Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard"
Gary Kosinsky
In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
I think it's an interesting book. However, since it was
published in 1977, and since I haven't seen any reference to this
portrait being accepted as a Shakespeare portrait by anyone (ie. in
biographies or articles), I can only conclude it didn't make much of
an impression on anyone else.
Does anyone know of any articles debunking Hotson's theory and
where I might find them?
Thanks for any info.
- Gary Kosinsky
Art Neuendorffer
> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
> In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
> by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
> issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
----------------------------------------------
http://www.deverestudies.org/index.html
The same or different?
http://www.antiquexplorer.com/Antiques/sept02.pdf
http://art-art.jp/it/info.asp?id=2431&back=%2Fit%2Fsearch%2Easp%3Fab%3DM%26s
t%3Dtt
----------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Tad Davis
gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote:
> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard". In it,
> he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted by
> Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
> issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
I don't remember a specific refutation of this claim, but I did want to
chime in on one thing. I love Hotson. I don't accept many of his
conclusions about Shakespeare -- i.e. the dating of the sonnets etc. --
but he always writes with great energy and enthusiasm for the subject.
And in the process of arriving at his sometimes questionable
conclusions, he throws up a great deal of fascinating information about
the times. You could do worse than spend a rainy Saturday afternoon
reading a book by Leslie Hotson.
--
Tad Davis
tadd...@ucwphilly.rr.com
http://taddavis.blogspot.com
Gary Kosinsky
I have to give you credit, Art. I did a Google search for the
portrait and I came up empty. And here you zoom in on two examples.
As far as the comparison to the DeVere portrait goes, there is
definitely a resemblance. How certain is it that that is a portrait
of Eddy?
- Gary Kosinsky
KQKnave
writes:
> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
>In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
>by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
>issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
> I think it's an interesting book. However, since it was
>published in 1977, and since I haven't seen any reference to this
>portrait being accepted as a Shakespeare portrait by anyone (ie. in
>biographies or articles), I can only conclude it didn't make much of
>an impression on anyone else.
> Does anyone know of any articles debunking Hotson's theory and
>where I might find them?
> Thanks for any info.
Well, you could look at the portrait itself. With the lace collar and
fancy hat, it's most likely to be a nobleman. Check out the collar
Shakespeare is wearing in the Droeshout portrait. The hand extending
from the cloud appears to be a female hand. Perhaps the subject's
wife has died and gone to heaven? What would any of this
have to do with Shakespeare at the age of 24? I can't read the first
word of the inscription but part of it reads "......amoris ergo". What's
the first word?
Hard to believe Hotson could write an entire book about this portrait
and the (non-existent) connection with Shakespeare. Then again,
as I explore more and more of Shakespearean studies, I guess I
can believe anything.
See my demolition of Monsarrat's RES paper!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/monsarr1.html
The Droeshout portrait is not unusual at all!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/shakenbake.html
Agent Jim
Art Neuendorffer
> >
> >> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
> >> In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
> >> by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
> >> issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
> <aneuendor...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> >----------------------------------------------
> >http://www.deverestudies.org/index.html
> >
> > The same or different?
> >
> >http://www.antiquexplorer.com/Antiques/sept02.pdf
>
>http://art-art.jp/it/info.asp?id=2431&back=%2Fit%2Fsearch%2Easp%3Fab%3DM%26
st%3Dtt
> >----------------------------------------------
> >Art Neuendorffer
"Gary Kosinsky" <gk...@vcn.bc.ca> wrote
> I have to give you credit, Art. I did a Google search for the
> portrait and I came up empty. And here you zoom in on two examples.
You do know that one can Google search on (in quotes) phrases like:
"Unknown Man Clasping a Hand"
> As far as the comparison to the DeVere portrait goes, there is
> definitely a resemblance. How certain is it that that is a portrait
> of Eddy?
---------------------------------------------------------------
This is all rather new to me.
Oxfordian Robert Brazil includes the "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand":
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/4260/manyfaces.html
<<I include this picture because I have noticed that it is being used by
Oxfordians as a picture to represent Oxford. There is a large literature on
the Hilliard Unknown Man with Hand. One starts with the Leslie Hotson book
and then branches out. I personally do not see the resemblance to Oxford,
given the date on the miniature of 1588, the Armada year. Compared to the
other images (where he was looking leaner and older by 1588) this Hilliard
looks like a younger man. However, I ( or we ) may be wrong about Oxford's
appearance . . . He wears a feathery cap, and Oxford had recently been
given such a hat by Queen Elizabeth.>> - Brazil
So it seems to be based upon Hotson's "Shakespeare connection" & the
"feathery cap" Oxford connection.
As for the other 1588 Hilliard; I assume some Oxfordian saw a similarity
and adopted that portrait as well.
Art Neuendorffer
Gary Kosinsky
>In article <3e9cdb9e...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky)
>writes:
>
>
>> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
>>In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
>>by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
>>issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
>
>> I think it's an interesting book. However, since it was
>>published in 1977, and since I haven't seen any reference to this
>>portrait being accepted as a Shakespeare portrait by anyone (ie. in
>>biographies or articles), I can only conclude it didn't make much of
>>an impression on anyone else.
>
>> Does anyone know of any articles debunking Hotson's theory and
>>where I might find them?
>
>> Thanks for any info.
>
>Well, you could look at the portrait itself. With the lace collar and
>fancy hat, it's most likely to be a nobleman.
Actually, Hotson spends a chapter on the symbolism of the
clothing. He argues that the sitter is being depicted as the god
Mercury.
>Check out the collar
>Shakespeare is wearing in the Droeshout portrait.
Hotson says that there were conventions peculiar to the
painting of miniatures.
>The hand extending
>from the cloud appears to be a female hand. Perhaps the subject's
>wife has died and gone to heaven?
The hand does indeed look feminine, and Hotson acknowledges as
much. As it happens, he also suggests that one possible
interpretation is that it is the subject's wife. He then, in another
chapter, explains why he thinks this is the wrong interpretation.
Hotson believed that the hand was intended to be understood as
belonging to the god Apollo, and would have been understood as such by
educated Elizabethans.
>What would any of this
>have to do with Shakespeare at the age of 24?
A good question. The person depicted may very well have been
a poet, for reasons that Hotson explains, but was it actually
Shakespeare? And at this point you'd have to read Hotson.
>I can't read the first
>word of the inscription but part of it reads "......amoris ergo". What's
>the first word?
"Attici amoris ergo". Hotson says it is a puzzling
inscription, but he translates it as "Athenians for love" or
"Athenians because of love".
>Hard to believe Hotson could write an entire book about this portrait
>and the (non-existent) connection with Shakespeare. Then again,
>as I explore more and more of Shakespearean studies, I guess I
>can believe anything.
Don't be too quick to write it off, Jim. Hotson was a very
knowledgeable guy. In the 210 pages of the book he makes a lot of
arguments to support his case. (Which is why I would like to find an
article written by an equally knowledgeable guy debunking his theory.)
It may be that this is an extreme case of misapplied ingenuity of the
type that allows Peter Farey to find a reference to Marlowe in the
Stratford monument inscription. And it also has to be pointed out that
Hotson himself owned one of the copies of the Hilliard minatures in
question. But it's an interesting book.
- Gary Kosinsky
Gary Kosinsky
<aneuendor...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> >"Gary Kosinsky" <gk...@vcn.bc.ca> wrote
>> >
>> >> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
>> >> In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
>> >> by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
>> >> issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
>
>> <aneuendor...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> >----------------------------------------------
>> >http://www.deverestudies.org/index.html
>> >
>> > The same or different?
>> >
>> >http://www.antiquexplorer.com/Antiques/sept02.pdf
>>
>>http://art-art.jp/it/info.asp?id=2431&back=%2Fit%2Fsearch%2Easp%3Fab%3DM%26
>st%3Dtt
>> >----------------------------------------------
>> >Art Neuendorffer
>
>"Gary Kosinsky" <gk...@vcn.bc.ca> wrote
>
>> I have to give you credit, Art. I did a Google search for the
>> portrait and I came up empty. And here you zoom in on two examples.
>
> You do know that one can Google search on (in quotes) phrases like:
>
> "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand"
Uhhhh, yeh, I knew that, (cough), of course I knew that.
Actually, I didn't. When I did my search I think I put in 'Hilliard'
and 'Shakespeare' without any quotes. I think I included 'cloud' one
time too. Live and learn. Although, when I just tried it now with
your suggestion I got back a 'nothing found' message. I then tried it
again with "Man Clasping a Hand" and got your sites. Thanks.
>
>> As far as the comparison to the DeVere portrait goes, there is
>> definitely a resemblance. How certain is it that that is a portrait
>> of Eddy?
>---------------------------------------------------------------
> This is all rather new to me.
>
> Oxfordian Robert Brazil includes the "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand":
>
>http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/4260/manyfaces.html
>
><<I include this picture because I have noticed that it is being used by
>Oxfordians as a picture to represent Oxford. There is a large literature on
>the Hilliard Unknown Man with Hand. One starts with the Leslie Hotson book
>and then branches out. I personally do not see the resemblance to Oxford,
>given the date on the miniature of 1588, the Armada year. Compared to the
>other images (where he was looking leaner and older by 1588) this Hilliard
>looks like a younger man. However, I ( or we ) may be wrong about Oxford's
>appearance . . . He wears a feathery cap, and Oxford had recently been
>given such a hat by Queen Elizabeth.>> - Brazil
>
> So it seems to be based upon Hotson's "Shakespeare connection" & the
>"feathery cap" Oxford connection.
>
> As for the other 1588 Hilliard; I assume some Oxfordian saw a similarity
>and adopted that portrait as well.
Sorry, Art, but I'm not following you here. I'm asking about
the portrait attached to the "Edward De Vere Studies Conference". How
certain is it that that is actually a portrait of De Vere? And if it
is fairly certain, do we know what date it was painted?
I'm also surprised that Robert Brazil doesn't notice a
resemblance between it and the Hilliard 'Cloud' miniature. While he
looks older and chubbier in the 'De Vere' portrait, I think there is a
definite resemblance to the person in the 'Cloud' miniature.
- Gary Kosinsky
Art Neuendorffer
> >> As far as the comparison to the DeVere portrait goes, there is
> >> definitely a resemblance. How certain is it that that is a portrait
> >> of Eddy?
> >---------------------------------------------------------------
> "Art Neuendorffer" <aneuendor...@comcast.net> wrote:
> > This is all rather new to me.
> >
> > Oxfordian Robert Brazil includes the "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand":
> >
> >http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/4260/manyfaces.html
> >
> ><<I include this picture because I have noticed that it is being used by
> >Oxfordians as a picture to represent Oxford. There is a large literature
on
> >the Hilliard Unknown Man with Hand. One starts with the Leslie Hotson
book
> >and then branches out. I personally do not see the resemblance to Oxford,
> >given the date on the miniature of 1588, the Armada year. Compared to the
> >other images (where he was looking leaner and older by 1588) this
Hilliard
> >looks like a younger man. However, I ( or we ) may be wrong about
Oxford's
> >appearance . . . He wears a feathery cap, and Oxford had recently been
> >given such a hat by Queen Elizabeth.>> - Brazil
> >
> > So it seems to be based upon Hotson's "Shakespeare connection" & the
> >"feathery cap" Oxford connection.
> >
> > As for the other 1588 Hilliard; I assume some Oxfordian saw a
similarity
> >and adopted that portrait as well.
"Gary Kosinsky" <gk...@vcn.bc.ca> wrote
> Sorry, Art, but I'm not following you here. I'm asking about
> the portrait attached to the "Edward De Vere Studies Conference".
Yes that is "the other 1588 Hilliard"
> How certain is it that that is actually a portrait of De Vere? And if it
> is fairly certain, do we know what date it was painted?
