The Naked Shakespeare

[Melanie Sands]

There was a documentary on German TV called "Der nackte
Shakespeare" - all anti-Strat stuff, of course - looking
for locations corresponding to places in his plays, etc.
etc. and the onscreen guide said the film was about
how "a myth became a truth, that a man from Statford upon
Avon, in spite of there being no handwritten manuscripts,
no handwritten letters or any indication during his
lifetime that he had actually written the plays..."

...and I thought:

a) yeah right, Christopher Marlowe for example, left
thousands of pages of handwritten manuscripts to
all his plays,

and

b) not to speak of his collected letters, which are now
published in paperback, Volume One "Letters from Christopher
Marley to his playwright friends", Volume Two "Letters
from Christina Over-M. to his Nancyboys" and finally, Volume
Three, "Letters in Code now for the first time revealed
found in a strongbox in the cellars of the British
Government, deciphered by MI6".

And then I thought:

Right, no indication at all during Shakespeare's lifetime
that he wrote plays. Nope.

And I also loved the way they (in the documentary) discussed
how Shakespeare must have "invented" the plotline for this play
in Venice, and how he must have "invented" the idea for that play
in Verona, and how he must have "come up with" the story for the
other play in Milano, etc. - and no mention at all of any pre-existing
plays/stories that might have served as a point-of-departure, shall
we call it.

Don't you just love it how anti-Strats always get their facts right?

Melanie

[Paul Crowley]

On 30/04/2014 17:35, Melanie Sands wrote:

> There was a documentary on German TV called "Der nackte
> Shakespeare" - all anti-Strat stuff, of course - looking
> for locations corresponding to places in his plays, etc.
> etc. and the onscreen guide said the film was about
> how "a myth became a truth, that a man from Statford upon
> Avon, in spite of there being no handwritten manuscripts,
> no handwritten letters or any indication during his
> lifetime that he had actually written the plays..."
>

> ....and I thought:

>
> a) yeah right, Christopher Marlowe for example, left
> thousands of pages of handwritten manuscripts to
> all his plays,

Marlowe had the misfortune to die before
(as least as far as the records tell us) anyone
noticed his talent or remarked on his literary
achievements.

His (supposed) career and that supposed of
Shakespeare (as Stratman) were remarkably
parallel -- with one huge difference. The
Stratman supposedly pranced around the
London literary and dramatic scene for the
next twenty years and more. That's twenty
years AFTER writing great plays, such as
Romeo & Juliet, Richard II, Richard III, and
Mid-Summers Nights Dream. And Hamlet
was supposedly written around 1600. He
published vastly more than every other play-
wright put together, and then there was his
poetry which mostly went into numerous
editions. So he was famous -- a great
celebrity. But (it seems) no one ever met
him, or saw him on stage, or wrote to him
-- except for one letter found in Stratford
about local matters, that was apparently not
delivered. Apparently he never wrote to
anyone. No one ever talked to him -- except
for one recorded conversation with his
lawyer (a highly learned man and competent
poet). That conversation was about a local
Stratford land-grab, about which the Stratman
was non-committal, perhaps because he
would be a beneficiary.

But he was seen in London. Given the litigious
nature of people then, it was almost impossible
to avoid the courts. So was he up before the
magistrates on account of something he had
written? Nah -- unlike every other writer of
quality who commented on political issues, the
authorities never noticed him.

Was he suing, or being sued for his multiple
financial interests? -- Nah. Did he use the
courts to prevent the wholesale breach of
his copyright? -- Nah. We encounter him
as a witness in a minor domestic matter.
where he featured as "the lodger upstairs",
with not one word or whisper from anyone
suggesting that he was anything more.

That all make sense to you?

> b) not to speak of his collected letters, which are now
> published in paperback, Volume One "Letters from Christopher
> Marley to his playwright friends", Volume Two "Letters
> from Christina Over-M. to his Nancyboys" and finally, Volume
> Three, "Letters in Code now for the first time revealed
> found in a strongbox in the cellars of the British
> Government, deciphered by MI6".

