Debate on Oxford's Bible
Terry Ross
[i.e., Oxfordian] Fellowship in Boston, Roger Stritmatter and I debated
the topic "Resolved: the annotator of De Vere's Bible was the author of
Shakespeare's Works." The Oxfordian verdict seems to be in: one of the
members of the Shakespeare Fellowship posted this at the group's website:
"most Oxfordians of course felt Roger won hands down, but Terry had his
supporters there too and I'm sure they feel he was the winner."
I put up the notes I used for the debate so that those who had been there
could refer to them if they wanted. I don't know that they make much
sense as is, but I will be fleshing them out with prose when I get a
chance: http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/debate.html
I was able to meet and speak with quite a few Oxfordians, some of whom I
had "known" from their writings for several years. The people I met
seemed very friendly, and very eager to talk about Shakespeare -- and not
just in terms of Oxford. I may be invited back again for their next
conference, and I would certainly be willing to go.
Although members had been promised to see Roger and me "duke it out," the
two of us were on our very best behavior, and Roger Stritmatter was
graciousness itself.
Yes, THAT Roger Stritmatter.
A few preliminary words about my notes:
1. Augustine http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/augustine.html
I used this as introduction to an interpretive principle that Augustine
used for scripture, but that I did not think had a valid parallel for
Oxfordians. Since Christianity promotes the reign of charity and opposes
cupidity, Augustine says you should always read scripture in such a way
that it promotes the reign of charity. If you can do this by reading
scripture literally, then do so. If you find a passage that does NOT
promote the reign of charity, then read it figuratively until you have
made it promote the reign of charity.
This works well for Christianity, because Jesus himself reduced the entire
law to two commandments (love God above all, and your neighbor as
yourself). On the other hand, Jesus gave us no Oxfordian commandment, so
even Augustinian Christians should reject any interpretive principle along
the lines of "read evidence figuratively UNTIL it promotes the reign of
Oxfordianism."
2. The Thing Itself: http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/thingitself.html
Roger spent 10 years on his project. In 1998, while Roger still had two
years to go, David Kathman published his list of the annotations in
Oxford's Bible. There are a number of places where Roger's list differs
from Dave's, and I expected to find that in such cases, Roger would always
be correct. That is not what I found: while we will have to make some
changes in Dave's list, in general, when the two lists disagree, Dave's
seems more reliable.
(The major exception: Dave lists 2 Macc 3.24 and 2 Macc 3.40, when he
should have listed 2 Macc 3.24 THROUGH 2 Macc 3.40.)
Dave gives a much fuller account of the "hands" drawn in the book, and
Roger completely neglects the cross marks that one finds at the start of
about 17 chapters of Oxford's Bible. Dave's transcriptions of annotations
seem more reliable as well.
3. Handwriting: http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/handwriting.html
When I first commented on Roger's dissertation, I was willing to accept
that the annotations were probably by Oxford. I now think the case for
Oxford is very weak, and has been very tendentiously made. On the
"handwriting" page I show the exemplars that Roger used for the letters
that his handwriting expert, Emily Will, found most compelling: the
letters "g", "p", and "t". I made my own sets of exemplars from two of
Oxford's letters that are reproduced in books that Roger is very familiar
with: a letter of Sept. 24, 1575 (five years after Oxford acquired the
Bible), and a letter of Oct. 7, 1601. The exemplars from the earlier
letter have a white background, and those from the alter one have a grey
background. In each case, these specimens do not support Roger's (or
Wills's) descriptions of what makes Oxford's handwriting so similar to
that of the annotator or annotators.
I also put up scans of the word "the" as is appears in Oxford's Bible, in
the 1575 letter, and in the 1601 letter, as well as scans of "continue"
from Oxford's Bible and from the 1575 letter. It appears to my untrained
eyes that "continue" is not only NOT in Oxford's hand, but is also very
different from the other annotations in Oxford's Bible.
So how many annotators were there? Roger thinks all but one are by Oxford
(the exception is at Job 9.1: "my" and "THen Iob a"); he thinks there are
no underlinings by the second hand. Roger said he ignored the crosses in
pencil because they had nothing to do with anything else in the Bible, but
they seem to represent a third annotator. The person who wrote "continue"
is a fourth annotator. There may be more. There are some markings noted
by Dave that Roger ignores, perhaps thinking they are accidental. Since
the evidence for Oxford's hand in ANY of the annotations is weak, and
since the great majority of annotations are underlinings of verse numbers
or words in a verse, and since I know of no test to identify the
distinctive way that Oxford might have used when he underlined, say, a
number "4," the conclusion that all the annotations (save the one at Job
9.1 and the crosses in pencil) are by Oxford seems unjustified.
4 & 5. "PlusFours": http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/plusfour.html
Roger calls any verse of the Bible that Shakespeare is thought to have
alluded to four or more times a "Shakespeare Diagnostic." I cannot accept
this term, because there is nothing particularly "diagnostic" about those
verses -- if we had a text by an unknown writer of the period, we would
NOT attribute it to Shakespeare on the grounds that it included the phrase
"fire and brimstone." I used "plusfours" or "PlusFours" as a more neutral
term.
Roger took lists of Biblical allusions to Shakespeare from a variety of
different sources, each of them using different (and mutually
inconsistent) standards for what should count as an allusion. I used
Naseeb Shaheen's *Biblical and Liturgical References in Shakespeare's
Plays*, since it was the most comprehensive, complete, consistent, and
recent source. I would be willing to use some other set of standards than
Shaheen's, but it seems to me to be a basic principle for this kind of
inquiry that whatever standards one uses should be global and consistent
BOTH for Shakespeare's works AND for the entire Bible. Shaheen covers the
plays and not the nondramatic verse, but unless someone has a consistent
set of standards applied even more widely than what Shaheen gave us, I
think we should stick with Shaheen. In addition, Shaheen has the
advantage that he is familiar with the work of his predecessors, and he
tells us that "Whenever a biblical parallel suggested by others does not
appear in this volume, it generally indicates that I have rejected that
parallel as being invalid."
There are about 2300 Biblical passages listed in Shaheen's index, of which
126 are "PlusFours" (passages alluded to 4 or more times by Shakespeare).
Roger counted 80 "diagnostics" using Shaheen AND his predecessors; I have
no way to account for the dozens of PlusFours/diagnostics that Roger
missed.
Oxford's Bible has about 1000 marked verses; of those, 81 appear within
Shaheen's index of Shakespeare's Biblical references. Roger claims that 30
of the marked verses are "diagnostics," but I count only 6 marked verses
among the 126 "PlusFours."
-- Not 30 "diagnostics" but 6 "PlusFours."
Let's consider Shaheen's work on Spenser. Shaheen lists 995 Biblical
passages in his index of Biblical references in the *Faerie Queene*.
OK, before we go on, what would you expect to find if you checked the 126
PlusFours (Biblical verses alluded to 4 or more times by Shakespeare)
against 1000 marked verses in Oxford's Bible AND made the same check
against the verses in the 1000 or so Biblical passages alluded to by
Spenser?
There are 31 verses marked in Oxford's Bible that appear within the
Spenser passages -- at this point, the Spenser/OxBib overlap seems quite
comparable to the Shakespeare/OxBib overlap. But when we look at the
PlusFours, we get a different story. Remember, of the 126 Shakespeare
"PlusFours," there are only 6 that correspond to marked verses in OxBib
(out of 1000 or so marked verses). There are, by contrast 37 passages on
Shaheen's *Faerie Queene* Biblical index (out of a total of about 1000)
that correspond to Shakespeare "PlusFours."
Thus, if we confine ourselves to Biblical verses that Roger considers
"diagnostic" of Shakespeare, we find a much greater overlap with Spenser's
use of the Bible in *The Faerie Queene* than we do with the verses marked
in Oxford's Bible. Here is a pdf chart of these findings:
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/diag3.pdf
Now, I could probably whittle the Spenser overlap with Shakespearean
plusfours down to 30 or so by applying stricter standards, but a similar
strictness would reduce the number of OxBib plusfours below 6, and Roger
needs every one he can get.
Readers of this newsgroup may remember that I criticized the two
statistical arguments that Roger (and Jim McGill) had advanced in his
dissertation. Those criticisms have gone unrefuted, and are in themselves
sufficient grounds for the rejection of Roger's book. The "PlusFours" v.
"diagnostics" bit is a new argument, and it appears to be just as damaging
to Roger's case.
6. Greensleeves
The explanation of Roger's "Greensleeves" argument, and the setting out of
everything wrong with it, will have to wait for another day.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lynne
any time. Delighted that you found us so congenial.
Lynne
Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message news:<Pine.GSO.4.44.0210231412580.28011-100000@mail>...
> Last Sunday (October 20), at the first conference of the Shakespeare
> [i.e., Oxfordian] Fellowship in Boston, Roger Stritmatter and I debated
> the topic "Resolved: the annotator of De Vere's Bible was the author of
> Shakespeare's Works." The Oxfordian verdict seems to be in: one of the
> members of the Shakespeare Fellowship posted this at the group's website:
> "most Oxfordians of course felt Roger won hands down, but Terry had his
> supporters there too and I'm sure they feel he was the winner."
>
>>
john_baker
I was given a 1st hand report on your critique of Roger's view on
this. It can be summed up in three words: you crashed and burned.
Let me help. Handwriting isn't DNA and cannot be used for the
purposes of identification.
Those who attempt it are fools.
john
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
> Terry,
>
> I was given a 1st hand report on your critique of Roger's view on this.
I'm sure your source was unbiased. So far, the only person I know of who
has put down my discussion of Roger's handwriting analysis is Dan Wright.
> It can be summed up in three words: you crashed and burned.
That's four words, John. Actually, several people came up to congratulate
me after the debate, and not only did I not crash and burn, I was bumped
up to first class for the flight back to Baltimore. Once aloft, I toasted
my new Oxfordian acquaintances with complemetary Jack on the rocks. Next
time (if I do anything like this again), I must find time to bar-hop with
a few of these fine people.
>
> Let me help. Handwriting isn't DNA and cannot be used for the purposes
> of identification.
>
It's OK with me if Oxfordians wish to argue that way -- but Roger
Stritmatter makes a very different point. According to Roger, most of the
marginal annotations were written by Oxford. According to Roger, "the
first possible line of attack for critics ... is to deny or cast doubt
upon the premise that the annotations are by Edward de Vere. If true,
this argument would of course obviate the significance of any alleged
relationship between those annotations and 'Shakespeare'" (Stritmatter's
dissertation, page 630). Roger considers his Appendix B a refutation of
this "line of attack."
Can you now understand the issue?
Roger knows that if his critics can either "deny or cast doubt upon the
premise that the annotations are by Edward de Vere," then his entire
project is pointless. In order to defend against this "line of attack"
(Roger's phrase), Roger went to a great deal of trouble to compare samples
of Oxford's writing with the annotations in Oxford's Bible (and to samples
by Lyly and Peele). He hired a document examiner to offer her "expert
opinion" in his support.
If Roger agreed with you that handwriting could never be used for purposes
of identification, then he would have no argument at all. If he thought as
you, all he could say is this: a book that once belonged to Oxford somehow
over the centuries acquired a number of markings, but there's no reason
trying to figure out who made them, because handwriting analysis isn't DNA
and therefore is worthless. Unlike you (and perhaps unlike the person who
gave you a "1st hand account"), I take Roger and his work seriously, and I
think it is worth a little effort to understand his argument on its own
ostensible terms.
When we look at the comparisons that Roger's examiner thought were the
strongest points for Oxford's having written the annotations, we find
something very curious: Oxford's actual handwriting in documents that we
know Roger was very familiar with is noticeably different from that of any
of the annotators.
What is more troubling is that Roger seems to have chosen his exemplars
from Oxford's writing on the basis of their perceived resemblance to the
annotations. He also seems to have deliberately omitted exemplars that
looked very different from those in the annotations. Look, for instance,
at what he did with the lowercase "g":
http://shakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/hwg.html
On the left side is Roger's presentation of exemplars: the top line shows
what each "g" looks like in the OxBib; the second line shows samples from
Oxford's writing; the third line has samples from Lyly; and the fourth
from Peele.
Now look on the right side of the page: here are samples taken from two of
Oxford's letters. The ones from the 24 Sept. 1575 letter have a white
background, while those from the 7 Oct. 1601 letter have a gray
background.
Here is some of Roger's description of Oxford's "g":
"The regularity and gracefulness of formation of letters so characteristic
of Oxford is nowhere more apparent than in the formation of the exemplar,
and this affords an impressive correspondence with the four samples from
the de Vere Bible" (579).
Wait a minute -- the way Oxford formed his "g" in the 1575 letter is
completely different from the way he formed his "g" in the 1601 letter.
While the formations are reasonably "regular" within a document, they vary
considerably from one document to the other. Why did Roger deliberately
exclude any "g" that looked like the one Oxford used in 1575 (five years
after he acquired the OxBib)?
In a remarkable concession, Roger admitted that he had considered asking
his friend Mark Anderson, who helped him with the handwriting analysis,
whether they should include any sample of Oxford's "variant 'g.'" What
this suggests is that Roger deliberately ignored exemplars that he
considered "variant" (and it appears that his sense of what made an
exemplar "variant" was that it looked even less like the characters found
in the annotations than other Oxford exemplars). For Roger to conceal
evidence this way, and then, knowing that Oxford's "g" was susceptible to
considerable "variation," to say that "the regularity and gracefulness of
formation of letters so characteristic of Oxford is nowhere more apparent
than in the formation of the exemplar" (i.e., the letter "g") is
mind-boggling. He conceals evidence of variation and then praises
Oxford's letter "g" for its "regularity."
Roger's "expert" Emily Will says, "Comparison of the letter 'g' reveals
that B [i.e., Lyly] and C [i.e., Peele] are different in proportion,
slant, and motion from the Q1 [i.e., OxBib] annotations." (618).
When we look at the samples of "g" from Oxford's 1575 and 1601 writings,
what do we find? They are different in proportion, slant, and motion from
the OxBib examples; indeed, the examples of "g" from Oxford's 1575 letter
are much more different from those in the OxBib than the examples from
Lyly and Peele are.
I am not an expert in Elizabethan paleography (neither is Roger; neither
is his "expert" Emily Will). I will look at other samples of Oxford's
writing when I get a chance, and I will build some pages based on what I
have found.
At the moment, it appears that Roger's analysis is deeply flawed; the bits
of handwriting evidence that Emily Will singled out as particularly
impressive do not, in fact, support the belief that Oxford penned ANY of
the annotations, let alone almost all of them. There appear to have been
at least three annotators (if you agree with Roger) or four (if you agree
with me) marking up the Oxbib over the years.
> Those who attempt it are fools.
I have never called Roger Stritmatter a fool; I don't think he is one,
although I do think Oxfordianism is folly. I don't even think that what
appears to be a shading of the evidence by Roger is evidence of
dishonesty: he really believes this stuff, and I think he often allows his
rooting interest to overrule whatever scholarly impulses he may feel. I
don't think detachment comes easily to Roger.
If you wish to rule out handwriting evidence altogether, then you are
telling Roger out of hand that he has no case. I have more respect for
Roger than that.
Of course, handwriting was not all we talked about in the debate. I also
used Augustine to discuss interpretive principles that would not be
legitimate in the debate; I discussed problems with Roger's transcription
of the OxBib annotations; I did a more accurate count of the marked verses
that correspond to Biblical passages used repeatedly by Shakespeare ("my
"PlusFours" v. Roger's "Diagnostics"), and showed that there is a much
stronger correlation between Spenser's use of Scripture in *The Faerie
Queene* and Shakespeare's "PlusFours" than between the OxBib markings and
Shakespeare's "PlusFours"; I countered Roger's "Greensleeves" bit (which
is presented in the dissertation as if it is very strong evidence). A
page with links to some of my debate notes is available at
http://shakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/debate.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
Toby Petzold
Bible:
> Roger knows that if his critics can either "deny or cast doubt upon the
> premise that the annotations are by Edward de Vere," then his entire
> project is pointless.
Interesting double standard there, Terry. Most Stratfordians ---who
shamelessly pretend that there is paleographic support for Shakspere
as Hand D--- also claim other grounds for attributing parts of Sir
Thomas More to their man. Yet, beyond their literary judgements, there
aren't any. Contrarily, the Geneva Bible in question WAS, in fact, de
Vere's; he has an actual connection to the object. Are you saying that
the variations and inconsistencies in the letter-formation in the
annotations of that book conclusively destroy Oxford's claim to them,
but that the (imagined) paleographic consistencies that Thompson found
between Shakspere and Hand D may be reserved as supportive?
> In order to defend against this "line of attack"
> (Roger's phrase), Roger went to a great deal of trouble to compare samples
> of Oxford's writing with the annotations in Oxford's Bible (and to samples
> by Lyly and Peele). He hired a document examiner to offer her "expert
> opinion" in his support.
>
> If Roger agreed with you that handwriting could never be used for purposes
> of identification, then he would have no argument at all.
Are underlinings as subject to paleographical analyses as actual
handwriting?
> If he thought as
> you, all he could say is this: a book that once belonged to Oxford somehow
> over the centuries acquired a number of markings, but there's no reason
> trying to figure out who made them, because handwriting analysis isn't DNA
> and therefore is worthless. Unlike you (and perhaps unlike the person who
> gave you a "1st hand account"), I take Roger and his work seriously, and I
> think it is worth a little effort to understand his argument on its own
> ostensible terms.
Tee hee.
> When we look at the comparisons that Roger's examiner thought were the
> strongest points for Oxford's having written the annotations, we find
> something very curious: Oxford's actual handwriting in documents that we
> know Roger was very familiar with is noticeably different from that of any
> of the annotators.
Handwriting style is liable to evolve. Oxford's seemed to. Of course,
when we look at the evolution of Shakspere's hand, the problem is that
all of his specimens (which vary enough from each other as it is) come
from the last four years of his life; we can't trace it through the
intermediate forms because there are (and, probably, were) none. Yet,
Thompson and the others were somehow able to discern this evolution
and [show] that Hand D (from 1590 or so) belonged to a man whose only
handwriting dates from 1612-16.
Why do Stratfordians claim to know what Shakspere's handwriting looked
like from a quarter-century before the first known exemplar was made?
> In a remarkable concession, Roger admitted that he had considered asking
> his friend Mark Anderson, who helped him with the handwriting analysis,
> whether they should include any sample of Oxford's "variant 'g.'" What
> this suggests is that Roger deliberately ignored exemplars that he
> considered "variant" (and it appears that his sense of what made an
> exemplar "variant" was that it looked even less like the characters found
> in the annotations than other Oxford exemplars). For Roger to conceal
> evidence this way, and then, knowing that Oxford's "g" was susceptible to
> considerable "variation," to say that "the regularity and gracefulness of
> formation of letters so characteristic of Oxford is nowhere more apparent
> than in the formation of the exemplar" (i.e., the letter "g") is
> mind-boggling. He conceals evidence of variation and then praises
> Oxford's letter "g" for its "regularity."
It's almost Stratfordian in its duplicity!
> Roger's "expert" Emily Will says, "Comparison of the letter 'g' reveals
> that B [i.e., Lyly] and C [i.e., Peele] are different in proportion,
> slant, and motion from the Q1 [i.e., OxBib] annotations." (618).
>
> When we look at the samples of "g" from Oxford's 1575 and 1601 writings,
> what do we find? They are different in proportion, slant, and motion from
> the OxBib examples; indeed, the examples of "g" from Oxford's 1575 letter
> are much more different from those in the OxBib than the examples from
> Lyly and Peele are.
>
> I am not an expert in Elizabethan paleography (neither is Roger; neither
> is his "expert" Emily Will). I will look at other samples of Oxford's
> writing when I get a chance, and I will build some pages based on what I
> have found.
>
> At the moment, it appears that Roger's analysis is deeply flawed; the bits
> of handwriting evidence that Emily Will singled out as particularly
> impressive do not, in fact, support the belief that Oxford penned ANY of
> the annotations, let alone almost all of them. There appear to have been
> at least three annotators (if you agree with Roger) or four (if you agree
> with me) marking up the Oxbib over the years.
So, what's the nub of your gist, Terry? Do you believe that Edward de
Vere made no marks in his own Bible and that others did? You won't
even give him a few underlined passages? It's HIS Bible! I can see
what partisan necessity there is in breaking this connection on the
rack (since there is no comparable Stratfordian connection to even a
single letter), but it seems uncharitable and pretty well unreasonable
to deny the great likelihood that, yes, Edward de Vere made some notes
in a Bible he actually owned.
<snip>
> I have never called Roger Stritmatter a fool; I don't think he is one,
> although I do think Oxfordianism is folly. I don't even think that what
> appears to be a shading of the evidence by Roger is evidence of
> dishonesty: he really believes this stuff, and I think he often allows his
> rooting interest to overrule whatever scholarly impulses he may feel. I
> don't think detachment comes easily to Roger.
The letter, met; the spirit, ravished.
> If you wish to rule out handwriting evidence altogether, then you are
> telling Roger out of hand that he has no case. I have more respect for
> Roger than that.
Shakespeare was apparently influenced by the Geneva Bible as by few
other works. Whether that Author would have been obligated to have
underlined and annotated every passage that interested him or only a
few or even none, it doesn't seem as important as the fact that an
actual connection exists between Oxford and that influence.
Stratfordians would love to have anything like the same.
<snip>
Toby Petzold
Much love and respect to Jam Master Jay (1965-2002)
Bob Grumman
the annotations. Only a complete loon would think that a man's underlining
biblical passages about subjects like cherubs must therefore be considered
to have written plays that refer to subjects like cherubs. Particularly, if
the underliner also underlined a great many biblical passages about subjects
the playwright was silent about, and the playwright referred to many
subjects there are passages in the Bible about which the underliner did not
underline.
--Bob G.
"Toby Petzold" <Neogno...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ad8b29ae.02110...@posting.google.com...
Alan Jones
> Shakespeare was apparently influenced by the Geneva Bible as by few
> other works. Whether that Author would have been obligated to have
> underlined and annotated every passage that interested him or only a
> few or even none, it doesn't seem as important as the fact that an
> actual connection exists between Oxford and that influence.
> Stratfordians would love to have anything like the same.
Could you direct me to the evidence that Shakespeare was influenced
specifically by the Geneva Bible? I assume someone has demonstrated that his
biblical allusions are unmistakably and overwhelmingly to that translation.
What other translations might have been readily available to him in his
younger years?
Alan Jones
john_baker
Terry,
Sounds like you had fun!! Good to hear your side of the tale!!
I remember flying back like that, from D.C., and got bumped up to
First Class and thus rode with an old Texas millionaire who had been a
personal friend of President Hoover, we'd sat at the conference with
Reagan...but the flight to Atlanta was the most fun of all...he told
me story after story....and it started with a gester...he made the
sign of a fuble and said "Hoover dropped the ball." He went on
to teach me that it isn't how you get the ball that counts, but what
you do with it while you have it....
In Change and the Law Goedecke, one of my major professors and
a life long friend and mentor, writes "the great argument for law is
the arguing itself."
I find the Shakespeare debate, no matter which side one is on, to
be of this nature.
All of us are enriched by the debate or by the "arguing itself."
The one thing that I see, as a critic of your position, is that
Stratfordianism is not open to understanding how important it is
to have these conflicting views and, thus, this "arguing."
\
My first dissertation, the one in philosophy at FSU, which I would
love to have you review and edit for me sometime, was on the
importance of "multiple working hypotheses" to the progression of
human knowledge.
Maybe you can tell us why Strats think it is so unimportant?
Bob Grumman
> Stratfordianism is not open to understanding how important it is
> to have these conflicting views and, thus, this "arguing."
Then why shouldn't we also be arguing who created the works of Dickens,
either Eliot, Sterne, Stevens, Bierce, Beethoven, Imhotep, Rembrandt, Plato,
Basho, etc., as well as who Elizabeth I really was, who built the pyramids,
whether Elvis, Hitler, Hughes, Hoffa, John F. Kennedy, Richard Kennedy,
etc., etc., are alive or not, and whether perpetual motion machines less
than the size of the universe are possible, and what color cheese the moon
is made out of, and whether fairies are real, etc., etc., etc.
--Bob G.
>
> Maybe you can tell us why Strats think it is so unimportant?
Only if you first tell us why you think "Strats" think multiple hypotheses
about genuine problems are unimportant. Or why we should have multiple
hypotheses about how many suns are within a hundred million miles of our
planet.
--Bob G.
Terry Ross
> Ross to Baker, on Stritmatter's Oxfordian defense of de Vere's Geneva
> Bible:
>
> > Roger knows that if his critics can either "deny or cast doubt upon the
> > premise that the annotations are by Edward de Vere," then his entire
> > project is pointless.
>
> Interesting double standard there, Terry.
In what sense is it a double standard to quote Roger Stritmatter's own
judgment about the importance to his case of establishing beyond doubt
that the annotations are in Oxford's hand? Let me paste some of what you
snipped:
According to Roger, most of the marginal annotations were written by
Oxford. According to Roger, "the first possible line of attack for
critics ... is to deny or cast doubt upon the premise that the annotations
are by Edward de Vere. If true, this argument would of course obviate the
significance of any alleged relationship between those annotations and
'Shakespeare'" (Stritmatter's dissertation, page 630). Roger considers
his Appendix B a refutation of this "line of attack."
> Most Stratfordians ---who shamelessly pretend that there is paleographic
> support for Shakspere as Hand D--- also claim other grounds for
> attributing parts of Sir Thomas More to their man.
Many scholars believe that a good case can be made that the additions are
probably in Shakespeare's hand, and there are, of course, other grounds
than the judgment that Hand D is consistent with Shakespeare's. If,
however, you remove Hand D from the table, the fact that Shakespeare wrote
the great bulk of the Shakespearean canon does not thereby become
doubtful, and the case that he contributed to *Thomas More* does not
evaporate. Nor is the case for Oxford's having written any of the
annotations in the OxBib strengthened.
> Yet, beyond their literary judgements, there aren't any. Contrarily, the
> Geneva Bible in question WAS, in fact, de Vere's; he has an actual
> connection to the object.
I have no problem accepting that Oxford owned the object, and that it is
very likely the book whose purchase was noted in 1570. It is also the
case that at least three different hands (according to Roger) or four
different hands (according to me) made marks in that book at some time.
> Are you saying that the variations and inconsistencies in the
> letter-formation in the annotations of that book conclusively destroy
> Oxford's claim to them, but that the (imagined) paleographic
> consistencies that Thompson found between Shakspere and Hand D may be
> reserved as supportive?
I have never made any detailed comment on the Hand D paleography. What I
am saying is this:
1. Roger Stritmatter tell us that is doubt can be cast on whether Oxford
wrote the annotations, such doubt would of course obviate the significance
of any alleged relationship between those annotations and 'Shakespeare'"
(Stritmatter's dissertation, page 630).
Are you with me so far? Whether you agree with Roger on this point or
not, do you at least understand it? Fine; let's go on.
2. Roger says, "a refutation of Smith's reasoning [i.e., the argument that
the handwriting is not Oxford's], accompanied by extensive paelological
proofs, is set forth in Appendix B [sic] of the present document" (630).
By "Appendix B," Roger clearly meant Appendix H, "Forensic Paleography."
Are you still with us? Again, the point is not whether you agree with
Roger but whether you understand him. If serious doubt can be cast on
whether the annotations are Oxford's, the game is over. Roger's
refutation of the attempt to cast doubt is his appendix called "Forensic
Paleography."
Roger hired a documents examiner (who does not appear to be an expert in
Elizabethan paleography), whose "expert opinion" gave qualified support to
the conclusions of Roger's Appendix I. There were a number of caveats in
her opinion, but she sided with Roger, and she was particularly impressed
by the evidence concerning the letters "g," "P," and "t" -- these were the
only ones she mentioned.
3. When we look at two of Oxford's actual epistles -- epistles that we
KNOW Roger was familiar with, because they are reprinted in two of his
favorite books -- we find that Roger's descriptions of the way key letters
of the alphabet are formed in Oxford's handwriting are misleading: and (to
judge by Roger's admission during his rebuttal) they are probably
deliberately misleading. We find that Oxford's characters are NOT formed
with the "regularity" claimed for them by Roger; we find that they have
features that Roger describes as so distinctive of the Lyly or Peele
samples that they may be used to distinguish those writers' hands both
from Oxford's and from the annotations in the OxBib.
>
> > In order to defend against this "line of attack"
> > (Roger's phrase), Roger went to a great deal of trouble to compare samples
> > of Oxford's writing with the annotations in Oxford's Bible (and to samples
> > by Lyly and Peele). He hired a document examiner to offer her "expert
> > opinion" in his support.
> >
> > If Roger agreed with you that handwriting could never be used for purposes
> > of identification, then he would have no argument at all.
>
> Are underlinings as subject to paleographical analyses as actual
> handwriting?
I don't see how they could be in this case. Roger's claim here is that
all of the underlinings are in the same inks as the written words that he
believes are in Oxford's hand; therefore, the writer of the words in those
colors of ink also made all the annotations in those color of ink. He
thinks there are six shades of ink in the book, but David Kathman was able
to group the markings into those made in black ink, those in red ink, and
those in pencil (Roger says nothing about the pencil annotations).
>
> > If he thought as
> > you, all he could say is this: a book that once belonged to Oxford somehow
> > over the centuries acquired a number of markings, but there's no reason
> > trying to figure out who made them, because handwriting analysis isn't DNA
> > and therefore is worthless. Unlike you (and perhaps unlike the person who
> > gave you a "1st hand account"), I take Roger and his work seriously, and I
> > think it is worth a little effort to understand his argument on its own
> > ostensible terms.
>
> Tee hee.
OK, so DON'T take Roger seriously; suit yourself.
>
> > When we look at the comparisons that Roger's examiner thought were the
> > strongest points for Oxford's having written the annotations, we find
> > something very curious: Oxford's actual handwriting in documents that we
> > know Roger was very familiar with is noticeably different from that of any
> > of the annotators.
>
> Handwriting style is liable to evolve. Oxford's seemed to.
Now that might have been a very interesting and useful point for Roger to
have suggested. IF Oxford's handwriting evolved, and IF the OxBib
annotations are in a consistent hand, then (IF Oxford is one of the
annotators), it might be possible to date some of the annotations by
comparing them to Oxford's hand at various stages in its evolution.
That, however, is not what Roger believes. He believes that Oxford's hand
is consistent and regular (and the regularity of his letter "g" is
particularly notable), unlike the hands of Lyly and Peele.
Your attempt to bail Roger out only reinforces the weakness of his case.
What is distressing is that Roger KNEW that Oxford's handwriting changed,
but deliberately concealed this knowledge from his readers. Roger KNEW,
for example, that the "g" in the 1575 epistle was very different from any
"g" in the samples from Lyly or Peele or the examples in the OxBib, but he
deliberately hid this information.
> Of course, when we look at the evolution of Shakspere's hand, the
> problem is that all of his specimens (which vary enough from each other
> as it is) come from the last four years of his life; we can't trace it
> through the intermediate forms because there are (and, probably, were)
> none.
If you want to see extreme variation, look at Walter Raleigh's signatures.
Shakespeare's are much more consistent.