(Both are 1588 Hilliard's and Oxfordians are
ONLY GUESSING that they are both portraits of De Vere.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I doubt that there is any DIRECT connection to Oxford in
the "Edward De Vere Studies Conference" portrait.
Rather I think Oxfordians are working backwards:
1) Oxfordians bought into Hotson's assumption that it was a Shakespeare
portrait
2) which they especially liked because of the feathered hat Oxford
connection.
3) ERGO: The "Edward De Vere Studies Conference" portrait.
(Also 1588 Hilliard) is Oxford by default
(i.e., assumed to be the same guy as the one holding the hand)
> I'm also surprised that Robert Brazil doesn't notice a
> resemblance between it and the Hilliard 'Cloud' miniature. While he
> looks older and chubbier in the 'De Vere' portrait, I think there is a
> definite resemblance to the person in the 'Cloud' miniature.
Since Robert Brazil doesn't strongly buy into the 'Cloud' miniature
there is no need for him to adopt "the other 1588 Hilliard"
Art Neuendorffer
KQKnave
writes:
>On 16 Apr 2003 05:58:23 GMT, kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote:
>
>>In article <3e9cdb9e...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary
>Kosinsky)
>>writes:
>>
>>
>>> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
>>>In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
>>>by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
>>>issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
>>
>>> I think it's an interesting book. However, since it was
>>>published in 1977, and since I haven't seen any reference to this
>>>portrait being accepted as a Shakespeare portrait by anyone (ie. in
>>>biographies or articles), I can only conclude it didn't make much of
>>>an impression on anyone else.
>>
>>> Does anyone know of any articles debunking Hotson's theory and
>>>where I might find them?
>>
>>> Thanks for any info.
>>
>>Well, you could look at the portrait itself. With the lace collar and
>>fancy hat, it's most likely to be a nobleman.
>
> Actually, Hotson spends a chapter on the symbolism of the
>clothing. He argues that the sitter is being depicted as the god
>Mercury.
I've been skimming the book. I'll present some examples later, but
I can tell you now that Hotson makes Charlton Ogburn look like
Sam Schoenbaum.
Gary Kosinsky
>I've been skimming the book. I'll present some examples later, but
>I can tell you now that Hotson makes Charlton Ogburn look like
>Sam Schoenbaum.
Good! I look forward to your post.
- Gary Kosinsky
Lorenzo4344
>From: "Art Neuendorffer" aneuendor...@comcast.net
>Date: 4/16/2003
>Both are 1588 Hilliard's and Oxfordians are
> ONLY GUESSING that they are both portraits of De Vere.
>--------------------------------------------------------------------
> I doubt that there is any DIRECT connection to Oxford in
> the "Edward De Vere Studies Conference" portrait.
Me too. I have often wondered who decided that curly-blonde, blue-eyed boy was
Edward de Vere. It is at odds with all the purported EO pix except the
Gheeraerts etching of QE's Garter procession at Windsor, June 18, 1572.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/4260/garterparade.html
The young man near her side with the sword of state is assumed to be The Lord
Great Chamberlain. He does somewhat resemble the Hilliards of 16 years later,
particularly in Hollar's re-do some 100 years after the fact.
Lorenzo
"Mark the music."
Art Neuendorffer
> > ONLY GUESSING that they are both portraits of De Vere.
> >--------------------------------------------------------------------
> > I doubt that there is any DIRECT connection to Oxford in
> > the "Edward De Vere Studies Conference" portrait.
"Lorenzo4344" <loren...@aol.com> wrote
> Me too. I have often wondered who decided that curly-blonde, blue-eyed boy
was
> Edward de Vere. It is at odds with all the purported EO pix except the
> Gheeraerts etching of QE's Garter procession at Windsor, June 18, 1572.
>
> http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/4260/garterparade.html
>
> The young man near her side with the sword of state is assumed to be The
Lord
> Great Chamberlain. He does somewhat resemble the Hilliards of 16 years
later,
> particularly in Hollar's re-do some 100 years after the fact.
------------------------------------------------
Hilliard = Hollar?
------------------------------------------------
Mr. [W]enceslaus [H]ollar
Also known as Wenzel Hollar
Bohemian, 1607 - 1677
<<Born in Prague in 1607, Hollar spent his early years in that city. It was
there that his prodigious talent for copy work, topography and mapmaking
were first evident. In 1627 he embarked on a lifelong course of travel in
search of employment and subjects. From the tiled rooftops of Tangier to the
crenelated parapets and celebrated towers of London, the dispassionate
reporter produced an invaluable record of the landscape, people, places,
architecture, art and accouterments of his time.>>
------------------------------------------
The Globe theatre by Wenceslaus Hollar (1647)
The Guildhall Library, Corporation of London
http://www.rdg.ac.uk/globe/oldglobe/HollarGlobeDef.htm
This is probably the most accurate representation of the Second Globe. It
has been the main reference for the construction of the New Globe, and for
John Orrell's exhaustive study of the orientation, situation and dimensions
of the original Globe. Contrary to this representation, the New Globe has
only one gable, as the First Globe probably had. The rounded white exterior
may have been achieved by plastering over the timber, though this was not a
systematic practise in the Renaissance.
------------------------------------------
The King Wenceslaus Hollar
http://wy.essortment.com/wenceslausholla_rznd.htm
"Good King Wenceslaus looked out, on the feast of Stephen." Most people know
the Christmas carol about the good king who took food and firewood to a poor
peasant during the winter holidays. But they may not know the story behind
the song, the story of a Bohemian duke plagued by political intrigue, family
feuding, and murder.
"King" Wenceslaus wasn't really a king at all, but the Duke of Bohemia,
which is now part of the present-day Czech Republic. When he was born in
A.D. 903, Bohemia still struggled between Christianity and paganism.
Wenceslaus' father was a Christian and his mother, Drahomira, was a pagan.
Wenceslaus chose to follow his father's religion, while his brother,
Boleslaus, chose to follow his mother's beliefs. Wenceslaus succeeded his
father as Duke of Bohemia when he was only 15. Because he was so young, his
mother served as regent. One of her first acts was to prohibit Christianity.
She even murdered Wenceslaus' grandmother, because she was the one who
taught her son to follow Christianity. After a couple of years, the people
could no longer stand Drahomira's cruelty and asked Wenceslaus to take the
throne. He did, making Christianity the official state religion, building
churches, inviting German missionaries to the region, and helping the poor.
When Wenceslaus married and had a child, his brother Boleslaus grew jealous
as he saw his chances at taking the throne slipping away. So he and some
friends plotted Wenceslaus' murder. They knew that Wenceslaus planned to
attend Mass for a saint's feast day, and they arranged to meet him at
church. He agreed, and they murdered him on the steps of the church. He was
declared a martyr and a saint almost immediately. But what about that song?
Where did it come from? Anglican minister John MASON Neale wrote the carol
in 1853 as part of a collection of songs for children. Although he had never
visited Bohemia, Neale heard the story of Good King Wenceslaus from British
soldiers who had returned from Eastern Europe. He set the tale to music to
teach children about the virtue of generosity.
-----------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Art Neuendorffer
> > ONLY GUESSING that they are both portraits of De Vere.
> >--------------------------------------------------------------------
> > I doubt that there is any DIRECT connection to Oxford in
> > the "Edward De Vere Studies Conference" portrait.
"Lorenzo4344" <loren...@aol.com> wrote
> Me too. I have often wondered who decided that curly-blonde, blue-eyed boy
was
> Edward de Vere. It is at odds with all the purported EO pix except the
> Gheeraerts etching of QE's Garter procession at Windsor, June 18, 1572.
>
> http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/4260/garterparade.html
>
> The young man near her side with the sword of state is assumed to be The
Lord
> Great Chamberlain. He does somewhat resemble the Hilliards of 16 years
later,
> particularly in Hollar's re-do some 100 years after the fact.
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/4260/garterparade.html
by Robert Brazil , January 1999 copyright
<<The original inscriptions were written by Thomas Dawes, who signed
the dedication panel, Thomas Dawes, ROUGECROIX. Mr. Dawes was indeed the
ROUGE CROIX Pursuivant in the Heraldic Hierarchy in the 1570's. The
dedication itself does not say which year the event pictured occurred.
It says that what is depicted is "the manner of that solemn and
triumphant proceeding". It is a make believe or idealized Garter
Procession because it features Maximilian II and other Honorary Garter
members who never were in England. I've not seen the tinted version in
full color but I do have a description of the colors. For the sword
bearer it says : "Sword-bearer : short black mantle, trimmed with black
bands, and lined with brocade; doublet and trunk hose of uncertain light
color; scarlet scabbard. "
The Inscription under the Sword Bearer
"Ceste place est toujours supplice par un Noble Homme
nestant point de l'ordre de la Jaretiere lequel porte l'Esper."
The English language Version (College of Arms) gives:
"This place is always supplied by a noble man being not of the order
of the garter, to carrie the sword."
So that's it for the inscription mystery; it doesn't identify
Oxford by name, but it does accurately describe his category :
nobleman, not of the Garter.>>
----------------------------------------------------------
Edmund Spenser The Man on the Stair
http://www.sirbacon.org/mspenser.htm
Monument to Spenser in Westminster Abbey as in the Works, 1679 Edition
by MATHER WALKER
The Father of Salomon's House was further described as wearing a black
robe with a beard that was cut round and was of the same color as his
hair although somewhat lighter. This matches exactly the Van Somer
portrait of Francis Bacon at middle age. Bacon is wearing a black robe.
He has his beard cut round, and it is of the same color as his hair
although somewhat lighter. So the Rosicrucian in The New Atlantis
matches both the man who addressed the Paris group and the contemporary
description of Francis Bacon. Although the people at the gathering in
Paris are described as all of "mature years", no description is given of
the age of the man who addressed them. Bacon would have been quite young
at the time. The text of the address was Bacon's. I think Bacon was
describing an actual event, and was the person who addressed the Paris
group. The allusion indicates it was in the role of a teacher and
authority figure of the Rosicrucians that Bacon addressed them. These
people, described as distinguished and mature, were patiently awaiting
his appearance. Who were these people who accepted young Francis Bacon
as an authority figure, and in what capacity was he addressing them?
What group of people was capable of recognizing the 16-year- old Francis
Bacon as the extraordinary being that he really was?
In his book, "The Sufis", Idries Shah said The Rosicrucian Fraternity
had it derivation from the Sufi order of "The Path of the Rose".
Certainly all three of these: The Rosicrucian Fraternity; much of
Bacon's thought; and the Shakespeare corpus, have a Sufi tinge. In his
"Novum Organum", Bacon, as was his custom, began with an idea originated
by someone else, then modified, perfected, and reworked it to suit his
own needs. Bacon utilized a Ladder of Generalization (The Ladder of The
Intellect) in connection with a mechanism which enabled the inquirer to
proceed from the almost infinite diversity of nature up to a very
limited number of basic qualities. (The Alphabet of Nature). It was this
very restricted terminus to the operation that made an inquiry machine
feasible. The idea of The Ladder of The Intellect originated from a man
who, according to Idries Shah, was a Sufi. This man was Raymon Lull, a
medieval philosopher and mystic who, as a result of a vision he had on a
mountain top, tried to formulate a universal art of discovery. Moreover,
In "Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz", Cambridge 1952,
Professor R.A. Nicholso points out that certain portions of the
Shakespearean corpus have an uncanny resemblance to passages in earlier
Sufi material. The play, "The Taming of the Shrew" is Sufi doctrine
through and through (see my essay on the play). And Idries Shah also
says there is much material that seems to come from Sufi
sources in the plays.
------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
JerryDowns
>> is fairly certain, do we know what date it was painted?