Marlowe was a spy, and they generally avoid
leaving documents about themselves lying
around. BUT he did, in fact, leave quite a lot
of records in his short life. His name came up
at the Privy Council a few times -- more than
that of Shake-speare, which was conspicuously
absent, especially during the Essex trial and
investigation.

> And then I thought:
>
> Right, no indication at all during Shakespeare's lifetime
> that he wrote plays. Nope.

A name, very roughly resembling his, was
attached to the plays. But that was manifestly
a joke -- as we can see from numerous other
items, such as the absurd "portrait" of him in
the First Folio. Illiterate yeomen do not write,
let alone write plays. let alone write highly
political ones full of immense learning.

> And I also loved the way they (in the documentary) discussed
> how Shakespeare must have "invented" the plotline for this play
> in Venice, and how he must have "invented" the idea for that play
> in Verona, and how he must have "come up with" the story for the
> other play in Milano, etc. - and no mention at all of any pre-existing
> plays/stories that might have served as a point-of-departure, shall
> we call it.

The 'departures' from the received works are,
by far, the most interesting bits .

> Don't you just love it how anti-Strats always get their facts right?

You haven't quoted anything direct. I'm sure
it had faults, but you don't suggest any.


Paul.

[Don]

But I suppose we all know that it's probably a mistake to discount
German scholarship, criticism, approaches to Shakespeare, etc.. I
even read that Shakespeare is more appreciated in Germany than
elsewhere.

Seems like German scholarship is especially good at classical
approaches; 19th century comparative philology,
*Altertumswissenschaft*, etc.. So I bet we just aren't quite on the
same page with what they would care to speculate about.

[Melanie Sands]

Am Donnerstag, 1. Mai 2014 03:35:38 UTC+2 schrieb Don:

>
> But I suppose we all know that it's probably a mistake to discount
>
> German scholarship, criticism, approaches to Shakespeare, etc.. I
>
> even read that Shakespeare is more appreciated in Germany than
>
> elsewhere.
>
>
>
> Seems like German scholarship is especially good at classical
>
> approaches; 19th century comparative philology,
>
> *Altertumswissenschaft*, etc.. So I bet we just aren't quite on the
>
> same page with what they would care to speculate about.

No, it seemed a British or American documentary and they all spoke
English (dimly heard mumbling in the background) while the annoying
voice-over people over-voiced them in German. There were a lot of
obscure people reading from the plays in English for no obvious reason
except to fill the time - anyone who watches Brit TV has noticed that
the programmes all last one hour, even though they may only tell you
three little things, they will fill in the rest of the time with:

a) commercial breaks
or
b) walking into the picture, strolling through the park, running up
and down stairs, sitting on the beach/at a cafe/in a church
staring out moddily or up moodily, holding their hands up to
shade their eyes while scanning the landscape - which we see for
three short seconds, after which the camera quickly cuts back
to the presenter's face scanning the landscape etc.

So while one doesn't wish to waste one hour of one's life to hear
three things that might be interesting, one can also not fast-forward
through the drivel because the Interesting Facts might be embedded in
said drivel along the way, and when one fast-forwards, the subtitles
do not appear.

So after I had heard some lecturer saying that St. Albans, home to
Sir Francis Bacon, was mentioned 15 times in Shakespeare's plays, and
Stratford not once, I decided to call it a day, and deleted it.

Because, after all, I still have 9 episodes of "The Musketeers", 3 episodes
of New World, the very last "Poirot", 4 episodes of "Ripper Street" season
two, 4 episodes of "Inspector de Luca" in Italian with english substitles,
not to speak of the German stuff for my Swiss husband including one
episode of "La Loi selon Bartoli" dubbed into German which I shall also
watch as it was prettily filmed in Aix-en-Provence.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Loi_selon_Bartoli-

so I need the DVR space!