> Yet, Thompson and the others were somehow able to discern this evolution
> and [show] that Hand D (from 1590 or so) belonged to a man whose only
> handwriting dates from 1612-16.
If you wish to reject the suggestion that Hand D is Shakespeare's, go
right ahead; you will not be alone. Neither your acceptance nor your
rejection would establish whether Oxford wrote any of the annotations in
the OxBib.
Again, you may, if you wish, reject the attribution of Hand D to
Shakespeare -- whether you accept it or reject it has no bearing on
whether Oxford wrote any of the annotations in the OxBib. There were
three or more different people marking up the OxBib (I would say at least
4); I don't think any of them was Shakespeare; I don't think any of them
was the person who wrote in Hand D; Roger has not made a case that any of
the annotations were by Oxford.
>
> > In a remarkable concession, Roger admitted that he had considered asking
> > his friend Mark Anderson, who helped him with the handwriting analysis,
> > whether they should include any sample of Oxford's "variant 'g.'" What
> > this suggests is that Roger deliberately ignored exemplars that he
> > considered "variant" (and it appears that his sense of what made an
> > exemplar "variant" was that it looked even less like the characters found
> > in the annotations than other Oxford exemplars). For Roger to conceal
> > evidence this way, and then, knowing that Oxford's "g" was susceptible to
> > considerable "variation," to say that "the regularity and gracefulness of
> > formation of letters so characteristic of Oxford is nowhere more apparent
> > than in the formation of the exemplar" (i.e., the letter "g") is
> > mind-boggling. He conceals evidence of variation and then praises
> > Oxford's letter "g" for its "regularity."
>
> It's almost Stratfordian in its duplicity!
I have not accused Roger of duplicity, but his deliberate withholding of
what he knows to be crucial evidence is difficult to justify.
>
> > Roger's "expert" Emily Will says, "Comparison of the letter 'g' reveals
> > that B [i.e., Lyly] and C [i.e., Peele] are different in proportion,
> > slant, and motion from the Q1 [i.e., OxBib] annotations." (618).
> >
> > When we look at the samples of "g" from Oxford's 1575 and 1601 writings,
> > what do we find? They are different in proportion, slant, and motion from
> > the OxBib examples; indeed, the examples of "g" from Oxford's 1575 letter
> > are much more different from those in the OxBib than the examples from
> > Lyly and Peele are.
> >
> > I am not an expert in Elizabethan paleography (neither is Roger; neither
> > is his "expert" Emily Will). I will look at other samples of Oxford's
> > writing when I get a chance, and I will build some pages based on what I
> > have found.
> >
> > At the moment, it appears that Roger's analysis is deeply flawed; the bits
> > of handwriting evidence that Emily Will singled out as particularly
> > impressive do not, in fact, support the belief that Oxford penned ANY of
> > the annotations, let alone almost all of them. There appear to have been
> > at least three annotators (if you agree with Roger) or four (if you agree
> > with me) marking up the Oxbib over the years.
>
> So, what's the nub of your gist, Terry? Do you believe that Edward de
> Vere made no marks in his own Bible and that others did?
The book is probably the one Oxford acquired in 1570. Oxford could have
made some of the marks in the Bible; Roger seems to think at least two
people who were NOT Oxford made marks in the Bible at some time during the
three an a half centuries between the time it was printed and the time it
was purchased by Folger. The case that the most of the handwritten
annotations were made by Oxford is extremely weak.
> You won't even give him a few underlined passages?
Sure it's possible -- but which ones? Roger attempts to give him ALL the
underlined verses and verse numbers on the grounds that the color of the
ink in the underlinings matches the colors of the ink in the words written
by a single annotator whom Roger believes was Oxford. The problem with
that line of argument is that the words do not appear to have been written
in Oxford's hand. There is, at a minimum, serious doubt whether ANY of
the words in the OxBib were written by Oxford, and the presence of such
doubt is enough, in Roger's words, to "obviate the significance of any
alleged relationship between those annotations and 'Shakespeare'" (630).
> It's HIS Bible!
It was; it has passed through a great many hands in the last 430 years.
Roger believes that some of the annotations were made by a "child," but
those annotations are closer to the style of most of the other annotations
than the word "continue" is. Somebody (somebody else?) made the marks in
pencil that one sees in the book.
> I can see what partisan necessity there is
There is nothing partisan in any of my examinations of Roger's
dissertation. What I have done from the first is to take his efforts and
arguments seriously and to subject them to scrutiny through the
application of neutral principles that even Oxfordians could (and that
even some Oxfordians do) appreciate. I am not using any "Oxford-only" or
"Shakespeare-only" rules here.
> in breaking this connection on the rack (since there is no comparable
> Stratfordian connection to even a single letter), but it seems
> uncharitable and pretty well unreasonable to deny the great likelihood
> that, yes, Edward de Vere made some notes in a Bible he actually owned.
As Roger said, "the first possible line of attack for critics ... is to
deny or cast doubt upon the premise that the annotations are by Edward de
Vere. If true, this argument would of course obviate the significance of
any alleged relationship between those annotations and 'Shakespeare'"
(630).
You may wish to disagree with Roger on this point, but I give him credit
for understanding how vital to his entire enterprise it is to establish
that the annotations were indeed in Oxford's hand.
So COULD Oxford have made SOME of the marks? Sure he could have; so could
anybody else who had access to the book. Roger, however, claims to have
shown beyond any serious doubt that Oxford did in fact mark close to 1000
verses in the book. The basis for his claim is extremely weak, and the
way he built his case is, shall we say, unscholarly. His readers had a
right to expect something better from him.
Initially, I was willing to agree with Roger and his "expert" that the
verbal annotations were probably by Oxford, and I was willing to consider
the underlinings and drawings as probably Oxford's as well. It hardly
matters, since there is no relationship between the pattern of marked
verses and Shakespeare's own use of the Bible. Then I decided to check
the details of Roger's work on handwriting, and when I did so, serious
questions were raised not only about whether Oxford wrote ANY of the
verbal annotations, but also about Roger's tendentious approach to the
evidence.
>
> <snip>
>
> > I have never called Roger Stritmatter a fool; I don't think he is one,
> > although I do think Oxfordianism is folly. I don't even think that what
> > appears to be a shading of the evidence by Roger is evidence of
> > dishonesty: he really believes this stuff, and I think he often allows his
> > rooting interest to overrule whatever scholarly impulses he may feel. I
> > don't think detachment comes easily to Roger.
>
> The letter, met; the spirit, ravished.
>
> > If you wish to rule out handwriting evidence altogether, then you are
> > telling Roger out of hand that he has no case. I have more respect for
> > Roger than that.
>
> Shakespeare was apparently influenced by the Geneva Bible as by few
> other works.
Well, let's say he was very familiar with the Bible. Naseeb Shaheen, the
expert in the field, says, "although the Geneva Bible may have been the
version that Shakespeare knew best, and which he seems to refer to most
often, the influence of other versions is also clearly evident, and no one
version can be called 'Shakespeare's Bible'" (*Biblical Influences in
Shakespeare's Plays* 44). One of the books Shakespeare referred to most
often was Psalms, but he generally alluded not to the Geneva Psalms but to
Coverdale's Psalter. Shaheen notes that "the Psalter was frequently bound
with copies of the popular Geneva Bible" (45) -- but the book Oxford owned
did NOT include this version of the Psalms. If Shakespeare owned a Geneva
Bible, wouldn't it more likely have been one of the later editions that
included the Psalter, rather than an edition that was printed when he was
6 years old?
> Whether that Author would have been obligated to have underlined and
> annotated every passage that interested him or only a few or even none,
> it doesn't seem as important as the fact that an actual connection
> exists between Oxford and that influence.
According to one estimate I read, there were something like 600,000 Bibles
or New Testaments in English published during Shakespeare's lifetime (this
in a country with a population of about 6 million). Of those 600,000,
there were far more Geneva Bibles than any other version. I don't know
how many Bibles printed between 1564 and 1616 have survived --certainly
hundreds; perhaps thousands. None of them, including the OxBib, can be
shown to have any connection to the author of the works of Shakespeare.
If you think the fact that Oxford owned a copy of the most popular Bible
of the day is in and of itself strong evidence that he wrote Shakespeare's
works, then you must believe the same thing of every other person (and
there were hundreds of thousands of them) who also owned such a book.
If, on the other hand, you are interested in Roger's claims about who
wrote the annotations and what relationship there may be between those
annotations and Shakespeare's use of the Bible, then you will have to be
willing to examine such minutiae as
* the actual marks in the book (Kathman is a more reliable guide in this
than Stritmatter where the two disagree);
* Oxford's actual handwriting as compared with that of the various
annotators (Roger is not a reliable guide here, but I will be putting up
more evidence when I get a chance);
* Shakespeare's pattern of Biblical reference (Shaheen is a more reliable
guide here than anybody else).
I said this last December:
"As for Roger Stritmatter's dissertation: it has been acclaimed by
Oxfordians not so much for the quality of its arguments and evidence but
for the mere fact of its existence: a dissertation that is
antistratfordian has been accepted by a reputable university, and its
author has been awarded a doctorate. Based on what readers of Roger's
tome have posted to this newsgroup, it seems clear that Roger's panel
failed in their duty, and that the acceptance of his dissertation was a
mistake -- there is, by the way, much, much else that is wrong with
Roger's work, and more of his blunders will be discussed later."
The statistical arguments advanced in Roger's dissertation were rebutted
last year. Thomas Larque's discussion of Roger's "diagnostics" exposed
grievous deficiencies in Roger's methods and arguments; Tom Veal's
criticisms provide further grounds against Roger.
> Stratfordians would love to have anything like the same.
Why is it that no Oxfordian can defend Roger's work on its own terms? He
wrote a 700-page dissertation that you seem to think was entirely beside
the point.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
Bob Grumman
> judgment about the importance to his case of establishing beyond doubt
> that the annotations are in Oxford's hand? Let me paste some of what you
> snipped:
>
> According to Roger, most of the marginal annotations were written by
> Oxford. According to Roger, "the first possible line of attack for
> critics ... is to deny or cast doubt upon the premise that the annotations
> are by Edward de Vere. If true, this argument would of course obviate the
> significance of any alleged relationship between those annotations and
> 'Shakespeare'" (Stritmatter's dissertation, page 630). Roger considers
> his Appendix B a refutation of this "line of attack."
Oddly unimaginative of Roger, I would say. Why couldn't he then say that
Oxford had a secretary underline certain passages? In fact, wouldn't he
have to?! Otherwise, the Bible might incriminate him!
--Bob G.
Elizabeth Weir
It has to be a monumental task to distinguish between English bibles
because they are built, one by one, on the textual foundations of the
one before. The text of the KJV is nearly identical to the Geneva.
Entire pages are verbatim. The distinction, in terms of the source,
may be the study notes in the margins of the Geneva. Those pithy
exegeses could easily find their way into the Shakespeare plays.
Ken Kaplan
you did not rebut the core initial statistical assertions. You did
force a recanting concerning the second set of statistics. Whether
Larque's criticisms are as powerful and valid as you claim remains to
be seen. Stritmatter has a response but he has not replied "en mass".
I think some of his essays on the Fellowship site deal with issues
Larque raised. In private communication he revealed at least one
egregious error by Larque equal to the mistake he "took a pounding
over" about Mary by you, Webb, and others. At some point he will have
to reply to people like Larque but the non response is not because
Larque has "shaken" his position soundly. Stritmatter claims that your
own analysis of the "plus fours" is compromised methodologically.
You bring up valid points. These kinds of criticisms are necessary and
welcome.
Just don't go assuming everything you write is correct until all is
done.
What interests me from reading Stritmatter's dissertation, is that the
exploration of the remarkable depth of Shakespeare's mind through this
arena of the Bible, a philosophical mind, one that seems to be denied
by many Strats on this NG and in general prompts counter questions.
Such as, given what is apparently a life long association with and
deep familiarity and study of the Bible, and its formative impact, why
do we get no evidence or contemporary's
comment on one who clearly had a strong comtemplative nature. Where
are the books? Where are comments of use of books? Where are comments
about this intellect, the "Soul of the Age". Why is he such a phantom?
Something is amiss here, as always. And it does not invalidate your
questions as to Oxford's role in annotating his Bible and its
association or non association with Shakespeare. But I'll tell you
Terry, just the fact that the verse from MOV was annotated that
changed the attribution of Portia's speech rings a great deal to me.
Ken Kaplan
Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message news:<Pine.GSO.4.44.0211020651500.15444-100000@mail>...
John W. Kennedy
> I have not accused Roger of duplicity, but his deliberate withholding of
> what he knows to be crucial evidence is difficult to justify.
Well, of course, I'm just a poor ol' academic layman from East
Vassalboro, and I don't know all that there fancy kol-ee-jit tawk,
but it sounds bloody duplicitous to me.
> Sure it's possible -- but which ones? Roger attempts to give him ALL the
> underlined verses and verse numbers on the grounds that the color of the
> ink in the underlinings matches the colors of the ink in the words written
> by a single annotator whom Roger believes was Oxford. The problem with
> that line of argument is that the words do not appear to have been written
> in Oxford's hand.
I rather thought that, in this period, ink was ink was ink.
> Well, let's say he was very familiar with the Bible. Naseeb Shaheen, the
> expert in the field, says, "although the Geneva Bible may have been the
> version that Shakespeare knew best, and which he seems to refer to most
> often, the influence of other versions is also clearly evident, and no one
> version can be called 'Shakespeare's Bible'" (*Biblical Influences in
> Shakespeare's Plays* 44). One of the books Shakespeare referred to most
> often was Psalms, but he generally alluded not to the Geneva Psalms but to
> Coverdale's Psalter. Shaheen notes that "the Psalter was frequently bound
> with copies of the popular Geneva Bible" (45) -- but the book Oxford owned
> did NOT include this version of the Psalms. If Shakespeare owned a Geneva
> Bible, wouldn't it more likely have been one of the later editions that
> included the Psalter, rather than an edition that was printed when he was
> 6 years old?
Coverdale's Psalms are used in the Book of Common Prayer. His entire
version of the Psalter was bound into the BCP from the Restoration
on, and even today the American BCP of 1976 includes a newly revised
Coverdale, rather than any other version. I cannot at the moment
discover whether the complete Psalter was bound into the Elizabethan
BCP, but, bound in or not, it was the version recited.
So, if Shakespeare is dependent on Coverdale, that indicates little more
than that he outwardly conformed, just as all the other evidence tends
to show.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly;
the rich have always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Man Who Was Thursday"
Alan Jones
"Elizabeth Weir" <elizabe...@mail.com> wrote in message
news:efbc3534.02110...@posting.google.com...
[...]
> It has to be a monumental task to distinguish between English bibles
> because they are built, one by one, on the textual foundations of the
> one before. The text of the KJV is nearly identical to the Geneva.
> Entire pages are verbatim. The distinction, in terms of the source,
> may be the study notes in the margins of the Geneva. Those pithy
> exegeses could easily find their way into the Shakespeare plays.
Quite so: "may", "could". And do they appear, incontrovertibly, in the
plays? Would you care to cite a few examples? (I hope the exegeses are not
so pithy as to be no more than commonplaces.)
Alan Jones
Terry Ross
Fellowship site. Since only members of that club can access the private
boards, I will posts here as well, in cased anybody is interested.
On the Shakespeare Fellowship boards, Roger posts as "Bassanio," and
refers to Stritmatter in the third person. Thus "Bassanio" will say,
"Stritmatter is an ass for not having spelled this out more directly in
his dissertation."
I am not making this up.
Roger as Bassanio also posted the following: "Terry, of course, with his
superior precision and care and more sophisticated comprehension of all
matters pertaining to intellectual excellence, got it right."
One of the SF members replied, "Oh dear, I'm lost. Got what right,
Bassanio?" Poor Roger/Bassanio had to come back with "Sorry, that was
intended to be sarcastic."
What I got wrong, according to Roger, is my count of PlusFours. Roger
counts 81 "diagnostics" in the Bible -- passages Shakespeare referred to
four or more times -- but when I made a somewhat similar count using
Roger's principle authority, I came up with 126 rather than 81. Of the
126, only 6 passages contain verses marked in Oxford's bible, while of
Roger's 81 "diagnostics," we are told that 30 contain marked verses.
Obviously, Roger and I are counting different things, or we are counting
things differently, or both. Here is what I posted today on the
Shakespeare Fellowship site:
=========
Roger Stritmatter says in his dissertation,
"A group of verses qualifies as a diagnostic if cited four or more times
in Carter (1905), Noble (1935), Shaheen (1987, 1989, 1993, 1999), Milward
(1987), Booth (1977), Stritmatter (1997, 1999a, 199b), or some combination
of these authorities. All citations must refer to the same motif or topic
within a verse" (Roger's dissertation, p.402).
Roger finds Shaheen the most reliable of his sources in this area: "of the
four major authorities on whom I primarily depend for compilation of the
Shakespeare Diagnostics, Shaheen is the most comprehensive and empirically
exact in his discriminations. However, Shaheen has not published a book on
the Romances nor has he treated the Sonnets or the Narrative Poems.
Also, in my opinion, he overlooks subtle but pertinent references which
were accepted by other scholars such as Carter, Noble or Milward" (402).
Roger is not entirely correct: in fact the Romances are indeed covered in
Shaheen's 1999 *Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays*, a work to
which Roger refers on the very same page of his dissertation. Note that
Roger faults Shaheen not for the looseness but for the excessive
strictness of his standards.
I have discussed my own reasons for relying on Shaheen (1999):
"Roger took lists of Biblical allusions to Shakespeare from a variety of
different sources, each of them using different (and mutually
inconsistent) standards for what should count as an allusion. I used
Naseeb Shaheen's *Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays*, since it
was the most comprehensive, complete, consistent, and recent source. I
would be willing to use some other set of standards than Shaheen's, but it
seems to me to be a basic principle for this kind of inquiry that whatever
standards one uses should be global and consistent BOTH for Shakespeare's
works AND for the entire Bible. Shaheen covers the plays and not the
nondramatic verse, but unless someone has a consistent set of standards
applied even more widely than what Shaheen gave us, I think we should
stick with Shaheen. In addition, Shaheen has the advantage that he is
familiar with the work of his predecessors, and he tells us that 'Whenever
a biblical parallel suggested by others does not appear in this volume, it
generally indicates that I have rejected that parallel as being invalid.'"
There are about 2300 Biblical passages listed in Shaheen's 1999 index, of
which 126 are what I call "PlusFours" (passages referred to 4 or more
times by Shakespeare). Shaheen lists "not only the principle passages in
Scripture to which Shakespeare refers, but also all of the secondary texts
that parallel them. These secondary passages are sufficiently similar to
Shakespeare's principle passages to warrant their inclusion in the
appendix" (Shaheen 769).
We could, if we wished exclude the "secondary texts" from our counts; the
result would be to reduce the number of "PlusFours" -- but among those
that would be lost would be *every one* of the six marked verses in the
OxBib that qualify as PlusFours:
1 Samuel 24.11
2 Samuel 1.14
1 Kings 2.32
Mark 10.21
Revelation 20.12
Revelation 21.8
Not one of these would qualify as a "PlusFour" if we considered only
"principle passages" in Shaheen. Let us restate the point: if we wish to
restrict "PlusFours" or "diagnostics" to those Shaheen describes as the
"principle passages" in Scripture to which Shakespeare refers in his
plays, we will find that NONE of the 1000 or so marked verses in Oxford's
Bible qualifies. Yet, as Shaheen says, "the secondary passages are
sufficiently similar to Shakespeare's principle passages to warrant their
inclusion in the appendix," and I think they are sufficiently similar to
warrant their inclusion in either Roger's list of "diagnostics" or in a
list of PlusFours. Remember: Roger's complaint against Shaheen was NOT
that his standards were too loose, but that, even with his inclusion of
"secondary texts," that they were too restrictive.
Given that Roger's complaint against Shaheen is that his standards are too
strict, one would expect the number of Stritmatter "diagnostics" to be
substantially greater than the number of "PlusFours." Roger wishes to add
to Shaheen's list "references which were accepted by other scholars such
as Carter, Noble or Milward" -- references which Shaheen tells us he
generally considered invalid (that is, not even worth listing as
"secondary texts").
How much does Roger wish to subtract from Shaheen's index? Roger lists a
handful of what he calls "false positives in Shaheen's data," only three
of which (Mt 19.5-6, Mt 20.30, Lk 18.13) will be found among the 126
PlusFours (see p. 403 for Roger's complete list of Shaheen "false
positives"). Actually, these three passages have at least as strong a
claim to be included as the six OxBib PlusFours, but even if we were to
subtract those three (and I am not inclined to do so), the number of
"PlusFours" would be 123.
Roger counted only 81 "diagnostics" using Shaheen's separate works on the
tragedies, histories, and comedies; AND Shaheen's comprehensive volume
covering all of the plays, including the romances; AND the suggestions of
other writers; AND a number of references that Roger himself added to the
mix.
How can one add any positive number to 126 (or even to 123) and end up
with 81?
As I said before, I have no way to account for the dozens of
PlusFours/diagnostics that Roger missed.
Here is a link to a new version of my chart of Shakespearean PlusFours:
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/diag4a.pdf
This chart shows the 126 Biblical passages that appear at least 4 times in
Shaheen's 1999 index ("PlusFours").
Of those 126 PlusFours, 48 correspond to Roger's "diagnostics" (these
appear in orange on the chart) and 78 do not (these appear in blue).
Even if we throw out the 3 passages among the 126 that Roger considers
"false positives" (and I see no particular reason to do so; if we were to
purge the list of all "secondary texts" then the number of OxBib PlusFours
would be reduced to zero), we are still left with 75 other
PlusFours/diagnostics that Roger somehow overlooked.
The headings on the chart are "4+" (the PlusFours are sequentially
numbered in the order in which the appear in the Bible, from 1 to 126);
"Book" (the book of the Bible in which the PlusFour appears); "Verse" (the
chapter and verse or verses of the PlusFour); "Count" (the number of times
this Biblical passage is listed in Shaheen's Index); "Sp?" (the verses in
Shaheen's Index to Biblical References in *The Faerie Queene* that
correspond to Shakespearean PlusFours); and "Ox?" (the verses marked in
Oxford's Bible that correspond to Shakespearean PlusFours).
There are 6 PlusFours that correspond to verses marked in Oxford's Bible.
Although only 38% of the 126 PlusFours correspond to Roger's
"diagnostics," every one of the 6 PlusFours that happened to correspond to
marked OxBib verses also happened to be dubbed a "diagnostic." Would
somebody care to state the odds against such a thing happening by chance?
Put 6 white balls and 120 black balls into a sack. Draw out 48 of the
balls without looking. What is the chance that all 6 while balls will be
among the 48 that you drew?
The Shakespeare Fellowship member "Bassanio," who amusingly refers to
Roger Stritmatter as if he were an entirely different person,
misinterpreted my observations when he said, "although Terry chose his
words carefully so as not to accuse Stritmatter of being dishonest, the
implication was very well present and intended in his presentation: the
implication was that Stritmatter must have more or less deliberately
undercounted the relevant data by more than 50%."
There was no implication of deliberate dishonesty in my discussion of
PlusFours/diagnostics. Let me repeat: I have no way to account for the
78 PlusFours/diagnostics that Roger missed.
I think sloppiness probably played a part. Anyone who looks at Roger's
Appendix A closely will notice that the "Table of Shakespeare Diagnostics"
is, frankly, a mess. I have put the table up so that readers may see for
themselves: http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/strit398-401.pdf
The "diagnostics" are supposed to be numbered in the order in which they
appear in the Bible, but "diagnostic" numbers 10 through 12 are from Job,
the 18th book of the Old Testament, while numbers 13 through 17 are from 1
Samuel, the 9th book.
Even within the group from 1 Samuel, Roger shuffles the "diagnostics":
number 15 (1 Samuel 10.1/16.13) comes *AFTER* "diagnostic" number 14 (1
Samuel 16.23).
Roger's "diagnostic" number 18 is from "Kings 2.32-38," but as he
elsewhere seems to know, there are *two* books called Kings. Roger
recovers a bit, noting that number 19 is from "1 Kings," but just when you
thought it was safe to go back into the Bible, we're back to the book of
Job for "diagnostic" number 20.
If Roger were following canonical order, Job should be followed by Psalms,
but the "diagnostics" in Psalms have the numbers 27 through 31, because
Roger has inserted Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Ecclesiastes between Job and
Psalms. Then, after the Psalms, it's back again to Isaiah for
"diagnostic" number 32.
Roger tops this by moving Tobit and Ecclesiasticus (numbers 33 and 34)
to the Old Testament, something that would have surprised readers of the
Geneva Bible. OK, it's time for the Apocrypha, with a "diagnostic" from
Wisdom, but then Roger returns to Ecclesiasticus for "diagnostics" 36-41.
Roger does a somewhat better job with the New Testament, but "diagnostic"
number 56 is Matthew 23.23; then comes "diagnostic" number 57, which is
Matthew 20.28; then we go forward again at diagnostic 58 (Matthew
25.14-29). In Ephesians we have number 74 (Ephesians 6.14-17 et alia)
followed by the earlier verses in number 75 (Ephesians 4.22-24). Roger
cannot even make it through Revelation in the proper order:
78 (Revelation 12.9);
79 (Revelation 3.5);
80 (Revelation 20.12);
81 (Revelation 21.8/20.10).
Such remarkable sloppiness is found everywhere in Roger's dissertation,
and it is one of the factors that makes the tome so difficult to read.
Roger's dissertation is full of jaw-dropping howlers (his errors would
number in the thousands if anyone could stand to tally them all). The
reader is constantly forced to wonder whether such howlers are the result
of carelessness, of ignorance, of a credulous belief in Oxfordian myths,
of fatigue, of difficulty in such simple tasks as counting, or of design.
The extraordinary sloppiness also, to some extent, insulates Roger from
the accusation of dishonesty -- an accusation, let me repeat, that (pace
Bassanio) I have not made concerning the PlusFours/Diagnostics issue.
Somebody who has such great difficulty arranging his "diagnostics" in the
order in which they appear in the Bible, someone who can't seem to
remember whether Ecclesiasticus and Tobit are in the Old Testament or the
Apocrypha, someone who cannot place Revelation 3.5 *before* Revelation
12.9 -- such a person may not be capable of carrying out a deliberate
campaign of disinformation.
Xr...@pxcr8.pxcr.com
On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Terry Ross wrote:
<snip>
>
> There are 6 PlusFours that correspond to verses marked in Oxford's Bible.
> Although only 38% of the 126 PlusFours correspond to Roger's
> "diagnostics," every one of the 6 PlusFours that happened to correspond to
> marked OxBib verses also happened to be dubbed a "diagnostic." Would
> somebody care to state the odds against such a thing happening by chance?
> Put 6 white balls and 120 black balls into a sack. Draw out 48 of the
> balls without looking. What is the chance that all 6 while balls will be
> among the 48 that you drew?
According to my calculator:
(48/120)*(47/119)*(46/118)*(45/117)*(44/116)*(43/115)=0.0033595311
So the odds against are about 99.66%
<snip>
Rob
Xr...@pxcr8.pxcr.com
Oops. That should have been (48/126)*(47/125) etc. which
would have resulted in the odds being 99.75% against.
Rob
Terry Ross
> Not so fast. From my reading of the posts between you and Jim McGill you
> did not rebut the core initial statistical assertions.
Ken, you know not whereof you speak. The core statistical assertions in
Roger's dissertation have been thoroughly rebutted, and Roger has made no
attempt that I know of either to resuscitate the poor creatures or to
replace them with valid arguments. Jim McGill himself granted that his
and Roger's chi-square argument was completely without merit, and he also
granted that if Dave Kathman's and my counts were more accurate than
Roger's counts, his and Roger's hypergeometric method would support the
claim that the overlap between Shakespeare's Biblical references and
Oxford's Bible was no more significant than that between Spenser's
Biblical references and Oxford's Bible.
Weren't you paying attention last year?
Why is this important? Roger in his dissertation lists four possible
lines of attack against his work (there are more than four, but let's give
Roger credit for counting at least that high on this occasion). He says,
"A second line of attack is to admit that the annotations are made by de
Vere but to contest the alleged connection to Shakespeare. This strategy
has been followed by David Kathman in his claim that the connections
between Shakespeare and the de Vere Bible are 'random.' A response to this
claim is included in the present document as appendix l [sic]" (630).
By "appendix l," Roger mean Appendix C, "Statistical Observations Related
to the Marked Verses in the de Vere Bible" by poor Jim McGill, whom Roger
hung out to dry last year. It is NOT the case that one must grant that
the markings in the OxBib were made by Oxford before one "contests the
alleged connection to Shakespeare." As David Kathman said, "One could
argue about whether the handwriting of the written annotations is
Oxford's, but this is largely a moot point, because the pattern of marked
marked verses in this Bible shows very little similarity to Shakespeare's
pattern of Bible use."
See Dave's essay "Oxford's Bible" at
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/ox5.html and his list of annotations in
de Vere's Bible at http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/oxbib.html
While we will have to make a few changes to Dave's list, it is more
reliable than anything Roger has yet produced, and Dave's essay remains
the best introduction to the OxBib and to the issues. My counts of the
number of passages listed in Shaneen's Spenser and Shakespeare indices
have not been supplanted in the last year.
Nothing Roger or any of his defenders have said or written in the last
year has cause me to change my mind about what I said in my first post on
Roger's statistical problems:
===
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.
===
What I said in October of last year remains true today: the marked verses
in Oxford's Bible do not correspond particularly well to the set of verses
Shakespeare is thought to have alluded to in his works.
In the absence of a statistical argument to the contrary, Roger's entire
project is finished.
> You did force a recanting concerning the second set of statistics.
Look again; neither statistical argument stands. At the Shakespeare
Fellowship Conference last month, I asked Dan Wright about the matter; he
said that the statistical parts had been "forced on" Roger by U Mass or
his department, and I suppose the implication is that since Roger was
forced to do something that looked like a statistical argument, the
validity of the argument didn't matter. Obviously, Roger had no
conception of how to form a statistical argument (although he at least
recognized that such an argument was crucial to his case), and it appears
that his readers either did not bother to assess the statistical parts of
Roger's dissertation, or they were not competent to judge those parts.
Nevertheless, they approved the dissertation "as to style and content."
> Whether Larque's criticisms are as powerful and valid as you claim
> remains to be seen.
There has not been a counter to them.
> Stritmatter has a response but he has not replied "en mass". I think
> some of his essays on the Fellowship site deal with issues Larque
> raised. In private communication he revealed at least one egregious
> error by Larque equal to the mistake he "took a pounding over" about
> Mary by you, Webb, and others.
If that "egregious error" is the one Roger mentioned during the debate,
and that he has made part of his canned response to critics, you are
wrong.