>
> (Both are 1588 Hilliard's and Oxfordians are
> ONLY GUESSING that they are both portraits of De Vere.)
If I remember correctly, the similar portrait had a hanging banner
inscribed to the effect "The Earl of Oxford," so it isn't merely a
guess. However, I am also left with the impression that the
label was not original. If I run across the info I will forward it.
Hotson's energy notwithstanding, the portrait is not likely to
be of Shakespeare. Jerry Downs
KQKnave
the original flavor of his writing because he uses italics
for emphasis constantly. I'll use asterisks to mark the italic
words here. Someone is going to have to explain to me what
Hotson means by Shakespeare's " 'Sonnets' portrait-Device 1588".
I guess Hotson has decided that that is what the miniature is,
but I don't have the entire book here to check.
Curly brackets {} are mine.
The title of this chapter in "Shakespeare by Hilliard" is
"Through Humility, Genius".
"By way of introduction let us take this surmise: that no possible
soil could have produced wisdom such as Shakespeare's but a ground
of *humility*. His friend John Davies of Hereford, noting that
'Humility is the surest foundation of highest glory' and
'doth best become the highest knowledge', prescribes it for
'the Poet of skill divine':
*Humility*, that can advance thy *name*
To highest height of *immortalitie*.
*Microcosmos. Works,* ed. Grosart, 1.81a
And in our day the insight of Sir Walter Raleigh (*Shakespeare*,
1907) finds *ingrained humility* as Shakespeare's great gift,
'his native endowment'.
If so, and (as Cicero puts it) 'that best becomes a man
which is really his own', must not the Mercury-colours chosen
by Shakespeare for his 'Sonnets' portrait-Device 1588 both
perfectly become him and present him as he is - *in the humility
of steadfast love for his Friend?*
Let us see. First, for his White and Black, the two *native*
or *true* colours. 'If the colour white shall be joined with
the black...they signify a person of lifelong humility' (Coronato
Accolti, *Del significato de' colori*, 1568, 38v-39.)
*In silver and sable to declare
The steadfast love he alwaies meant.*
Lord Vaux (Tottel's *Miscellany* 1557 no. 211)
qu. Puttenham, Dd 3
Next, for the Violet (Purple, Murrey) of his hat and his
amethyst brooch: 'By the [flower] Violet is signified a most
excellent virtue called Humility.'{a footnote gives the source
for that last quote: "Henry Goldingham, *The Garden Plot*, a poem
(with commentary on its symbolism) dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.
Pr. from MS. Harl. 6902 with spelling modernized by the Rev.
F. Wrangham, 1825, 70."} Further, 'It may seeme strange that such
a poore violet virtue [sc. Humility] should ever [i.e. always]
dwell with Honour.'{Another footnote gives the source of this
one: "Owen Feltham, *Resolves*, 1628, 2.6.12, qu. OED; and
compare Nicholas Breton, '*Oh that same minde of humilitie...
Doth show the honour that will ever hold.' Pasquils Mistresse*,
1600, C2."}
White and Black, Violet: humble Mercury's colours. These
three stand strikingly together, marked as his choice both for
painted *impresa* and for poetic image. In Sonnet 12, leading
with the white and black of *day* sunk in *night*, he goes on-
123 *When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls or silver'd oer with white*...[all silver'd]
And his *Murrey* drives home the *steadfast love* of his
White and Black: 'The *Murrey* reveals steadfast will in love....*Murrey*.
Steadfastness of soul in loving, and contempt of life for [the
sake of] the beloved.'{footnote here gives the source of that
last quote: "'Salda voglia il *Morello* apre in amore....*Morello*.
Fermezza d'animo in amare, & dispregio di vita per la cosa amata.'
*Il Mostruosissimo Mostro di Giovanni De' Rinaldi...del Significata
de Colori*, 1584, A3, A3v}
The three chosen by Shakespeare to declare the personal
*high thought* or *resolution* of his portrait-Device executed
by Nicholas Hilliard are the identical three first named by that
master-painter in his *Arte of Limning*. Enumerating the seven
basic colours, he lists *white, black, murrey, red, blue, green,
yellow.* And he adds that these colours (after white and black,
both in the diamond) are represented in 'the five principal
precious stones bearing colour', beginning with 'ammatist orient
for murrey'. (Sir John Pope-Hennessy, *A Lecture on Nicholas
Hilliard, 1949, 21.)
Pursuing the Amethyst farther, we find Frances Meres
(Palladis Tamia 85v) quoting the 14th-century Joannes Gorus on
the Christian virtues shown by the colours of the stone:
As that Amethist is good which is beautified with the
mixture of two colours, purple and violet, so is that
temperance profitable, that is adorned with two vertues,
with charitie, and humility.
*I. a S. Geminiano lib. 2. de metallis & lapid. cap. 36*
As well in painting as in poetry, the amethyst's colours
always identify Christ Jesus the Saviour. 'Violet, the Word
Made Flesh'; 'Cloathed with Christs Purpur-Mantle'; and (Donne)
'So, in his purple wrapp'd receive me Lord.'
*Humility* is the root of Christian strength. Thus the
Regalia declare the source whence Britain's monarchy draws its
sanction: at the tip of the King's Sceptre stands a cross on an
*amethyst*; and on the top of the Mound, again an *amethyst*.
'Thy Sum of Duty let Two Words contain...Be Humble, and be
Just.' (Prior, after Micah.)
Since the Amethyst signifies Humility - 'the love divine'-
and Mercury, Roger Bacon found it rational to conclude that the
Christian religion is under the planet Mercury. (Lynn Thorndike,
*History of Magic and Experimental Science*, 2.672) And for
Neckam, Mercury corresponded to *Pietas*, gift of the Holy Spirit.
Many astrologers held that his good influence 'makes *Ecclesiasticall*
Men; yea oft...Bishops and Prelats' - 'such as with painful wit
Have dived for knowledge in the Sacred Writ'. Lodge writes, 'O
*Mercurie*,...in former ages Devotion was thy father.'* In the
second century of our era, San Mercuriale was the first Bishop
of Forli, where his church stands today. And Pope John II - A.D.
532-535 under Justinian - was also named *Mercurias*."
{end of selection from Hotson}
******
It's all quite mad, isn't it? By the end of this chapter, Hotson
manages to suck in Keats, Coleridge, Schlegel and probably the
janitor of his flat to show some connection between Mercury,
the color amethyst (or was that purple? or violet?) and humility
(or was that devotion? or Christianity?). The light violet color
is the color of the hat the gentleman in the painting is wearing,
and Hotson is trying to deduce what the painting "means". Rather
than try to nail down the precise meaning of that particular color,
Hotson just throws together a hodgepodge of color references, some
violet, some purple, some amethyst, as if they all referred to
the same thing. But Shakespeare doesn't use the word "murrey",
and his references to purple have nothing to do with humility,
but with passion, usually either love or battle. In fact,
Shakespeare seems to associate white with humility in the only
instance I can find, the "surplice of humility" in AWEW 1.3.94-95.
Nor does Shakespeare appear to associate Mercury with humility
either. Instead, he associates him with quick travel, speed or
strength, or as a messenger. Certainly he is not referring to
humility at the end of LLL: "The words of Mercury are harsh
after the words of Apollo."
One of the things that's hilarious about Hotson's argument in
this book is that he spends a great deal of time saying that
you have to be like Sherlock Holmes and look at all the details
and clues, etc. But he almost completely ignores the motto on
the miniature, surely one of the major clues as to what it's
about (if indeed it is "about" anything other than a personal
remembrance). The motto is "Attici amoris ergo", which someone
here with good knowledge of Latin grammar can translate correctly. I
think it means something like "Athenian loves, therefore", which
sounds to me like what the man will concern himself with after
his wife has died.
Here's a url for the miniature:
http://art-art.jp/it/info.asp?id=2431&back=%2Fit%2Fsearch%2Easp%3Fab%3DM%2
6st%3Dtt
or
Gary Kosinsky
>I'm going to let Hotson speak for himself. It's hard to capture
>the original flavor of his writing because he uses italics
>for emphasis constantly.
You're right, at times Hotson's style can be hard to follow.
And you have been able to zoom in on one section that is particularly
so.
>I'll use asterisks to mark the italic
>words here. Someone is going to have to explain to me what
>Hotson means by Shakespeare's " 'Sonnets' portrait-Device 1588".
>I guess Hotson has decided that that is what the miniature is,
>but I don't have the entire book here to check.
Yes, that's correct.
>Curly brackets {} are mine.
>The title of this chapter in "Shakespeare by Hilliard" is
>"Through Humility, Genius".
In fairness, the chapter you quote is chapter 11 beginning on
page 187 of Hotson's book. Much of what he says refers back to points
he's made in earlier parts of the book. Trying to read this chapter
without having read the earlier chapters would make a confusing
passage even more confusing, if not incomprehensible.
SNIP of quoted passage
>It's all quite mad, isn't it?
Hotson's style may be confusing at times, but I think it's
unfair to characterize it as "mad".
>By the end of this chapter, Hotson
>manages to suck in Keats, Coleridge, Schlegel and probably the
>janitor of his flat to show some connection between Mercury,
>the color amethyst (or was that purple? or violet?) and humility
>(or was that devotion? or Christianity?). The light violet color
>is the color of the hat the gentleman in the painting is wearing,
>and Hotson is trying to deduce what the painting "means". Rather
>than try to nail down the precise meaning of that particular color,
>Hotson just throws together a hodgepodge of color references, some
>violet, some purple, some amethyst, as if they all referred to
>the same thing. But Shakespeare doesn't use the word "murrey",
>and his references to purple have nothing to do with humility,
>but with passion, usually either love or battle. In fact,
>Shakespeare seems to associate white with humility in the only
>instance I can find, the "surplice of humility" in AWEW 1.3.94-95.
>Nor does Shakespeare appear to associate Mercury with humility
>either. Instead, he associates him with quick travel, speed or
>strength, or as a messenger.
The thing is, how Shakespeare used the words isn't that
important. The question would be: what were the symbolic conventions
associated with miniature portrait painting? And in an earlier
chapter Hotson cites references that associate the colour purple with
the god Mercury.
>Certainly he is not referring to
>humility at the end of LLL: "The words of Mercury are harsh
>after the words of Apollo."
Funnily enough, Hotson pays special attention to this line in
his chapter on LLL.
>
>One of the things that's hilarious about Hotson's argument in
>this book is that he spends a great deal of time saying that
>you have to be like Sherlock Holmes and look at all the details
>and clues, etc. But he almost completely ignores the motto on
>the miniature, surely one of the major clues as to what it's
>about (if indeed it is "about" anything other than a personal
>remembrance). The motto is "Attici amoris ergo", which someone
>here with good knowledge of Latin grammar can translate correctly. I
>think it means something like "Athenian loves, therefore", which
>sounds to me like what the man will concern himself with after
>his wife has died.
Hotson does not "almost completely ignore the motto on the
minature". He spends a few pages noting the importance of the motto
in minature paintings, and then in Chapter 5 spends a few more pages
discussing the motto of this particular painting. (Which, as I
mentioned in an earlier post, Hotson translates as: "Athenians because
of love".)
- Gary Kosinsky
KQKnave
writes:
>On 18 Apr 2003 01:41:24 GMT, kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote:
>
>>I'm going to let Hotson speak for himself. It's hard to capture
>>the original flavor of his writing because he uses italics
>>for emphasis constantly.
>
> You're right, at times Hotson's style can be hard to follow.
>And you have been able to zoom in on one section that is particularly
>so.
>
>
>>I'll use asterisks to mark the italic
>>words here. Someone is going to have to explain to me what
>>Hotson means by Shakespeare's " 'Sonnets' portrait-Device 1588".