I shall reply to Mr. Crowley's post when I have read it.

A demain,

Melanie

[marco]

[Bob Grumman]

Hi, Paul! Glad to see you're still fighting the good fight. But you'd make a better case for your side if you could present a list of all the know writers of the time, and an exhaustive collection of EVERYTHING written at the time about any of them. I think you would find that very little was written about any of them.

Oh, and you would have to accept the possibility that a man's name meant something back then--that is, that the name William Shakespeare COULD have been a reference to the man who bought New Place in Stratford of that exact same name.

That's it for now. Maybe in a few weeks I'll drop back in. But I don't seem to have much interest in Shakespeare crankery anymore.

[Bob Grumman]

Hi, Melanie! Nice to find you still here. Good luck with Paul. I just tooken him on, but I don't think I did too good.

Whee, Bob

[Arthur Neuendorffer]

Bob Grumman wrote:

> Hi, Melanie! Nice to find you still here.

"In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Bob Grumman wrote:

> Whee, Bob

Is that the royal Whee?

Art N.

[david....@dartmouth.edu]

In article <6f1a9aae-a05c-4c98...@googlegroups.com>,

Arthur Neuendorffer <acne...@gmail.com> (aka Noonedafter) wrote:

> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > Hi, Melanie! Nice to find you still here.

> "In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and
> peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

It is VERy easy to refute rubbish like that -- as indeed it is in the
case of practically all the rubbish that you post, Art. In this case,
such a refutation is easy within mathematics alone:

(1) Daniel Bernoulli
(2) Johann Bernoulli
(3) Jakob Bernoulli
(4) Georges de Rham
(5) Michel Plancherel
(6) Armand Borel
...and many others, including one of the greatest mathematicians of all,
(7) Leonhard Euler

There are many others in the sciences and in the arts. For example,
have you eVER heard of a guy who was educated in Switzerland named
Albert Einstein, Art? No? I expect not; you were, after all,
misundereducated. There is another Swiss guy, Heinrich Rohrer, of whom
you also have neVER heard; you might ask St. Carolyn to read the
pertinent encyclopedia entry to you, Art -- he won something called the
Nobel Prize.

Since you profess an interest in astronomy -- although how someone
who thinks (usual disclaimer) that
(1) the watt is a unit of energy,
(2) the number 19 is remarkable as both the sum of two consecutive
integers and the difference of their squares, and
(3) a sample mean of a random variable is the same thing as its expected
value
can possibly have studied astronomy remains a mystery -- perhaps you
have heard of a guy called Fritz Zwicky, Art. Hint: He was also
educated in Switzerland.

> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > Whee, Bob

> Is that the royal Whee?

Are you suggesting that Bob has royal blood, Art? Perhaps as a scion
of the Bloodline?

> Art N.

[Arthur Neuendorffer]

>> Bob Grumman wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi, Melanie! Nice to find you still here.

> Arthur Neuendorffer <acne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of
>> democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Dwebb wrote:

> It is VERy easy to refute rubbish like that -- as indeed
> it is in the case of practically all the rubbish that you post, Art.
> In this case, such a refutation is easy within mathematics alone:

...............................................
A refutation is *only* valid within mathematics.
...............................................

Dwebb wrote:

> (1) Daniel Bernoulli
> (2) Johann Bernoulli
> (3) Jakob Bernoulli

...............................................
<<The Bernoulli family came originally from Antwerp, at that time in the Spanish Netherlands, but emigrated to escape the Spanish persecution of the Huguenots. After a brief period in Frankfurt the family moved to Basel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Fawlty.>>
...............................................
Dwebb wrote:

> (4) Georges de Rham
...............................................
Differential topology...you've got to be kidding!
...............................................
Dwebb wrote:

> (5) Michel Plancherel
...............................................
The unitarity of the Fourier transform is called Parseval's theorem in science and engineering fields, after French mathematician Marc-Antoine Parseval
...............................................
Dwebb wrote:

> (6) Armand Borel
...............................................
Algebraic topology...Boreling!
...............................................
Dwebb wrote:

> (7) Leonhard Euler
...............................................
Euler spent most of his productive life in Russia & Germany
...............................................