Here is Thomas's original error, from November 18, 2001:
====
And yet again Stritmatter does not have the authority of real Shakespeare
scholars to support his claims for this verse. Carter and Milward, he
tells us, refer to 1 Corinthians 7.5 - "For a time, that ye may give
yourselves to fasting and prayer", Mark 9:29 - "By praier and fasting" and
Matthew 17:21 - "How be it this king goeth not out, but by prayer and
fasting", but Stritmatter claims that "None of the cited verses is closer
to Sh[akespeare's] wording than the marked Tobit 12:8-9. This seems to be
a rather desperate lie, or Stritmatter just isn't too bright, since all of
the Shakespeare verses he cites contain references to fasting *AND*
prayer. Fasting and prayer appear in all the verses listed by Carter and
Milward, but there is no prayer at all in Tobit 12:8-9, so when
Stritmatter claims that Shakespeare is referring to these verses, he is
clearly wrong.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=hdqfvtst22rgiqqub...@4ax.com
Thomas made two mistakes here: first, his tone was riskily abusive ("a
rather desperate lie," "just isn't too bright"). We're all tempted to
abuse the honesty or intelligence of those we disagree with, and sometimes
with what seems to us good cause, but our opponents can always dismiss us
as people who are merely abusive, and if it turns out that what we called
a "lie" was not a mistake on our opponent's part at all, then we have left
ourselves open for a considerable hiding. Thomas's second mistake was not
noticing that the word "prayer" DOES appear in Tobit 12:8-9 --
8 Prayer is good with fasting, and almes, and righteousnesse. A litle with
righteousnesse is better then much with vnrighteousnes: it is better to
giue almes then to lay vp golde.
9 For almes doth deliuer from death, & doeth purge all sinne. Those which
exercise almes & righteousnes, shalbe filled with life.
===
OK, that's a horse on Thomas. What sometimes happens in such cases is
that an opponent will post the correct information and denounce the person
who falsely claimed to have found an error as the sort of jabbernowl who
should never again be taken seriously as long as the earth continues to
turn.
That's not what happened here. It was Thomas himself who spotted his
error, and who posted a correction and apology immediately:
=====
OK. This one is my stupid mistake. The word "Prayer" appears as the very
first word in Tobit 12:8. I must have had some sort of peculiar
brainstorm to miss it. This means that this is one less Roger cheat and
one more in the "doubtful" category. This means that if you only reject
the instances where Roger is clearly cheating then he has found a possible
22 matches between his "Shakespeare Diagnostics" and marks in the Oxford
Bible.
I apologise to Roger and everybody else for my stupid error.
http://groups.google.com/groups?&selm=kndgvt446vcatqssg...@4ax.com
=========================
Thomas's correction and apology was posted the SAME DAY as his original
blunder. No Oxfordian, no supporter of Roger showed Thomas where he had
been wrong -- he himself was the first person to catch his mistake; he
promptly posted a correction; he apologized.
But that is not the end of the story. Roger has incorporated Thomas's use
of the word "lie," his error about whether "prayer" appears in Tobit
12.8-9, and the fact that Thomas was wrong at all into his Powerpoint
Presentation on the OxBib. It is his sole "refutation" to Thomas's
devastating examinations of Roger's "diagnostics." Roger does not tell
his audience that Thomas himself spotted his mistake very quickly and very
quickly published a public correction and apology. Roger does not deal
with any of Thomas's substantive criticisms. For him, it is sufficient that
on one of the occasions where Thomas thought he had caught Roger in an
error, it was Thomas himself who was wrong. And what of the great
majority of places where Thomas's analysis of Roger's methods was correct?
Not a peep from Roger.
Roger's confusing Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots is a very different
matter. For one thing, it does not seem to have been the sort of hasty
oversight that led Thomas to his mistake. It appears that Roger genuinely
confused the two queens who happened to be named Mary -- a fundamental
howler in any work that purports to deal with 16th century England. Here
is part of a passage I quote last year:
"In reaction, counter-reformationist plots swirled thickly about Mary
Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I's Spanish half-sister and Catholic heir to
Henry VIII. As Elizabeth fretted over and deferred the execution of her
sister, Mary's cousin, the Spanish King Phillip II, aided by powerful
English nobles such as Oxford's antagonist Charles Arundel, prepared for
military conquest and counter-reformation" (Roger's dissertation, p. 60).
Here is a sentence from Roger's dissertation that I have NOT posted
before: "Only after the 1587 execution of the Scots Queen, Elizabeth's own
half-sister Mary Stuart, was her reign secured, and even then the price of
security was high" (186).
I suppose Roger's confusing the two Marys in ONE of these passages might
be chalked up to editorial gremlins, but the fact that he made the same
error in two widely-spaced places, in very different words, suggests that
he really was NOT able to distinguish Mary the Queen of England from Mary
Queen of Scots. Thomas Larque very quickly spotted, corrected, and
apologized for his error within hours of his initial post. I don't know
that Roger was aware of his Mary-Mary confusion until I pointed it out
last year.
> At some point he will have to reply to people like Larque but the non
> response is not because Larque has "shaken" his position soundly.
> Stritmatter claims that your own analysis of the "plus fours" is
> compromised methodologically.
I didn't mention this to the hlas group, but Roger has offered a copy of
his dissertation (not the real one, but Roger's partial reprint) to
anybody who can supply the response Roger seems to wish he had come up
with during the debate. I thought I was supposed to be the one who had
"crashed and burned."
----- THIS JUST IN ----
Roger has announced a winner in his "Help Me Against Terry" contest -- Jim
Brooks, who thinks some of the various Biblical passages that I have
listed separately should be grouped together: "For example, in Terry's
list, #2 (Gen. 2.24) should be grouped with #108 (Eph. 5.31), #117 (2
Peter 2.4) with #118 (Jude 6), and #33 (Ps. 6.2) with #35 (Ps. 9.13)."
Well, Roger might be pleased with that unresponsive response, but it
misses the point. Here's the kicker: Roger is welshing on the deal.
After congratulating Brooks for winning, Roger added this postscript:
"PS -- Jim, your free copy of Stritmatter's dissertation will be mailed as
soon as more copies become available. It is currently out of print."
This is most unfortunate, and unnecessary. Roger can always acquire a
copy of his actual dissertation from UMI at
http://www.umi.com/hp/Products/Dissertations.html
He can then mail the UMI version to Brooks.
> You bring up valid points. These kinds of criticisms are necessary and
> welcome.
Judging by the reactions of confirmed Oxfordians, my criticisms are not
all that welcome. Nor are they necessary. Roger's dissertation is not a
contribution to scholarship in literary history, comparative literature,
or any other field that I know of. His panel was wrong to approve it,
whether they were capable of judging it or not. I happen to have become a
minor player in the Shakespeare authorship game, so Roger's dissertation
may be worth MY time, but I would not advise any reader to trust anything
anywhere in the work that he cannot verify independently.
> Just don't go assuming everything you write is correct until all is
> done.
Such an assumption is not really my style. I may have made a mistake here
or there in my counting of PlusFours (although nobody has spotted any
yet), and if so, I will amend my chart of them, but as it stands it's far
more reliable than Roger's chart of "diagnostics," and it didn't take me
10 years to compile, either.
>
> What interests me from reading Stritmatter's dissertation, is that the
> exploration of the remarkable depth of Shakespeare's mind through this
> arena of the Bible, a philosophical mind, one that seems to be denied by
> many Strats on this NG and in general prompts counter questions.
Do you really think you are equipped by education, training, or
temperament to plumb the depths of Shakespeare's mind?
> Such as, given what is apparently a life long association with and deep
> familiarity and study of the Bible, and its formative impact, why do we
> get no evidence or contemporary's comment on one who clearly had a
> strong contemplative nature. Where are the books?
Lost or destroyed, probably, with one or two possible exceptions, such as
the *Archaionomia*. What became of the overwhelming majority of the
600,000 or so Bibles and New Testaments in English that were printed
during Shakespeare's lifetime? Still, if you think the argument that a
book that Oxford owned, a book that was marked up by at least three or
four different people over the centuries, a book whose marked verses (by
whichever people are responsible) do not correspond particularly well to
Shakespeare's pattern of Biblical reference -- if you think the mere
existence of such a book is a strong argument in Oxford's favor, then you
will never lack for companions in the Shakespeare Fellowship. IF, on the
other hand, you think Roger actually advances an argument or two in his
dissertation, and if you think any of those arguments may be worth
exploring, then hlas is a more useful site.
> Where are comments of use of books? Where are comments about this
> intellect, the "Soul of the Age". Why is he such a phantom?
Halloween was last week. The "soul of the age" comment was made by a
contemporary and friend of William Shakespeare, by the way, a man who
wrote plays for Shakespeare's company (including prominent parts for
Shakespeare himself), a man who did not think Shakespeare was one of the
great intellects of the age, a man who mocked some of the errors in
Shakespeare, a man who seems to have resented the popularity of some of
Shakespeare's plays, a man who loved him and who honored his memory.
Where do you find any contemporary praising Shakespeare (or praising the
works) for erudition or theological insight? If anything, you will find
the opposite. Shakespeare was NOT considered particularly learned by his
contemporaries.
>
> Something is amiss here, as always.
Of course you will believe as you wish to believe. Somehow none of the
thousand things amiss with Oxfordianism has the slightest impact on you.
> And it does not invalidate your questions as to Oxford's role in
> annotating his Bible and its association or non association with
> Shakespeare.
I was willing to grant that Oxford had probably made the marks in the book
until I took a close look at what Roger was passing off as evidence. Now
I doubt that ANY of the written words in the book were penned by Oxford. I
will look at more specimens of Oxford's writings when I get a chance, and
if the evidence starts to turn Oxford's way, I will certainly say so, but
I have seen enough to know that we cannot rely on what Roger presents.
> But I'll tell you Terry, just the fact that the verse from MOV was
> annotated that changed the attribution of Portia's speech rings a great
> deal to me.
One verse? There are about 1000 marked verses in the OxBib, one of which
is Philippians 2.15. There are some 2300 Biblical references in Shaheen's
list, one of which is Philippians 2.15.
Shaheen listed Phil 2.15 as a source for the MoV speech in his *Biblical
References in Shakespeare's Comedies*, which was printed in 1993, and the
source is also given in his comprehensive 1999 study. Roger seems to
suspect that Shaheen first learned about Phil 2.15 from a letter that
Roger sent some time earlier in the same year of 1993. Are we supposed to
believe that upon receipt of the letter Shaheen called his publisher and
inserted the Phil 2.15 reference? If you look at Shaheen's 1993 book,
will you find signs of last-minute revisions? Are there more lines on
that page than on other pages? Is the reference to Phil 2.15 in a subtly
different font? Oh, how crafty are the many anti-Stritmatterians at the
University of Delaware Press to conceal all evidence for Roger's fantasy
of how Shaheen robbed him of the rightful credit for the Phil 2.15
reference.
Actually, the fact that Shaheen suggests Phil 2.15 as a Biblical reference
works against Roger. Shaheen rejects many of the Biblical references
suggested by earlier writers, and lists as probable references many
passages that were overlooked by his predecessors. In this particular
instance, he agrees with (even as he resents) Shaheen, because Shaheen's
judgment adds an instance to that small group, the verses marked in
Oxford's Bible that Shakespeare refers to, and removes an instance from
that vastly larger group of marked verses that Shakespeare does NOT refer
to. If Roger were to use Sahheen's standards exclusively, the number of
PlusFours (or "diagnostics") would drop to 6.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross Visit the SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP home page
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Ken Kaplan
Bob Grumman
baloney:
To this, am I not correct to add that just about ALL the marked verses that
correspond to verses some of Shakespeare's lines are based on (directly or
indirectly) are ones that just about any writer of the time would have
thought of using?
Also, I still want to know if any study of Shakespeare's sources has been
made to find out how many of his "Biblical allusions" came from them. I
know this was discussed. Perhaps, I've just forgotten the answer. I do
recall that someone said they should still count because his keeping such
"allusions" would indicate his interest in them.
--Bob G.
Jim McGill
I see that my name has appeared, once again, in your postings. And it
seems that, once again, some clarifications are needed.
"Jim McGill himself granted that his and Roger's chi-square argument
was completely without merit,"
The specific Chi-Square argument that I developed for Dr. Stritmatter
was mathematically erroneous and was, indeed, "completely without
merit". Roger used that argument, accepting my word on its accuracy,
but had no part in its development. The mathematical error was
entirely mine and, after acknowledging my mistake in a response to
your postings, I sent to Roger a note of apology which he graciously
accepted. We remain cordial and I believe I still have his respect.
"and he [McGill] also granted that if Dave Kathman's and my counts
were more accurate than Roger's counts, his and Roger's hypergeometric
method would support the claim that the overlap between Shakespeare's
Biblical references and
Oxford's Bible was no more significant than that between Spenser's
Biblical references and Oxford's Bible."
I granted that if the specific alternate counts that Kathman proposed
were accepted (as they certainly have not been by Stritmatter or by
the Oxfordian community, as far as I am aware), then your resulting
calculation using the hypergeometric distribution would not support
rejection of the random hypothesis at the 1% level of significance.
My use of the stringent 1% level dictates that if a calculation shows
even as much as a 2% probability that the corresponding verse overlaps
really could have happened just due to random chance (i.e. a 98%
chance that they didn't), then I would not reject the random
hypothesis. I know that you understand that "not reject" is not the
same as "accept". By not rejecting the random hypothesis, I leave the
matter unresolved. This is not equivalent to actually accepting the
random hypothesis. And it certainly does not imply a probabilistic
equivalence between verse overlaps in de Vere/Shakespeare as compared
with those of de Vere/Spenser. I must also add that David Kathman's
original assertion, which my hypergeometric argument considered,
addressed Roger's counts, not Kathman's.
"… Appendix C, "Statistical Observations Related
to the Marked Verses in the de Vere Bible" by poor Jim McGill, whom
Roger
hung out to dry last year."
You used these same words ("poor Jim McGill" and "hung out to dry") in
your previous postings, seeming to imply that I have somehow been
victimized by a callous or even cowardly Roger. I had hoped that my
responses to those posting made it clear that any such notion is pure
rubbish. Indeed, it is Roger who might exhibit quite justified
annoyance at being "hung out to dry" by my carelessness. But, as I
stated, we remain cordial and he has assured me that he bears me no
ill will for my gaffe. Criticize me as you choose, Terry, but please
do not attempt to extend such criticism into some kind of implied
corresponding character flaw on Roger's part.
"At the Shakespeare Fellowship Conference last month, I [Ross] asked
Dan Wright about the matter; he said that the statistical parts had
been "forced on" Roger by U Mass or his department, and I suppose the
implication is that since Roger was forced to do something that looked
like a statistical argument, the validity of the argument didn't
matter."
I know nothing of this. I do know, as stated in my previous postings,
that the original hypergeometric argument, that I developed and
submitted as a Letter to the Editor of an Oxfordian magazine, was
solely in response to Dr. Kathman's hypothesis of random verse
overlap, as then stated on his Stratfordian website. I am frankly
skeptical that either U Mass or Roger would have considered a
statistical argument to be "crucial to his case" as you go on to
state. Roger's arguments are of a qualitative, not quantitative,
nature. It's my impression that he had no initial intention or
expectation of including any supporting statistical evidence. Indeed,
the development of such evidence would likely not be expected in such
a subjective domain. It was Kathman's specific raising of the
possibility of a random overlap, a notion that one actually can
explore mathematically, that piqued my interest and prompted my paper.
Statistical arguments are certainly not crucial to Roger's case, but
they can offer an additional perspective in viewing the subject. In
this case, the hypergeometric argument, as I previously stated, was
designed to consider Kathman's original comment that Roger's counts
(not the subsequent Kathman counts) could be ascribed to merely chance
overlap. That hypothesis remains rejected.
Jim McGill
Terry Ross
Aw, shucks, ROb; I was hoping some Oxfordian would give it a try. Nice
work.
In going over Roger's table of diagnostics more carefully, I found a few
more typos that affect the calculation. Of the 126 PlusFours (verses
listed by Shaheen as being referred to 4 or more times by Shakespeare),
Roger's table of diagnostics actually should include not 48 but 52, while
the number he is missing is not 78 but 74. Thus the math problem should
be restated:
There are 6 PlusFours that correspond to verses marked in Oxford's Bible.
Although only 41% of the 126 PlusFours correspond to Roger's
"diagnostics," every one of the 6 PlusFours that happened to correspond to
marked OxBib verses also happened to be dubbed a "diagnostic." Would
somebody care to state the odds against such a thing happening by chance?
Put 6 white balls and 120 black balls into a sack. Draw out 52 of the
balls without looking. What is the chance that all 6 while balls will be
among the 52 that you drew?
(52/126)*(51/125)*(50/124)*(49/123)*(48/122)*(47/121) = 0.388429752
So the odds against are about 99.59%.
Terry Ross
> Terry,
>
> I see that my name has appeared, once again, in your postings.
Did you also see that it was Ken Kaplan, and not I, who brought up your
name first?
> And it seems that, once again, some clarifications are needed.
>
> "Jim McGill himself granted that his and Roger's chi-square argument
> was completely without merit,"
>
>
> The specific Chi-Square argument that I developed for Dr. Stritmatter
> was mathematically erroneous and was, indeed, "completely without
> merit".
Thank you for the "clarification." Strictly speaking, the chi-square
argument was "developed" before Roger became a doctor, and it was partly
on the basis of the meritless argument that his dissertation was approved
"as to style and content" by his panel.
> Roger used that argument, accepting my word on its accuracy, but had no
> part in its development. The mathematical error was entirely mine and,
> after acknowledging my mistake in a response to your postings, I sent to
> Roger a note of apology which he graciously accepted. We remain cordial
> and I believe I still have his respect.
Jim, the dissertation was not yours, but Roger's. The responsibility for
the dissertation is not yours, but Roger's. The kind of analysis that
Roger was looking for is something that he should have learned how to do
for himself (and could have learned to do for himself if he had taken an
undergraduate statistics course). Of course, it would have been helpful
if there had been somebody on Roger's panel who was competent to evaluate
his statistical arguments.
>
> "and he [McGill] also granted that if Dave Kathman's and my counts were
> more accurate than Roger's counts, his and Roger's hypergeometric method
> would support the claim that the overlap between Shakespeare's Biblical
> references and Oxford's Bible was no more significant than that between
> Spenser's Biblical references and Oxford's Bible."
>
> I granted that if the specific alternate counts that Kathman proposed
> were accepted (as they certainly have not been by Stritmatter or by the
> Oxfordian community, as far as I am aware), then your resulting
> calculation using the hypergeometric distribution would not support
> rejection of the random hypothesis at the 1% level of significance.
As I said. Actually, even in the dissertation, you do not reject the
random hypothesis at the 1% level of significance in your second
hypergeometric run.
The acceptance or rejection of Kathman's numbers by "the Oxfordian
community" is not a factor here. Anyone who cares to take the time and
trouble can verify that Roger's counts are not to be relied on, but "the
Oxfordian community" by and large does not seem interested in such things.
> My use of the stringent 1% level dictates that if a calculation shows
> even as much as a 2% probability that the corresponding verse overlaps
> really could have happened just due to random chance (i.e. a 98% chance
> that they didn't), then I would not reject the random hypothesis.
Look on p. 439 of Roger's dissertation; in your second hypergeometric
go-round, you conclude, "even with these assumptions, deliberately
conservative with respect to the Stritmatter data, we note that the
probability of overlap of more than 190 verses is less than 3%." One
problem with that go-round is that it was insufficiently "conservative
with respect to the Stritmatter data" -- but granted that your other
argument is meritless, and granted that your so-called "conservative"
hypergeometric would not support your "stringent 1% level," you should not
have rejected the random hypothesis. There was much, much more wrong with
the statistical "arguments" in Roger's dissertation, but even on its own
terms, your hypergeometric argument did not support rejection of the random
hypothesis.
Jim, you do not understand the field, you do not understand the data, you
made no effort, so far as I can tell, to determine whether the kind of
toys you wished to play with were appropriate to the issues involved, you
made fundamental errors in the construction of your hypergeometric
argument that made it invalid regardless of whether it would have been an
appropriate way to proceed. The use of statistical patter in the
pseudo-sciences is widespread; claims of significance similar to the ones
present in Roger's dissertation are common, but the disciples of such
mavens of moonshine as J. B. Rhine are, to give them their due, better at
the mechanics of statistical eyewash than anything we see in Roger's
dissertation.
> I know that you understand that "not reject" is not the same as
> "accept". By not rejecting the random hypothesis, I leave the matter
> unresolved. This is not equivalent to actually accepting the random
> hypothesis.
Jim, have you read Roger's dissertation? Have you any idea of the uses
Roger makes of your and his statistical arguments?
"A second line of attack ... is to contest the alleged connection to
Shakespeare. This strategy has been followed by David Kathman in his
claim that the connection between Shakespeare and the de Vere Bible are
'random.' A response to this claim is included in the present document as
appendix I [sic]" (630).
Roger recognizes four of the "possible lines of attack" and, as refutation
to one of them, offers up your and his statistical arguments as if they
were a complete and satisfactory refutation.
In another place, Roger tells us, "These computations [referring to the
meritless chi-square bit] suggest that, from a statistical point of view,
the threshold of relevance has been passed" (626). Read what follows;
Roger's entire framework for the theoretical significance of his so-called
"Shakespeare diagnostics" ASSUMES the validity of the meritless chi-square
bit.
> And it certainly does not imply a probabilistic equivalence between
> verse overlaps in de Vere/Shakespeare as compared with those of de
> Vere/Spenser. I must also add that David Kathman's original assertion,
> which my hypergeometric argument considered, addressed Roger's counts,
> not Kathman's.
Never in "Appendix C" is Dave Kathman quoted; nowhere in Appendix C is he
named.
Jim, one of the problems you faced from the outset was that neither you
nor Roger chose to, or was able to, understand Dave's essay. It also
seems that neither of you has a particularly good understanding of the
word "random." Here is part of what Dave said:
===
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
cataloged 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.
http://shakespeareAuthorship.com/ox5.html
====
Your hypergeometric argument showed no comprehension of Dave's point. It
was unfair to Dave and to the readers of the dissertation to offer what
you and Roger took to be a refutation of Dave's essay without mentioning
the essay, without citing the essay, without running your experiments on
his numbers -- especially since you were trotting out a variety of
different scenarios.
Neither you nor Roger made any attempt to establish whether the observed
overlap between Spenser's use of the Bible and marked verses in the OxBib
was significantly different from the observed overlap between
Shakespeare's use of the Bible and the marked verses in the OxBib.
>
> "… Appendix C, "Statistical Observations Related to the Marked Verses in
> the de Vere Bible" by poor Jim McGill, whom Roger hung out to dry last
> year."
>
> You used these same words ("poor Jim McGill" and "hung out to dry") in
> your previous postings, seeming to imply that I have somehow been
> victimized by a callous or even cowardly Roger. I had hoped that my
> responses to those posting made it clear that any such notion is pure
> rubbish. Indeed, it is Roger who might exhibit quite justified
> annoyance at being "hung out to dry" by my carelessness. But, as I
> stated, we remain cordial and he has assured me that he bears me no ill
> will for my gaffe. Criticize me as you choose, Terry, but please do not
> attempt to extend such criticism into some kind of implied corresponding
> character flaw on Roger's part.
I have no criticism of you, Jim; I have serious criticisms of the
arguments you and Roger advanced, and I was not pleased to see that Ken
Kaplan had somehow reimagined Roger's statistical catastrophes as a
partial victory. To my knowledge, Roger has made no attempt to defend the
statistical part of his dissertation; in fact, I was told last year that
he went on record offering to respond to criticisms of anything in the
dissertation EXCEPT the statistical arguments. He left you to take the
fall for serious weaknesses in his dissertation, even as he relied on
"arguments" to stand in rebuttal for one of the four "lines of attack"
that he anticipated, and even as he relied upon them (particularly the
meritless chi-square bit) as the theoretical prop for his "diagnostics"
fiasco.
>
> "At the Shakespeare Fellowship Conference last month, I [Ross] asked Dan
> Wright about the matter; he said that the statistical parts had been
> "forced on" Roger by U Mass or his department, and I suppose the
> implication is that since Roger was forced to do something that looked
> like a statistical argument, the validity of the argument didn't
> matter."
>
> I know nothing of this.
I just have Dan Wright's word for it, but I don't know why he would lie
about such a thing; do you?
> I do know, as stated in my previous postings, that the original
> hypergeometric argument, that I developed and submitted as a Letter to
> the Editor of an Oxfordian magazine, was solely in response to Dr.
> Kathman's hypothesis of random verse overlap, as then stated on his
> Stratfordian website.
You did not understand Dave's essay then (or you would never have
attempted to refute it in such a way), and you do not seem to understand
it today. The fact that Appendix C was intended as a refutation to Dave
is something that is nowhere mentioned in that Appendix. If you and Roger
have an honest disagreement with Dave's analysis, then the proper thing to
do is to cite him correctly, or (even better) to quote him. You should
then have performed an analysis based on HIS counts, and if you had done so
fairly and honestly you would NOT have rejected his claim. Why you and
Roger chose to suppress Dave's analysis while in your own minds imagining
you were rebutting it is a mystery.
> I am frankly skeptical that either U Mass or Roger would have considered
> a statistical argument to be "crucial to his case" as you go on to
> state.
An article in *The Chronicle of Higher Education*, June 4, 1999, reports
that David Mix Barrington, a U. Mass. computer scientist, was originally
on Dr. Stritmatter's committee, but that he left the committee because of
disagreement about methodology.
Roger, and you, and Roger's panel, and the University of Massachusetts,
could have been spared considerable embarrassment, if Barrington had
looked at the dissertation before it was submitted. Don't you agree?
> Roger's arguments are of a qualitative, not quantitative, nature.
He's got both, as you would know if you were to read his dissertation.
> It's my impression that he had no initial intention or expectation of
> including any supporting statistical evidence. Indeed, the development
> of such evidence would likely not be expected in such a subjective
> domain.
According to the story in the *Chronicle*, you are wrong. According to a
description of Roger's work by Mark K. Anderson that appeared in
*Harper's* in 1999, you are wrong:
=====
The case for Oxford's authorship hardly rests on hidden clues and
allusions, however. One of the most important new pieces of Oxfordian
evidence centers around a 1570 English Bible, in the "Geneva translation,"
once owned and annotated by the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. In an
eight-year study of the de Vere Bible, a University of Massachusetts
doctoral student named Roger Stritmatter has found that the 430-year-old
book is essentially, as he puts it, "Shake-speare's Bible with the Earl of
Oxford's coat of arms on the cover." Stritmatter discovered that more than
a quarter of the 1,066 annotations and marked passages in the de Vere
Bible appear in Shake-speare. The parallels range from the
thematic--sharing a motif, idea, or trope--to the verbal--using names,
phrases, or wordings that suggest a specific biblical passage.
In his research, Stritmatter pioneered a stylistic-fingerprinting
technique that involves isolating an author's most prominent biblical
allusions-those that appear four or more times in the author's canon.
After compiling a list of such "diagnostic verses" for the writings of
Shake-speare and three of his most celebrated literary
contemporaries--Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edmund
Spenser--Stritmatter undertook a comparative study to discern how
meaningful the de Vere Bible evidence was. He found that each author's
favorite biblical allusions composed a unique and idiosyncratic set and
could thus be marshaled to distinguish one author from another.
Stritmatter then compared each set of "diagnostics" to the marked passages
in the de Vere Bible. The results were, from any perspective but the most
dogmatically orthodox, a stunning confirmation of the Oxfordian theory.
Stritmatter found that very few of the marked verses in the de Vere Bible
appeared in Spenser's, Marlowe's, or Bacon's diagnostic verses. On the
other hand, the Shake-speare canon brims with de Vere Bible verses.
Twenty-nine of Shakespeare's top sixty-six biblical allusions are marked
in the de Vere Bible. Furthermore, three of Shakespeare's diagnostic
verses show up in Oxford's extant letters. All in all, the correlation
between Shake-speare's favorite biblical verses and Edward de Vere's Bible
is very high: .439 compared with .054, .068, and .020 for Spenser,
Marlowe, and Bacon.
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1787_298/54272553/print.jhtml
======
> It was Kathman's specific raising of the possibility of a random
> overlap, a notion that one actually can explore mathematically, that
> piqued my interest and prompted my paper.
And how exactly were you going to explore the claim that the overlap
between Spenser and the OxBib seemed quite comparable to the overlap
between Shakespeare and the OxBib without mentioning Spenser? It doesn't
matter now, because neither statistical "argument" in Roger's dissertation
is valid, and neither should have been used to prop up Roger's
"qualitative" efforts.
> Statistical arguments are certainly not crucial to Roger's case, but
> they can offer an additional perspective in viewing the subject. In
> this case, the hypergeometric argument, as I previously stated, was
> designed to consider Kathman's original comment that Roger's counts (not
> the subsequent Kathman counts) could be ascribed to merely chance
> overlap. That hypothesis remains rejected.
No it did not. Leaving aside the numerous flaws that have been pointed
out in previous posts (e.g., the fact that your "universe" excludes almost
300 of the verses marked in Oxford's Bible), are the problems that you do
not understand the argument you think you are refuting, and that you are
working with numbers that you know are (to put it mildly) controversial,
and that you KNOW that changing the numbers will change the outcome, yet
you never plug in an alternate set of numbers that you now tell us you
were aware of.
You say, "an assumption of *more* [your emphasis] than 982 unique Biblical
verses referenced in Shakespeare will similarly increase the probabilities
and lend weight to the hypothesis of random overlap" (439). You expect
this newsgroup to believe that you were using Dave's numbers, but not only
do you not cite Dave in your appendix, you do not use his estimate of 2000
for the number of Biblical verses referred to by Shakespeare, and you do
not use Dave's actual count of 80 marked verses in the OxBib that appear
on Shaheen's lists (Shaheen was also the source of Dave's figure of 2000).
OK, I can understand your running the numbers Roger gave you -- perhaps
you didn't see any reason to doubt him, and you certainly were not about
to investigate the issue yourself. I can understand your running another
hypergeometric argument using different assumptions -- yet this suggests
that you didn't really buy Roger's numbers. You tell this newsgroup
something that no reader of Appendix C could know -- that you were
familiar with Dave Kathman's essay. Why did you not plug in HIS numbers?
You are attempting to refute the claim that the Shakespeare/OxBib overlap
is quite comparable to the Spenser/OxBib overlap -- why did you not plug
in the Spenser numbers?
Your loyalty to your friend Roger is admirable in many ways, but your
defense of him by trying to take the blame on yourself is misguided.
Your post-hoc claim that you were merely trying to refute Dave Kathman is
in some ways more troubling than the shoddy way the original statistical
"arguments" were put together, because the readers of Appendix C had a
right to know what Dave had actually said and what the results would have
been if you had used his actual numbers.
As things stand now, Appendix C provides no support for anything else in
Roger's dissertation; the chi-square argument (the one Roger thought most
of) is by common agreement meritless; the hypergeometric approach, if done
with more care than is found in Roger's dissertation, offers no reason to
reject Dave's analysis. Having been through Roger's dissertation,
Shaheen's books, and the OxBib itself, I have come away even more
impressed with Dave's survey of the issues and his list of the OxBib
annotations; I have come away even more skeptical of anything Roger says
that I cannot verify independently.
Elizabeth Weir
> "Elizabeth Weir" <elizabe...@mail.com> wrote in message
> news:efbc3534.02110...@posting.google.com...
> [...]