>>I guess Hotson has decided that that is what the miniature is,
>>but I don't have the entire book here to check.
>
> Yes, that's correct.
>
>>Curly brackets {} are mine.
>>The title of this chapter in "Shakespeare by Hilliard" is
>>"Through Humility, Genius".
>
> In fairness, the chapter you quote is chapter 11 beginning on
>page 187 of Hotson's book. Much of what he says refers back to points
>he's made in earlier parts of the book. Trying to read this chapter
>without having read the earlier chapters would make a confusing
>passage even more confusing, if not incomprehensible.
I don't have any trouble understanding what he's saying. But his
arguments are silly. Right from the beginning, it makes no
sense. His first assertion is just something he made up:
"that no possible soil could have produced wisdom such as
Shakespeare's but a ground of *humility*." That's nuts all by itself,
but when he quotes John Davies, a contemporary of Shakespeare's,
and Sir Walter Raleigh from 1907 (not the Raleigh of Shakespeare's
time) and Cicero, to support it, that's plainly absurd!
And I can find you references that associate the color emerald with
Mercury.
But the whole point of Hotson's book is that the miniature is telling
a story, one that relates to Shakespeare and things that he wanted
expressed. The idea that Hilliard could express some secret story
related to Shakespeare's sonnets by himself is crazy. Hotson in
this chapter is trying to tell us that Hilliard in 1588 recognized
Shakespeare's genius, (long before any of his works were written,
5 years before Greene mentioned the "upstart) associated genius
with humility, and then created a miniature to reflect those ideas. That's
nuts!
>>Certainly he is not referring to
>>humility at the end of LLL: "The words of Mercury are harsh
>>after the words of Apollo."
>
> Funnily enough, Hotson pays special attention to this line in
>his chapter on LLL.
>
>>
>>One of the things that's hilarious about Hotson's argument in
>>this book is that he spends a great deal of time saying that
>>you have to be like Sherlock Holmes and look at all the details
>>and clues, etc. But he almost completely ignores the motto on
>>the miniature, surely one of the major clues as to what it's
>>about (if indeed it is "about" anything other than a personal
>>remembrance). The motto is "Attici amoris ergo", which someone
>>here with good knowledge of Latin grammar can translate correctly. I
>>think it means something like "Athenian loves, therefore", which
>>sounds to me like what the man will concern himself with after
>>his wife has died.
>
> Hotson does not "almost completely ignore the motto on the
>minature". He spends a few pages noting the importance of the motto
>in minature paintings, and then in Chapter 5 spends a few more pages
>discussing the motto of this particular painting. (Which, as I
>mentioned in an earlier post, Hotson translates as: "Athenians because
>of love".)
In the context of the book as a whole he does. Instead he spends
a huge amount of time weaving implausible theories based on
what he imagines is a color relationship between amethyst and Mercury,
and another imaginary relationship between Mercury and Shakespeare.
Bob Grumman
Finally, something I can wholeheartedly agree with you on, Jim! It's the old
decided what you want a text, or the equivalent, to REALLY say, and then
search all of the time's literature for bits that seem to you to support
your interpretation.
--Bob G.
John W. Kennedy
> But Shakespeare doesn't use the word "murrey",
He would have known it, though; it's used in heraldry.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Never try to take over the international economy based on a radical
feminist agenda if you're not sure your leader isn't a transvestite."
-- "She-Spies"
Gary Kosinsky
SNIP
>I don't have any trouble understanding what he's saying. But his
>arguments are silly. Right from the beginning, it makes no
>sense. His first assertion is just something he made up:
>"that no possible soil could have produced wisdom such as
>Shakespeare's but a ground of *humility*."
The complete opening sentence is: "By way of introduction let
us take this surmise: that no possible soil could have produced wisdom
such as Shakespeare's but a ground of humility." My dictionary
defines 'surmise' as "suppose something without having evidence; a
guess". Hotson is admitting up front that he is speculating in this
particular section.
>That's nuts all by itself,
Why is his assertion nuts? I think it is a bit pretentious,
in a way often encountered in reading about Shakespeare, but I don't
see why it should be described as "nuts".
>but when he quotes John Davies, a contemporary of Shakespeare's,
>and Sir Walter Raleigh from 1907 (not the Raleigh of Shakespeare's
>time) and Cicero, to support it, that's plainly absurd!
But the quote from Davies echoes the idea that great poets are
grounded in humility. Again, I have no idea whether that is true or
not, or even what it means, but what is wrong with backing up your
assertions with quotes from like-minded people?
SNIP
>> The thing is, how Shakespeare used the words isn't that
>>important. The question would be: what were the symbolic conventions
>>associated with miniature portrait painting? And in an earlier
>>chapter Hotson cites references that associate the colour purple with
>>the god Mercury.
>
>And I can find you references that associate the color emerald with
>Mercury.
Bingo! Now we're talking! Hotson was a very knowledgeable
person in Elizabethan matters. Reading his book I recognized that he
might be cherry-picking items from his extensive readings to back up
his case. However, until someone else with a detailed knowledge of
Elizabethan matters could counter with other examples, I couldn't be
sure. This is why I'm looking for articles that have been published
by other Elizabethan experts that debunk Hotson's theory on his own
grounds.
SNIP
>Instead he spends
>a huge amount of time weaving implausible theories based on
>what he imagines is a color relationship between amethyst and Mercury,
>and another imaginary relationship between Mercury and Shakespeare.
But is he only imagining a colour relationship between
amethyst and Mercury? On page 60 he writes:
" And the Amethyst announces 'Mercury'. According to Sir John
Ferne in 1586...the colour Purple 'signifieth in Plannets, Mercury; in
Precious stones, Amethist; in Flowers, the Violet'. Sir Henry Spelman
gives the same: 'Purpureus-Pourpre-Mercury-Amethistus'...".
I read this to mean that there was a relationship or
correspondence in the Elizabethan mind between purple, Mercury and
amethyst.
As far as the Mercury/Shakespeare relationship goes, I think
this would be the weak point for anyone trying to counter his argument
ie: the portrait is a man in the semblance of Mercury, Shakespeare was
commonly known as Mercury to his contemporaries, therefore the picture
is of Shakespeare. To be fair to Hotson, there is more to his
argument than this. But this sleight-of-hand does comprise a portion
of that argument, and is, I think, suspect.
- Gary Kosinsky
Gary Kosinsky
wrote:
But the thing is, Hotson **did** find examples to support his
interpretation, many of which are from the Elizabethan Age. Thus, as
I mentioned to Jim, I would like to find counter-examples from some
other Elizabethan expert which debunk Hotson's theory.
- Gary Kosinsky
KQKnave
writes:
>On 18 Apr 2003 05:42:13 GMT, kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote:
>SNIP
>
>>I don't have any trouble understanding what he's saying. But his
>>arguments are silly. Right from the beginning, it makes no
>>sense. His first assertion is just something he made up:
>>"that no possible soil could have produced wisdom such as
>>Shakespeare's but a ground of *humility*."
>
> The complete opening sentence is: "By way of introduction let
>us take this surmise: that no possible soil could have produced wisdom
>such as Shakespeare's but a ground of humility." My dictionary
>defines 'surmise' as "suppose something without having evidence; a
>guess". Hotson is admitting up front that he is speculating in this
>particular section.
>
>>That's nuts all by itself,
>
> Why is his assertion nuts? I think it is a bit pretentious,
>in a way often encountered in reading about Shakespeare, but I don't
>see why it should be described as "nuts".
It's nuts because of the assumption made regarding wisdom. It makes
as little sense as saying "Nothing could have served as the foundation
for Shakespeare's wisdom other than the eating of cherry pie." It's nuts
to assume in the first place that anybody thought of Shakespeare
as wise in 1588 to begin with. It's nuts to think that foundations
of wisdom rest on one thing. It's nuts to even want to surmise any
particular thing about Shakespeare's wisdom, and then find quotes from
1600 and 1907 and 50 B.C. to "support it", unless you have some
preconceived theory about a miniature that you want to find the meaning
you want in it.
>>but when he quotes John Davies, a contemporary of Shakespeare's,
>>and Sir Walter Raleigh from 1907 (not the Raleigh of Shakespeare's
>>time) and Cicero, to support it, that's plainly absurd!
>
> But the quote from Davies echoes the idea that great poets are
>grounded in humility. Again, I have no idea whether that is true or
>not, or even what it means, but what is wrong with backing up your
>assertions with quotes from like-minded people?
Nothing, if you're just making things up. But if you want to convince a
rational
person such as myself that you should even begin to think that Shakespeare's
wisdom was grounded in humility, it would help if to quote a contemporary of
Shakespeare saying something to that effect. Instead, Hotson confuses
the issue, like he confuses the colors. He says Shakespeare's *wisdom*
is grounded in humility, then quotes Davies to the effect that humility
will make a great poet. What is the connection between "wisdom" and
being a great poet? I notice that Hotson doesn't quote Jonson, who was
a contemporary of Shakespeare and says of poetry and Shakespeare:
"...he/who casts to write a living line, must sweat,/(such as thine are)
and strike the second heat/ upon the muses anvil.../For a good poet's
made, as well as borne./ And such wert thou." No mention of humility
there.
Another thing that's funny about Hotson's use of Davies *Microcosmos*.
In that work, Davies refers to two players, "R.B." and "W.S.", and says
that they are admired for their painting (Burbage) and poesie (Shakespeare).
He says they have "wit", "courage" and are "generous...in mind and mood".
Nothing about humility there.
>SNIP
>
>>> The thing is, how Shakespeare used the words isn't that
>>>important. The question would be: what were the symbolic conventions
>>>associated with miniature portrait painting? And in an earlier
>>>chapter Hotson cites references that associate the colour purple with
>>>the god Mercury.
>>
>>And I can find you references that associate the color emerald with
>>Mercury.
>
> Bingo! Now we're talking! Hotson was a very knowledgeable
>person in Elizabethan matters.
Actually, he only appears that way to persons who don't peruse the
literature themselves. He has lots of Official Quotes all over the place,
but they don't make any sense if you think about them.
>Reading his book I recognized that he
>might be cherry-picking items from his extensive readings to back up
>his case. However, until someone else with a detailed knowledge of
>Elizabethan matters could counter with other examples, I couldn't be
>sure. This is why I'm looking for articles that have been published
>by other Elizabethan experts that debunk Hotson's theory on his own
>grounds.
>
>SNIP
>>Instead he spends
>>a huge amount of time weaving implausible theories based on
>>what he imagines is a color relationship between amethyst and Mercury,
>>and another imaginary relationship between Mercury and Shakespeare.
You snipped an important objection of mine, that Hilliard would have known
anything about Shakespeare's sonnets, his wisdom or relationship to
Mercury in 1588, and then put them all in symbolic form into a miniature.
That's
nuts.
> But is he only imagining a colour relationship between
>amethyst and Mercury? On page 60 he writes:
>
>" And the Amethyst announces 'Mercury'. According to Sir John
>Ferne in 1586...the colour Purple 'signifieth in Plannets, Mercury; in
>Precious stones, Amethist; in Flowers, the Violet'. Sir Henry Spelman
>gives the same: 'Purpureus-Pourpre-Mercury-Amethistus'...".
Do you know the difference between the god Mercury and the planet
Mercury?
> I read this to mean that there was a relationship or
>correspondence in the Elizabethan mind between purple, Mercury and
>amethyst.
>
> As far as the Mercury/Shakespeare relationship goes, I think
>this would be the weak point for anyone trying to counter his argument
>ie: the portrait is a man in the semblance of Mercury,
Actually, the portrait doesn't look anything like Mercury. He looks like
a blonde man with a violet colored hat.
>Shakespeare was
>commonly known as Mercury to his contemporaries, therefore the picture
>is of Shakespeare.