Dwebb wrote:

<<There are many others in the sciences and in the arts. For example,
have you eVER heard of a guy who was educated in Switzerland named
Albert Einstein, Art?>>

...............................................
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg
...............................................

Dwebb wrote:

<<There is another Swiss guy, Heinrich Rohrer, of whom
you also have neVER heard; you might ask St. Carolyn to read the
pertinent encyclopedia entry to you, Art -- he won something called the
Nobel Prize.>>

----------------------------------------------------
Heinrich Rohrer shared half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gerd Binnig of Germany for the design of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The other half of the Prize was awarded to Ernst Ruska of Germany.

Well...a quarter of a Nobel is better than nothing.
...............................................

Dwebb wrote:

> perhaps you have heard of a guy called Fritz Zwicky, Art.

...............................................
Fritz Zwicky was born in Varna, Bulgaria
----------------------------------------------------
Maybe I was thinking of Dartmouth instead of Switzerland:
----------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Delta_Phi

<<Alpha Delta Phi (ΑΔΦ, also Alpha Delt, A.D. or ADPhi) is a North American Greek-letter secret and social college fraternity. ADPhi was originally founded as a literary society by Samuel Eells in 1832 at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Its 50,000+ alumni include former Presidents and Senators of the United States, as well as Chief Justices of the Supreme Court.

Alpha Delta Phi's Dartmouth College chapter was the inspiration for National Lampoon's Animal House. At Yale University, it was mostly brothers of Alpha Delta Phi that were invited to join the university's top-ranked senior society Skull and Bones.>>
-------------------------------------------------
http://tinyurl.com/nvov6ey

Dartmouth vows to curb student misbehavior
Applications dip prompts action
By Marcella Bombardieri, Boston Globe, April 17, 2014

<<Dartmouth College president Philip J. Hanlon is declaring that the university must fundamentally change its student culture to combat a litany of harmful behaviors — including binge drinking, sexual assault, hazing, and anonymous online vitriol — that have kept the school in the headlines and limited its advancement. “Dartmouth’s promise is being hijacked by extreme and harmful behaviors, often masked by its perpetrators as fun,” Hanlon said in an interview Wednesday. “But in fact this is a barrier to Dartmouth achieving its potential and promise, and we cannot allow this to continue.” “Dangerous drinking has become the rule and not the exception,” he said in an advance copy of remarks prepared for the campus summit. He called hazing, “disgusting” threats and insults on the Internet, and parties with racist or sexist undertones symptoms of “a general disregard for human dignity.”

The Ivy League school in Hanover, N.H., has been known for generations for outrageous student antics. It inspired the movie “Animal House,” and its students are said to have invented beer pong, a drinking game now popular across the country. But the bad publicity may have reached historic heights in the past few years.

First, a former fraternity member published an exposé of fraternity hazing that included pledges being told to swim in a pool filled with human waste.

Last spring saw students protesting that the university was not properly handling sexual assaults, which inspired a backlash from other students, including online death threats. Over the summer, a fraternity sponsored a “Bloods and Crips” party decried as racist.

Several months ago, a post on a popular student website offered a chilling guide on how to sexually assault a specific young woman.>>
----------------------------------------------------

>> Bob Grumman wrote:
>>>
>>> Whee, Bob

> Arthur Neuendorffer <acne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Is that the royal Whee?

Dwebb wrote:

> Are you suggesting that Bob has royal blood, Art?

I'm suggesting that Bob is a Royal Blob.

Art Neuendorffer

[John W Kennedy]

Perhaps even more to the point, it was the Swiss who developed the
infantry tactics that dominated Europe from the late 15th century to
the introduction of repeating weapons in the mid-19th century.