> > It has to be a monumental task to distinguish between English bibles
> > because they are built, one by one, on the textual foundations of the
> > one before. The text of the KJV is nearly identical to the Geneva.
> > Entire pages are verbatim. The distinction, in terms of the source,
> > may be the study notes in the margins of the Geneva. Those pithy
> > exegeses could easily find their way into the Shakespeare plays.
>
> Quite so: "may", "could". And do they appear, incontrovertibly, in the
> plays?
I dont' have an answer to that question. The Geneva with
study notes was first published in 1560, and the author of the
Shakespeare plays was raised on it since scholars can detect
great familiarity with the Geneva. The author memorized
whole scenes. I can't say for sure that the author of the
Shakespeare plays averted his eyes from the notes when he
studied the Geneva.
> Would you care to cite a few examples? (I hope the exegeses are not
> so pithy as to be no more than commonplaces.)
The pithiest Geneva notes are from the more philosophical books
like Proverbs but I don't want to misrepresent them as a whole
so I picked a few at random, the second fairly poetic.
17:9 He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but
he that repeateth a matter separateth [very] d friends.
He that admonishes the prince of his fault makes him
his enemy.
1:7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea [is] not
full; to the place from f which the rivers come, there they
return again.
The sea which compasses all the earth, fills the veins of
it which pour out springs and rivers into the sea again.
1:12 But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied
and grew. And e they were grieved because of the children of
Israel.
The more God blesses his own, the more the wicked envy them.
Bob Grumman
> > so pithy as to be no more than commonplaces.)
>
> The pithiest Geneva notes are from the more philosophical books
> like Proverbs but I don't want to misrepresent them as a whole
> so I picked a few at random, the second fairly poetic.
>
> 17:9 He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but
> he that repeateth a matter separateth [very] d friends.
>
> He that admonishes the prince of his fault makes him
> his enemy.
>
> 1:7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea [is] not
> full; to the place from f which the rivers come, there they
> return again.
>
> The sea which compasses all the earth, fills the veins of
> it which pour out springs and rivers into the sea again.
>
> 1:12 But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied
> and grew. And e they were grieved because of the children of
> Israel.
>
> The more God blesses his own, the more the wicked envy them.
>
Incredible! Someone worse than Stritmatter at finding Biblical parallels in
Shakespeare.
--Bob G.
Tom Reedy
message news:aqf3t...@enews3.newsguy.com...
I don't believe that was her intention. I thought she
was giving examples of Bible verses with the marginal
study notes from the Geneva Bible that "could easily
[have found] their way into the Shakespeare plays."
You have to realize that when reading posts of E.W.,
the subject shifts with every subsequent post, even
though the same words, phrases and sentences are
referred to.
TR
Alan Jones
"Elizabeth Weir" <elizabe...@mail.com> wrote in message
news:efbc3534.02110...@posting.google.com...
[...]
>
> he that repeateth a matter separateth [very] d friends.
>
> He that admonishes the prince of his fault makes him
> his enemy.
>
> 1:7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea [is] not
> full; to the place from f which the rivers come, there they
> return again.
>
> The sea which compasses all the earth, fills the veins of
> it which pour out springs and rivers into the sea again.
>
> 1:12 But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied
> and grew. And e they were grieved because of the children of
> Israel.
>
> The more God blesses his own, the more the wicked envy them.
Thank you. Could you now say what passages in the plays appear to rely on
these glosses?
Alan Jones
Bob Grumman
You're right. So she's taking texts that any writer of the time might have
used variations of WITHOUT having seen them, and claiming that they show
Shakespeare used the Geneva Bible, I guess.
> You have to realize that when reading posts of E.W.,
> the subject shifts with every subsequent post, even
> though the same words, phrases and sentences are
> referred to.
>
> TR
Yes--and because what she writes is so idiotic, I rarely take the time to
try to figure out exavtly what she's saying, and jump to sometimes erroneous
conclusions about it.
--Bob G.
Elizabeth Weir
Grummn. You've lately become incoherent. How do the matches above
constitute "Biblical parallels to Shakespeare?"
The lines above are verses from the bible, not lines from Shakespeare
plays.
If you will scroll up a few posts you will note that I said
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I DON'T KNOW <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
to Jones' question about the Geneva study notes
>>>>> And do they appear, incontrovertibly, in the plays?" <<<<<<<
I replied
>>>>>>>>>>>> I dont' have an answer to that question. <<<<<<<<<<<<<
Here it is again:
JONES: Quite so: "may", "could". And do they appear, incontrovertibly,
in the plays? Would you care to cite a few examples? (I hope the
exegeses are not so pithy as to be no more than commonplaces.)
ELIZ: I dont' have an answer to that question. The Geneva with
study notes was first published in 1560, and the author of the
Shakespeare plays was raised on it since scholars can detect
great familiarity with the Geneva. The author memorized
whole scenes. I can't say for sure that the author of the
Shakespeare plays averted his eyes from the notes when he
studied the Geneva.
In my **earlier post,** in response to Jones' question about whether or
not the author of the Shakespeare works was influence by the Geneva
Bible I merely expressed
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> AN OPINION <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
that the Geneva study notes had an influence.
JONES: Could you direct me to the evidence that Shakespeare was
influenced specifically by the Geneva Bible? I assume
someone has demonstrated that his biblical allusions are
unmistakably and overwhelmingly to that translation.
What other translations might have been readily available
to him in his younger years?
ELIZ: It has to be a monumental task to distinguish between
English bibles because they are built, one by one, on
the textual foundations of the one before. The text of
the KJV is nearly identical to the Geneva. Entire pages
are verbatim. The distinction, in terms of the source,
may be the study notes in the margins of the Geneva.
>>>>>>>>> Those pithy exegeses could easily find their way into
the Shakespeare plays. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
-------------------end of exerpt from earlier post-----------------
Does that help?
Elizabeth Weir
Do you have evidence or are you just bumbling around
like Grumman?
Elizabeth Weir
I've already answered that question.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Quite so: "may", "could". And do they appear, incontrovertibly, in the
> > plays?
> I dont' have an answer to that question.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim McGill
The "Clarification" regarding the chi square argument is related to
your use of the phrase "his and Roger's chi-square argument". That
phrase could lead a reader unfamiliar with our postings to assume that
Roger co-wrote Appendix C with me and is, therefore, as guilty as I am
of committing the related mathematical errors. I assume it's now
clear that Roger had no part in the development of the chi square, or
the hypergeometric argument. That fault for the chi square errors is
mine alone.
But I do understand the broader point you are making, that a scholar
assumes full responsibility for the contents of his dissertation.
Roger understands that point as well, and says so on page XI of the
dissertation where he states "Any remaining errors of fact, form, or
interpretation are, of course, my own." Roger's error was one of
including my chi square analysis in his dissertation and accepting my
word for its accuracy. Yes, it certainly would have saved a lot of
embarrassment to everyone, particularly to me, if the error had been
discovered and removed prior to publication. But it wasn't, and I'm
obliged to live with the result.
Yes, I have read Roger's dissertation, Terry. I own my own copy and
have read it from cover to cover. That's why I know that of its 504
pages, exclusive of the Bibliography, precisely 5 of them are devoted
to my paper in Appendix C. In addition, Stritmatter refers to my work
in the main body of the dissertation on pages 77 and 78, and makes
additional brief references to it on pages VII and 472. Thus, to the
best of my knowledge, he devotes a total of 9 of the 504 pages to my
statistical analyses (actually less, since the references in the main
body do occupy full pages). Other chapters and appendices deal with
Roger's approach to analyzing the Geneva Bible, the related work of
previous scholars, justifications for believing that the Geneva Bible
belonged to de Vere, and the evidence that the annotations are in de
Vere's hand. The remainder focuses on the true meat of the
dissertation, an examination and analysis of the apparent
philosophical similarities between Shakespeare and de Vere inferred
from the corresponding similarities of the Bible verses to which they
were apparently drawn. Delete Appendix C, and all references to it,
and all of the meat remains. I have the impression that you believe
that Appendix C was the key to final acceptance of his dissertation,
and I don't imagine that even denials from the members of Roger's
panel would dissuade you. I can only tell you, once again, that the
notion is absurd.
Terry, you're expending a lot of energy inferring some kind of
conspiracy on my part, or on Roger's part, or both, to blind side or
suppress David Kathman. I must tell you that I find your insinuations
puzzling. First, you seem to imply that the fact that my interest in
exploring the random overlap question was inspired by reading
Kathman's web pages was just revealed in my last posting. In fact, it
was stated in my initial response to you last year. Second, Appendix
C clearly states its objective to explore the question of whether a
verse overlap between de Vere and Shakespeare may reasonably be
ascribed to random chance. It also makes clear that the question is
explored in the context of Stritmatter's data. The analysis deals
with the question, regardless of who is asking. I saw no need to
personalize it into an attack on Kathman. Stritmatter, of course,
does refer specifically to Kathman (see page 74 and footnotes) and his
belief that any verse overlap between de Vere and Shakespeare is due
merely to random chance. Roger identifies two methods (see page 77)
used to consider this question. The first is "to submit the data to
statistical analysis." The second is to "run empirical trials to see
if similar results might be obtained with other Renaissance writers
presumably influenced by the same religious zeitgeist." Regarding the
first method, he refers the reader to my work for a related
statistical analysis, also making it clear that my work used his data.
For the second method, he refers the readers to his data in Appendix
E (and, I believe, should also have included Appendices F and J)
related to Bacon, Marlow, Spenser, Montaigne, and Rabelais. Finally,
Kathman's writings could hardly be suppressed. They are, and have
been, available to the public at his website. Roger provided the
website address in footnote 113 (page 74) and in the Bibliography
(page 511).
Again, we clearly disagree on the relative importance of Appendix C to
Roger's overall thesis. I was confused by your statement regarding
Barrington and your quoting of Anderson in defense of your position,
since neither seems to make any specific mention of Appendix C
(although I'm really not sure what to make of the statement regarding
Barrington). Then I reread my statement that "I am frankly skeptical
that either U Mass or Roger would have considered a statistical
argument to be 'crucial to his case' as you go on to state." Okay,
Terry, you caught me there. I meant to say "my statistical argument"
instead of "a statistical argument". It is, after all, specifically
Appendix C that we are discussing, right? I assume you are not
inferring that my error with the chi square argument automatically
invalidates any supportive statistical data or analysis that anyone
else used, or will ever use, either in the dissertation or in
subsequent papers. So let me reiterate, with a corrected statement,
that I remain skeptical that U Mass or Roger would have considered my
statistical arguments, as provided in Appendix C, crucial to his case.
Even the loss of my chi square argument does not invalidate his use
of the "Shakespeare Diagnostics". It merely removes what would have
been an additional objective statistical support. The subjective
arguments that he provides for their use, and for the conclusions to
which they lead, remain.
Roger and I have met only once, at an Oxford convention, and only
briefly that time. All remaining contact between us has been via
email and postings at the Shakespeare Fellowship website, and has
addressed only items related to the authorship question. Beyond that
narrow range of interaction, we barely know each other. While we are
amicable in our communications, I would not refer to Roger as my
"friend" simply because that would be presumptuous on my part. My
"loyalty" to Roger is based on the respect due a scholar, in this case
one who spent 10 years of his life researching the subject matter of
his dissertation. And, of course, you are deserving of that same
respect. Would it surprise you, Terry, to know that both Kaplan and I
have, on occasion, defended you on the Shakespeare Fellowship pages?
I'm well aware that my interested amateur's knowledge of the
authorship question can never be compared to that of yourself, or
Roger, or any other professional who is devoting his life to the study
of the field. I've never presumed to debate you on any of the related
subjective issues that arise so often on the HLAS pages. I leave that
to the professionals, and am happy to read, and learn from, the
exchanges. But I do know what random means, and I do not associate
with the pseudo sciences (in fact I abhor them as much as you
apparently do). While I can't boast a Ph.D., I do have a Master's in
Applied Mathematics, and I've taught classes in basic statistics to
professional engineers during my 23 years as an Aerospace software
engineer. I understand how easy it is to lie with statistics, but
that doesn't make all statistics lies. My analyses made no attempt to
deceive, suppress, or blind side anyone. They considered a single,
well-defined question. The chi square analysis has been found to be
in error and must be discarded. The hypergeometric argument, using
Roger's verse counts (or anything close to them if we use your
universal verse set of 30000 verses), leads to the conclusion that the
hypothesis of random overlap may be rejected. Using Kathman's counts,
that same hypergeometric formula, as you demonstrated in your postings
last year, will tell us that the random hypothesis may not be
rejected. And that's where it stands. Who's verse counts are
correct? Well, we have intelligent persons on both sides, but it
seems to me that Roger has put in the time and done the broader and
deeper analysis. Misguided? We'll see.
Jim McGill
Ken Kaplan
You say via Kathman that Shaheen acknowledges 2000 independent and
separate BIble references used by Shakespeare and that Stritmatter is
wrong in claiming approximately 1000 verses that are distinct, many
used more than once to make up the _aggregate_ total of approxomately
2000 verses. In Stritmatter's dissertation, these appx. 1000 (982) are
broken down as follows:
450 used once total "hits" 450
310 used twice " " 620
160 used three times " 480
81 used 4 or more times. " 450
Total verses: 2000
81 verses used 4 or more times equals between twenty and twenty five
percent of the total depending on exact count. That is why they are
considered diagnostic.
PLease show me from Shaheen _in quotes_ where he claims Shakespeare
used 2000 distinct and independent Bible verses. I confronted Kathman
on this many times. He has never responded. If he is wrong it is a
monumental gaffe.
Ken Kaplan
jim.m...@lmco.com (Jim McGill) wrote in message news:<5b6cb1a8.02111...@posting.google.com>...
Terry Ross
Roger's dissertation...
On 11 Nov 2002, Ken Kaplan wrote:
> To Terry Ross,
>
> You say via Kathman that Shaheen acknowledges 2000 independent and
> separate BIble references used by Shakespeare and that Stritmatter is
> wrong in claiming approximately 1000 verses that are distinct, many
> used more than once to make up the _aggregate_ total of approxomately
> 2000 verses. In Stritmatter's dissertation, these appx. 1000 (982) are
> broken down as follows:
> 450 used once total "hits" 450
> 310 used twice " " 620
> 160 used three times " 480
> 81 verses used 4 or more times equals between twenty and twenty five
> percent of the total depending on exact count. That is why they are
> considered diagnostic.
>
> PLease show me from Shaheen _in quotes_ where he claims Shakespeare used
> 2000 distinct and independent Bible verses. I confronted Kathman on this
> many times. He has never responded. If he is wrong it is a monumental
> gaffe.
>
> Ken Kaplan
OK, Ken, this will take awhile, because I want to show you things from
Dave Kathman, from Naseeb Shaheen, and from Roger -- "in quotes" as you
requested. In return, I ask only that you try to read what I have to say
as if it were coming from a neutral party. I know you don't think of me
that way, but to make it easier, I will try not to say anything that could
NOT have been said by a neutral party, and I will not use any methods or
arguments that could not be advanced by a neutral party -- in fact, what I
say will be based on things that you can verify for yourself, if you care
to. Your asking for direct quotation is, I think, an appeal to neutral
standards: you want to be sure that what Dave refers to is based on what
Shaheen actually says and does, and is not a misinterpretation.
If, on the other hand, you prefer to dismiss in advance anything I might
have to say as being without value because it must proceed from an
irremovable bias, then you can stop reading right now, but I don't think
you would have posted if you had not considered the possibility that I
might have something to say that you could respond to on its own terms,
and not as something that could only have issued from an impossibly
prejudiced source.
So let's go through your message a bit at a time.
> To Terry Ross,
>
> You say via Kathman that Shaheen acknowledges 2000 independent and
> separate BIble references used by Shakespeare and that Stritmatter is
> wrong in claiming approximately 1000 verses that are distinct, many used
> more than once to make up the _aggregate_ total of approxomately 2000
> verses.
Dave Kathman says this: "based on my estimates from the lists in Naseeb
Shaheen's books, Shakespeare alluded to at least 2000 Bible verses in his
works."
To ensure that I have not misquoted Dave or taken his words out of
context, you may wish to check his essay "Oxford's Bible" at
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/ox5.html
You can find Naseeb Shaheen's comprehensive "Index to Shakespeare's
Biblical References" on pages 769-826 of *Biblical References in
Shakespeare's Plays* (1999). Last year I counted each separate biblical
passage on Shaheen's list; my total was 2276, but if somebody wants to
redo the count and then tells me I was slightly off, I promise not to be
terribly offended. Certainly Dave's estimate of "at least 2000" is pretty
good, but maybe you'd be more comfortable with "about 2300." I cannot
type up all of the 57 pages of Shaheen's index, but let me give you a
sample line from Shaheen's index under 1 Maccabees:
6.46 *Ham.* 1.2.131-32; *Cym* 3.4.76-77
Although I didn't surround this line with quotation marks, it is a direct
quotation from page 800 of his book. Shaheen lists two Shakespeare
references for 1 Maccabees, chapter 6, verse 46. This counts as ONE of
the roughly 2300 (or what Dave estimated as "at least 2000") biblical
passages in Shaheen's list. It does NOT count as TWO of the 2300 but as
ONE.
Shaheen describes what he has included in his index:
"The following index to biblical references in Shakespeare's plays is
arranged according to the books of the Bible from Genesis onward. To make
the index as useful as possible, I have included not only the principle
passages in Scripture to which Shakespeare refers, but also all of the
secondary texts that parallel them. These secondary passages are
sufficiently similar to Shakespeare's principle passages to warrant their
inclusion in the appendix" (Shaheen 769).
Shaheen devotes a chapter to discussing his "Criteria for a Valid
Reference" (67-74). He rejects as "too tenuous and far-fetched to be
accepted as valid and convincing biblical parallels" ... those in which
"the differences [between the biblical passage and the suggested
Shakespeare parallel] far outweigh the similarities, and the supposed
parallels are inconsistent both with Scripture and Shakespeare's context"
(68). Shaheen's list includes "passages in Shakespeare that are clearly
based on Scripture" (68); "passages in which the biblical references are
probable but not altogether certain" (69); and even "passages where a
biblical reference or echo is possible, but where we are dangerously close
to having nothing more than a parallel idea, a resemblance rather than a
reference."
Of this last group, he says,
"Should these passages be included in our list of biblical references?
To exclude them when a good possibility exists that their origin is
scriptural, would be to withhold evidence that should be examined when
considering Shakespeare's biblical references. It would be better to list
these passages about which there is a measure of doubt and let the reader
be the final judge" (70).
For each of these kinds of passages he rejects or accepts, Shaheen
provides numerous examples, but he states,
"These categories are not intended to be hard and fast classifications,
since different readers will have widely different opinions as to what
constitutes a certain, probable, or possible reference to Scripture. But
all those references that seem to be reasonably valid are listed for the
reader's consideration" (74).
Again, Shaheen's index lists about 2300 biblical passages. For most of
them, Shaheen lists only a single Shakespearean parallel, while for a few
there are more than 10. Shaheen says,
"I have made every effort to find all the biblical and liturgical
references in Shakespeare's plays. I have also read all the significant
scholarship, not only on Shakespeare's use of Scripture, but also on
religious themes found in Shakespeare's plays. Whenever a biblical
parallel suggested by others does not appear in the volume, it generally
indicates that I have rejected that parallel as being invalid" (74).
I have quoted extensively from Shaheen so that you will understand just
what Dave's estimate of 2000 (and mine of about 2300) refers to: not lines
from Shakespeare, but passages from Scripture.
If one wished, it might be possible to extract from Shaheen's book only
those Shakespearean passages that are "clearly based on Scripture," or
only those plus the ones where "the biblical references are probable but
not altogether certain," and to reject those that Shaheen says are
certainly "possible" but perhaps not probable - that is, the kind he
considers might be "a resemblance rather than a reference." In such a
case, the number of biblical passages on this stricter list would be
considerably lower than the 2300 that we find in Shaheen's index.
Of course, we have a right to expect that anybody who wishes to use
stricter standards than Shaheen must explain those standards in detail,
must give clear examples of passages accepted by Shaheen that he would
reject, must apply those stricter standards throughout the whole of
Scripture and the whole of Shakespeare's plays, and must provide a
complete list of those passages that he accepts.
Conversely, it would be possible to use looser standards than those
employed by Shaheen; in which case the number of biblical passages
referenced by Shakespeare would be considerably larger than 2300 -- but,
again, the reader has the right to expect that anybody advocating such
standards must explain them in detail, must give clear examples of
passages rejected by Shaheen that he would accept, must apply those looser
standards throughout the whole of Scripture and the whole of Shakespeare's
plays, and must provide a complete list of those passages that he accepts.
Have I said anything so far that you disagree with?
I maintain that anybody claiming that he has a more reliable list than
Shaheen's must explain his standards in detail, must apply those standards
throughout Shakespeare's plays and throughout the entire Bible, and must
provide a complete list of biblical passages and their Shakespearean
parallels. The point is not that Shaheen's work is perfect, but that it
is the best that we have to date, and we should not lightly reject it
unless we are presented with an effort that is clearly superior. As I
said in an earlier post, I prefer to use Naseeb Shaheen's *Biblical
References in Shakespeare's Plays*, since it is the most comprehensive,
complete, consistent, and recent source. I would be willing to use some
other set of standards than Shaheen's, but it seems to me to be a basic
principle for this kind of inquiry that whatever standards one uses should
be global and consistent BOTH for Shakespeare's works AND for the entire
Bible. Shaheen covers the plays and not the nondramatic verse, but unless
someone has a superior consistent set of standards applied even more
widely than what Shaheen gave us, I think we should stick with Shaheen.
If you like, I can scan in a page from Shaheen's index, so you can see
what it looks like. Of course, anybody who is seriously interested in the
question of Shakespeare's use of the Bible MUST read Shaheen. You should
find his 1999 book in any good library, and it is in print for $60.
> In Stritmatter's dissertation, these appx. 1000 (982) are broken down as
> follows:
What "982" are you referring to? There is no list in Roger's dissertation
of 982 "independent and separate Bible references used by Shakespeare."
I have never seen any such list, and I very much doubt that you have. To
my knowledge, Roger has NEVER produced his list of all the "independent
and separate Bible references used by Shakespeare." I have looked both in
Roger's actual dissertation (copies of which are available through UMI)
and in the version that he is, er, distributing on his own. There is no
such list in either volume. There is no such list on the Shakespeare
Fellowship site. There is no such list anywhere on the Internet that I
know of. There is no such list in any Oxfordian or non-Oxfordian
publication that I am aware of.
So here's where we stand so far: Shaheen lists about 2300 Biblical
passages in his Index to Shakespeare's Biblical References. You tell us
that Roger has a list of 982 "distinct and independent Bible verses"
referred to by Shakespeare, but I do not believe you have ever seen any
such list; and I know that I never have.
Can you tell me why I should reject Shaheen's list of 2300 biblical
passages, a list whose standards are explained in detail, a list which has
been published in full, for Roger's figure of "982," which we have to take
on faith?
What is the relationship between Shaheen's list -- which is available for
inspection to anyone who has access to a good library or who is willing to
buy the book for $60 -- and Roger's count of distinct and independent
Bible verses"? Well, since Roger hasn't made his list available, we have
to rely on his description of how he assembled it. Guess what -- his
principle source was Naseeb Shaheen.
Roger Stritmatter says in his dissertation,
"A group of verses qualifies as a diagnostic if cited four or more times
in Carter (1905), Noble (1935), Shaheen (1987, 1989, 1993, 1999), Milward
(1987), Booth (1977), Stritmatter (1997, 1999a, 199b), or some combination
of these authorities. All citations must refer to the same motif or topic
within a verse" (Roger's dissertation, p.402).
Careful readers will note that Roger does NOT use Ken's language,
"distinct and independent Bible verses"; Roger speaks of a "diagnostic" as
"a group of verses." Note that Roger cites four works by Shaheen: his
separate volumes on Shakespeare's Tragedies (1987), Histories (1989), and
Comedies (1993); and his comprehensive work on all the plays (1999).
Since Roger used four volumes by Shaheen, and since each volume has an
index of Biblical passages referred to by Shakespeare, Roger MUST (if he
was doing the job properly) at some point have had a list that included
ALL of the 2300 passages in Shaheen's 1999 index. Now, given that
Shaheen's 1999 book is comprehensive, and that Shaheen modified some of
the judgments in his earlier books, I think it makes the most sense for us
just to put aside those earlier ones, and stick with the big one. The
question is this: how can the 2300 passages listed in Shaheen be reduced
to the 982 that Roger claims to have on a list that I have never seen,
that Ken has never seen, that the readers of Roger's dissertation have
never seen, but that Ken believes is the basis for Roger's counts?
If Roger were to say, I accept all of Shaheen's 2300 listed passages
EXCEPT the following 1318 (that is, 2300 minus 982), and then if Roger
were to list ALL the Shaheen passages that he does not accept, we could
figure out which ones Roger DOES accept by looking at the other ones on
Shaheen's list.
Simplicity itself, no?
Fortunately, Roger provides a list of Shaheen's "false positives" -- you
will find it on page 403 of his dissertation. He does not list 1318
"false positives"; he does not list 1000; he does not list 100; he does
not even list 13: he lists only 10. I do not agree that these are all
"false positives," but even if we give them to Roger that there are about
1300 passages listed in Shaheen's index that Roger says nothing about.
DO you begin to see the problem? If Roger rejects 1300 of Shaheen's 2300
Biblical passages, which 1300 are they? What are the grounds for this
enormous renunciation of Shaheen's work? Have you ever seen a list of the
hundreds of passages listed in Shaheen that Roger neither accepts NOR
considers "false positives"?
Here is a pdf scan of Roger's complete list of "False positives in
Shaheen's data" from p.403: ShakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/stritShfp.pdf
Somehow, Roger's mysterious list (which nobody seems to have seen) has 982
passages that Shakespeare referred to rather than the 2300 listed by
Shaheen (which anybody may see who looks at Shaheen's book).
Shaheen, by the way, is the scholar in this field whose work Roger finds
most authoritative: "of the four major authorities on whom I primarily
depend for compilation of the Shakespeare Diagnostics, Shaheen is the most
comprehensive and empirically exact in his discriminations. However,
Shaheen has not published a book on the Romances nor has he treated the
Sonnets or the Narrative Poems. Also, in my opinion, he overlooks subtle
but pertinent references which were accepted by other scholars such as
Carter, Noble or Milward" (402).
Roger is astute to recognize the value of Shaheen's work, but his
criticism is not entirely correct: in fact the Romances are indeed covered
in Shaheen's 1999 *Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays*, a work to
which Roger refers on the very same page of his dissertation. Note, by the
way, that Roger faults Shaheen not for the looseness but for the excessive
strictness of his standards: "he overlooks subtle but pertinent references
which were accepted by other scholars such as Carter, Noble or Milward."
This only deepens the mystery. To Shaheen's list of 2300 Biblical
passages, we must ADD all those "subtle but pertinent references which
were accepted by other scholars such as Carter, Noble or Milward" but
which do not appear in Shaheen's index. How many such "subtle but
pertinent references" does Roger have in mind? Nobody knows. Roger
nowhere gives us a complete list of all the "subtle but pertinent
references" rejected by Shaheen that he accepts.
Remember -- the inevitable result of using standards looser than Shaheen's
(which is what allowing "subtle but pertinent references" he rejects
amounts to), and using those standards throughout the entire Bible and
throughout all of Shakespeare's plays will be to increase the number of
biblical passages with Shakespearean parallels. Is it possible to
estimate how many "subtle but pertinent references" not listed by Shaheen
would be added? While there are about 80 or so passages in Shaheen's list
that correspond to verses marked in Oxford's Bible, Roger seems to think
that another 120 or so verses that do NOT correspond to items on Shaheen's
list should be added. Thus, if EVERY ONE of the "subtle but pertinent
references" should correspond to verses marked in Oxford's Bible (an
extraordinarily unlikely event), we should add 120 to our original 2300.
If we assume that the same loose standards for what counts as a "subtle
but pertinent reference" were applied to the verses NOT marked in Oxford's
Bible, the number would be far more than 120 additions to Shaheen's list.
Given that the number of marked passages that Roger wants to count is much
more than twice the number of marked passages that correspond to items on
Shaheen's list, we can conservatively estimate that the number of "subtle
but pertinent references" rejected by Shaheen that would have been
accepted by Roger IF those passages had been marked in Oxford's Bible
would total at least another 2300. When we add those to the 2300 listed
by Shaheen, we would be close to 5000 Biblical passages, comprising
Shaheen's "primary" and "Secondary" texts, plus all the other "subtle but
pertinent references" that are at least as plausible as whatever the ones
are that Roger accepts.
As we have seen, Roger thinks Shaheen's standards are too strict; while he
would reject or reclassify 10 of Shaheen's 2300 Biblical passages, he
would add a great many more that Shaheen would reject "as being invalid."
Let's return to Ken's citation of Roger.
> In Stritmatter's dissertation, these appx. 1000 (982) are broken down as
> follows:
This is not exactly true. As I have pointed out, this list of 982 appears
nowhere in Roger's dissertation, and nowhere else that I am aware of.
All that we have is a number. The fact that Roger rejects only 10 of
Shaheen's 2300 biblical passages while accepting a great many that Shaheen
rejects means that the total for Roger must be much greater than 982.
>
> 450 used once total "hits" 450
No, Ken, Roger never tells us WHICH 450 passages he thinks Shakespeare
refers to only once. Anybody who wishes to count how many of the biblical
passages listed in Shaheen are referred to only once by Shakespeare has
only to count them.
> 310 used twice " " 620
No, Ken. Roger never tells us WHICH 310 passages he thinks Shakespeare
refers to exactly twice. Again, this equivalent information for Shaheen
could be obtained by anyone with a copy of his book and the ability to
count.
> 160 used three times " 480
No, Ken. Roger never tells us WHICH 160 passages he thinks Shakespeare
refers to exactly twice. Can you guess how somebody could find out how
many of Shaheen's biblical passages have three Shakespeare references?
> 81 used 4 or more times. " 450
Here we are on somewhat steadier ground. Roger DOES give us a list of 81
passages or sets of passages that he calls "Shakespeare diagnostics" (SDs
for short), and we can compare his list to what we see in Shaheen.
Of the 2300 Biblical passages listed in Shaheen's 1999 index, 126 have at
least four Shakespearean references in Shaheen's index. I call such
passages "plusfours." Here is the latest version of a the plusfours chart
that I introduced at the Shakespeare Fellowship Conference last month:
http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/diag4c.pdf
The headings on the chart are "+4" (the plusfours are sequentially
numbered in the order in which they appear in the Bible, from 1 to 126);
"Book" (the book of the Bible in which the plusfour appears); "Verse" (the
chapter and verse or verses of the plusfour); "Count" (the number of times
this biblical passage is listed in Shaheen's Index); "Sp?" (the verses in
Shaheen's *Index to Biblical References in "The Faerie Queene"* that
correspond to Shakespearean plusfours); "Ox?" (the verses marked in
Oxford's Bible that correspond to Shakespearean PlusFours); and "SD" (the
number of any of Roger's "Shakespeare Diagnostics" that corresponds to the
plusfour).