He was? In 1588? In 1614, Thomas Freeman in a sonnet refers to
Shakespeare's *brain* as being swift like Mercury's:
"Shakespeare, that nimble Mercury thy brain,
Lulls many hundred Argus-eyes asleep"
>To be fair to Hotson, there is more to his
>argument than this. But this sleight-of-hand does comprise a portion
>of that argument, and is, I think, suspect.
The entire book is pile of ridiculous quote-mongering. He believes that
LLL was written in 1588, which is nonsense.
Gary Kosinsky
>In article <3ea05b52...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky)
>writes:
>> Bingo! Now we're talking! Hotson was a very knowledgeable
>>person in Elizabethan matters.
>
>Actually, he only appears that way to persons who don't peruse the
>literature themselves.
And you're talking to one of them. (And just how many people
here **have** perused books like "Selectorum Emblematum Centuria
Secunda", or William Cuningham's "The Cosmographical Glasse" of 1559?)
SNIP
>You snipped an important objection of mine, that Hilliard would have known
>anything about Shakespeare's sonnets, his wisdom or relationship to
>Mercury in 1588, and then put them all in symbolic form into a miniature.
>That's
>nuts.
Now that you mention it, that would have been before V&A or
RoL were published. Which is a problem. And the earliest reference
to Shakespeare as Mercury that Hotson can find is a questionable
reference by Spenser in 1590 that may or may not be about Shakespeare
and may or may not reference Mercury. Definitely a problem.
>> But is he only imagining a colour relationship between
>>amethyst and Mercury? On page 60 he writes:
>>
>>" And the Amethyst announces 'Mercury'. According to Sir John
>>Ferne in 1586...the colour Purple 'signifieth in Plannets, Mercury; in
>>Precious stones, Amethist; in Flowers, the Violet'. Sir Henry Spelman
>>gives the same: 'Purpureus-Pourpre-Mercury-Amethistus'...".
>
>Do you know the difference between the god Mercury and the planet
>Mercury?
To continue with Hotson then:
"As G.B. della Porta further reports.....'Carved in an Amethyst is
frequently found a young man, with caduceus, hat, and on his feet
winged shoes, sometimes holding a cock in his left hand, whom all know
at sight to be Mercury; nor does he differ in power from the stone, by
which its wearers are promised wisdom and wit; and more besides, since
his nature is versatile."
Della Porta wrote that in 1560. Again, there does seem to be
some sort of connection in the Elizabethan mind between Mercury and
the amythyst.
>> I read this to mean that there was a relationship or
>>correspondence in the Elizabethan mind between purple, Mercury and
>>amethyst.
>>
>> As far as the Mercury/Shakespeare relationship goes, I think
>>this would be the weak point for anyone trying to counter his argument
>>ie: the portrait is a man in the semblance of Mercury,
>
>Actually, the portrait doesn't look anything like Mercury. He looks like
>a blonde man with a violet colored hat.
Well, yes he does look like a blonde man with a violet
coloured hat. But this brings up Hotson's ideas on miniatures. Do
you agree with his argument that miniatures contained symbolic hints
as to what they were about? But, by tradition, they didn't spell out
their meaning in a blatant or obvious form? I thought this was one of
the most interesting ideas he put forward in his book. Only I wish he
had applied himself to analyzing a few more miniatures whose sitters'
identities are known.
SNIP
- Gary Kosinsky
KQKnave
writes:
> Well, yes he does look like a blonde man with a violet
>coloured hat. But this brings up Hotson's ideas on miniatures. Do
>you agree with his argument that miniatures contained symbolic hints
>as to what they were about? But, by tradition, they didn't spell out
>their meaning in a blatant or obvious form? I thought this was one of
>the most interesting ideas he put forward in his book. Only I wish he
>had applied himself to analyzing a few more miniatures whose sitters'
>identities are known.
>
No, I don't agree with him. I'm looking at one of Hilliard's miniatures
right now, the one in the Riverside color plates section. The symbolism
is obvious: orange flames form the background, symbolizing....gosh, would
you believe the young man's passion? The young man is holding a locket himself,
probably that of the beloved this miniature was intended for. And he's not
wearing a hat.
You don't have to read William Cuningham's "The Cosmographical Glasse" of
1559 to see that Hotson's method has nothing to do with logic, reason or
scholarship.
Elizabeth Weir
Does it require an authority to debunk Hotson, the silliest
of the Strat novelizers? Hilliard's miniature is dated 1588.
The future Burgher had just landed in London, no doubt broke.
How could Hotson imagine that the arrivee could afford
the courtier's clothes or pay Hilliard's fee?
On the other hand Hotson has probably united author and work
since the sitter's genetic checklist is a perfect match for the
physiognomy and odd coloring of the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon.
KQKnave
writes:
> To continue with Hotson then:
>
>"As G.B. della Porta further reports.....'Carved in an Amethyst is
>frequently found a young man, with caduceus, hat, and on his feet
>winged shoes, sometimes holding a cock in his left hand, whom all know
>at sight to be Mercury; nor does he differ in power from the stone, by
>which its wearers are promised wisdom and wit; and more besides, since
>his nature is versatile."
>
> Della Porta wrote that in 1560. Again, there does seem to be
>some sort of connection in the Elizabethan mind between Mercury and
>the amythyst.
>
Who is G. B. della Porta? Is he English? Is he an acknowledged expert
on the relationship between stones, their colors and the gods they represent?
Or is he like the 1560 equivalent of those internet pages which tell
you the correlation of birthstones to the months of the year etc?. And why
would
you symbolize Mercury with a violet hat rather than a man with wings on his
boots or a cadeucus? Why be so subtle and mysterious? Or to put it
in Hotson's terms, would an Elizabethan have recognized merely the presence
of that color as representing Mercury? Does that mean that every purple
or violet object represented Mercury? If not, how do you know when it
does represent Mercury? Hotson treats the miniature as if were intended
to be hung in a museum, where every Elizabethan passing by could
respond to its "signals". But the miniatures were personal objects, intended
for at most two people. Thus whatever imagery is present is probably personal
to them, not some signal for the wider world. The motto is therefore much
more likely to provide a clue to whatever "meaning" is in the miniature, but
Hotson would prefer to focus on dubious color coding.
Gary Kosinsky
>In article <3ea093f9...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky)
>writes:
>
>> Well, yes he does look like a blonde man with a violet
>>coloured hat. But this brings up Hotson's ideas on miniatures. Do
>>you agree with his argument that miniatures contained symbolic hints
>>as to what they were about? But, by tradition, they didn't spell out
>>their meaning in a blatant or obvious form? I thought this was one of
>>the most interesting ideas he put forward in his book. Only I wish he
>>had applied himself to analyzing a few more miniatures whose sitters'
>>identities are known.
>>
>
>No, I don't agree with him. I'm looking at one of Hilliard's miniatures
>right now, the one in the Riverside color plates section. The symbolism
>is obvious: orange flames form the background, symbolizing....gosh, would
>you believe the young man's passion? The young man is holding a locket himself,
>
>probably that of the beloved this miniature was intended for. And he's not
>wearing a hat.
>You don't have to read William Cuningham's "The Cosmographical Glasse" of
>1559 to see that Hotson's method has nothing to do with logic, reason or
>scholarship.
But I am reading Roy Strong's short biography of Nicholas
Hilliard and he writes: "And as in large-scale painting the miniatures
are sometimes a compilation of attributes to be read in the silent
language of renaissance allegory." (p. 11). I may be misunderstanding
Hotson - perhaps he didn't think **all** miniatures had to be complex
in their allegorical allusions. Perhaps the miniature you mention
("An Unknown Man against a background of flames") is simply a more
obvious allegorical picture than the "Cloud" picture. In her
biography of Hilliard, Erna Auerbach describes the young man in flames
as "...suffering as a martyr for his love." (p.137).
On the other hand, Strong notes that Hilliard actually wrote a
treatise called "Art of Limning". I suppose the sensible thing to do
would be to track down this book and see what Hilliard himself had to
say about the subject. Perhaps I will.
- Gary Kosinsky
Gary Kosinsky
Weir) wrote:
>gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote in message news:<3e9b3344...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>...
>> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
>> In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
>> by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
>> issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
>>
>> I think it's an interesting book. However, since it was
>> published in 1977, and since I haven't seen any reference to this
>> portrait being accepted as a Shakespeare portrait by anyone (ie. in
>> biographies or articles), I can only conclude it didn't make much of
>> an impression on anyone else.
>>
>> Does anyone know of any articles debunking Hotson's theory and
>> where I might find them?
>
>Does it require an authority to debunk Hotson, the silliest
>of the Strat novelizers? Hilliard's miniature is dated 1588.
Yes, it is.
>The future Burgher had just landed in London,
I don't think anyone is sure when Shakespeare arrived in
London.
> no doubt broke.
I don't think anyone is sure what Shakespeare's financial
position was in 1588.
>How could Hotson imagine that the arrivee could afford
>the courtier's clothes or pay Hilliard's fee?
As far as the clothes go, Hotson quotes someone named Ruscelli
writing in 1566 that:
"...in the Device it is not becoming that one should represent
men and women ordinarily dressed as they usually are, but that those
human figures one represents should somehow wear garments of a strange
fashion, and somewhat different from those in which we see them every
day." (p. 27)
So it's not clear to me whether the sitter would even have
been wearing those clothes, let allow own them.
As far as paying Hilliard, that would depend on what
Shakespeare's financial situation was (assuming the sitter was
Shakespeare), which we simply don't know. But it does raise the
question(s) of how much Hilliard charged for his work, and how people
arranged for his services. Which are good questions.
SNIP
- Gary Kosinsky
Gary Kosinsky
>In article <3ea093f9...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky)
>writes:
>
>> To continue with Hotson then:
>>
>>"As G.B. della Porta further reports.....'Carved in an Amethyst is
>>frequently found a young man, with caduceus, hat, and on his feet
>>winged shoes, sometimes holding a cock in his left hand, whom all know
>>at sight to be Mercury; nor does he differ in power from the stone, by
>>which its wearers are promised wisdom and wit; and more besides, since
>>his nature is versatile."
>>
>> Della Porta wrote that in 1560. Again, there does seem to be
>>some sort of connection in the Elizabethan mind between Mercury and
>>the amythyst.
>>
>
>Who is G. B. della Porta? Is he English? Is he an acknowledged expert
>on the relationship between stones, their colors and the gods they represent?
>Or is he like the 1560 equivalent of those internet pages which tell
>you the correlation of birthstones to the months of the year etc?.
He's some guy Hotson quotes who wrote in the mid-sixteenth
century. Other than that, I really don't know.
>And why
>would
>you symbolize Mercury with a violet hat rather than a man with wings on his
>boots or a cadeucus? Why be so subtle and mysterious? Or to put it
>in Hotson's terms, would an Elizabethan have recognized merely the presence
>of that color as representing Mercury? Does that mean that every purple
>or violet object represented Mercury?
In addition to the purple hat, there is also a purple-violet
jewel in the hat which Hotson says is an amethyst. Hotson claims
there are other clues as well that point to Mercury.
One of the problems here, is that Hotson includes a lot of
details in his book, intended to be cumulative in nature, which are
difficult to summarize in posts such as these. I fear I am doing a
disservice to Hotson's argument which, after all, takes him 200 pages
to make. Rather than have someone respond to my brief summary of
Hotson's work, I think it would be fairer to respond directly to
passages in the book. This was one of the reasons I was searching for
a critical review of the book itself.
Not to say that you haven't made some very good points.
BTW: where are those references that link Mercury to
turquoise?