--
John W Kennedy
"Though a Rothschild you may be
In your own capacity,
As a Company you've come to utter sorrow--
But the Liquidators say,
'Never mind--you needn't pay,'
So you start another company to-morrow!"
-- Sir William S. Gilbert. "Utopia Limited"

[Paul Crowley]

On 22/06/2014 15:08, Bob Grumman wrote:

> Hi, Paul! Glad to see you're still fighting the good fight.

Nice to see you're back -- in some form at least

> But you'd make a better case for your side if you could present a
> list of all the know writers of the time, and an exhaustive collection
> of EVERYTHING written at the time about any of them. I think you
> would find that very little was written about any of them.

Been done.

Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography by Diana Price
http://www.shakespeare-authorship.com/

But the point you miss is that Shake-speare was head-
and-shoulders above every other playwright of his day
-- not just in quality (which you'll ignorantly query), but
in terms of numbers of printed plays. There are more
editions of his plays than of the rest put together. So
while there are issues as why so many of the less-well-
known playwrights are quite so obscure, such reasons
will not apply to the greatest of the age.

> Oh, and you would have to accept the possibility that a man's
> name meant something back then--that is, that the name William
> Shakespeare COULD have been a reference to the man who
> bought New Place in Stratford of that exact same name.

Of course it did. That's how he used some of the
money he was paid (in ~February 1597) as his price
for acting as stooge.

> of that exact same name.

The Shagsber / Shaxsper / Shackspere surname was
not uncommon in the area. It was never (or hardly ever)
spelt in the form we see the poet used (printed on V&A
in 1593) until after the cover-up had been arranged
(in early 1597). It was never shown with a hyphen,
except when it appeared on the poet's works or when
others wrote about the poet.


Paul.

[marco]

>That's how he used some of the
>money he was paid (in ~February 1597) as his price
>for acting as stooge.

>It was never (or hardly ever)
>spelt in the form we see the poet used (printed on V&A
>in 1593) until after the cover-up had been arranged
>(in early 1597). It was never shown with a hyphen,
>except when it appeared on the poet's works or when
>others wrote about the poet.

>Paul

Paul just loves making things up.
He's our master storyteller.

marc

[david....@dartmouth.edu]

In article <8dc87a6c-9e1d-45d2...@googlegroups.com>,

Arthur Neuendorffer <acne...@gmail.com> (aka Noonedafter) wrote:

> >> Bob Grumman wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi, Melanie! Nice to find you still here.

> > Arthur Neuendorffer <acne...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> "In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of
> >> democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

> Dwebb wrote:
>
> > It is VERy easy to refute rubbish like that -- as indeed
> > it is in the case of practically all the rubbish that you post, Art.
> > In this case, such a refutation is easy within mathematics alone:
> ...............................................
> A refutation is *only* valid within mathematics.

Don't be an idiot, Art -- or at any rate, don't let it show so
conspicuously. For example, it was quite easy to refute your assertion
that the eminent Yale historian Peter Gay had perished in the 9/11
attacks without recourse to any mathematics -- indeed, it was a simple
matter to note that the victim was the wrong age, had the wrong middle
initial, followed the wrong profession, and had the wrong place of
residence -- and that moreover the historian Peter Gay was still alive.

As another example, it was quite easy to refute your claim that
_vier_ means "four" in Spanish by the simple expedient of *knowing* the
language. In a similar vein, it was VERy easy to refute your demented
claim that _tｾrin_ means "youth" in Russian, again by the simple expedient
of knowing the language -- although in this instance, one need not even
know Russian to recognize that you had committed yet another blunder of
Neundorfferesque proportions, since the word contains letters *not in the
Russian alphabet*.