The plusfours in orange correspond to Roger's "diagnostics" (or "SDs");
the plusfours in blue do NOT correspond to any of Roger's SDs.
My source for Roger's "SDs" is Roger's dissertation. Here is Roger's
table of SDs: http://shakespeareAuthorship.com/sf/strit398-401.pdf
Note that for MOST of the SDs, Roger lists only a single Biblical passage;
for a few of them he lists more than one, and for a few he lists a verse
and adds "et alia"; I went to his complete description of SDs in search of
all the "alia," and whenever any verse listed by Roger as the sole SD
passage, or one of two SD passages, or one of the "alia" passages appeared
on the list of Biblical passages for which Shaheen lists four or more
references in Shakespeare, I listed the SD number on the chart. In a few
instances, different plusfours correspond to the same SD (e.g, plusfours
18 and 20 both correspond to SD 17). In one instance, a single plusfour
corresponded to two SDs: plusfour 109 (Ephesians 6.12) is counted as one
of the verses in SD 54 and all of the verses in SD 73.
Note that half of the plusfours can be correlated with Roger's SDs, while
the other half are not. It has been suggested (I am not at liberty to say
by whom or under what circumstances) that some of the plusfours could be
grouped in a manner similar to the way some of Roger's SDs represent
different biblical passages. This might be one way to proceed, but it
will not be as useful if we are going to discuss the marked verses in
Oxford's Bible. "Diagnostics" are not marked in Oxford's Bible --
individual verses are. The most common kind of marking is the underlining
of a verse number; the second most common kind of marking is the
underlining of words within a verse (sometimes the entire verse is
underlined, sometimes only a few words). If one of the annotators
underlined a verse number "4" in one chapter of the Bible, that does NOT
mean that he or she meant to refer to some unmarked verse elsewhere in the
Bible that contains similar words. Under Roger's SD method, a reference
to any verse within a set of verses constituting an SD is taken as a
reference to the entire complex of verses -- which has the perhaps not
undesired effect of greatly exaggerating the significance of the marked
verses -- but all we can really say about it is that the annotator
underlined a "4." It is reasonable to think that something in that verse
was important enough to justify the expense of ink; it is not so
reasonable to infer that what was important in that verse was a
parallelism that Roger perceives to another verse that is NOT marked.
Note that a great many of Roger's SDs are not represented at all on my
plusfours chart. Note, most importantly, that only 6 of the roughly 1000
verses marked in Oxford's Bible correspond to passages listed by Shaheen
as having four or more Shakespearean references. Note that there is a far
greater overlap between biblical references in *The Faerie Queene* and
Shakespearean plusfours than there is between marked verses in Oxford's
Bible and Shakespearean plusfours.
>
> Total verses: 2000
Roger does list his "diagnostics," and we have discussed some of the
problems with that list. He does NOT list the other passages that he is
willing to count, but given that he only rejects ten of Shaheen's 2300
passages, and given that he wishes to include a large number that Shaheen
would have considered invalid, Roger's numbers simply do not add up.
> 81 verses used 4 or more times equals between twenty and twenty five
> percent of the total depending on exact count. That is why they are
> considered diagnostic.
Your instincts for what Roger SHOULD have been looking at may be sound,
but your description of what Roger says is not accurate. Roger's 81 SDs
are NOT 81 biblical verses. Have you looked, for example, at his SD 30?
SD 30 corresponds to Psalm 137 -- not to any single verse of the psalm,
and not to any subset of the psalm, but to the whole shebang. Shaheen
lists a total of two Shakespearean references to two different verses
within the Psalm:
137.1 *Wiv.* 3.1.24
137.5 *H5* 2.2.33-34
Even when Roger adds "subtle but pertinent references which were accepted
by other scholars such as Carter, Noble or Milward" for passages within
Psalm 137, he STILL doesn't come up with four references for the same
passage, although he does surpass four for the entire Psalm.
What would happen if we used the same standard that Roger uses for Psalm
137 throughout the entire Bible? Any chapter of any book of the Bible
whose verses collectively had a total of four or more Shakespearean
parallels in Shaheen's list PLUS Carters PLUS Noble's PLUS Milward's would
be considered a "Shakespeare diagnostic." For Genesis alone, that would
mean that chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19, 27, 30, 31, 41, and 49
would, IN THEIR ENTIRETY, count as "Shakespeare Diagnostics." Would you
consider this a reasonable standard for the entire Bible? If not, then
perhaps it is not a reasonable standard for Psalm 137.
>
> PLease show me from Shaheen _in quotes_ where he claims Shakespeare used
> 2000 distinct and independent Bible verses.
>
I think I've given you enough direct quotations from Shaheen to make the
point. If you doubt Dave's estimate of "at least 2000" biblical passages
in Shaheen's index, you can count them for yourself, as I have done, and
you will confirm Dave's estimate.
> I confronted Kathman on this many times. He has never responded. If he
> is wrong it is a monumental gaffe.
And if he is right? I am trying to approach your points in as neutral a
way as I can, and I think I have shown that Dave's estimate was justified,
and that it is based on published data that anyone may verify. I will not
speculate about the implications of Dave's being right, because I think
that's your responsibility. You tell us that if Dave is wrong, "it is a
monumental gaffe." Whether you taker my word on it (and the quotations I
have marshaled from Shaheen and Roger), or whether you decide to read
Shaheen for yourself, and count the items in his index for yourself, you
will come to the realization that Dave was right. If Dave is right, does
that mean that Roger's counts of "Shakespeare diagnostics" should be
called "monumental gaffes"?
John W. Kennedy
> In article <roEx9.16909$0x....@news4.srv.hcvlny.cv.net>, "John W.
> Kennedy" <jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>>Well, of course, I'm just a poor ol' academic layman from East
>>Vassalboro,
Well, 1948-1955, and then Waterville until 1962. Since then I've
been sweltering my life away in tropical New Jersey. The old
house on the east side of the road after you pass south through
town and past the lake landing.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Which way to East Vassalboro?"
"Don'ch'a move a gawd-dam inch!"
-- "Bert and I"
Ken Kaplan
Ken Kaplan
Terry Ross <tr...@bcpl.net> wrote in message news:<Pine.GSO.4.44.0211121815020.28506-100000@mail>...
Toby Petzold
> Actually, Toby, it doesn't matter in the least whether or not Oxford made
> the annotations.
Of course it matters! If they're his, it means that he was a literate
book-possessor who was interested in some of the same passages that
Shakespeare was. That's at least three things that Oxford would have
over Shakspere, so don't try to rationalize this away.
> Only a complete loon would think that a man's underlining
> biblical passages about subjects like cherubs must therefore be considered
> to have written plays that refer to subjects like cherubs.
Great. I guess that, since I didn't say any such thing, I must not be
a complete loon.
> Particularly, if
> the underliner also underlined a great many biblical passages about subjects
> the playwright was silent about, and the playwright referred to many
> subjects there are passages in the Bible about which the underliner did not
> underline.
Yeah, but what was the name of that book that belonged to Shakspere?
Jack Shit? Never Was? Can't quite recall...
Toby Petzold
Islama delenda est.
Spam Scone
> Grumman:
>
> > Actually, Toby, it doesn't matter in the least whether or not Oxford made
> > the annotations.
>
> Of course it matters! If they're his, it means that he was a literate
> book-possessor who was interested in some of the same passages that
> Shakespeare was. That's at least three things that Oxford would have
What "evidence" do you have that Shakespeare was not literate, or a
book-possessor? I need a laugh today.
Bob Grumman
>
> > Actually, Toby, it doesn't matter in the least whether or not Oxford made
> > the annotations.
>
> Of course it matters! If they're his, it means that he was a literate
> book-possessor who was interested in some of the same passages that
> Shakespeare was. That's at least three things that Oxford would have
> over Shakspere, so don't try to rationalize this away.
Not so. Even if Shakespeare were as illiterate as you claim he STILL
would have been interested in many of the passages underlined in
Oxford's Bible. That's because those passages were dramatized in
the morality plays often shown throughout England, were discused in
sermons, were depicted in stained glass windows, were referred to
in regular plays.
> > Only a complete loon would think that a man's underlining
> > biblical passages about subjects like cherubs must therefore be considered
> > to have written plays that refer to subjects like cherubs.
>
> Great. I guess that, since I didn't say any such thing, I must not be
> a complete loon.
You didn't have to say such a thing, wack. Most of the underlined
passages have no more connection to the Shakespearean plays than
a single word or phrase in common, such as "cherub." To believe
the underlined pasages indicate that that underliner must have written
the Shakespearean plays, as you seem to, and Rogerk definitely does, is
to believe that "a man's underlining biblical passages about subjects
like cherubs must therefore be considered to have written plays that
refer to subjects like cherubs."
> > Particularly, if
> > the underliner also underlined a great many biblical passages about subjects
> > the playwright was silent about, and the playwright referred to many
> > subjects there are passages in the Bible about which the underliner did not
> > underline.
>
> Yeah, but what was the name of that book that belonged to Shakspere?
> Jack Shit? Never Was? Can't quite recall...
>
> Toby Petzold
Ah, we have a book known to have belonged to Oxford, but none known
for certain to have belonged to Shakespeare. (Try "in the same empty
pile of books known definitely to have belonged to just about every
other playwright of the times" in your list, wack.) That must
override such a triviality as the appearance of Shakespeare's
name on so many title pages in determining the authorship of
those plays. It's certainly a good argument against mine that
the underliner . . . "underlined a great many biblical passages
about subjects the playwright was silent about, and the playwright
referred to many subjects there are passages in the Bible about
which the underliner did not underline," too.
--Bob G.
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Tom Reedy
message
news:ad8b29ae.02112...@posting.google.com...
I believe the book you are referring to is
*Archaionomia* by William Lambarde.
TR
Terry Ross
> Grumman:
>
> > Actually, Toby, it doesn't matter in the least whether or not Oxford made
> > the annotations.
>
> Of course it matters! If they're his, it means that he was a literate
We would know that Oxford was literate even if the Bible had not survived;
we also know that Shakespeare was literate.
> book-possessor
There is good evidence that Shakespeare possessed a copy of
*Archaionomia*.
> who was interested in some of the same passages that Shakespeare was.
Naseeb Shaheen lists 2300 passages from Scripture in his index of
Shakespeare's Biblical references. There are about 37000 verses in the
Bible (counting the Apocrypha). There are about 1000 marked verses in
Oxford's Bible. It would be very surprising if ANY bible that had 1000
marked verses did not have some that could be found in the 2300 passages
listed by Shaheen, but the great majority of passages in Shaheen's index
are NOT marked in Oxford's Bible; the great majority of verses marked in
Oxford's Bible do NOT appear on Shaheen's Shakespeare index.
> That's at least three things that Oxford would have over Shakspere, so
> don't try to rationalize this away.
There were hundreds of thousands of English Bibles printed during
Shakespeare's lifetime, most of which have not come down to us. Roger
Stritmatter thinks there were at least three different people who left
marks in Oxford's Bible, one of whom was Oxford himself. I think there
were at least four different people, none of who can be shown to have been
Oxford.
Consider one of the more interesting annotations:
1 Kings 8.63 reads,
"And Salomon offred a sacrifice of peace offrings which he offred vnto the
Lorde, to wit, two and twentie thousande beeues, and an hundreth and
twentie thousande shepe: so the king & all the children of Israel
dedicated the house of the Lorde."
In the margin of Oxford's Bible, someone has written this:
oxen - 22000
shepe 1220000
OK, "two and twentie thousande beeues" may equal "oxen - 22000", but how
does "an hundreth and twentie thousande shepe" equal "shepe 1220000"? We
know that Oxford was constantly in money trouble, but is there any reason
to think he didn't know the difference between a hundred and twenty
thousand; and one million, two hundred twenty thousand?
Is this innumeracy something we should expect from the author of
Shakespeare's plays?
[snip]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross tr...@bcpl.net
SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com
CHRISTMAS POEMS http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com/xmas/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Reynolds
Toby Petzold wrote:
> Grumman:
>
> > Actually, Toby, it doesn't matter in the least whether or not Oxford made
> > the annotations.
>
> Of course it matters! If they're his, it means that he was a literate
> book-possessor who was interested in some of the same passages that
> Shakespeare was. That's at least three things that Oxford would have
> over Shakspere, so don't try to rationalize this away.
You are trying to establish that Oxford is literate? That
is already known. It is one of the "BIG FOUR or FIVE," Toby!
Oxford was
1. English-speaking
2. literate
3. in England during a portion of the Shakespearean era
4. alive during a portion of the Shakespearean era
and
5. male (this is dependent upon the author being male)
These are the five reasons to believe Oxford wrote Shakespeare.
If you can add to this list, why haven't you yet?
Volker Multhopp cowrote number 5 with me because
he was an upstanding, responsible antiStrat and was
not afraid to expand our positive reinforcement of
the Oxford case.
Other Oxfordians CAN'T or WON'T add to the list, because
they know of no other consideration linking Oxford to the works.
I have to take their (non)word(s) for it!
> > Only a complete loon would think that a man's underlining
> > biblical passages about subjects like cherubs must therefore be considered
> > to have written plays that refer to subjects like cherubs.
>
> Great. I guess that, since I didn't say any such thing, I must not be
> a complete loon.
You are a loon-in-training if you CAN'T or WON'T add to the list.
> > Particularly, if
> > the underliner also underlined a great many biblical passages about subjects
> > the playwright was silent about, and the playwright referred to many
> > subjects there are passages in the Bible about which the underliner did not
> > underline.
>
> Yeah, but what was the name of that book that belonged to Shakspere?
> Jack Shit? Never Was? Can't quite recall...
>
> Toby Petzold
Oxford marked up his prayerbook. Yeah? So that means that.... what?
That we was bored in church? Please, Toby, show the connection!
You're brimming with Oxfordian bravado but quiet as a churchmouse as to why.
Greg Reynolds, whose church has coloring books
for feisty little Christians with attention disorders
Art Neuendorffer
>>>Actually, Toby, it doesn't matter in the least whether or not
>>> Oxford made the annotations.
> On 28 Nov 2002, Toby Petzold wrote:
>>Of course it matters! If they're his, it means that he was a literate
>
>
> We would know that Oxford was literate even if the Bible had not survived;
> we also know that Shakespeare was literate.
Since Oxford & Shake-speare were one in the same:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
John ----------- MARgerY
|
______|____
/ \ m. OPALIA(1571) [Sonneteer]
MARY Oxford --------------- Anne
[BROOKE House] | [b. 1556]
[Oxford's Boys] |
[Oxford GLOVES] |
[Golding's 'OVID'] |
[Stratford atte Bowe] |
[God's 'I am that I am'] |
[1604 DEER Park warden] |
[£1,000/year for 18 years] |
[MERES' Top 10 in comedy (1598)] |
[1583 Lessor of Blackfriars Th.] |
|
Herbert (Philip) ----- SUSAN
[Folio dedicatee] [b. May 26]
[Jaggard dedicatee]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
BAILIFF ______________________
GLOVEmaker- / \
BUTCHER John --------- MARY MARgerY
[could write | [could write [d. St.Adrian's Day]
his 'marke'] | her 'marke']
[bur. St.Adrian's Day] | [d. St.Adrian's Day]
___|___________
/ \ [illiterate]
MARgerY Shakspere ------------- Anne
[BROOK House] | [b. 1556]
[Shaxpere's Boys] |
[Shakspere GLOVES] |
[Golding's 'OVID'] |
[Stratford upon Avon] |
[God's 'I am that I am'] |
[1586 DEER Park poacher] |
[£1,000/year for 18 years] |
[MERES' Top 10 in comedy (1598)] |
[1608 Lessor of Blackfriars Th.] |
|
Hall M.D. -- SUSANna
[b. May 26]
[could write name]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
September 8, 1560, Amy Robsart BREAKS neck at bottom of staircase
September 8, 1573, Caravaggio born
September 8, 1601, Shakespeare's father, John, buried
September 8, 1608, Shakespeare's mother, Mary, dies
September 8, 1611, FORMAN SIMon dies: "An IMPOST, an IMPOST"
September 8, 1644, Francis QUARLES (_Hièroglyphikes_) dies
---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Toby Petzold wrote:
>
>>book-possessor
Terry Ross wrote:
> There is good evidence that Shakespeare
> possessed a copy of *Archaionomia*.
<<APXAIONOMIA, sive de priscis anglorum legibus libri, sermone Anglico,
vetustate antiquissimo, aliquot abhinc seculis conscripti, ... Gulielmo
Lambardo interprete. (Londini, : ex officina Joannis Daij., An. 1568.)
(STC 15142).
The duties of constables, borsholders, tythingmen, and such other lowe
ministers of the peace. ...First collected and penned by William Lambard
of Lincolnes Inne Gent. 1582. and now enlarged by the same authour,
1587. (Imprinted at London by Rafe Newberie & Henrie Midleton, 1587.)>>
> Toby Petzold wrote:
>>who was interested in some of the same passages that Shakespeare was.
Terry Ross wrote:
> Naseeb Shaheen lists 2300 passages from Scripture in his index of
> Shakespeare's Biblical references. There are about 37000 verses in the
> Bible (counting the Apocrypha). There are about 1000 marked verses in
> Oxford's Bible. It would be very surprising if ANY bible that had 1000
> marked verses did not have some that could be found in the 2300 passages
> listed by Shaheen, but the great majority of passages in Shaheen's index
> are NOT marked in Oxford's Bible; the great majority of verses marked in
> Oxford's Bible do NOT appear on Shaheen's Shakespeare index.
The 2001 Literature IgNobel was given to two U.S. researchers who wrote
a report on "The Effects Of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting On
Reading Comprehension," meaning you may have problems with a used
textbook if someone else has already used a yellow highlighter on it.
(The IgNobel for Medicine was given to Chris McManus, of University
College in London, who showed that ancient sculptures, men have a
larger left testicle (while in nature, the reverse is true).)
> Toby Petzold wrote:
>
>>That's at least three things that Oxford would have over Shakspere,
>> so don't try to rationalize this away.
>
Terry Ross wrote:
> There were hundreds of thousands of English Bibles printed during
> Shakespeare's lifetime, most of which have not come down to us. Roger
> Stritmatter thinks there were at least three different people who left
> marks in Oxford's Bible, one of whom was Oxford himself. I think there
> were at least four different people, none of who can be shown to have been
> Oxford.
> Consider one of the more interesting annotations:
>
> 1 Kings 8.63 reads,
>
> "And Salomon offred a sacrifice of peace offrings which he offred vnto the
> Lorde, to wit, two and twentie thousande beeues, and an hundreth and
> twentie thousande shepe: so the king & all the children of Israel
> dedicated the house of the Lorde."
>
> In the margin of Oxford's Bible, someone has written this:
>
> oxen - 22000
> shepe 1220000
>
> OK, "two and twentie thousande beeues" may equal "oxen - 22000", but how
> does "an hundreth and twentie thousande shepe" equal "shepe 1220000"? We
> know that Oxford was constantly in money trouble, but is there any reason
> to think he didn't know the difference between a hundred and twenty
> thousand; and one million, two hundred twenty thousand?
Maybe Oxford owned a Serta mattress & didn't need to count shepe:
http://www.btinternet.com/~david.c.mitchell/serta_sheep.htm
Is insomnia something we should expect
from the author of Shakespeare's plays?
Terry Ross wrote:
> Is this innumeracy something we should expect
> from the author of Shakespeare's plays?
-------------------------------------------------------------------
His "faults were rather subtle"
-------------------------------------------------------------------
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/WhosCounting/whoscounting010927.html
<<Professor of mathematics at Temple University and adjunct professor of
journalism at Columbia University, John Allen Paulos is the author of
several best-selling books, including Innumeracy and A Mathematician
Reads the Newspaper.>>
<<People search the Bible for equidistant letter sequences (ELSs) that
spell out words that are relevant to an event and that can be said to
have "predicted" it. (ELSs are letters in a text, each separated from
the next by a fixed number of other letters.) Consider the word
"generalization" for an easy example. It contains an equidistant letter
sequence for "Nazi" as can be seen by capitalizing the letters in
question: geNerAliZatIon.
There were e-mails and Web sites claiming the Bible contains many ELSs
for "Saddam Hussein," "bin Laden," and also much longer ones describing
the heinous acts at the World Trade Center. Unlike the original Bible
codes, whose faults were rather subtle, these longer ELSs are purely
bogus.>>
------------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Art Neuendorffer
LEVIT 22:19 Ye shall offer at your own will a male without blemish,
of the beeves, of the sheep, or of the goats.
LEVIT 22:20 But whatsoever hath a blemish, that shall ye not offer:
for it shall not be acceptable for you.
LEVIT 22:21 And whosoever offereth a sacrifice of peace offerings
unto the LORD to accomplish his vow, or a freewill offering
in beeves or sheep, it shall be perfect to be accepted;
there shall be no blemish therein.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry Ross wrote:
> There were hundreds of thousands of English Bibles printed during
> Shakespeare's lifetime, most of which have not come down to us.
> Roger Stritmatter thinks there were at least three different people
> who left marks in Oxford's Bible, one of whom was Oxford himself.
> I think there were at least four different people,
> none of who can be shown to have been Oxford.
> Consider one of the more interesting annotations:
>
> 1 Kings 8.63 reads,
>
> "And Salomon offred a sacrifice of peace offrings which he offred vnto
> the Lorde, to wit, two and twentie thousande beeues, and an hundreth
> and twentie thousande shepe: so the king & all the children of Israel
> dedicated the house of the Lorde."
>
> In the margin of Oxford's Bible, someone has written this:
>
> oxen - 22000
> shepe 1220000
> OK, "two and twentie thousande beeues" may equal "oxen - 22000", but how
> does "an hundreth and twentie thousande shepe" equal "shepe 1220000"? We
> know that Oxford was constantly in money trouble, but is there any reason
> to think he didn't know the difference between a hundred and twenty
> thousand; and one million, two hundred twenty thousand?
Perhaps the last 0 is a mistake or a central (2/0?) is implied:
shepe - 12(2/0?)000
It might be preferable to have:
22000 - oxen (followers of Mithras)
122000 - shepe (followers of Christ)
--------------
144000
------------------------------------------------------------------
144,000 (ekaton tesserakonta tessareV ciliadeV)
Rev 7:4 And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred
forty-four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of the people of Israel:
Rev 14:1 Then I looked, and there was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion!
And with him were one hundred forty-four thousand who had his name and
his Father's name written on their foreheads.
Rev 14:3 and they sing a new song before the throne and before the four
living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song
except the one hundred forty-four thousand who have been redeemed from
the earth.
------------------------------------------------------------------
_THE (little flock) 144,000_ by Gerald Sigal
------------------------------------------------------------------
<<The Watchtower Society teaches that only a restricted number of
persons will be allowed to enter heaven. This doctrine is based on
verses in the Book of Revelation. The Society explains that "According
to Revelation 7:4 and 14:1-4, these are to number merely 144,000
individuals, the 'little flock,' called to God's heavenly Kingdom. (Luke
12:32) The selection of these especially favored ones of Jehovah God
began with the selection of the 12 apostles of Jesus Christ. (Matthew
10:2-4; Acts 1:23-26)"1 According to the Watchtower Society, this
gathering of the 144,000 began in the first century C.E. and continued
through the year 1935. At that time, the number of those chosen was
completed and no more were added. Since the establishment of the
Watchtower Society in the latter half of the nineteenth century, only
those associated with it prior to 1935 have been numbered among the
144,000. Jehovah's Witnesses who have joined the organization since 1935
are not part of the heaven-bound 144,000 but form a secondary class
called the "'great crowd' of 'other sheep'" 2 who are destined to spend
eternity in a post- Armageddon earth. Only the 144,000 have the hope of
heaven, and only they may partake of the "emblems" of "the Lord's
Evening Meal," that is, the loaf and cup, at the annual Jehovah's
Witness Memorial observance of Jesus' death.
Yes, some good people do go to heaven. A most interesting fact about
good people, or true Christians, that is unknown to most churchgoers is
that there are two groups. A small minority go to heaven to reign with
Jesus Christ, while the majority will enjoy everlasting life on earth. .
. ."
The minority group are given a very special privilege, that of reigning
with Christ in heaven. In other words, they will share with Jesus in
governing those living on earth. . . .
Does the Bible reveal how many are going to enjoy the very great
privilege of reigning with Christ in heaven? Yes, it does. Says
Revelation chapter 14, verse 1: "I saw, and, look, the Lamb standing
upon the Mount Zion, and with him a hundred and forty-four thousand
having his name and the name of his Father written on their foreheads."
Keep in mind that Revelation uses many symbols, or "signs," as expressed
in the opening verse, Revelation 1:1. "The Lamb" is Jesus Christ.
(Compare John 1:29.) And Mount Zion refers not to the political capital
of Israel but to "heavenly Jerusalem."--Hebrews 12:22.
Revelation chapter 7 gives us information about both the heavenly group
and the earthly group we have mentioned. Verses 4-8 mention the 144,000
"sealed out of every tribe of the sons of Israel." This is another case
of symbolism and means spiritual Israel, or "the Israel of God."
(Galatians 6:16) Romans 2:29 says: "He is a Jew who is one on the
inside, and his circumcision is that of the heart by spirit." Revelation
7:9 next describes the earthly group, saying: "Look! a great crowd,
which no man was able to number, out of all nations and tribes and
peoples and tongues."3
Revelation 7:4 states that the 144,000 are "of the sons of Israel," but
the Watchtower Society contends that the Christian congregation, that
is, the Jehovah's Witnesses, is here symbolically portrayed as
"spiritual Israel." The 144,000, the Society contends, are therefore
drawn from among its members belonging to several different racial,
social, and national groups. The "spiritual Israel" explanation is
problematical. Revelation 7:4-8 states:
And I heard the number of those who were sealed, a hundred and
forty-four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of the sons of Israel:
Out of the tribe of Judah twelve thousand sealed; out of the tribe of
Reuben twelve thousand; out of the tribe of Gad twelve thousand; out of
the tribe of Asher twelve thousand; out of the tribe of Naphtali twelve
thousand; out of the tribe of Manasseh twelve thousand; out of the tribe
of Simeon twelve thousand; out of the tribe of Levi twelve thousand; out
of the tribe of lssachar twelve thousand; out of the tribe of Zebulon
twelve thousand; out of the tribe of Joseph twelve thousand; out of the
tribe of Benjamin twelve thousand sealed. (NWT).
The many Christian denominations and sects generally disagree as to the
composition of the 144,000. As a result, there are a number of Christian
interpretations that are at odds with each other. In any case, they all
share a basic difficulty that is not satisfactorily addressed by any
Christian group. The Watchtower Society interpretation, with its
over-all symbolism, only adds to the confusion. In listing Manasseh, the
text leaves out Dan, the son of Jacob, without offering any explanation
for this omission. As a rule, when Joseph is listed as one of the
tribes, it automatically includes Manasseh (and Ephraim). There is no
satisfactory reason for the omission of Dan and the inclusion of
Manasseh. Moreover, the text states explicitly that each group of 12,000
would be drawn literally from the tribes of Israel. Could it be that the
author of the Book of Revelation was referring symbolically to
Israelites? If so, then why the exclusive enumeration tribe-by-tribe?
Indeed, if "every tribe of the sons of Israel" is to be taken
symbolically why should one not take the number 144,000 to also be
symbolic? If the number 144,000 is symbolic it nullifies the Watchtower
Society's doctrines which depend on it. Most significant would be a
collapse respectively of the belief that only 144,000 have the hope of
heaven and the belief that the "'great crowd' of 'other sheep'" are
destined to spend eternity in a post-Armageddon earth. Symbolically,
heaven would be open to an undetermined number of people.>>
------------------------------------------------------------------
144 (ekaton tesserakonta tesaroV)
------------------------------------------------------------------
Rev 21:17: And he measured the *wall* thereof, an hundred and forty
and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is,
of the angel. And the building of the *wall* of it was of jasper:
----------------------------------------------------------------
144 letters
T O T H E O (N)l I[E| B E G E T T E R O
F T H E S E (I)n[S| U I N G S O N N E
T S M R W H A (L*L|H] a P P I *N* E S S
E A N D T H A T (E|T] (E)r N I T *I* E P
R O M I S E D B [Y|O] u (R)e V E R *L* I
V I N G P O E T w|I] sh (E)t H T H *E*
[W] E L L W I S H i nga (d V e) N T U
[R] E R I N S E T T ing f o r T H
----------------------------------------------------------------
SNOUT(TOM):
You can never bring in a *wall* . What say you, BOTtom?
BOT(tom):
Some man or other must present *Wall* : and let him
have some *plaster* , or some loam, or some rough-cast
about him, to signify *wall*; and let him hold his
fingers thus, and through that cranny shall
Pyramus and Thisby whisper.
---------------------------------------------------------
READ IF THOV CANST,
WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH HATH PLAST
--------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Toby Petzold
> On 28 Nov 2002, Toby Petzold wrote:
>
> > Grumman:
> >
> > > Actually, Toby, it doesn't matter in the least whether or not Oxford made
> > > the annotations.
> >
> > Of course it matters! If they're his, it means that he was a literate
>
> We would know that Oxford was literate even if the Bible had not survived;
> we also know that Shakespeare was literate.
Because someone wrote him (Shakspere) a letter which may or may not
have been sent? That's a mighty slender reed. Maybe it was his
father's professional standing that guarantees his literacy. Or, maybe
it's impossible to believe that he could have been involved in a
literary hoax without some degree of literacy.
> > book-possessor
>
> There is good evidence that Shakespeare possessed a copy of
> *Archaionomia*.
Naturally, I disagree. I suppose it's possible to believe that a great
playwright-poet would have absolutely no connection to anything
printed under his own name (or, even a friend's) and yet have a
credible claim on some book on ancient law, but it isn't a probable
supposition. I mean, you have to figure that references to things like
Shakspere's ownership of that copy of Archaionomia is meant to help
keep the sawdust in, but it can't be much more.
> > who was interested in some of the same passages that Shakespeare was.
>
> Naseeb Shaheen lists 2300 passages from Scripture in his index of
> Shakespeare's Biblical references. There are about 37000 verses in the
> Bible (counting the Apocrypha). There are about 1000 marked verses in
> Oxford's Bible. It would be very surprising if ANY bible that had 1000
> marked verses did not have some that could be found in the 2300 passages
> listed by Shaheen, but the great majority of passages in Shaheen's index
> are NOT marked in Oxford's Bible; the great majority of verses marked in
> Oxford's Bible do NOT appear on Shaheen's Shakespeare index.
Excellent points, Terry. I'll concede them to you every time because I
don't think Stritmatter has done enough to earn even my uninformed
defense. Maybe his numbers man was right about those few coinciding
passages being qualitatively more significant, but who knows?
> > That's at least three things that Oxford would have over Shakspere, so
> > don't try to rationalize this away.
>
> There were hundreds of thousands of English Bibles printed during
> Shakespeare's lifetime, most of which have not come down to us. Roger
> Stritmatter thinks there were at least three different people who left
> marks in Oxford's Bible, one of whom was Oxford himself. I think there
> were at least four different people, none of who can be shown to have been
> Oxford.
I like the idea that your Anti-Oxfordianism should be so pro-active.
There's pre-emption in the air these days!