>If not, how do you know when it
>does represent Mercury? Hotson treats the miniature as if were intended
>to be hung in a museum, where every Elizabethan passing by could
>respond to its "signals". But the miniatures were personal objects, intended
>for at most two people. Thus whatever imagery is present is probably personal
>to them, not some signal for the wider world. The motto is therefore much
>more likely to provide a clue to whatever "meaning" is in the miniature, but
>Hotson would prefer to focus on dubious color coding.
But again, Hotson does spend time on the motto.
- Gary Kosinsky
Bob Grumman
>The entire book is pile of ridiculous quote-mongering. He believes that
>LLL was written in 1588, which is nonsense.
Phooey, I was agreeing with all you said in this thread up to
here, Jim. Why is it nonsense? I like 1588, myself. LLL
is Shakespeare's worst plotted comedy--a situation out in a
nowhereland full of eccentrics that allows him to parody other
writers, one of the things I think writers with a bent for comedy
like best to do when young, and play word-games, Shakespeare's
favorite activity, and one he'd probably had to keep to a minimum in
the history plays I think he was working on at the same time--his own,
collaborations, and others'. And the best parts in LLL are
almost certainly the additions later made and referred to on the
title-page of the version published in 1598. It's sophisticated only
in its language, its artificial language, which is what most writers
who go on to greatness, especially word-mad ones like Shakespeare, are earliest
sophisticated in.
--Bob G.
bobgr...@nut-n-but.net
>> where I might find them?
>
>Does it require an authority to debunk Hotson, the silliest
>of the Strat novelizers? Hilliard's miniature is dated 1588.
>The future Burgher had just landed in London, no doubt broke.
>How could Hotson imagine that the arrivee could afford
>the courtier's clothes or pay Hilliard's fee?
How do you know all this, Elizabeth? For instance, how do you know there was a
fee? Perhaps Hilliard was taken by the young man's looks and portrayed him in
clothes Hilliard made up, or lent to the young man. Or maybe Shakespeare
briefly had a patron. Or had money and was vain enough to order the portrait.
>On the other hand Hotson has probably united author and work
>since the sitter's genetic checklist is a perfect match for the
>physiognomy and odd coloring of the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon.
Sorry, no, Elizabeth. The Renaissance Genius (you really must capitalize the
latter, Elizabeth!) Franics Bacon was at that time posing for the Statue of
Liberty.
--Bob G.
KQKnave
writes:
>>The entire book is pile of ridiculous quote-mongering. He believes that
>>LLL was written in 1588, which is nonsense.
>
>Phooey, I was agreeing with all you said in this thread up to
>here, Jim. Why is it nonsense?
For one thing, because Hotson has no evidence for that particular
date (other than his usual quote-mongering).
>I like 1588, myself. LLL
>is Shakespeare's worst plotted comedy--a situation out in a
>nowhereland full of eccentrics that allows him to parody other
>writers, one of the things I think writers with a bent for comedy
>like best to do when young, and play word-games, Shakespeare's
>favorite activity, and one he'd probably had to keep to a minimum in
>the history plays I think he was working on at the same time--his own,
>collaborations, and others'.
I don't see how any of this follows. I don't think it's his worst plotted
comedy, TGV is (and poorly written at times too). LLL is very polished, both
in verse and in plot. It's very imaginitive, and unlike TGV, it's not
limited to series of dialogues. I also don't see how you would know
that this is the kind of play that a young Shakespeare might write.
1H6 and TGV seem to me to be the young Shakespeare.
Launce with his dog seems to me to be a primitive type of clown,
perhaps someone in the acting troupe could do a routine with a dog. Holofernes
is an original clown type, something that a more assured Shakespeare
could come up with, like Dogberry or Andrew Aguecheek, in fact
LLL is full of original clowns.
I don't see it as a "situation out of nowhere". If Shakespeare set
himself the problem of showing the difference between true love
and the words that men use to woo women, and the silly games
they play, Shakespeare's plot is one possible solution.
>And the best parts in LLL are
>almost certainly the additions later made and referred to on the
>title-page of the version published in 1598.
Now you've lost me completely. You can claim any date if you claim
that the "best parts" are due to revision. You can't arbitrarily decide
which parts have been revised.
The masque of the muscovites seems to be related to the Gray's Inn
revels of 1594/5, and there is a reference to a poem by Chapman
from 1594, so 1595 seems right to me.
> It's sophisticated only
>in its language, its artificial language, which is what most writers
>who go on to greatness, especially word-mad ones like Shakespeare, are
>earliest sophisticated in.
It's great in its perception of the difference between true love and the
words men use to woo women, and in its recognizance of the fact that
the sophisticated women portrayed in this play would be likely to see through
them.
KQKnave
writes:
>On 19 Apr 2003 02:31:39 GMT, kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote:
>
>>In article <3ea093f9...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary
>Kosinsky)
>>writes:
>>
>>> To continue with Hotson then:
>>>
>>>"As G.B. della Porta further reports.....'Carved in an Amethyst is
>>>frequently found a young man, with caduceus, hat, and on his feet
>>>winged shoes, sometimes holding a cock in his left hand, whom all know
>>>at sight to be Mercury; nor does he differ in power from the stone, by
>>>which its wearers are promised wisdom and wit; and more besides, since
>>>his nature is versatile."
>>>
>>> Della Porta wrote that in 1560. Again, there does seem to be
>>>some sort of connection in the Elizabethan mind between Mercury and
>>>the amythyst.
>>>
>>
>>Who is G. B. della Porta? Is he English? Is he an acknowledged expert
>>on the relationship between stones, their colors and the gods they
>represent?
>>Or is he like the 1560 equivalent of those internet pages which tell
>>you the correlation of birthstones to the months of the year etc?.
>
> He's some guy Hotson quotes who wrote in the mid-sixteenth
>century. Other than that, I really don't know.
But why does he quote him? Because he happens to supply a random
quote that fits his thesis. A genuine researcher would find an authority
to back himself up, not search wildly for random quotes.
>>And why
>>would
>>you symbolize Mercury with a violet hat rather than a man with wings on his
>>boots or a cadeucus? Why be so subtle and mysterious? Or to put it
>>in Hotson's terms, would an Elizabethan have recognized merely the presence
>>of that color as representing Mercury? Does that mean that every purple
>>or violet object represented Mercury?
>
> In addition to the purple hat, there is also a purple-violet
>jewel in the hat which Hotson says is an amethyst. Hotson claims
>there are other clues as well that point to Mercury.
But you can't tell what color the "jewels" are from the picture. The hat
and the " jewels" are painted in a uniform light violet color. Hotson
wants one of them to be an amethyst, that's all. In fact, looking at it
again, I can't tell if there are *any* jewels in the hat, it could be
just a cloth hatband with a feather.
>
> One of the problems here, is that Hotson includes a lot of
>details in his book, intended to be cumulative in nature, which are
>difficult to summarize in posts such as these.
It doesn't matter. All you have to do is show that one his suppositions
is wrong and the whole thing comes down.
> I fear I am doing a
>disservice to Hotson's argument which, after all, takes him 200 pages
>to make. Rather than have someone respond to my brief summary of
>Hotson's work, I think it would be fairer to respond directly to
>passages in the book. This was one of the reasons I was searching for
>a critical review of the book itself.
Sam Schoenbaum reviews it in the Times Literary Supplement, Oct 28,
1977.
> Not to say that you haven't made some very good points.
>
> BTW: where are those references that link Mercury to
>turquoise?
To emerald, but I don't think they apply here because they have to
do with Indian customs (India as in Calcutta).
>>If not, how do you know when it
>>does represent Mercury? Hotson treats the miniature as if were intended
>>to be hung in a museum, where every Elizabethan passing by could
>>respond to its "signals". But the miniatures were personal objects, intended
>>for at most two people. Thus whatever imagery is present is probably
>personal
>>to them, not some signal for the wider world. The motto is therefore much
>>more likely to provide a clue to whatever "meaning" is in the miniature, but
>>Hotson would prefer to focus on dubious color coding.
>
> But again, Hotson does spend time on the motto.
But not nearly enough. And he spends far too much time with color codes
and imaginary references to Shakespeare (like the one in Spenser's
Tears of the Muses). The Mercury references are nonsense, since
it's quite evident from the mentions of Shakespeare that no one mentioned
him in connection with Mercury until 1614, and that was a reference to
his quick mind. Let's look at it from another angle. There is at least one
entire
book on the subject of Mercury in Shakespeare's time. It's called
"The Mercurian Monarch - Magical Politics from Spenser to Pope" by
Douglas Brooke-Davies (1983). If you look in the index under Mercury,
you see that Mercury was associated with innumerable things, yet not
once does Brooke-Davies mention amethyst, or Shakespeare, in connection
with Mercury.
John W. Kennedy
> Does it require an authority to debunk Hotson, the silliest
> of the Strat novelizers? Hilliard's miniature is dated 1588.
> The future Burgher had just landed in London, no doubt broke.
> How could Hotson imagine that the arrivee could afford
> the courtier's clothes or pay Hilliard's fee?
> On the other hand Hotson has probably united author and work
> since the sitter's genetic checklist is a perfect match for the
> physiognomy and odd coloring of the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon.
Amazing how Weird Lizzie just keeps making up "facts", isn't it?
Gawd! Maybe there's something in Hotson's theory after all....
Bob Grumman
kqk...@aol.comcrashed says...
>
>In article <b7rae...@drn.newsguy.com>, Bob Grumman <Bob_m...@newsguy.com>
>writes:
>
>>>The entire book is pile of ridiculous quote-mongering. He believes that
>>>LLL was written in 1588, which is nonsense.
>>
>>Phooey, I was agreeing with all you said in this thread up to
>>here, Jim. Why is it nonsense?
>
>For one thing, because Hotson has no evidence for that particular
>date (other than his usual quote-mongering).
Just because his reasons for thinking LLL was written in 1588 are bad does not
make the date nonsense, which is what you were saying, in my view.
>>I like 1588, myself. LLL
>>is Shakespeare's worst plotted comedy--a situation out in a
>>nowhereland full of eccentrics that allows him to parody other
>>writers, one of the things I think writers with a bent for comedy
>>like best to do when young, and play word-games, Shakespeare's
>>favorite activity, and one he'd probably had to keep to a minimum in
>>the history plays I think he was working on at the same time--his own,
>>collaborations, and others'.
>
>I don't see how any of this follows. I don't think it's his worst plotted
>comedy, TGV is (and poorly written at times too).
This is all subjective. But I claim that LLL is not plotted. It's just a
situation: boys camp out, girls appear. That's it except for a few mechanical
set scenes, and various eccentrics that wander in and out. TGV--which may also
have been written in 1588--has an active plot, even though very clumsy at times.
I haven't an opinion on which had more poorly written passages but am sure both
did.
>LLL is very polished, both in verse and in plot.
LLL's polish may be a sign of servility to standard writing. TGV may seem more
poorly written because Shakespeare has started in it to break out into more
natural dialogue. I find LLL very stilted much of the time. I find TGV not
stilted but awkward at times.
>It's very imaginative,
Sorry, don't see it. The boys decide to be monks, that's the extent of the
narrative imaginativeness.
> and unlike TGV, it's not
>limited to series of dialogues.
Maybe I should reread it. That's the way I remember it, except for the funny
but hokey scene of the eavesdropping.
>I also don't see how you would know
>that this is the kind of play that a young Shakespeare might write.
Like all our opinion on this, that's subjective. I said why I thought it that.
A chance to make fun of euphuism, for example, and really indulge in word-play.
A situation, not a plot, so he can roam where he wants to.
I'm influenced, too, by the fact that my first serious play took off from LLL,
which I thought was based on a great idea poorly exploited. My women didn't
just show up, they pursued the boys into the wilderness--and the boys did things
to get away from them, and there were mistaken identities, and other boys came
into the plot pursuing the girls pursuing the boys, etc. I was 19. The
language was way less sophisticated than Shakespeare's, and my knowledge of life
less, though I got some things right. My plot was much better than his.