It was also VERy easy to refute your assertion that the watt is a
unit of energy. Incidentally, Art, here's a riddle for you that should
keep you busy for a while: if power is the derivative of energy, yet
energy is constant by law of consERVation of energy, why isn't the power
always zero? If you think you know the answer, write it on the back of
a $500 bill and send it to me -- it will coVER the interest you owe on
that bet that you neVER paid up.

> Dwebb wrote:
>
> > (1) Daniel Bernoulli
> > (2) Johann Bernoulli
> > (3) Jakob Bernoulli
> ...............................................
> <<The Bernoulli family came originally from Antwerp, at that time in the
> Spanish Netherlands, but emigrated to escape the Spanish persecution of the
> Huguenots. After a brief period in Frankfurt the family moved to Basel:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Fawlty.>>

Jakob and Johan Bernoulli were both born in Basel, Art. (In case
you're wondering, Art, that's in Switzerland.) MoreoVER, the Bernoullis
were educated and worked in Switzerland.

> Dwebb wrote:
>
> > (4) Georges de Rham
> ...............................................
> Differential topology...you've got to be kidding!
> ...............................................
> Dwebb wrote:
>
> > (5) Michel Plancherel
> ...............................................
> The unitarity of the Fourier transform is called Parseval's theorem in
> science and engineering fields, after French mathematician Marc-Antoine
> Parseval

Parseval?! I said that *Plancherel* was Swiss, not Parseval, Art. But
congratulations anyway -- you have just given another splendid
demonstration of your inability to read.

> Dwebb wrote:
>
> > (6) Armand Borel
> ...............................................
> Algebraic topology...Boreling!

You are apparently unfamiliar with his work, Art; he was one of the
founders of the modern theory of algebraic groups.

> Dwebb wrote:
>
> > (7) Leonhard Euler
> ...............................................
> Euler spent most of his productive life in Russia & Germany

He was educated in *Basel*, Art -- which is in Switzerland.

> Dwebb wrote:
>
> <<There are many others in the sciences and in the arts. For example,
> have you eVER heard of a guy who was educated in Switzerland named
> Albert Einstein, Art?>>
> ...............................................

> Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of W殲ttemberg

Learn to read English, Art. I said that Einstein was *educated* in
Switzerland. (You do know what "education" is, don't you, Art, even if
you neVER availed yourself of it?)

> Dwebb wrote:
>
> <<There is another Swiss guy, Heinrich Rohrer, of whom
> you also have neVER heard; you might ask St. Carolyn to read the
> pertinent encyclopedia entry to you, Art -- he won something called the
> Nobel Prize.>>
> ----------------------------------------------------
> Heinrich Rohrer shared half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gerd
> Binnig of Germany for the design of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM).
> The other half of the Prize was awarded to Ernst Ruska of Germany.
>
> Well...a quarter of a Nobel is better than nothing.
> ...............................................
> Dwebb wrote:
>
> > perhaps you have heard of a guy called Fritz Zwicky, Art.
> ...............................................
> Fritz Zwicky was born in Varna, Bulgaria

Zwicky is considered a *Swiss* astronomer, Art, because he moved to
that country at the age of six and was educated in Z殲ich.

[Irrelevant rubbish deleted]

> >> Bob Grumman wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Whee, Bob

> > Arthur Neuendorffer <acne...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Is that the royal Whee?

> Dwebb wrote:
>
> > Are you suggesting that Bob has royal blood, Art?

> I'm suggesting that Bob is a Royal Blob.

Better a blob than a boob.

> Art Neuendorffer

[marco]

at least Paul is interesting/entertaining
[this is a drama group after all]

remember when that Art used to just cut & paste?
[talk about a boring troll]

marc

[Jim F.]

When I said Shakespeare monument is left-to-right-to-left readable,
Art knew immediately it's Boustrophedon, and Peter G. can only curse.
Stone is a perfect anagram of Sonet, an old spelling of Sonnet.
The one criticized Art didn't know this. See the good, ignore the rest.

[marco]

[marco]

Art N

[marco]

Art N