> Consider one of the more interesting annotations:
>
> 1 Kings 8.63 reads,
>
> "And Salomon offred a sacrifice of peace offrings which he offred vnto the
> Lorde, to wit, two and twentie thousande beeues, and an hundreth and
> twentie thousande shepe: so the king & all the children of Israel
> dedicated the house of the Lorde."
>
> In the margin of Oxford's Bible, someone has written this:
>
> oxen - 22000
> shepe 1220000
>
>
> OK, "two and twentie thousande beeues" may equal "oxen - 22000", but how
> does "an hundreth and twentie thousande shepe" equal "shepe 1220000"? We
> know that Oxford was constantly in money trouble, but is there any reason
> to think he didn't know the difference between a hundred and twenty
> thousand; and one million, two hundred twenty thousand?
>
> Is this innumeracy something we should expect from the author of
> Shakespeare's plays?
>
> [snip]
That's silly. As you just wrote, you don't know who put those figures
down, nor the rationale behind them. Maybe the person was doodling, or
just being symmetrical or absent-minded. I don't know if the annotator
was Oxford, but there's nothing inherently disqualifying for a great
mind about writing down such a thing.
Toby Petzold
Remember Pearl Harbor
Bob Grumman
>
> Because someone wrote him (Shakspere) a letter which may or may not
> have been sent?
Interesting. I never use that argument, myself, but that a letter was
written to him suggests that he could read. He could have had someone read
his letters to him, but that might jeopardize the hoax to make people think
he was an author.
My reasons for saying he was literate, leaving out the fact that he was a
known playwright and poet, are that his monument says he was, he could write
his signatures, and his profession was acting, which generally requires an
ability to read.
--Bob G.
Art Neuendorffer
>>
>> Because someone wrote him (Shakspere) a letter
>> which may or may not have been sent?
Was it returned for insufficient postage?
Bob Grumman wrote:
> Interesting. I never use that argument, myself, but that
> a letter was written to him suggests that he could read.
That the letter was never sent suggests that he couldn't.
Bob Grumman wrote:
> He could have had someone read his letters to him,
> but that might jeopardize the hoax to make people
> think he was an author.
Nobody in their right mind would have believed that Shaksper
was an author during his lifetime and it's rather amazing
that anyone would still believe he was 400 years later.
Bob Grumman wrote:
> My reasons for saying he was literate,
> leaving out the fact that he was a known playwright and poet,
Leaving out the fiction that he was a known playwright & poet,
Bob Grumman wrote:
> are that his monument says he was,
His monument says he was: NESTOR, SOCRATES & VIRGIL.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
UNO.VERE-VIRGIL. POET.
OUR.EVER-LIVING. POET.
NIL.VERO-VERIUS. POET.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
CRATYLUS by Plato
<<[SOCRATES to Hermogenes]: ARETE signifying in the 1st place
ease of motion, then that the STREAM of the good soul is unimpeded,
and has therefore the attribute of EVER FLOWING
without let or hindrance, and is therefore called ARETE,
or, more correctly, aeireite (EVER-FLOWING)>>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
T O T H E O [N] L i E B E G E T T E R O
F T H E S E [I] n s U I N G S O N N E T
S M *r* W h a [L] L h a] P P I [N] E S S E A
N D *t* h a t [E] T [E|r] N I T [I] E P R O M
I S *E* D B Y O U [R|e] V E R [L] I V I N G
P O *E* t W I S H [E|t] H T H [E] W E L L W
I S *h* I N G A [d V e] N T U R E R I N S
E t *T* I N G
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.ccel.org/c/calvin/comment2/ps1-18.htm
THE BOOK OF PSALMS BY JOHN CALVIN
THE EPISTLE DEDICATORY
[PREFIXED TO THE ORIGINAL TRANSLAT10N, 1571.]
To The Right Honorably And Verie Good Lord,
EDWARD DE VERE, ERLE OF OXINFORD,
Lord Great Chamberlain Of England, Vicount Bulbecke, Etc.
ARTHUR GOLDING
To the furtherance wherof, God hath by householde alyance lincked vnto
your Lordship a long experienced NESTOR, whose counsaile and footsteps
if you folowe, no doubte but you shalbee bothe happie in your selfe, and
singularly profitable to your common welth; and moreouer, God shall
blisse you with plentiful and godly issue by your vertuous and
deerbeloued Spouse, to continew the honor and renoavne of your noble
house after the happy knitting vp of bothe your yeeres, which I pray God
may bee many in vnseperable loue, like the loue of Ceix and Alcyonee,
to the glory of God, and the contentation of bothe your desires.
Written at London, the 20:of October 1571.
Your good Lordship's moste humlble to commaund, Arthur Golding.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Grumman wrote:
> he could write his signatures,
<<Only six examples of his handwriting are known to exist:
http://home.att.net/~tleary/sigs.htm
each spelled differently.>>
Bob Grumman wrote:
> and his profession was acting,
He bought the second best house in Stratford
by playing Adam & Hamlet's ghost?
Bob Grumman wrote:
> which generally requires an ability to read.
How pathetic that you feel you must end
your argument on such a strong note. :-)
Art N.
Peter Groves
> Remember Pearl Harbor
will live in rational geopolitical action"?
Bob Grumman
>
> That the letter was never sent suggests that he couldn't.
Right, Art: a man who knew Shakespeare wrote a letter to him, then, just
before having it delivered to Shakespeare, remembered that the boob couldn't
read, so held it back.
>
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > He could have had someone read his letters to him,
> > but that might jeopardize the hoax to make people
> > think he was an author.
>
> Nobody in their right mind would have believed that Shaksper
> was an author during his lifetime
Why not? There were no who's who's back then one could consult to find out
about the literacy of alleged authors' parents, spouses and children, and
the educational background of the alleged authors. Witches were widely
believed in then, too, so why couldn't people believe that just about anyone
could learn to read, and that there was no more to writing than knowing how
to write, and being intelligent, which had nothing to do with formal
education or the kind of knowledge possessed by a person's relatives.
> and it's rather amazing
> that anyone would still believe he was 400
> years later.
Why the monument and the First Folio and the absence of any testimony
indicating that these things were lies?
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > My reasons for saying he was literate,
> > leaving out the fact that he was a known playwright and poet,
>
> Leaving out the fiction that he was a known playwright & poet,
>
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > are that his monument says he was,
>
> His monument says he was: NESTOR, SOCRATES & VIRGIL.
No, Art, the monument compares him to those men.
babble snipped
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > he could write his signatures,
>
> <<Only six examples of his handwriting are known to exist:
>
> http://home.att.net/~tleary/sigs.htm
>
> each spelled differently.>>
That he could write his name is evidence that he could write other things.
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > and his profession was acting,
>
> He bought the second best house in Stratford
> by playing Adam & Hamlet's ghost?
The evidence indicates that he also played other roles.
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > which generally requires an ability to read.
>
> How pathetic that you feel you must end
> your argument on such a strong note. :-)
>
> Art N.
I was just quickly stating the facts.
--Bob G.
Art Neuendorffer
>>> a letter was written to him suggests that he could read.
> Neuendorffer wrote:
>> That the letter was never sent suggests that he couldn't.
Bob Grumman wrote:
> Right, Art: a man who knew Shakespeare wrote a letter to him,
> then, just before having it delivered to Shakespeare,
> remembered that the boob couldn't read, so held it back.
The fact that such an unsent letter still exists suggests that it
was bogus. Keeping a record of a non-communication is rather pointless.
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>> He could have had someone read his letters to him,
>>>but that might jeopardize the hoax to make people
>>> think he was an author.
> Neuendorffer wrote:
>> Nobody in their right mind would have believed
>> that Shaksper was an author during his lifetime
Bob Grumman wrote:
> Why not? There were no who's who's
Who's who's what?
> back then one could consult to find out
> about the literacy of alleged authors' parents, spouses and children,
> and the educational background of the alleged authors.
The Stratford paper trail is sufficient (or lack of it).
Bob Grumman wrote:
> Witches were widely believed in then, too,
Which witches?
> so why couldn't people believe that just about anyone could learn to
> read, and that there was no more to writing than knowing how
> to write, and being intelligent, which had nothing to do with formal
> education or the kind of knowledge possessed by a person's relatives.
I'm assuming that Stratfordians back then had as much common sense
as they do today. (It's just the tourists who are gullible & stupid.)
> Neuendorffer wrote:
>>and it's rather amazing that anyone would still believe he was 400
>>years later.
Bob Grumman wrote:
> Why the monument and the First Folio and the absence of
> any testimony indicating that these things were lies?
G.A.O.T.U. masonic conspiracy.
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>> My reasons for saying he was literate,
>>>leaving out the fact that he was a known playwright and poet,
>>
>> Leaving out the fiction that he was a known playwright & poet,
>>
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>>are that his monument says he was,
> Neuendorffer wrote:
>> His monument says he was: NESTOR, SOCRATES & VIRGIL.
> No, Art, the monument compares him to those men.
ARTHUR GOLDING
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>>he could write his signatures,
> Neuendorffer wrote:
>><<Only six examples of his handwriting are known to exist:
>>
>> http://home.att.net/~tleary/sigs.htm
>>
>> each spelled differently.>>
Bob Grumman wrote:
> That he could write his name is evidence that he could write other things.
That he struggled so hard in order to write his name so evidence
that he avoided the pain of writing other things.
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>>and his profession was acting,
> Neuendorffer wrote:
>> He bought the second best house in Stratford
>> by playing Adam & Hamlet's ghost?
>
>
> The evidence indicates that he also played other roles.
"Tradesman, userer, grain hoarder & collector of tithes."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Ben Jonson's _Timber; or, Disco(VER)i(E)s
as They Have FLOWED Out of His Daily Reading_
----------------------------------------------------------------------
<<Some are fit to make Divines,
some Poets, some Lawyers, some Physicians ;
*some to be sent to the plough, and trades* . >>
---------------------------------------------------------------
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>>which generally requires an ability to read.
> Neuendorffer wrote:
>> How pathetic that you feel you must end
>> your argument on such a strong note. :-)
Bob Grumman wrote:
> I was just quickly stating the facts.
Mark Twain has already done that:
--------------------------------------------------------------
_Is Shakespeare Dead_ (1908) by Mark Twain
CHAPTER III
<<For the instruction of the ignorant I will make a list, now, of
those details of Shakespeare's history which are FACTS -- verified
facts, established facts, undisputed facts.
FACTS
He was born on the 23d of April, 1564.
Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write,
could not sign their names.
At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby
and unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men
charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to
"make their mark" in attesting important documents,
because they could not write their names.
Of the first eighteen years of his life NOTHING is known.
They are a blank.
On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare
took out a license to marry Anne Whateley.
Next day William Shakespeare took out a license
to marry Anne Hathaway. She was eight years his senior.
William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In a hurry.
By grace of a reluctantly-granted dispensation there was
but one publication of the banns.
Within six months the first child was born.
About two (blank) years followed, during which period NOTHING
AT ALL HAPPENED TO SHAKESPEARE, so far as anybody knows.
Then came twins -- 1585. February.
Two blank years follow.
Then -- 1587 -- he makes a ten-year visit to London,
leaving the family behind.
Five blank years follow. During this period
NOTHING HAPPENED TO HIM, as far as anybody actually knows.
Then -- 1592 -- there is mention of him as an actor.
Next year -- 1593 -- his name appears in the official list of players.
Next year -- 1594 -- he played before the queen. A detail of no
consequence: other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five
of her reign. And remained obscure.
Three pretty full years follow. Full of play-acting. Then
In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford.
Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he
accumulated money, and also reputation as actor and manager.
Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become
associated with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly)
author of the same. Some of these, in these years and later, were
pirated, but he made no protest.
Then -- 1610-11 -- he returned to Stratford and settled
down for good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading
in tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one
shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his
family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself
for shillings and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbor
who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain common, and
did not succeed.
He lived five or six years -- till 1616 -- in the joy
of these elevated pursuits. Then he made a will,
and signed each of its three pages with his name.
A thoroughgoing business man's will. It named in minute detail
every item of property he owned in the world -- houses, lands, sword,
silver-gilt bowl, and so on -- all the way down to his "second-best
bed" and its furniture.
It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the
members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not even
his wife: the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry by
urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen; the
wife whom he had left husbandless so many years; the wife who had
had to borrow forty-one shillings in her need, and which the lender
was never able to collect of the prosperous husband,
but died at last with the money still lacking.
No, even this wife was remembered in Shakespeare's will.
He left her that "second-best bed."
And NOT ANOTHER THING;
not even a penny to bless her lucky widowhood with.
It was eminently and conspicuously a business man's will,
not a poet's.
It mentioned NOT A SINGLE BOOK.
Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and
second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned
one he gave it a high place in his will.
The will mentioned NOT A PLAY, NOT A POEM, NOT AN UNFINISHED
LITERARY WORK, NOT A SCRAP OF MANUSCRIPT OF ANY KIND.
Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that
has died THIS poor; the others all left literary remains behind.
Also a book. Maybe two.
If Shakespeare had owned a dog -- but we need not go into that: we
know he would have mentioned it in his will. If a good dog,
Susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have
got a dower interest in it. I wish he had had a dog, just so we
could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among
the family, in his careful business way.
He signed the will in three places.
In earlier years he signed two other official documents.
These five signatures still exist.
There are NO OTHER SPECIMENS OF HIS PENMANSHIP IN EXISTENCE.
Not a line.
Was he prejudiced against the art? His granddaughter, whom he
loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no
teaching, he left no provision for her education although he was
rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't
tell her husband's manuscript from anybody else's -
- she thought it was Shakespeare's.
When Shakespeare died in Stratford IT WAS NOT AN EVENT. It made no
more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten theatre-
actor would have made. Nobody came down from London; there were no
lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears -- there was merely
silence, and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened
when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh and
the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare's time passed
from life! No praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of
Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven years before he lifted his.
SO FAR AS ANYBODY ACTUALLY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare
of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.
SO FAR AS ANYBODY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE,
he never wrote a letter to anybody in his life.
SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS,
HE RECEIVED ONLY ONE LETTER DURING HIS LIFE.
So far as any one KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of Stratford
wrote only one poem during his life. This one is authentic. He
did write that one -- a fact which stands undisputed; he wrote
the whole of it; he wrote the whole of it out of his own head.
He commanded that this work of art be engraved upon his tomb,
and he was obeyed. There it abides to this day. This is it:
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
In the list as above set down, will be found EVERY POSITIVELY KNOWN
fact of Shakespeare's life, lean and meagre as the invoice is.
Beyond these details we know NOT A THING about him. All the rest
of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up,
course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures --
an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat
and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.
------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Art Neuendorffer
>>>>
>>>>Because someone wrote him (Shakspere) a letter
>>>> which may or may not have been sent?
>>>
>> Was it returned for insufficient postage?
>>
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>>Interesting. I never use that argument, myself, but that
>>> a letter was written to him suggests that he could read.
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>
>> That the letter was never sent suggests that he couldn't.
David L. Webb wrote:
> No, Art -- only a cretin like aneuendor...@comicass.nut
> would write a letter to a correspondent known to be illiterate.
Grumman can, at least, write rigidnik (though I doubt it is a word).
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>> He could have had someone read his letters to him,
>>>but that might jeopardize the hoax to make people
>>> think he was an author.
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>
>> Nobody in their [sic] right mind would have believed
>> that Shaksper was an author during his lifetime
David L. Webb wrote:
> Plenty of people expressed the opinion that William Shakesspeare was
> a writer, and these is robust evidence of his identification with
> William Shakespeare of Stratford, known to have been an actor in the
> company that performed the plays. You really should take a look at
>
> <http://shakespeareauthorship.com/howdowe.html>
----------------------------------------------------
How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare:
The Historical Facts by Tom Reedy and David Kathman
Facts?!
> William Shakespeare was born in April, 1564,
William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564.
No one knows when he was born.
> John Shakespeare was ambitious, and he filled many municipal
> offices in Stratford including that of burgess,
Ambitious?!
Thankless tasks that other Stratfordians paid to avoid.
> which privileged him to educate his children
> without charge at the King's New School in Stratford.
And did he?!
> He rose by election to the position of Alderman in 1565; and in 1568
> he was elected Bailiff (equivalent to mayor), and in that year he
> made an application to the Herald's office for a grant of arms.
Which was summarily refused.
--------------------------------------------------------------
David L. Webb wrote:
> But let's try a more modern analogy. Nobody in his or her right
> mind would believe that a moron like aneuendor...@comicass.nut
> was educated at MIT. Indeed, aneuendor...@comicass.nut is a
> cretin who believes that:
> (1) There is a bijective correspondence between persons and names;
> (2) Virgil predated Herodotus;
> (3) "Moniment" meant laughingstock in the early 1600s;
> (4) The number 19 is remarkable in being both the sum of two
> consecutive integers and the difference of their squares;
> (5) _Don Quixote_ was originally written in English;
> etc., etc.
> Surely the Neuendorffer who was educated at MIT must be someone
> completely different from the illiterate District Heights boob -
> - the latter must just be a bogus Masonic "front man."
Neuendorffer's HLAS posts surpasse
All, that was writ by Rats of BRASSe.
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>
>> and it's rather amazing
>> that anyone would still believe he was 400 years later.
>
David L. Webb wrote:
> It's rather amazing that anyone would believe that virtually all the
> plays and poetry of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, from Spenser
> to Marlowe to Shakespeare, is actually the work of a monstrous Masonic
> conspiracy (whose goal was to undermine the VERy social system from
> which its prominent members benefitted conspicuously),
It's called altruism (a term unknown to the illiterate Stratford boob).
David L. Webb wrote:
> and that that conspiracy is still active 400 years later,
Well, you're here responding to my post, aren't you?
David L. Webb wrote:
> its membership having
> included virtually eVERy distinguished writer in the history
> of modern English and many other tongues as well.
Present company excluded, of course.
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>> My reasons for saying he was literate,
>>>leaving out the fact that he was a known playwright and poet,
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>
>> Leaving out the fiction that he was a known playwright & poet,
David L. Webb wrote:
> See <http://shakespeareauthorship.com/howdowe.html>
> before making an ass of yourself, Art.
But I was just there!
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>>are that his monument says he was,
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>
>>His monument says he was: NESTOR, SOCRATES & VIRGIL.
>>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> UNO.VERE-VIRGIL. POET.
>> OUR.EVER-LIVING. POET.
>> NIL.VERO-VERIUS. POET.
>
>
> There is occurrence of "G" in "Nil vero verius poet," so it is not
> an anagram of "our ever-living poet." In any case, its INPNC score is
> risible.
And what is it's INPNC score, Dave?
> MoreoVER, "Uno Vere-Virgil poet" is multilinguial macaronic
> nonsense.
Sounds like Finnegans Wake.
ARTHUR GOLDING
> Neuendorffer wrote:
>> He bought the second best house in Stratford
>> by playing Adam & Hamlet's ghost?
David L. Webb wrote:
> No, Art; he bought the second best house (with its second best bed)
> by being a shareholder in the company, a position to which he could
> hardly have hoped to aspire as merely a minor actor who took bit parts.
> As a playwright, howeVER, he was invaluable to the company.
Company? You mean G.A.O.T.U. Freemasonry?
>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>>>which generally requires an ability to read.
>>
> Neuendorffer wrote:
>> How pathetic that you feel you must end
>> your argument on such a strong note. :-)
David L. Webb wrote:
> It's far better evidence of the literacy of Shakespeare than your
> post was of the literacy of aneuendor...@comicass.nut, Art.
How pathetic that you feel you must end
your argument on such a weak note. :-)
Art Neuendorffer
Bob Grumman
>
> >> That the letter was never sent suggests that he couldn't.
>
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > Right, Art: a man who knew Shakespeare wrote a letter to him,
> > then, just before having it delivered to Shakespeare,
> > remembered that the boob couldn't read, so held it back.
>
> The fact that such an unsent letter still exists suggests that it
> was bogus.
Ah, so you admit your original argument was poor.
>Keeping a record of a non-communication is rather pointless.
Not if the communication was made orally. The letter would record the
details. Many other possibilities exist, like the writer's forgetting to
send it, and leaving it, forgotten, with other letters. Certainly, it could
not have been bogus. Why would anyone fake such a letter? If he did, why
didn't he put it where it would seem Shakespeare got it. Better, why not
make it FROM Shakespeare? Your ad hoc fantasies are idiotic, Art.
> >> Nobody in their right mind would have believed
> >> that Shaksper was an author during his lifetime
>
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > Why not? There were no who's who's
>
> Who's who's what?
>
> > back then one could consult to find out
> > about the literacy of alleged authors' parents, spouses and children,
> > and the educational background of the alleged authors.
> The Stratford paper trail is sufficient (or lack of it).
For moderns not able to understand that things disappearer over time,
yes--but we were talking about how contemporaries could believe he was an
author. They would not know how many letters were not sent to or from him.
Time for a joke, Art.
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > Witches were widely believed in then, too,
>
> Which witches?
>
> > so why couldn't people believe that just about anyone could learn to
> > read, and that there was no more to writing than knowing how
> > to write, and being intelligent, which had nothing to do with formal
> > education or the kind of knowledge possessed by a person's relatives.
>
> I'm assuming that Stratfordians back then had as much common sense
> as they do today. (It's just the tourists who are gullible & stupid.)
I was saying that if they could believe in witches, surely they could
believe in self-education, something most Shakespeare-rejecters realize is
an impossibility.
>
> > Neuendorffer wrote:
>
> >>and it's rather amazing that anyone would still believe he was 400
> >>years later.
>
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > Why the monument and the First Folio and the absence of
> > any testimony indicating that these things were lies?
>
> G.A.O.T.U. masonic conspiracy.
Why one so bad that even you can see through it?
For instance, why didn't they use a man with a diploma and . . . LITERATE
PARENTS!!! Surely there were a few commoners around with those
qualifications.
> >>Bob Grumman wrote:
> >>
> >>> My reasons for saying he was literate,
> >>>leaving out the fact that he was a known playwright and poet,
> >>
> >> Leaving out the fiction that he was a known playwright & poet,
> >>
> >>Bob Grumman wrote:
> >>
> >>>are that his monument says he was,
>
> > Neuendorffer wrote:
>
> >> His monument says he was: NESTOR, SOCRATES & VIRGIL.
>
> > No, Art, the monument compares him to those men.
snip
> Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > I was just quickly stating the facts.
Not quite, Art.
David Kathman
<bobgr...@nut-n-but.net> wrote:
>> > Neuendorffer wrote:
>>
>> >> That the letter was never sent suggests that he couldn't.
>>
>> Bob Grumman wrote:
>>
>> > Right, Art: a man who knew Shakespeare wrote a letter to him,
>> > then, just before having it delivered to Shakespeare,
>> > remembered that the boob couldn't read, so held it back.
>>
>> The fact that such an unsent letter still exists suggests that it
>> was bogus.
>
>Ah, so you admit your original argument was poor.
>
>>Keeping a record of a non-communication is rather pointless.
>
>Not if the communication was made orally. The letter would record the
>details. Many other possibilities exist, like the writer's forgetting to
>send it, and leaving it, forgotten, with other letters. Certainly, it could
>not have been bogus. Why would anyone fake such a letter? If he did, why
>didn't he put it where it would seem Shakespeare got it. Better, why not
>make it FROM Shakespeare? Your ad hoc fantasies are idiotic, Art.
As I've explained before, the reason the letter happened to
survive is that Richard Quiney (the writer of the letter)
had it among his papers when he was murdered in office as
bailiff of Stratford in 1602, and those papers got tossed
into the archives and forgotten for the next 200 years.
Nobody made a conscious decision to save this letter; it was
just basically random chance.
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
Art Neuendorffer
Geoffrey Chaucer dies 25 October 1400
Agincourt 25 October 1415
----------------------------------------------------------------
Saints Crispin Day
Oct.25 = 33rd day of Autumn (mystic Masonic #33)
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) died on St.Crispin's Day, 1400
6 x 33 years later:
Richard Quiney's HASTE letter to Shakspere
-------------------------------------------------------------------
http://home.earthlink.net/~mark_alex/1600.htm
1598 Oct 25 [St.Crispin's day] Letter from Richard Quiney asking
for a £30 loan. This is the only letter that has ever been found
addressed to William Shakspere of Stratford. It is addressed
"H[ASTE] To my Loveinge good ffrend & contreymann
Mr Wm. Shackespere deliver thees."
(Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office, MS. ER 27/4.)
Loveinge Contreyman, I am bolde of yowe as of a ffrende, craveinge yowre
helpe with xxxll vppon Mr Bushells & my securytee or Mr Myttons with me.
Mr Rosswell is nott come to London as yeate & I have especiall cawse.
Yowe shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the debettes I
owe in London, I thancke god, & muche quiet my mynde which wolde nott be
indebeted. I am nowe towardes the Cowrte in hope of answer for the
dispatche of my Buysenes. Yowe shall neither loase creddytt nor monney
by me, the Lorde wyllinge, & nowe butt perswade yowre selfe soe as I
hope & yowe shall nott need to feare butt with all hartie
thanckefullenes I will holde my tyme & content yowre ffrende, & yf we
Bargaine farther yowe shalbe the paiemaster yowre self. My tyme biddes
me hasten to an ende & soe I committ thys [to] yowre care & hope of
yowre helpe. I feare I shall nott be backe thys night ffrom the Cowrte.
HASTE. The Lorde be with yowe & with vs all Amen. ffrom the Bell in
Carter Lane the 25 October 1598. Yowres in all kyndenes Ryc. Quyney.
----------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>Neuendorffer wrote:
>>>
>>>>> That the letter was never sent suggests that he couldn't.
>>>>
>>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>>
>>>> Right, Art: a man who knew Shakespeare wrote a letter to
>>>> him, then, just before having it delivered to Shakespeare,
>>>> remembered that the boob couldn't read, so held it back.
>> Neuendorffer wrote:
>>> The fact that such an unsent letter still exists suggests
>>> that it was bogus.
>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>Ah, so you admit your original argument was poor.
>> Neuendorffer wrote:
>>>Keeping a record of a non-communication is rather pointless.
>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>Not if the communication was made orally. The letter would record the
>>details. Many other possibilities exist, like the writer's forgetting to
>>send it, and leaving it, forgotten, with other letters. Certainly, it could
>>not have been bogus. Why would anyone fake such a letter? If he did, why
>>didn't he put it where it would seem Shakespeare got it. Better, why not
>>make it FROM Shakespeare? Your ad hoc fantasies are idiotic, Art.
David Kathman wrote:
> As I've explained before, the reason the letter happened to
> survive is that Richard Quiney (the writer of the letter)
> had it among his papers when he was murdered in office as
> bailiff of Stratford in 1602, and those papers got tossed
> into the archives and forgotten for the next 200 years.
> Nobody made a conscious decision to save this letter;
> it was just basically random chance.
That was May, 1602. . .the unsent letter was Oct, 1598.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Honan: What is a little odd about Quiney's letter is a dark
undercurrent of inexplicit, half-suppressed worry & anxiety,
and he concludes in a rush:
"My tyme biddes me hasten to an ende & soe
I committ thys [to] yowre care & hope of yowre helpe.
I feare I shall nott be backe thys night ffrom the Cowrte.
HASTE. The Lorde be with yowe & with vs all Amen.
ffrom the Bell in Carter Lane the 25 October 1598."
Yowres in all kyndenes Ryc. Quyney.
--------------------------------------------------------------
" H[ASTE] To my Loveinge
good ffrend & contreymann
Mr Wm. Shackespere
DELIVER thees."
"NIL VERO-VERIUS"
ENVOI LIVREURS: SENDING DELIVERYMEN . . .
LIVRE SOUVENIR: TO DELIVER MEMORY.
http://home.earthlink.net/~mark_alex/1600.htm
-------------------------------------------------------------------
So, why was a non-communication kept for 43 months?
<<May 1602: Bailiff Richard Quiney's 'head grievously broken
by henchmen of Edward Greville>>
*Wasn't it in the "handes" of Abraham Sturley* :
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1598 Nov 4 Letter from Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney.
It is addressed: "To his most lovinge brother, Mr Richard Quinej,
att the Bell in Carterlane att London, geve these."
(Misc. Document 1, 136, Birthplace Museum, Stratford).
Vr letter of the 25 of October came to mj handes the laste of the same
att night per Grenwaj, which imported . . . that our countriman Mr Wm.
Shak. would procure vs monej, which I will like of as I shall heare
when, and wheare, and howe; and I praj let not go that occasion if it
may sort to any indifferent condicions. Allso that if monej might be had
for 30 or 40l, a lease, &c., might be procured. Oh howe can v make dowbt
of monej, who will not beare xxxtie or xll towardes sutch a match? ...
Now to vr other letter of the 10 of November receved the 3d of the
same.... For present advise and encouragmente v have bj this time Mr
Bailj . . . Mr Parsons supposeth that Wenlock came the same daj with
Mr Bailj that v writt vr letter . . . From Stretford Novem. 4th 1598
. . . Abrah. Sturlej.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Schoenbaum _WS--A Compact Documentary Life_,
<<Literate persons, as some authorities have pointed out, preferred
on occasion to use a mark--Adrian Quiney, for example, whose mark
or sign (an inverted upper-case Q) embellishes the same page as
John Shakespeare's in the council records; that Quiney could sign
his name we know, for letters written by him have come down.>>
---------------------------------------------------------------
1598 Oct 30 Letter from Adrian Quiney to Richard Quiney.
It is addressed: "To my lovynge sonne Rycharde Qwyney
at the Belle in Carter Leyne deliver thesse in London."
(Misc. Document 1, 135, Birthplace Museum, Stratford).
Yow shalle, God wylling, receve from your wyfe by ye baylye, thys
brynger, aswrance of xs.... Yff yow bargen with Mr Sha. . or receve
money therfor, brynge your money home yf yow maye, I see howe knite
stockynges be sold, ther ys gret byinge of them at Evysshome. Edward
Wheat and Harrye, your brother man, were both at Evyshome thys daye
senet, and, as I harde, bestow 20ll. ther in knyt hosseyngs,
wherefore I thynke yow maye doo good, yff yow can have money...
------------------------------------------------------------------
*scholar* grandson RICHARD QUINEY's "UNGUICULIS"
------------------------------------------------------------------
_Shakespeare in Fact_ by Matus
<<In a *October 1598* letter
written by 11 year old RICHARD QUINEY, Jr., to his father,
Richard, Sr., the lad asked that his father
"provideres fratri meo et mihi duos chartaceos libellos"
(provide my brother and me two copy books). The boy goes on:
"gratias tibi ago quia a teneris, quod aiunt, UNGUICULIS,
educasti me in sacrae docrinae studiis usque ad hunc diem"
(I give thee thanks that "from tender soft nails," as they say, unto
this day thou hast instucted me in the studies of Sacred Learning.)
The phrase "from tender soft nails," is take from CICERO's
_Epistolae ad Familiares_). It is noteworthy that the boy retained
CICERO's structure- "a teneris, ut Graeci dicunt, unguiculis"
- but in a burst of originality replaced "ut Graeci dicunt"
(as the Greeks say) with "qud aiunt" (as they say).>>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
HOLOFERNES' "DUNGHILL for UNGUEM"
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Love's Labour's Lost Act 5, Scene 1
COSTARD Go to; thou hast it ad DUNGHILL,
at the fingers' ends, as they say.