My theme was different, or its emphasis different: I was concerned with the call
of the body versus the needs of the mind, and the impingement of society on need
of solitude. Dang, I'm ready to rewrite the stupid thing. For quite a few
years I thought I would, but I haven't thought of doing so for twenty years or
more till now. But I don't have time to.
>1H6 and TGV seem to me to be the young Shakespeare.
I agree.
>Launce with his dog seems to me to be a primitive type of clown,
>perhaps someone in the acting troupe could do a routine with a dog.
Launce seems to me Shakespeare's first mature comic figure--someone to laugh
with rather than at. The clowns in LLL are parodies we're mostly to laugh at.
And it's mostly their affected speech that is funny, not their human actions.
>Holofernes
>is an original clown type, something that a more assured Shakespeare
>could come up with, like Dogberry or Andrew Aguecheek, in fact
>LLL is full of original clowns.
Maybe. But I put Launce in his class or higher--though I don't remember
Holofernes well enough to be sure.
>I don't see it as a "situation out of nowhere". If Shakespeare set
>himself the problem of showing the difference between true love
>and the words that men use to woo women, and the silly games
>they play, Shakespeare's plot is one possible solution.
I still claim it's a situation. And just showing the difference between
true love, etc., is a pretty weak problem for a whole play.
>>And the best parts in LLL are
>>almost certainly the additions later made and referred to on the
>>title-page of the version published in 1598.
>
>Now you've lost me completely. You can claim any date if you claim
>that the "best parts" are due to revision. You can't arbitrarily decide
>which parts have been revised.
I don't arbitrarily do that. We know from the title-page of LLL that some parts
were revised. Since there are scattered passages that seem to me
an order of magnitude better than the rest of the play, it makes sense to think
they were the revised parts. Of course, we can assume that Shakespeare would
not have improved over time, and that any revisions he might have made would not
be better than the rest of the play. In any case, I'm only talking about a
handful of short passages. My dating of the play depends on the play as a
whole, with or without the revisions, but taking into consideration that a few
indications of later writing can be ignored as probable revisions. If you can't
accept that, then I would ignore them as the occasional first glints of the
writer's later writing that most great writers' early works have.
>The masque of the muscovites seems to be related to the Gray's Inn
>revels of 1594/5, and there is a reference to a poem by Chapman
>from 1594, so 1595 seems right to me.
These are good points, but the fact that the play was revised makes them
inconclusive. The masque seems the kind of thing that would have been added for
a revival. As I say, I haven't read the play in a while, but isn't the masque
chunked in? I mean, it doesn't flow out of any narrative. The reference to a
poem by Chapman, I'd have to see. No reason Shakespeare could not have seen the
poem in manuscript years before it was published, though--or that Chapman might
not have been influenced by the play rather than the reverse.
>> It's sophisticated only
>>in its language, its artificial language, which is what most writers
>>who go on to greatness, especially word-mad ones like Shakespeare, are
>>earliest sophisticated in.
>
>It's great in its perception of the difference between true love and the
>words men use to woo women, and in its recognizance of the fact that
>the sophisticated women portrayed in this play would be likely to see through
>them.
But Shakespeare did this in all his romantic comedies. It would seem to be
something he knew from the age of 15 or earlier.
This is a fun discussion, I think. I wish I had time to reread the plays and
say something of substance. I can think of several interesting lines of
investigation, such as the evolution of Shakespeare comic characters.
--Bob G.
Gary Kosinsky
SNIP
>But you can't tell what color the "jewels" are from the picture. The hat
>and the " jewels" are painted in a uniform light violet color. Hotson
>wants one of them to be an amethyst, that's all. In fact, looking at it
>again, I can't tell if there are *any* jewels in the hat, it could be
>just a cloth hatband with a feather.
There is a larger jewel attached to the feather in the hat (in
addition to the smaller jewels that decorate the hatband). In the
copy I'm seeing, the jewel actually looks dark green, but for
something like this it would probably be best to see the original.
SNIP
>> I fear I am doing a
>>disservice to Hotson's argument which, after all, takes him 200 pages
>>to make. Rather than have someone respond to my brief summary of
>>Hotson's work, I think it would be fairer to respond directly to
>>passages in the book. This was one of the reasons I was searching for
>>a critical review of the book itself.
>
>Sam Schoenbaum reviews it in the Times Literary Supplement, Oct 28,
>1977.
Thank you! I will make it a point to look the article up.
SNIP
> There is at least one
>entire
>book on the subject of Mercury in Shakespeare's time. It's called
>"The Mercurian Monarch - Magical Politics from Spenser to Pope" by
>Douglas Brooke-Davies (1983). If you look in the index under Mercury,
>you see that Mercury was associated with innumerable things, yet not
>once does Brooke-Davies mention amethyst, or Shakespeare, in connection
>with Mercury.
Thank you again. I'll put this one down on the list as well.
- Gary Kosinsky
Elizabeth Weir
> Elizabeth Weir wrote:
> > Does it require an authority to debunk Hotson, the silliest
> > of the Strat novelizers? Hilliard's miniature is dated 1588.
> > The future Burgher had just landed in London, no doubt broke.
> > How could Hotson imagine that the arrivee could afford
> > the courtier's clothes or pay Hilliard's fee?
>
> > On the other hand Hotson has probably united author and work
> > since the sitter's genetic checklist is a perfect match for the
> > physiognomy and odd coloring of the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon.
>
> Amazing how Weird Lizzie just keeps making up "facts", isn't it?
>
> Gawd! Maybe there's something in Hotson's theory after all....
Fact: Strats, Rowse in particular, are very critical of Hotson.
Hotson is the Silly Goose of Stratfordianism. I know of at least
three journal articles [one by Rowse] attacking Hotson for
his lack of scholarly rigor. Hotson was also let go from a
teaching post in the 1970s, probably for publishing that
ridiculous book.
Elizabeth Weir
> >> Does anyone know of any articles debunking Hotson's theory and
> >> where I might find them?
> >
> >Does it require an authority to debunk Hotson, the silliest
> >of the Strat novelizers? Hilliard's miniature is dated 1588.
> >The future Burgher had just landed in London, no doubt broke.
> >How could Hotson imagine that the arrivee could afford
> >the courtier's clothes or pay Hilliard's fee?
>
> How do you know all this, Elizabeth? For instance, how do you know there was a fee?
Rita states on her Nashe website that Hilliard charged £6 for a
miniature [the average annual income for a laborer was £2 in
1588]. That's probably correct since his son and successor
Lawrence Hiliard once got £45 for a lot of six miniatures done
for James I. Hilliard was granted a patent by James I and
eventually got very rich from Court commissions.
> Perhaps
Perhaps? You can speculate all you want, Grumman, but keep
in mind that the Authorship Dispute will be resolved by facts,
not assumptions.
> Hilliard was taken by the young man's looks and portrayed him in
> clothes Hilliard made up, or lent to the young man.
And the facts to support that are where?
> Or maybe Shakespeare
> briefly had a patron.
I take note of your "maybe." You admit, Grumman, that there
are no facts at all to support the Strat claim that
the future Burgher was seeking patronage from Southampton.
There is, however, a plethora of fact to support the claim that
Bacon was seeking patronage from Essex and how better than
through Essex' intimate young friend Southampton. Bacon
had a powerful motive to dedicate the poem to Southampton and
in fact Bacon attained patronage from Essex in 1592 when the
V & A was being circulated in manuscript.
Strats have to remain stubbornly ignorant of the culture of
the Elizabethan Court to sustain the claim that the future
Burgher dedicated the V & A to Southampton to gain patronage.
> Or had money and was vain enough to order the portrait.
You and Hotson seem to think that assumptions and facts are
the same thing.
> >On the other hand Hotson has probably united author and work
> >since the sitter's genetic checklist is a perfect match for the
> >physiognomy and odd coloring of the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon.
>
> Sorry, no, Elizabeth. The Renaissance Genius (you really must capitalize the
> latter, Elizabeth!) Franics Bacon was at that time posing for the Statue of
> Liberty.
There's far more fact to support Bacon as the subject of both
Hilliard's miniature and the Saunders portrait starting with the
facts that Bacon already had one Hilliard and that Bacon was
a Saunders.
We don't know what the Burgher looked like. The ridiculous
Droeshout looks nothing like the Hilliard or the Saunders
but we do have enough images of Bacon from his youth and
middle age to know that his colouring and features are a
match for both paintings. The Hilliards--there are at least
three without provenances that match Bacon's features--and the
Saunders fill in a thirty year blank in which we have no
identified portraits of Bacon. That makes no sense because
Bacon was at Court during most of that period.
The English were plagued with amateur painters and inferior
professional painters so we don't have any really realistic
paintings of Bacon as we have from great Dutch portraits
of Essex and Southampton. Consequently we have many versions
of Bacon which nevertheless share common genetic traits in terms
of his eye, hair and beard coloring, baldness, his straight
nose and small mouth, eye lid fold, shape of ears, etc..
The several Hilliards, the Saunders and the VanMander
"chess portrait" all perfectly match Bacon's genetic check list
and in every case there is a physical resemblence to Bacon.
Elizabeth Weir
> On 18 Apr 2003 19:28:04 -0700, elizabe...@mail.com (Elizabeth
> Weir) wrote:
>
> >gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote in message news:<3e9b3344...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>...
> >> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
> >> In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
> >> by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
> >> issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
> >>
> >> I think it's an interesting book. However, since it was
> >> published in 1977, and since I haven't seen any reference to this
> >> portrait being accepted as a Shakespeare portrait by anyone (ie. in
> >> biographies or articles), I can only conclude it didn't make much of
> >> an impression on anyone else.
> >>
> >> Does anyone know of any articles debunking Hotson's theory and
> >> where I might find them?
> >
> >Does it require an authority to debunk Hotson, the silliest
> >of the Strat novelizers? Hilliard's miniature is dated 1588.
>
> Yes, it is.
>
> >The future Burgher had just landed in London,
>
> I don't think anyone is sure when Shakespeare arrived in
> London.
The date of Hathaway's last pregnancy and the appearance of
"Guillimus Shackspere" as a plaintiff show that he was still
in Stratford in 1585. Most chronologies date his arrival in
London in 1587 or 1588. If you subtract all the literary
evidence that does not directly connect the Burgher to the
Shakespeare works you have have the first empirical evidence
that he was in London in the record of his payment to a
theatre company in, iirc, 1594. The fact that "Shakespeare"
was paying a theatre company in 1594 and not the reverse
raises not only the question of why "Shakespeare" never
appears in any payment book for plays. It also raises the
possibility that the actual author of the Shakespeare plays
was also using the name "Shakespeare" in transactions with the
theatre companies. I wish I could find the webpage that stated
that a "Francis Bacon" secured a bond for the Globe but alas
I was an Oxfordian when I saw it.
> > no doubt broke.
>
> I don't think anyone is sure what Shakespeare's financial
> position was in 1588.
His father's financial position was very poor due to a multitude
of small law suits for unpaid debts. I assume that the son was
no richer than the father in 1588.
> >How could Hotson imagine that the arrivee could afford
> >the courtier's clothes or pay Hilliard's fee?
>
> As far as the clothes go, Hotson quotes someone named Ruscelli
> writing in 1566 that:
>
> "...in the Device it is not becoming that one should represent
> men and women ordinarily dressed as they usually are, but that those
> human figures one represents should somehow wear garments of a strange
> fashion, and somewhat different from those in which we see them every
> day." (p. 27)
Ruscelli is talking about costuming, not every day clothing.
> So it's not clear to me whether the sitter would even have
> been wearing those clothes, let allow own them.
