similarly with Oxford's Geneva Bible: it is possible that further
inquiry will show that everyone who annotated a bible marked 47% of the
passages Shakespeare used and only 13% of the verses he used only once.
In that case, the current evidence will look different.
Until then, everyone can smell the ocean.
OF.
Okay Fine
> You vaguely remind me of a certain mindset (is that one word now?) that
> comes into play sometimes in human endeavors. The family who does not
> know the fate of a soldier at war, someone awaiting the results of a
> blood test, etcc, where one must be fully prepared for either outcome no
> matter how good or bad the odds. But that's different.
>
> The probabilities matter when we choose our beliefs, e.g., I don't think
> it's likely that the lone literate member of a family would enjoy the
> reputation of Shakespeare.
>
> Stratfordians acknowledge the wisdom of this approach by their vehement
> arguments against it. If it simply did not matter, they would ignore
> it. But even if it were 99% likely that Shakspere's parents and
> children could not even recognize their own names they would not abandon
> Stratfordianism.
>
> Similarly with Oxford's Geneva Bible: it is possible that further
> inquiry will show that everyone who annotated a bible marked 47% of the
> passages Shakespeare used
john_baker
THAT's NOT the POINT!!!
The point is that any winner, had only a 1 in a million chance of
winning....that's the point.
The point is that the application of statistical odds will NOT be able
to predicit the winner of a lotto drawing.
You can't get from the general to the particular.
Any particularly player either wins or loses.
This Bible either was or it wasn't Shakespeare's.
You guys can do all the class statistics you please on it, but it
doesn't change the fact that it either was or wasn't his.
If it was, the figures, as with those in the lotto drawing, are
meaningless.
The winner beats all odds....
I'm not against the use of the statistical method or against
statistics...I'm just pointing out the problem here. It is a
problem in any individual case.
john