HOLOFERNES O, I smell false Latin; DUNGHILL for UNGUEM.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"O, I smell false Latin; (a)DUNGHILL for
(ad)unguem."
unguem n., [NAIL, claw, talon].
ad unguem, adv. [clean, - as a whistle].
-------------------------------------------------------------------
DANIEL 3:29 Therefore I make a decree, That every people, nation,
& language, which speak any thing amiss against the God of Shadrach,
Meshach, & Abednego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall
be made a DUNGHILL: because there is no other God that can DELIVER...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
_William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius_ by Anthony Holden
<<We know that by 1552 John Shakespeare was living on the north-eastern
side of town, in HENley Street, thanks to his ignominious debut in the
town records on 29 April: fined a shilling, along with Humphrey Reynolds
and ADRIAN QUINEY, for making an unauthorised DUNGHILL>>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shakespeare & Cervantes died on St. George's day, 1616
33rd day of Spring (mystic Masonic #33)
April 23 is preceded by 113 days
September 9 precedes 113 days
Psalms 113:7 He raiseth up the poor out of the dust,
and lifteth the needy out of the DUNGHILL;
That he may set him with princes,
even with the princes of his people.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
EZRA 6:11 Also I have made a decree, that whosoever shall alter this
word, LET TIMBER BE PULLED DOWN from his HOUSE, and being set up, let
him be hanged thereon; and let his house be made a DUNGHILL for this.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
SIRACH 22 A slothful man is compared to the filth of
a DUNGHILL: every man that takes it up WILL SHAKE his hand.
As TIMBER girt and bound together in a building cannot be loosed
with SHAKING: so the heart that is stablished by advised counsel
shall fear at no time. A heart settled upon a thought of
understanding is as a fair PLAISTERING on the WALL of a gallery.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
(_The Life of William Shakespeare_ - Books Inc.):
<<In *the garden* of this house it is believed that Shakespeare planted
a mulberry tree, about the year 1609. In 1609, King James was anxious
to introduce the mulberry (which had been imported about half a century
earlier). On the 25th November, 1609, £935 were paid out of the
public purse for the planting of mulberry trees "near the palace
of Westminster." The mulberry tree, said to have been planted by
Shaespeare, was in existence up to about the year 1755; and in the
spring of 1742, Barrick, Macklin, and Delane the actor, were entertained
under it by Sir Hugh Clopton. New Place remained in possession of
Shakespeare's successors until the Restoration; it was then purchased by
the Clopton family: about 1752 it was sold by the executor of Sir Hugh
to a clergyman of the name of Francis Gastrell, who, on some offence
taken at the authorities of the borough of Stratford, on the subject
of rating the house, PULLED IT DOWN, and cut down the mulberry tree.
According to a letter in the Annual Register of 1760,
the wood was bought by a silver-smith,
who "made many odd things of it for the curious.">>
http://www.johnrausch.com/PuzzleWorld/toc.asp?t=_cat/io001.htm&m=cat/io000.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Art Neuendorffer
1598 Oct 30 Letter from Adrian Quiney to Richard Quiney.
It is addressed: "To my lovynge sonne Rycharde Qwyney
at the Belle in Carter Leyne deliver thesse in London."
(Misc. Document 1, 135, Birthplace Museum, Stratford).
Yow shalle, God wylling, receve from your wyfe by ye baylye, thys
brynger, aswrance of xs.... Yff yow bargen with Mr Sha. . or receve
money therfor, brynge your money home yf yow maye, I see howe knite
stockynges be sold, ther ys gret byinge of them at Evysshome. Edward
Wheat and Harrye, your brother man, were both at Evyshome thys daye
senet, and, as I harde, bestow 20ll. ther in knyt hosseyngs,
wherefore I thynke yow maye doo good, yff yow can have money...
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Schoenbaum _WS--A Compact Documentary Life_,
<<Literate persons, as some authorities have pointed out, preferred
on occasion to use a mark--Adrian Quiney, for example, whose mark
or sign (an inverted upper-case Q) embellishes the same page as
John Shakespeare's in the council records; that Quiney could sign
his name we know, for letters written by him have come down.>>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q, the 17th letter of the English alphabet,
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Q, the 17th letter of the English alphabet, has but one sound (that of
k), and is always followed by u, the two letters together being sounded
like kw, except in some words in which the u is silent. Q is not found
in Anglo-Saxon, cw being used instead of qu; as in cwic, quick; cwen,
queen. The name (k[=u]) is from the French ku, which is from the Latin
name of the same letter; its form is from the Latin, which derived it,
through a Greek alphabet, from the Ph[oe]nician, the ultimate origin
being Egyptian. Etymologically, q or qu is most nearly related to a
(ch, tch), p, q, and wh; as in cud, quid, L. equus, ecus, horse, Gr. ?,
whence E. equine, hippic; L. quod which, E. what; L. aquila, E. eaqle;
E. kitchen, OE. kichene, AS. cycene, L. coquina.
---------------------------------------------------------------
http://phoenicia.org/tblalpha.html
Aleph (Ox) Phoenician letter used to represent alryngeal consonant
('), or glotal stop. The Greeks reversed its form, changed
its name to Alpha and made the sign stand for the vowel A.
Heth (Wall) Phoenician letter used to represent h laryngeal consonent.
The Greeks removed the upper and lower bars, changed its name to Eta
and made the sign stand for the consonant H.
Ayin (Eye) Phoenician letter used to represent 3 laryngeal consonant.
The Greeks changed its name to Omikron and made the sign stand
for the vowel short O.
Taw (Mark) Phoenician letter used to represent t consonant. The Greeks
changed its name to Tau and made the sign stand for the consonant T.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Qoph (Monkey) Phoenician letter used to represent q voiceless velar.
The Greeks changed its name to qoppa and but had no use for
its sound in Indo-European so they used it for the sound K.
Ben Jonson: "Poor Poet-Ape ... the frippery of Wit," (1602)
AUTOLYCUS. Vices, I would say, sir. I know this man well; he hath
been since an APE-bearer; then a process-server, a BAILIFF;
then he compass'd a motion of the Prodigal Son, and married
a tinker's wife within a mile where my land and living lies;
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
John Shakspere - BAILIFF (1568-1571)
Adrian QUINEY - BAILIFF (1571-157?)
Richard QUINEY - BAILIFF (1592-1593)
Abraham Sturley - BAILIFF (1596-1597)
Richard QUINEY - BAILIFF (1601-1602)
BAILIFF, n. [OF. baillif, F. bailli, custodia? magistrate,
fr. L. bajulus porter. See {Bail} to DELIVER.]
2.(Mining) An officer who directs and lays out the MERES
or boundaries for the workmen;
1598 _Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury_ by Francis MERES.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Elizabeth Weir
Nineteenth century literature featured illiterates who received
letters. They just took it to someone who would read it to them.
I don't see any problem with Quiny sending a letter to the
illiterate Burgher. The sexton or schoolmasters probably routinely
read mail for the illiterate population of Stratford
Bob Grumman
> >>
> >> Bob Grumman wrote:
> >>
> >> > Right, Art: a man who knew Shakespeare wrote a letter to him,
> >> > then, just before having it delivered to Shakespeare,
> >> > remembered that the boob couldn't read, so held it back.
> >>
> >> The fact that such an unsent letter still exists suggests that it
> >> was bogus.
> >
> >Ah, so you admit your original argument was poor.
> >
> >>Keeping a record of a non-communication is rather pointless.
> >
> >Not if the communication was made orally. The letter would record the
> >details. Many other possibilities exist, like the writer's forgetting to
> >send it, and leaving it, forgotten, with other letters. Certainly, it
could
> >not have been bogus. Why would anyone fake such a letter? If he did,
why
> >didn't he put it where it would seem Shakespeare got it. Better, why not
> >make it FROM Shakespeare? Your ad hoc fantasies are idiotic, Art.
>
> As I've explained before, the reason the letter happened to
> survive is that Richard Quiney (the writer of the letter)
> had it among his papers when he was murdered in office as
> bailiff of Stratford in 1602, and those papers got tossed
into the archives and forgotten for the next 200 years.
> Nobody made a conscious decision to save this letter; it was
> just basically random chance.
Right, David, but Art's point (even though he surprised me by not making it
after your post) is that if it were a genuine letter, Quiney would have
pitched it immediately after deciding for whatever reason not to send it to
Shakespeare. So the question is why it was still among Quiney's papers when
Quiney was killed.
--Bob G.
Art Neuendorffer
>>>>>
>>>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Right, Art: a man who knew Shakespeare wrote a letter to him,
>>>>> then, just before having it delivered to Shakespeare,
>>>>> remembered that the boob couldn't read, so held it back.
>>>>
>>>> The fact that such an unsent letter still exists suggests that it
>>>>was bogus.
>>>
>>>Ah, so you admit your original argument was poor.
>>>
>>>
>>>>Keeping a record of a non-communication is rather pointless.
>>>
>>>Not if the communication was made orally. The letter would record the
>>>details. Many other possibilities exist, like the writer's forgetting to
>>>send it, and leaving it, forgotten, with other letters. Certainly, it
>>
> could
>
>>>not have been bogus. Why would anyone fake such a letter? If he did,
>>
> why
>
>>>didn't he put it where it would seem Shakespeare got it. Better, why not
>>>make it FROM Shakespeare? Your ad hoc fantasies are idiotic, Art.
Kathman wrote
>>As I've explained before, the reason the letter happened to
>>survive is that Richard Quiney (the writer of the letter)
>>had it among his papers when he was murdered in office as
>>bailiff of Stratford in 1602, and those papers got tossed
>
> into the archives and forgotten for the next 200 years.
>
>>Nobody made a conscious decision to save this letter; it was
>>just basically random chance.
>
Bob Grumman wrote:
> Right, David, but Art's point (even though he surprised me by not making it
> after your post) is that if it were a genuine letter, Quiney would have
> pitched it immediately after deciding for whatever reason not to send it to
> Shakespeare. So the question is why it was still among Quiney's papers when
> Quiney was killed.
Why thank you, Bob. You state it quite well.
So, why was a non-communication kept for 43 months?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
In addition
*Wasn't it in the "handes" of Abraham Sturley by Nov. 4* :
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1598 Nov 4 Letter from Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney.
It is addressed: "To his most lovinge brother, Mr Richard Quinej,
att the Bell in Carterlane att London, geve these."
(Misc. Document 1, 136, Birthplace Museum, Stratford).
Vr letter of the 25 of October came to mj handes the laste of the same
att night per Grenwaj, which imported . . . that our countriman Mr Wm.
Shak. would procure vs monej, which I will like of as I shall heare
when, and wheare, and howe; and I praj let not go that occasion if it
may sort to any indifferent condicions. Allso that if monej might be had
for 30 or 40l, a lease, &c., might be procured. Oh howe can v make dowbt
of monej, who will not beare xxxtie or xll towardes sutch a match? ...
Now to vr other letter of the 10 of November receved the 3d of the
same.... For present advise and encouragmente v have bj this time Mr
Bailj . . . Mr Parsons supposeth that Wenlock came the same daj with
Mr Bailj that v writt vr letter . . . From Stretford Novem. 4th 1598
. . . Abrah. Sturlej.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Alan Jones
"Bob Grumman" <bobgr...@nut-n-but.net> wrote in message
news:at1vl...@enews3.newsguy.com...
[...]
> ... Art's point ...is that if it were a genuine letter, Quiney would have
> pitched it immediately after deciding for whatever reason not to send it
to
> Shakespeare. So the question is why it was still among Quiney's papers
when
> Quiney was killed.
Might it have been a copy routinely retained by Quiney, which happened to
survive the disposal of other papers? Before the invention of copying
materials, a second handwritten version was presumably the only way of
keeping a copy of correspondence. Does any other correspondence survive that
may have been routinely copied, either of Quiney's or of other
contemporaries? (My own experience has been that very little correspondence
does survive, except in the kind of great house where a steward, or later an
archivist, stored all the business papers, however trivial.)
Alan Jones
Rita
I read in a book on Sir Robert Cotton (regarding his correspondence)
:'We are fortunate to have the bound volume in which Cotton filed some
of the letters written to him - would that he had kept, as did Camden,
a copy-book of his answers!'
This isn't quite the example you're looking for perhaps, since Camden
was a scholar and Quiney a businessman; but at least it suggests the
practice wasn't unknown?
Rita
Bob Grumman
> when
> > Quiney was killed.
>
> Might it have been a copy routinely retained by Quiney, which happened to
> survive the disposal of other papers? Before the invention of copying
> materials, a second handwritten version was presumably the only way of
> keeping a copy of correspondence. Does any other correspondence survive
that
> may have been routinely copied, either of Quiney's or of other
> contemporaries? (My own experience has been that very little
correspondence
> does survive, except in the kind of great house where a steward, or later
an
> archivist, stored all the business papers, however trivial.)
> Alan Jones
That occurred to me, too. Anyone have an answer? If it wasn't a copy,
there are numerous reasons Quiney kept it. (1) He wanted it as a record of
what turned out to be an oral message (as I previously suggested); (2) He
meant to send it, but misplaced it, and never bothered to hunt it up after
there was no longer any need for it; (3) He had it in his pockets intending
to give it to a messenger when he heard that someone else had broached the
business to Shakespeare, or when he himself met him in person, or the like,
and later absent-mindedly tossed the letter aside, perhaps with other
things, and never threw it out; (4) he didn't know where to send it, so put
it aside until he found out, then forgot it entirely when it was no longer
necessary to send it; (5) he was told by people trying to make it seem like
Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays to save it for posterity because they knew
Paul Crowley would think it impossible that anyone could write a letter to
Shakespeare that made no mention of him as the world's greatest poet and
playwright. I'm sure others could think of other plausible reasons.
--Bob G.
>
Art Neuendorffer
>> > So the question is why it was still among Quiney's papers
>>> when Quiney was killed.
>Alan Jones wrote:
>>Might it have been a copy routinely retained by Quiney, which happened to
>>survive the disposal of other papers? Before the invention of copying
>>materials, a second handwritten version was presumably the only way of
>>keeping a copy of correspondence. Does any other correspondence survive
>> that may have been routinely copied, either of Quiney's or of other
>>contemporaries?(My own experience has been that very little correspondence
>>does survive, except in the kind of great house where a steward, or later
>> an archivist, stored all the business papers, however trivial.)
Bob Grumman wrote:
> That occurred to me, too. Anyone have an answer? If it wasn't a copy,
> there are numerous reasons Quiney kept it. (1) He wanted it as a record of
> what turned out to be an oral message (as I previously suggested); (2) He
> meant to send it, but misplaced it, and never bothered to hunt it up after
> there was no longer any need for it; (3) He had it in his pockets intending
> to give it to a messenger when he heard that someone else had broached the
> business to Shakespeare, or when he himself met him in person, or the like,
> and later absent-mindedly tossed the letter aside, perhaps with other
> things, and never threw it out; (4) he didn't know where to send it, so put
> it aside until he found out, then forgot it entirely when it was no longer
> necessary to send it; (5) he was told by people trying to make it seem like
> Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays to save it for posterity because they knew
> Paul Crowley would think it impossible that anyone could write a letter to
> Shakespeare that made no mention of him as the world's greatest poet and
> playwright.
> I'm sure others could think of other plausible reasons.
--------------------------------------------------------------
'Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice,
very earnestly.
'I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone,
'so I can't take more.'
'You mean you can't take less ,' said the Hatter:
'it's very easy to take more than nothing.'
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Whatever solution you come up with must be consistent with
Abraham Sturley letter of Nov. 4* :
KQKnave
<bobgr...@nut-n-but.net> writes:
>5) he was told by people trying to make it seem like
>Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays to save it for posterity because they knew
>Paul Crowley would think it impossible that anyone could write a letter to
>Shakespeare that made no mention of him as the world's greatest poet and
>playwright. I'm sure others could think of other plausible reasons.
>
Shakespeare returned it to him personally after it was read.
See my demolition of Monsarrat's RES paper!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/monsarr1.html
The Droeshout portrait is not unusual at all!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/shakenbake.html
Agent Jim
Bob Grumman
> >Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays to save it for posterity because they
knew
> >Paul Crowley would think it impossible that anyone could write a letter
to
> >Shakespeare that made no mention of him as the world's greatest poet and
> >playwright. I'm sure others could think of other plausible reasons.
> >
>
> Shakespeare returned it to him personally after it was read.
Ha, good one, and I never thought of it!
--Bob G.
David Kathman
<bobgr...@nut-n-but.net> wrote:
Really? I thought of that scenario as soon as I considered the
issue, way back a few years ago. A lot of people don't realize
that Quiney and Shakespeare were both in London when this letter
was written. Quiney was there to petition the Court for tax relief
for Stratford (thus his mention in the letter of going to court);
he had been there for several weeks, if not months, which is one
reason why he needed money. Perhaps Quiney sent the letter, but
then ran into Shakespeare personally before it was delivered;
perhaps he wrote it, but then ran into Shakespeare before sending it.
There are all kinds of ordinary, non-sinister scenarios which
explain why the letter might have ended up in Quiney's papers.
Paper was expensive, too, and people didn't just toss letters
away when they were done with them.
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
KQKnave
>> Shakespeare returned it to him personally after it was read.
>
>Ha, good one, and I never thought of it!
>
There are so many possibilities on this one. Richard Quiney was
in London on official business when he wrote the letter. He was
trying to get funds to support his stay until the court would hear
his case concerning relief for Stratford. Later, the court reimbursed
all of his expenses. If Shakespeare did loan him money, Quiney
would almost certainly want to preserve any loan-related materials,
like we save receipts today for reimbursement, to show the exchequer.
He may have requested the letter back from Shakespeare. In any
case, I don't think anything bad happened as a result of this business,
because Richard's son Thomas married Shakespeare's daughter
Judith.
KQKnave
<dj...@ix.netcom.com> writes:
>Really? I thought of that scenario as soon as I considered the
>issue, way back a few years ago. A lot of people don't realize
>that Quiney and Shakespeare were both in London when this letter
>was written. Quiney was there to petition the Court for tax relief
>for Stratford (thus his mention in the letter of going to court);
>he had been there for several weeks, if not months, which is one
>reason why he needed money. Perhaps Quiney sent the letter, but
>then ran into Shakespeare personally before it was delivered;
>perhaps he wrote it, but then ran into Shakespeare before sending it.
>There are all kinds of ordinary, non-sinister scenarios which
>explain why the letter might have ended up in Quiney's papers.
>Paper was expensive, too, and people didn't just toss letters
>away when they were done with them.
>
Yes, just posted on the same issues after rereading Schoenbaum's
discussion. I thought of the expense-of-paper angle too but it seems
to me it was more likely preserved because it ended up as part of
official business related to Quiney's expenses and reimbursement
for his official trip to London.
Art Neuendorffer
>>>>5) he was told by people trying to make it seem like
>>>>Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays to save it for posterity because they
>>>
>>knew
>>
>>>>Paul Crowley would think it impossible that anyone could write a letter
>>>
>>to
>>
>>>>Shakespeare that made no mention of him as the world's greatest poet and
>>>>playwright. I'm sure others could think of other plausible reasons.
>>>>
>>>
>>>Shakespeare returned it to him personally after it was read.
>>
>>Ha, good one, and I never thought of it!
>
David Kathman wrote:
> Really? I thought of that scenario as soon as I considered the
> issue, way back a few years ago. A lot of people don't realize
> that Quiney and Shakespeare were both in London when this letter
> was written. Quiney was there to petition the Court for tax relief
> for Stratford (thus his mention in the letter of going to court);
> he had been there for several weeks, if not months, which is one
> reason why he needed money. Perhaps Quiney sent the letter, but
> then ran into Shakespeare personally before it was delivered;
> perhaps he wrote it, but then ran into Shakespeare before sending it.
> There are all kinds of ordinary, non-sinister scenarios which
> explain why the letter might have ended up in Quiney's papers.
> Paper was expensive, too, and people didn't just toss letters
> away when they were done with them.
Think of all the people who "ran into Shakespeare" in London
and never wrote one single word about it.
Art Neuendorffer
David Kathman
kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote:
>In article <at3lp0$pb$1...@slb4.atl.mindspring.net>, "David Kathman"
><dj...@ix.netcom.com> writes:
>
>>Really? I thought of that scenario as soon as I considered the
>>issue, way back a few years ago. A lot of people don't realize
>>that Quiney and Shakespeare were both in London when this letter
>>was written. Quiney was there to petition the Court for tax relief
>>for Stratford (thus his mention in the letter of going to court);
>>he had been there for several weeks, if not months, which is one
>>reason why he needed money. Perhaps Quiney sent the letter, but
>>then ran into Shakespeare personally before it was delivered;
>>perhaps he wrote it, but then ran into Shakespeare before sending it.
>>There are all kinds of ordinary, non-sinister scenarios which
>>explain why the letter might have ended up in Quiney's papers.
>>Paper was expensive, too, and people didn't just toss letters
>>away when they were done with them.
>>
>
>Yes, just posted on the same issues after rereading Schoenbaum's
>discussion. I thought of the expense-of-paper angle too but it seems
>to me it was more likely preserved because it ended up as part of
>official business related to Quiney's expenses and reimbursement
>for his official trip to London.
Yeah, that's a good point. Of course, the scarcity of paper
could also be a background factor, even if the primary reason
Quiney kept the letter was as a sort of receipt.
Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com
Peter Farey
Alan Jones wrote:
>
> Bob Grumman wrote:
> >
> > ... Art's point ...is that if it were a genuine
> > letter, Quiney would have pitched it immediately
> > after deciding for whatever reason not to send it
> > to Shakespeare. So the question is why it was
> > still among Quiney's papers when Quiney was killed.
>
> Might it have been a copy routinely retained by
> Quiney, which happened to survive the disposal of
> other papers? Before the invention of copying
> materials, a second handwritten version was
> presumably the only way of keeping a copy of
> correspondence. Does any other correspondence
> survive that may have been routinely copied,
> either of Quiney's or of other contemporaries?
> (My own experience has been that very little
> correspondence does survive, except in the kind
> of great house where a steward, or later an
> archivist, stored all the business papers, however
> trivial.)
>
> Alan Jones
The papers of Anthony Bacon held at Lambeth Palace,
consisting of some 9,000 pages in all, contain a huge
number of copies of letters apparently sent by him.
They are usually either in the hand of Anthony Bacon
himself, or in that of his secretary Jaques Petit.
Those in his hand appear to have been drafts of what
he wanted sent. It is of course impossible to know
whether the letter was actually delivered in every case.
Peter F.
pet...@rey.prestel.co.uk
http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/index.htm
Toby Petzold
I don't get the joke, Bruce. Are you saying that Australian liberals
can go back to their smarmy, self-righteous disdain for societies with
actual patriotic sentiments now that they've decided to trash that
warmongering John Howard as just another Bush-league cowboy?
Toby Petzold
No more owl shit! Down with the Fascist Left!
Toby Petzold
> > > Actually, Toby, it doesn't matter in the least whether or not Oxford made
> > > the annotations.
Petzold:
> > Of course it matters! If they're his, it means that he was a literate
> > book-possessor who was interested in some of the same passages that
> > Shakespeare was. That's at least three things that Oxford would have
> > over Shakspere, so don't try to rationalize this away.
Reynolds:
> You are trying to establish that Oxford is literate?
No, I was thinking of things that can be said of Oxford that can't be
said of Shakspere. Is this going to dull your [retort]?
> That
> is already known. It is one of the "BIG FOUR or FIVE," Toby!
> Oxford was
> 1. English-speaking
> 2. literate
> 3. in England during a portion of the Shakespearean era
> 4. alive during a portion of the Shakespearean era
> and
> 5. male (this is dependent upon the author being male)
>
> These are the five reasons to believe Oxford wrote Shakespeare.
> If you can add to this list, why haven't you yet?
When I was wasting my time here, I did.
> Volker Multhopp cowrote number 5 with me because
> he was an upstanding, responsible antiStrat and was
> not afraid to expand our positive reinforcement of
> the Oxford case.
Gosh. I wonder where he went. Out with the golden days, I fear!
> Other Oxfordians CAN'T or WON'T add to the list, because
> they know of no other consideration linking Oxford to the works.
> I have to take their (non)word(s) for it!
You're under no obligations. Just walk away from it. Get clear.
> > > Only a complete loon would think that a man's underlining
> > > biblical passages about subjects like cherubs must therefore be considered
> > > to have written plays that refer to subjects like cherubs.
> >
> > Great. I guess that, since I didn't say any such thing, I must not be
> > a complete loon.
>
> You are a loon-in-training if you CAN'T or WON'T add to the list.
Your mind's going, Reynolds: you believe the EXACT OPPOSITE. Read it
again.
> > > Particularly, if
> > > the underliner also underlined a great many biblical passages about subjects
> > > the playwright was silent about, and the playwright referred to many
> > > subjects there are passages in the Bible about which the underliner did not
> > > underline.
> >
> > Yeah, but what was the name of that book that belonged to Shakspere?
> > Jack Shit? Never Was? Can't quite recall...
> >
> > Toby Petzold
>
> Oxford marked up his prayerbook. Yeah? So that means that.... what?
> That we was bored in church? Please, Toby, show the connection!
Oxford annotated his Bible. Some of the passages coincide with those
also used by Shakespeare. This Bible and those annotations exist. Do
you realize how vastly more that is to say than what could ever be
claimed for your old horse-minder? Real, physical proof of literacy
and book-ownership and --gasp!-- even intellectual curiosity. All of
y'alls maggot-headed, zombie-like assaults on this simple fact do
nothing but shine a light on your boring-assed view of the world.
> You're brimming with Oxfordian bravado but quiet as a churchmouse as to why.
I renounced Oxfordianism some time ago. I am now a Neo-Groupist
(non-observant).
> Greg Reynolds, whose church has coloring books
> for feisty little Christians with attention disorders
I can only smile when I learn that a church-goer has thought enough of
himself to presume to question MY reason.
Toby Petzold
No More Owl Shit and College Boys! Smash the Candy-Assed Left!
Bob Grumman
> and never wrote one single word about it.
>
> Art Neuendorffer
Or took his picture and got him to autograph it.
--Bob G.
Toby Petzold
> > > a letter was written to him suggests that he could read.
> >
> > That the letter was never sent suggests that he couldn't.
>
> Right, Art: a man who knew Shakespeare wrote a letter to him, then, just
> before having it delivered to Shakespeare, remembered that the boob couldn't
> read, so held it back.
Bob, it's like practically any other piece of evidence that comes from
the Question: six of one, a half-dozen of the other. Quiney made a
"carbon copy" draft and kept it for his files, or the purpose of the
letter was obviated by some other unknown circumstance, or it was
written and Quiney put it away because he realized that, in the event
that Shakspere might not be able to make out what was being asked, he
didn't want someone else knowing their business by having to have it
read aloud, or a dozen other reasons. Who knows?
> >
> > Bob Grumman wrote:
> >
> > > He could have had someone read his letters to him,
> > > but that might jeopardize the hoax to make people
> > > think he was an author.
> >
> > Nobody in their right mind would have believed that Shaksper
> > was an author during his lifetime
>
> Why not?
I agree, Bob. It was intended that Shakspere be perceived as an author
by the public by those who set him up in business.
> There were no who's who's back then one could consult to find out
> about the literacy of alleged authors' parents, spouses and children, and
> the educational background of the alleged authors. Witches were widely
> believed in then, too, so why couldn't people believe that just about anyone
> could learn to read, and that there was no more to writing than knowing how
> to write, and being intelligent, which had nothing to do with formal
> education or the kind of knowledge possessed by a person's relatives.
>
> > and it's rather amazing
> > that anyone would still believe he was 400
> > years later.
>
> Why the monument and the First Folio and the absence of any testimony
> indicating that these things were lies?
>
> > Bob Grumman wrote:
> >
> > > My reasons for saying he was literate,
> > > leaving out the fact that he was a known playwright and poet,
> >
> > Leaving out the fiction that he was a known playwright & poet,
Fiction - fact = belief.
> > Bob Grumman wrote:
> >
> > > are that his monument says he was,
> >
> > His monument says he was: NESTOR, SOCRATES & VIRGIL.
>
> No, Art, the monument compares him to those men.
>
> babble snipped
>
> > Bob Grumman wrote:
> >
> > > he could write his signatures,
> >
> > <<Only six examples of his handwriting are known to exist:
> >
> > http://home.att.net/~tleary/sigs.htm
> >
> > each spelled differently.>>
>
> That he could write his name is evidence that he could write other things.
>
> > Bob Grumman wrote:
> >
> > > and his profession was acting,
> >
> > He bought the second best house in Stratford
> > by playing Adam & Hamlet's ghost?
Art's right, Bob: if Shakspere had been a player, it was not for much.
> The evidence indicates that he also played other roles.
That's a lot of crap. You're not still paying attention to Foster's
ideas on that, are you?
<snip>
Toby Petzold
Peter Groves
of the kind now advocated by President Shrub, so (mistakenly taking you for
a logical creature) I took you to be celebrating it as a precedent. The bit
about trashing Howard has me flummoxed: he's never been more popular (many
Australian voters being on just your intellectual level, Toby).
Peter G.
"Toby Petzold" <Neogno...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ad8b29ae.0212...@posting.google.com...
Art Neuendorffer
>> Think of all the people who "ran into Shakespeare" in London
>>and never wrote one single word about it.
Bob Grumman wrote:
> Or took his picture and got him to autograph it.
He would have if only he wasn't in paine.
Art
Alan Jones
"Peter Farey" <Peter...@prst17z1.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:at44be$qfa$1$8300...@news.demon.co.uk...
Thanks - my speculation was evidently not unreasonable, then.
Alan Jones
Elizabeth Weir
If only you could think up a scenario that gets the
Strachey letter out of the hands of the Renaissance genius
and co-council to the Virginia Company [his New Atlantis]
Sir Francis Bacon and into the hands of the Burgher of Stratford
you can avoid falsifying all of Stratfordian scholarship.
Bob Grumman
> > > by playing Adam & Hamlet's ghost?
>
> Art's right, Bob: if Shakspere had been a player, it was not for much.
>
> > The evidence indicates that he also played other roles.
>
> That's a lot of crap. You're not still paying attention to Foster's
> ideas on that, are you?
>
Foster's ideas have to do mostly with the parts Shakespeare played in his
own plays, some of which, if I remember correctly, were not insubstantial,
just not lead roles. But he was an actor in a famous company of actors for
some twenty years, and headed the list of actors in one of Jonson's plays,
and all of his own. He was also known as an actor by that guy in the
herald's office. How, if he only played very minor roles?
--Bob G.
Art Neuendorffer
>>>> That the letter was never sent suggests [Shakspeare] couldn't read.
>>David L. Webb wrote:
>>> No, Art -- only a cretin like aneuendor...@comicass.nut
>>> would write a letter to a correspondent known to be illiterate.
>>
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>>Grumman can, at least, write rigidnik (though I doubt it is a word).
David L. Webb wrote:
> I realize that you are known to be illiterate, Art, but the same
> remarks I made about my posts may apply to Bob's as well: first,
> you're not the only potential reader,
Sort of like Abraham Sturley:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1598 Nov 4 Letter from Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney.
It is addressed: "To his most lovinge brother, Mr Richard Quinej,
att the Bell in Carterlane att London, geve these."
(Misc. Document 1, 136, Birthplace Museum, Stratford).
Vr letter of the 25 of October came to mj handes the laste of the same
att night per Grenwaj, which imported . . . that our countriman Mr Wm.
Shak. would procure vs monej, which I will like of as I shall heare
when, and wheare, and howe; and I praj let not go that occasion if it
may sort to any indifferent condicions. Allso that if monej might be had
for 30 or 40l, a lease, &c., might be procured. Oh howe can v make dowbt
of monej, who will not beare xxxtie or xll towardes sutch a match? ...
Now to vr other letter of the 10 of November receved the 3d of the
same.... For present advise and encouragmente v have bj this time Mr
Bailj . . . Mr Parsons supposeth that Wenlock came the same daj with
Mr Bailj that v writt vr letter . . . From Stretford Novem. 4th 1598
. . . Abrah. Sturlej.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
>>David L. Webb wrote:
>>>Plenty of people expressed the opinion that William Shakesspeare was
>>> a writer, and these is robust evidence of his identification with
>>>William Shakespeare of Stratford, known to have been an actor in the
>>>company that performed the plays. You really should take a look at
>>>
>>><http://shakespeareauthorship.com/howdowe.html>
>>
>>----------------------------------------------------
>> How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare:
>> The Historical Facts by Tom Reedy and David Kathman
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> Facts?!
>>
>> > William Shakespeare was born in April, 1564,
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564.
>> No one knows when he was born.
David L. Webb wrote:
> It was almost uniVERsal practice to christen infants a few days
> after birth; thus, while there might be some uncertainty concerning
> the exact day of Shakespeare's birth, there is little reasonable
> doubt that he was born in April (had his christening date been
> Rpril 2, there would have been reasonable doubt. . .
Rpril is the cruellest month,
breeding Rilacs out of the dead land
>> > John Shakespeare was ambitious, and he filled many municipal
>> > offices in Stratford including that of burgess,
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> Ambitious?!
>>
>> Thankless tasks that other Stratfordians paid to avoid.
David L. Webb wrote:
>Most public sERVice at the local level consists largely of thankless
> tasks, as indeed do many professions, yet ambitious people often
> undertake such tasks neVERtheless, Art.
And I'm sure that the task of defending the illiterate Stratford boob
is equally thankless, Dave.
>> > which privileged him to educate his children
>> > without charge at the King's New School in Stratford.
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> And did he?!
David L. Webb wrote:
> It is a reasonable guess that he did; ambitious people usually take
> full advantage of any entitlements.
You mean like educating their daughters?
David L. Webb wrote:
> Of course, one cannot know for sure, since
> the school's enrollment records for the period have not survived.
How convenient.
>> > He rose by election to the position of Alderman in 1565;
>> > and in 1568 he was elected Bailiff (equivalent to mayor),
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
John Shakspere - BAILIFF (1568-1571)
Adrian QUINEY - BAILIFF (1571-157?)
Richard QUINEY - BAILIFF (1592-1593)
Abraham Sturley - BAILIFF (1596-1597)
Richard QUINEY - BAILIFF (1601-1602)
BAILIFF, n. [OF. baillif, F. bailli, custodia? magistrate,
fr. L. bajulus porter. See {Bail} to DELIVER.]
2.(Mining) An officer who directs and lays out the MERES
or boundaries for the workmen;
1598 _Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury_ by Francis MERES.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Schoenbaum _WS--A Compact Documentary Life_,
<<Literate persons, as some authorities have pointed out, preferred
on occasion to use a mark--Adrian Quiney, for example, whose mark
or sign (an inverted upper-case Q) embellishes the same page as
John Shakespeare's in the council records; that Quiney could sign
his name we know, for letters written by him have come down.>>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Qoph (Monkey) Phoenician letter used to represent Q voiceless velar.
The Greeks changed its name to qoppa and but had no use for
its sound in Indo-European so they used it for the sound K.
Ben Jonson: "Poor Poet-Ape ... the frippery of Wit," (1602)
AUTOLYCUS. Vices, I would say, sir. I know this man well; he hath
been since an APE-bearer; then a process-server, a BAILIFF;
then he compass'd a motion of the Prodigal Son, and married
a tinker's wife within a mile where my land and living lies;
------------------------------------------------------------------
>> > and in that year he made an application
>> > to the Herald's office for a grant of arms.
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> Which was summarily refused.
David L. Webb wrote:
> So what? The question was whether he was *ambitious*, not whether
> he was born to the gentry; his pursuit of a more elevated social
> status is certainly indicative of ambition.
His pursuit of a more elevated social status
is certainly indicative of snobbery.
>>David L. Webb wrote:
>>
>>>Surely the Neuendorffer who was educated at MIT must be someone
>>>completely different from the illiterate District Heights boob -
>>> - the latter must just be a bogus Masonic "front man."
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> Neuendorffer's HLAS posts surpasse
>> All, that was writ by Rats of BRASSe.
David L. Webb wrote:
> Neuendorffer's h.l.a.s. posts might as well have been writ by rats
> of brasse for all the sense contained therein. Indeed, note that
> "writ by rats of brasse" is an anagram of
>
> "Forbye Art (ass) writ b.s."
I wrote Bill Shakespeare?
>>> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>>
>>>> and it's rather amazing
>>>> that anyone would still believe he was 400 years later.
>>>
>>David L. Webb wrote:
>>
>>>It's rather amazing that anyone would believe that virtually all the
>>>plays & poetry of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, from Spenser
>>>to Marlowe to Shakespeare, is actually the work of a monstrous
>>> Masonic conspiracy (whose goal was to undermine the VERy social
>>> system from which its prominent members benefitted conspicuously),
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> It's called altruism
>> (a term unknown to the illiterate Stratford boob).
David L. Webb wrote:
> It's *not* a truism, Art; it's a crackpot conspiracy theory.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The Tale of Taliesin by Jennifer Cochrane
http://www.cyberphile.co.uk/~taff/taffnet/mabinogion/taliesin.html
<< The Cauldron of Wisdom and Inspiration must be kept boiling
for a year and a day, and then the first three drops from it
would impart ultimate knowledge to the one who drank them.
But the rest of the liquid would be deadly poison.
Long laboured Ceridwen, roaming far to find the rare and exotic herbs
she required, and so it chanced that she fell asleep on the last day of
the spell. The boy Gwion was stirring the brew when three drops flew out
onto his thumb, and they were scalding hot, so that he thrust it into
his mouth to stop the burning. Instantly, he had the wisdom and
inspiration of ages.>>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
crack-cauldron conspiracy theory.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
http://btobsearch.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?btob=Y&isbn=1402829744&pwb=1
XXVIII Of little WS and the cauldron of inspiration & science
[Shakespeare] fled from the house in Henley Street. The cauldron seethed
behind him in the kitchen. Purple bubbles burst from the magic brew. Hot
ooze began to spill down its brazen sides. Then the cauldron cracked in
two, with a melodious twang. The terrible brew flowed in a hissing
snake-like stream over the floor, and out of the house, and down the
streets and lanes till it came to the River Avon. Some swans on the
river were poisoned instantly and fell dead in their own reflections.
Mary Arden went after her son like a fury.
---------------------------------------------------------------
>>David L. Webb wrote:
>>
>>>and that that conspiracy is still active 400 years later,
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> Well, you're here responding to my post, aren't you?
David L. Webb wrote:
> I read your posts for amusement, Art;
> I have no idea why anyone else would read them.
You do seem devoid of ideas.
>>>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> My reasons for saying he was literate,
>>>>>leaving out the fact that he was a known playwright and poet,
>>>>
>> > Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> >
>>>> Leaving out the fiction that he was a known playwright & poet,
>>>
>>David L. Webb wrote:
>>
>>> See <http://shakespeareauthorship.com/howdowe.html>
>>> before making an ass of yourself, Art.
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> But I was just there!
David L. Webb wrote:
> Where? Making an ass of yourself?
>
How do we make asses of ourselfs: howdowe.html
>>>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>are that his monument says he was,
>> > Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>>>>His monument says he was: NESTOR, SOCRATES & VIRGIL.
>>>>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> UNO.VERE-VIRGIL. POET.
>>>> OUR.EVER-LIVING. POET.
>>>> NIL.VERO-VERIUS. POET.
>>>
>>> There is occurrence of "G" in "Nil vero verius poet,"
>>> so it is not an anagram of "our ever-living poet."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
King Richard III Act 1, Scene 1
CLARENCE Yea, Richard, when I know; for I protest
[A]s yet I do not: but, as I can learn,
[H]e hearkens after prophecies and dreams;
[A]nd from the cross-row plucks the letter G.
[A]nd says a WIZARD told him that by G
[H]is issue disinherited should be;
[A]nd, for my name of GEORGE begins with G,
It follows in his thought that I am he.
--------------------------------------------------------------
" H[ASTE] To my Loveinge
good ffrend & contreymann
Mr Wm. Shackespere
DELIVER thees."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
PSALM 40:13 DELIVER me: O LORD, make HASTE to help me.
Let them be ashamed and confounded together that seek after my soul
to destroy it; let them be driven backward and put to shame that
wish me evil. Let them be desolate for a reward of their shame
that say unto me, AHA, AHA.
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://phoenicia.org/tblalpha.html
Aleph (Ox) Phoenician letter representing *A*
Heth *Wall* Phoenician letter representing *H*
Aleph (Ox) Phoenician letter representing *A*
-----------------------------------------------------------------
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> And what is [NIL.VERO-VERIU(S).]'s INPNC score, Dave?
David L. Webb wrote:
> Can't you count, Art? "Nil vero verius poet" contains
> *no* proper names whateVER, pertinent or otherwise.
There is a very specific person identified by NIL.VERO-VERIU(S).
Its INPNC score is therefore 12/13.
The INPNC score of [UNO.VERE-VIRGIL.] is 10/13.
>> David L. Webb wrote:
>>> MoreoVER, "Uno Vere-Virgil poet"
>>> is multilinguial macaronic nonsense.
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> Sounds like Finnegans Wake.
David L. Webb wrote:
> No, _Finnegans Wake_ contains some (arguably) VERy *cleVER*
> multilingual macaronic nonsense, or as Nabokov's John Shade
> wrote in another context,
>
> "Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense."
>
> Yours is the flimsy nonsense, Art -- I am the Webb of sense.
A cataleptic mithyphallic! Was this Totem Fulcrum Est
Ancestor yu hald in Dies Eirae where no spider webbeth
Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers
prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust
darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on
dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies,
leprous and winedark stones.
David L. Webb wrote:
> In any
> case, _Finnegans Wake_ has VERy little in common with your crank
> cryptography -- other than the fact that both are (arguably) in
> English, which is admittedly clearer in the case of Joyce's novel than
> it is in the case of your posts. Had Joyce entitled his novel
> _Finnegans Wack_, you might have had a better claim, Art.
Massa Ewacka. . .Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise.
the flashlight of his ire wacker-ing from the eyewinker on his masttop
>>>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>and his profession was acting,
>>>>
>>>Neuendorffer wrote:
>>
>>>> He bought the second best house in Stratford
>>>> by playing Adam & Hamlet's ghost?
>>David L. Webb wrote:
>>
>>> No, Art; he bought the second best house (with its second best bed)
>>>by being a shareholder in the company, a position to which he could
>>>hardly have hoped to aspire as merely a minor actor who took bit
>>>parts. As a playwright, howeVER, he was invaluable to the company.
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> Company? You mean G.A.O.T.U. Freemasonry?
David L. Webb wrote:
> No, Art; I mean his acting company.
>
I'm always getting those two confused.
>>>>Bob Grumman wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>which generally requires an ability to read.
>>>>
>>>Neuendorffer wrote:
>>
>>>> How pathetic that you feel you must end
>>>> your argument on such a strong note. :-)
>>David L. Webb wrote:
>>> It's far better evidence of the literacy of Shakespeare than your
>>> post was of the literacy of aneuendor...@comicass.nut, Art.
> Art Neuendorffer wrote:
>> How pathetic that you feel you must end
>> your argument on such a weak note. :-)
David L. Webb wrote:
> It's actually VERy strong
This man gives too much for his whistle.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthews, Brander, ed. (1852-1929).
The Whistle: Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) To Madame Brillon
When I was a child of seven years old, my friends, on a holiday,
filled my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold
toys for children; and being charmed with the sound of a whistle, that I
met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and
gave all my money for one. I then came home, and went whistling all over
the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family.
My brothers, and sisters, and cousins, understanding the bargain I had
made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth; put
me in mind what good things I might have bought with the rest of the
money; and laughed at me so much for my folly, that I cried with
vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave
me pleasure.
This, however, was afterwards of use to me, the impression continuing
on my mind; so that often, when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary
thing, I said to myself, Don't give too much for the whistle; and I
saved my money. As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the
actions of men, I thought I met with many,very many, who gave too much
for the whistle.
When I saw one too ambitious of court favor, sacrificing his time in
attendance on levees, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps
his friends, to attain it, I have said to myself, This man gives too
much for his whistle.
When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing himself
in political bustles, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them by
that neglect, He pays, indeed, said I, too much for his whistle.
If I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, all
the pleasure of doing good to others, all the esteem of his
fellow-citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship, for the sake of
accumulating wealth,Poor man, said I, you pay too much for your whistle.
When I met with a man of pleasure, sacrificing every laudable
improvement of the mind, or of his fortune, to mere corporeal
sensations, and ruining his health in their pursuit, Mistaken man, said
I, you are providing pain for yourself, instead of pleasure; you give
too much for your whistle.
If I see one fond of appearance, or fine clothes, fine houses, fine
furniture, fine equipages, all above his fortune, for which he contracts
debts,and ends his career in a prison, Alas! say I, he has paid dear,
very dear, forhis whistle.
When I see a beautiful sweet-tempered girl married to an ill-natured
brute of a husband, What a pity, say I, that she should pay so much for
a whistle!
In short, I conceive that great part of the miseries of mankind are
brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of
things,and by their giving too much for their whistles.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GASTRONOMY FEATURE:
TGAOTU FREEMASONRY
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G.A.O.T.U. By William K. Bissey, MPS
http://www.indianamasons.org/imoanti/gaotu.html
G.A.O.T.U. means the Great Architect of the Universe. In some Masonic
jurisdictions the abbreviation is considered to mean Grand Architect.
Also, sometimes the abbreviation includes at the beginning a capital T
meaning The. The abbreviation can also mean Grand or Great Artificer of
the Universe. According to the Mentor's Manual published by the Grand
Lodge of Indiana, "In any event, these are titles under which
Freemasonry refers to Deity."
G.A.O.T.U. has been used by members of religious groups to attack
Freemasonry. Some of these critics have claimed that this is a false god
worshipped at our altar; other critics claim that G.A.O.T.U. "makes God
seem like an abstract being."
The question then becomes how did G.A.O.T.U. enter into Masonry? Our
search starts with the Compass. The Indiana Monitor states in the
section on the Master Mason Degree that "The Compass is peculiarly
dedicated to this degree."
What is a compass? One of the definitions of a compass in The Oxford
English Dictionary is "an instrument for taking measurements and
describing circles." The dictionary then cites an example of this usage
of a compass from Milton's Paradise Lost vii 224 "In His hand He took
the golden Compasses prepared...to circumscribe This Universe." The
capitalized pronouns refer to the Deity. An even earlier work, Dante
(1265-1321) in his Divine Comedy has the following: "He that with
turning compass drew the world's confines." Like Milton, Dante is
referring to the Deity.
A 13th century painting (the artist is not mentioned in the reference
book) in the Austrian National Library shows the Deity as The Great
Architect of the Universe circumscribing Heaven and Earth. Another
painting depicting the Deity using a compass is by William Blake
(1757-1827), an English poet and artist. Blake's painting is titled The
Ancient of Days whose subject matter is the Deity using a compass.
By itself the compass has been used as an allegorical tool by which the
Deity created the Universe. As a compass is a measuring device, it is
logical to assume that the instrument would be used by the operative
masons in the era of Cathedral building. In the Middle Ages, the terms
Master Mason and Architect were used interchangeably. Architect is
defined in The Oxford English Dictionary as "a master builder." This
definition also infers that a Master Mason would also be a craftsman or
artificer.
This leads back to The Oxford English Dictionary which defines an
artificer as "one who makes by art of skill; especially a craftsman."
The definition also refers "to the Artificer of the Universe; meaning
the Creator." The dictionary cites two further usages of artificer in
this manner. One is from Person's Creed of 1659 "The Great Artificer of
the World." The second is from Wordsworth's Excursion vi 551 "By the
Great Artificer endued With no Inferior power."
But exactly how did G.A.O.T.U. come to be used in Freemasonry?
Wallace McLeod, an eminent Canadian Masonic scholar, discusses
T.G.A.O.T.U. in his book The Grand Design. McLeod states the phrase
entered Freemasonry in the first Book of Constitutions of 1723 of the
first or premier Grand Lodge of England. The Book of Constitutions was
written by the Reverend James Anderson who was minister of a Scottish
Presbyterian Church on Swallow Street in London from 1710 to 1734.
Anderson was a graduate of Marischal College which is a part of the
University of Aberdeen in Scotland.
In the seventeenth century, when Anderson was probably studying at the
University of Aberdeen, the role of education in Scotland's universities
was to train their students to become ministers. This meant the students
learned the Bible and their theology "according to the reasoned theology
of Calvin's Institutes."
John Calvin (1509-1564) was a French reformer of the Church who, at the
age of 26, first published his classic work of theology, Institutes of
the Christian Religion, 1536. In this work, which formed the basis of
theology for Presbyterian and Reformed Churches, Calvin repeatedly calls
the Deity "the Architect of the Universe" and refers to His works in
nature as "Architecture of the Universe" ten times. Calvin also refers
to the Deity as the Great Architect or Architect of the Universe in his
Commentary on Psalm 19.
In literature, art, and theology the Deity has been referred to as an
Artificer and Architect. Thus, in using G.A.O.T.U. Freemasonry has
continued a long tradition of using an allegorical name for the Deity.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Toby Petzold
> Sorry I need to spell it out, Toby: Pearl Harbour was a pre-emptive strike,
> of the kind now advocated by President Shrub, so (mistakenly taking you for
> a logical creature) I took you to be celebrating it as a precedent.
No, patriotic Americans with any historical memory to speak of make it
a point to say such things as "Remember Pearl Harbor" each 7 December,
as I did. See, 7 December is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on
my country. Of course, the real shame here is not your ignorance, but
your smug comparison of an unprovoked attack on a peaceful nation to
the necessity of that same nation in destroying its enemies before
they wreak havoc. Again. Had John Howard known what was about to
happen to those Australian kids in Bali, he would have been right to
have pre-emptorily attacked the terrorists. You anti-war com-symps
sicken me with your moral cowardice and relativism. The victories to
come aren't for you, but you'll ungratefully take from them what you
want, anyway.
> The bit
> about trashing Howard has me flummoxed: he's never been more popular (many
> Australian voters being on just your intellectual level, Toby).
Which is why I made the distinction between patriotic Australians who
support their government and liberals (like you) who have no reason to
denigrate men like Howard except that his strength reminds them too
brutally of their own lack thereof.
Toby Petzold
Islama delenda est.
Peter Groves
for satire.
"Toby Petzold" <Neogno...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ad8b29ae.02121...@posting.google.com...
> "Peter Groves" <Monti...@REMOVETHISbigpond.com> wrote in message
news:<8ilJ9.523$jM5....@newsfeeds.bigpond.com>...
> > Sorry I need to spell it out, Toby: Pearl Harbour was a pre-emptive
strike,
> > of the kind now advocated by President Shrub, so (mistakenly taking you
for
> > a logical creature) I took you to be celebrating it as a precedent.
>
> No, patriotic Americans with any historical memory to speak of make it
> a point to say such things as "Remember Pearl Harbor" each 7 December,
> as I did. See, 7 December is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on
> my country. Of course, the real shame here is not your ignorance,
When I was a student I had an American friend who once surprised me by not
knowing about King Alfred burning the cakes. He countered with Washington
crossing the Potomac (I think) and it made me realize that the problem was
not his ignorance but my unthinking parochialism. Of coures, it's easier to
be parochial when your parish is Very Big.
> but
> your smug comparison of an unprovoked attack on a peaceful nation to
> the necessity of that same nation in destroying its enemies before
> they wreak havoc.
Which boils down to the smug conviction that US foreign policy always
occupies the moral high ground (tell that to the Chileans): it's this
complacent self-righteousness, Toby, that gets up other people's noses (the
first to notice it, by the way, was Samuel Johnson, at the very birth of the
USA: "How is it", he once asked, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty
from the drivers of Negroes?"). In 1941 the USA, with its embargo on
Japanese oil (and steel), was a genuine strategic threat to Japan; Iraq
(though admittedly sitting on lots of lovely oil) represents no conceivable
threat to the US (no-one even believes it's backing terrorists -- Saddam is
a pragmatist where power is concerned, not a loony ideologue like Bin
Laden).
> Again. Had John Howard known what was about to
> happen to those Australian kids in Bali, he would have been right to
> have pre-emptorily attacked the terrorists.
If it could be done, certainly -- but real-world intelligence is rarely that
precise.
> You anti-war com-symps
Does this mean "communist sympathiser"? News-flash, Toby: the Cold War is
over -- even the Chinese have abandoned Communism in all but name.
> sicken me with your moral cowardice and relativism. The victories to
> come aren't for you, but you'll ungratefully take from them what you
> want, anyway.
>
You're becoming incoherent, Toby: a coiuple of those little pills and a
lie-down would do you the world of good.
> > The bit
> > about trashing Howard has me flummoxed: he's never been more popular
(many
> > Australian voters being on just your intellectual level, Toby).
>
> Which is why I made the distinction between patriotic Australians who
> support their government and liberals (like you) who have no reason to
> denigrate men like Howard except that his strength reminds them too
> brutally of their own lack thereof.
>
Howard is wetting his pants for a war in Iraq (he wants to go down in
history by going down on Bush). But he won't, of course, be out there being
shot at -- and nor, I suspect, will you, for all your masturbatory
sabre-rattling.
Peter G.
KQKnave
<Monti...@REMOVETHISbigpond.com> writes:
>In 1941 the USA, with its embargo on
>Japanese oil (and steel), was a genuine strategic threat to Japan;
No, it was a genuine threat to their visions of empire. I'm sure the
Chinese can tell you a lot about that.
> Iraq
>(though admittedly sitting on lots of lovely oil) represents no conceivable
>threat to the US (no-one even believes it's backing terrorists -- Saddam is
>a pragmatist where power is concerned, not a loony ideologue like Bin
>Laden).
Ah, tell us the source of your top secret information! Neither you nor anyone
you talk to knows whether Saddam helps or has helped Al Qaeda.
I think the possibility of Hussein helping terrorists himself is not really the
point.
If Al Qaeda had not attacked the U.S., I'm sure the status quo would have
been fine for a while at least. But the U.S. now wants to go after Al Qaeda
worldwide, and it needs to free up the military resources tied up around
Iraq. There are about 14,000 troops and their support units tied up in
the gulf enforcing the embargo (boarding ships, dangerous business and
something we never had to do when I was in the Navy). There are also
god knows how many fighter planes and their support units tied up
enforcing the northern and southern no-fly zones. This is neccessary,
because if you'll recall, Iraq launched a massive attack on Kuwait and
was nearly ready to pick off Saudi Arabia. But now the U.S. needs
those forces. They would like the forces in Korea too, and may get
around to eliminating the North Korean threat, but right now their
military is too strong, fighting conditions are too tough, and China
might not like it. The Iraqi people have been given sufficient time
to overthrow their dictator and haven't done it (understandably, given
the ruthless way that Hussein maintains his power). So like it or not,
he's going to go. If we're lucky, he'll run away to Libya or some place
like that before things get too rough. As far as the self-righteousness
of the U.S. goes, I don't think that has any importance whatsoever,
since it's just rhetoric. The U.S. is going to act in its own self-interest,
just like every other country.
Tom Veal
recommend http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/weblog.php.
On *this* newsgroup, the only "weapons of mass destruction" that ought
to be discussed are the techniques by which the Tudor monarchs
suppressed the Roman Catholic liturgy.
kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote in message news:<20021211210816...@mb-ci.aol.com>...
John W. Kennedy
> When I was a student I had an American friend who once surprised me by not
> knowing about King Alfred burning the cakes. He countered with Washington
> crossing the Potomac (I think) and it made me realize that the problem was
> not his ignorance but my unthinking parochialism. Of coures, it's easier to
> be parochial when your parish is Very Big.
Washington crossed the Delaware (between Pennsylvania and New Jersey) to
make a surprise attack on an encampment of Hessians (a general term for
German mercenaries in the service of George III, though I believe they
were not all from Hesse) on Christmas, 1776. A major strategic victory
at a politically sensitive time.
But surely everyone knows the story of Alfred the Cake?
> In 1941 the USA, with its embargo on
> Japanese oil (and steel), was a genuine strategic threat to Japan;
In the sense that the US stood in the way of Japanese rule of the
Pacific, I suppose so. But this seems to be an equivocal use of the
word "threat". (Japan's ambitions had been more than clear since
Manchuria.)
> Iraq
> (though admittedly sitting on lots of lovely oil) represents no conceivable
> threat to the US (no-one even believes it's backing terrorists -- Saddam is
> a pragmatist where power is concerned, not a loony ideologue like Bin
> Laden).
I am not convinced of that. He seems to have a teenager's conviction of
his own immortality, and no slight case of megalomania (cf. his recent
career as a novelist), not to mention a history of genocide. If (and
this is where I have grave doubts anent Bushlad) he is indeed close to
getting usable quantities of nuclear weaponry, nerve gas, etc., prudence
dictates that he be stopped.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly;
the rich have always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Man Who Was Thursday"
Bob Grumman
Not I. (Although I read about Alfred when I was young so probably knew it
once.) I think everyone is certain not to know many things that everyone
knows.
--Bob G.
Toby Petzold
> If Toby hadn't already shown himself to be a pinhead, I'd take this bluster
> for satire.
>
> "Toby Petzold" <Neogno...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:ad8b29ae.02121...@posting.google.com...
> > "Peter Groves" <Monti...@REMOVETHISbigpond.com> wrote in message
> news:<8ilJ9.523$jM5....@newsfeeds.bigpond.com>...
> > > Sorry I need to spell it out, Toby: Pearl Harbour was a pre-emptive
> strike,
> > > of the kind now advocated by President Shrub, so (mistakenly taking you
> for
> > > a logical creature) I took you to be celebrating it as a precedent.
> >
> > No, patriotic Americans with any historical memory to speak of make it
> > a point to say such things as "Remember Pearl Harbor" each 7 December,
> > as I did. See, 7 December is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on
> > my country. Of course, the real shame here is not your ignorance,
>
> When I was a student I had an American friend who once surprised me by not
> knowing about King Alfred burning the cakes.
I don't know anything about King Alfred or his cakes. It's not really
comparable to knowing the date of the most infamous military attack of
modern times, though.
> He countered with Washington
> crossing the Potomac (I think) and it made me realize that the problem was
> not his ignorance but my unthinking parochialism. Of coures, it's easier to
> be parochial when your parish is Very Big.
If you still have such a fellow-feeling for the cultural heredity of
Great Britain, shouldn't you also have some appreciation for why its
government is prepared to wage war against (yet another) totalitarian
state? The greatness of the British Empire came from its dedication to
action and not from its half-heartedness.
> > but
> > your smug comparison of an unprovoked attack on a peaceful nation to
> > the necessity of that same nation in destroying its enemies before
> > they wreak havoc.
>
> Which boils down to the smug conviction that US foreign policy always
> occupies the moral high ground (tell that to the Chileans):
Ever since President Monroe, America has strived to keep Europe out of
this hemisphere. Obviously not Europeans, per se, but Europe as waves
of meddlesome governments and ideas. When we have failed to keep out
alien ideologies like Communism, we have usually backed the
reactionaries so that our other little brown brothers won't get any
pie-in-the-sky ideas. For the most part, we have been right to do
this. Now, all we're waiting for is Castro to die. The world has never
had a better friend than Uncle Sam. I don't care if you acknowledge
this or not: it happens to be true.
> it's this
> complacent self-righteousness, Toby, that gets up other people's noses (the
> first to notice it, by the way, was Samuel Johnson, at the very birth of the
> USA: "How is it", he once asked, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty
> from the drivers of Negroes?").
I don't know if that old sod was the first to notice the hypocrisy of
Jefferson's declaration or not, but what other country can you think
of that fought a massive civil war to liberate non-citizens living
within its own borders? There's a Very Big List of things that my
country has done to ensure liberty and democracy to the world. You
should thank Uncle Sam every day that your country isn't part of the
Colonial States of the Rising Sun, Inc.
> In 1941 the USA, with its embargo on
> Japanese oil (and steel), was a genuine strategic threat to Japan;
Your ignorance of Japanese brutality over its neighbors is appalling.
I'll bet you didn't even know that Australia was on the Japanese Hit
Parade. Thank God for Jewish physicists, eh?
> Iraq
> (though admittedly sitting on lots of lovely oil) represents no conceivable
> threat to the US (no-one even believes it's backing terrorists -- Saddam is
> a pragmatist where power is concerned, not a loony ideologue like Bin
> Laden).
You don't know anything. You're just some standard-issue anti-war
Leftist who thinks it's all about oil or some other nonsense. Time to
grow up, college boy. The mohammedan is coming after YOU.
> > Again. Had John Howard known what was about to
> > happen to those Australian kids in Bali, he would have been right to
> > have pre-emptorily attacked the terrorists.
>
> If it could be done, certainly -- but real-world intelligence is rarely that
> precise.
So, better to do nothing? Great idea, Neville.
> > You anti-war com-symps
>
> Does this mean "communist sympathiser"? News-flash, Toby: the Cold War is
> over -- even the Chinese have abandoned Communism in all but name.
Com-symp still meets my needs.
> > sicken me with your moral cowardice and relativism. The victories to
> > come aren't for you, but you'll ungratefully take from them what you
> > want, anyway.
> >
>
> You're becoming incoherent, Toby: a coiuple of those little pills and a
> lie-down would do you the world of good.
Just wait for Uncle Sam to fix this mess. I figure if Saddam uses some
nerve agents on us, we'll just make downtown Baghdad one big plate of
glass. Makes the Saudis wet their towels.
> > > The bit
> > > about trashing Howard has me flummoxed: he's never been more popular
> (many
> > > Australian voters being on just your intellectual level, Toby).
> >
> > Which is why I made the distinction between patriotic Australians who
> > support their government and liberals (like you) who have no reason to
> > denigrate men like Howard except that his strength reminds them too
> > brutally of their own lack thereof.
> >
>
> Howard is wetting his pants for a war in Iraq (he wants to go down in
> history by going down on Bush). But he won't, of course, be out there being
> shot at -- and nor, I suspect, will you, for all your masturbatory
> sabre-rattling.
>
> Peter G.
This is the age of Doers, not Talkers.