Hilliard painted his face in the miniature and then filled in
a courtier's hat and doublet from some other sitter?
> As far as paying Hilliard, that would depend on what
> Shakespeare's financial situation was (assuming the sitter was
> Shakespeare), which we simply don't know.
The sitter looks very unlike the Droushout image.
> But it does raise the
> question(s) of how much Hilliard charged for his work, and how people
> arranged for his services. Which are good questions.
I cover Hilliard's rates in a post below.
Elizabeth Weir
> "Gary Kosinsky" <gk...@vcn.bc.ca> wrote
>
> > I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
> > In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
> > by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
> > issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
> http://www.deverestudies.org/index.html
>
> The same or different?
>
> http://www.antiquexplorer.com/Antiques/sept02.pdf
> http://art-art.jp/it/info.asp?id=2431&back=%2Fit%2Fsearch%2Easp%3Fab%3DM%26s
> t%3Dtt
> ----------------------------------------------
> Art Neuendorffer
You've taken the Unknown Man With Hand from the faded
cover of an antiques magazine. His eyes appear to be
colourless.
Other jpgs of Hilliard's miniature show the Unknown Man
with brown or brown-hazel eyes [just as Bacon's are described]
while Hilliard shows Oxford as having very light blue eyes.
If both miniatures are of Oxford why would Hilliard paint Oxford
with brown eyes in one and light blue eyes in the other?
You may have noticed that Hilliard dated *both* the Unknown Man
and Oxford's miniatures to 1588 yet their faces are quite
different. Oxford had a soft round face while the Unknown Man
has definite cheek bones. Oxford is wearing a gorgeous
white silk and gold doublet befitting an earl while the
Unknown Man is dressed like a stylish courtier but not a
prince of the realm. I've stared at a lot of portraits of
earls and courtiers but I've never seen an earl in casual
dress. It was probably against the rules.
Elizabeth Weir
> On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 23:10:14 -0400, "Art Neuendorffer"
> <aneuendor...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> >"Gary Kosinsky" <gk...@vcn.bc.ca> wrote
> >
> >> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
> >> In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
> >> by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
> >> issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
> >----------------------------------------------
> >http://www.deverestudies.org/index.html
> >
> > The same or different?
> >
> >http://www.antiquexplorer.com/Antiques/sept02.pdf
> >http://art-art.jp/it/info.asp?id=2431&back=%2Fit%2Fsearch%2Easp%3Fab%3DM%26s
> >t%3Dtt
> >----------------------------------------------
> >Art Neuendorffer
>
>
> portrait and I came up empty. And here you zoom in on two examples.
>
> As far as the comparison to the DeVere portrait goes, there is
> definitely a resemblance. How certain is it that that is a portrait
> of Eddy?
I believe that the Hilliard of Oxford is the only reliable image
we have of him other than a small crude engraving. There's an
Oxfordian webpage that essentially dismisses most all the other
portraits of Oxford. None of them resemble the Hilliard in
any event. I'm assuming that Oxford's extreme poverty caused
him to sell off his possessions including his portraits.
Kathman is correct that the Ashbourne is of Lord Mayor Hammersley,
not Oxford. I put both in a picture editor and the Folger is
right that a Hammersley portrait was altered to make it look
like someone else.
I don't know why Kathman or the Folger don't go online
and find Hugh Hammersley's other portrait posted by the
Hammersley family on their genealogy page. Despite the fact
that his hair has been painted out and his eyebrows reduced,
both paintings are clearly of Hugh Hammersley--the features
are identical. It would be fascinating to know why someone
had a painter alter the Hammersley.
Bob Grumman
elizabe...@mail.com says...
>
>bobgr...@nut-n-but.net wrote in message news:<b7re1...@drn.newsguy.com>...
>> >> Does anyone know of any articles debunking Hotson's theory and
>> >> where I might find them?
>> >
>> >Does it require an authority to debunk Hotson, the silliest
>> >of the Strat novelizers? Hilliard's miniature is dated 1588.
>> >The future Burgher had just landed in London, no doubt broke.
>> >How could Hotson imagine that the arrivee could afford
>> >the courtier's clothes or pay Hilliard's fee?
>>
>>How do you know all this, Elizabeth? For instance, how do you know there was a
>>fee?
>
>miniature [the average annual income for a laborer was Ł2 in
>1588]. That's probably correct since his son and successor
>eventually got very rich from Court commissions.
>
>> Perhaps
>
>Perhaps? You can speculate all you want, Grumman, but keep
>in mind that the Authorship Dispute will be resolved by facts,
>not assumptions.
A speculation is not an assumption, wack. In any case, nothing you've said
about the miniature is other than speculation. You have no record of
payment for the particular miniature we are talking about. You speculate there
was a fee and that Shakespeare would not have been able to afford it and that no
one would have paid it for him.
>> Hilliard was taken by the young man's looks and portrayed him in
>> clothes Hilliard made up, or lent to the young man.
>
>And the facts to support that are where?
Same place as the facts to support the opposite. In fact, Gary posted that what
I said MIGHT be the case was, from something he read about the practice of
miniaturists of the time, and we have to consider all possibilities when there
is no hard evidence, which is the case here.
>> Or maybe Shakespeare
>> briefly had a patron.
>
>I take note of your "maybe." You admit, Grumman, that there
>are no facts at all to support the Strat claim that
>the future Burgher was seeking patronage from Southampton.
When did I do that? His preface to Venus and Adonis is clearly an attempt to
win patronage from Southampton, which he clearly got. But Southampton is not
the only one he may have gotten patronage from.
>There is, however, a plethora of fact to support the claim that
>Bacon was seeking patronage from Essex and how better than
>through Essex' intimate young friend Southampton. Bacon
>had a powerful motive to dedicate the poem to Southampton and
>in fact Bacon attained patronage from Essex in 1592 when the
>V & A was being circulated in manuscript.
>
>Strats have to remain stubbornly ignorant of the culture of
>the Elizabethan Court to sustain the claim that the future
>Burgher dedicated the V & A to Southampton to gain patronage.
I don't know why we're discussing this. All I will say is that it was common
practice for writers to write poems in attempts to gain patronage.
>> Or had money and was vain enough to order the portrait.
>
>You and Hotson seem to think that assumptions and facts are
>the same thing.
Right. That's why I use "maybe" and "perhaps."
>> >On the other hand Hotson has probably united author and work
>> >since the sitter's genetic checklist is a perfect match for the
>> >physiognomy and odd coloring of the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon.
>>
>> Sorry, no, Elizabeth. The Renaissance Genius (you really must capitalize the
>> latter, Elizabeth!) FranCIS Bacon was at that time posing for the Statue of
>> Liberty.
>
>There's far more fact to support Bacon as the subject of both
>Hilliard's miniature and the Saunders portrait starting with the
>facts that Bacon already had one Hilliard and that Bacon was
>a Saunders.
>We don't know what the Burgher looked like.
We have two certain likenesses of him.
>The ridiculous
>Droeshout looks nothing like the Hilliard or the Saunders
>but we do have enough images of Bacon from his youth and
>middle age to know that his colouring and features are a
>match for both paintings. The Hilliards--there are at least
>three without provenances that match Bacon's features--and the
>Saunders fill in a thirty year blank in which we have no
>identified portraits of Bacon. That makes no sense because
>Bacon was at Court during most of that period.
>
>The English were plagued with amateur painters and inferior
>professional painters so we don't have any really realistic
>paintings of Bacon as we have from great Dutch portraits
>of Essex and Southampton. Consequently we have many versions
>of Bacon which nevertheless share common genetic traits in terms
>of his eye, hair and beard coloring, baldness, his straight
>nose and small mouth, eye lid fold, shape of ears, etc..
>The several Hilliards, the Saunders and the VanMander
>"chess portrait" all perfectly match Bacon's genetic check list
>and in every case there is a physical resemblence to Bacon.
And not one of them says it is of Bacon. Nor does any Bacon scholar say any of
them is of him that I know of, just wacks like you.
--Bob G.
KQKnave
writes:
>On 20 Apr 2003 01:24:47 GMT, kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote:
>SNIP
>
>
>>But you can't tell what color the "jewels" are from the picture. The hat
>>and the " jewels" are painted in a uniform light violet color. Hotson
>>wants one of them to be an amethyst, that's all. In fact, looking at it
>>again, I can't tell if there are *any* jewels in the hat, it could be
>>just a cloth hatband with a feather.
>
> There is a larger jewel attached to the feather in the hat (in
>addition to the smaller jewels that decorate the hatband). In the
>copy I'm seeing, the jewel actually looks dark green, but for
>something like this it would probably be best to see the original.
It wouldn't matter. There is no way to tell what it is. I've seen the
plates he includes with the book and you can't tell from those either.
Even if you could tell the color and it was purple, amethyst is not
the only purple gemstone (tourmaline, garnet are two that I know).
>SNIP
>
>>> I fear I am doing a
>>>disservice to Hotson's argument which, after all, takes him 200 pages
>>>to make. Rather than have someone respond to my brief summary of
>>>Hotson's work, I think it would be fairer to respond directly to
>>>passages in the book. This was one of the reasons I was searching for
>>>a critical review of the book itself.
>>
>>Sam Schoenbaum reviews it in the Times Literary Supplement, Oct 28,
>>1977.
>
> Thank you! I will make it a point to look the article up.
I can tell you what he says. He's more charitable than I am, but he's
skeptical. He pointed out something I missed when I quoted Jonson:
Jonson compares Shakespeare to Apollo and Mercury a couple of
lines above what I quoted. But he also says:
"In identifying Apollo, Dr. Hotson performs acrobatic feats without
quite disarming our consciousness of the meagreness of the
iconographical details - a hand, a ruff-cuff, and some clouds - he
has to work with. For Mercury he produces more voluminous
evidence, not all of it persuasive. Noting that the little is the
"mercurial finger", Dr. Hotson makes much of the fact that this
digit is separated from the others clutching Apollo's index finger:
emphasis by separation points to Mercury. All right; but the
index finger of the same hand is even more prominently parted
from the others, a fact which does not interest Dr. Hotson until
much later, when he remarks that this finger signifies Apollo.
On the basis of such reasoning, the hand with its Mercurial and
Apollonian fingers, could belong to either deity. Or neither."
and:
"Other recalcitrant problems intrude. Although Hilliard himself
fought a losing battle with insolvency in his Gutter Lane house-
cum-studio, he catered for the beautiful people of his day,
especially the circle clustering round Leicester. Portrait-painting,
he firmly believed, was not for the hoi-polloi. As he tells us
in his manuscript *Treatise Concerning the Art of Limning, "it
is a thing apart from all other painting or drawing, and tendeth
not to common men's use", but "is for the service of noble
persons very meet in small volumes in private manner for them
to have the portraits and pictures of themselves."
The are several problems with the Mercury/Shakespere correspondence.
One is that no one explicitly mentioned Mercury in connection with
Shakespeare until 1614 (Freeman), yet the portrait was executed
in 1588. Another is that the sum total of the comparisons to Mercury
is two, one in 1614, the other 1623. Still another is that it is probable
that the two writers who mention Mercury are not thinking about
Mercury and all his properties, but about Shakespeare's quick mind.
The quick mind lead to something quick, Mercury. That is probably
the only reason Mercury is brought in, yet Hotson wants to connect
all the other properties of Mercury to Shakespeare. Schoenbaum
says:
"Dr. Hotson must somehow show that Shakespeare was popularly
associated with Mercury. He points to Thomas Freeman's eulogy,
in 1614, of "Shakespeare, that nimble Mercury", and the allusions
to Shakespeare as both Apollo and Mercury in Jonson's celebrated
tribute. But mostly Dr. Hotson must by indirections find directions
out, and the indirections tend to be very indirect. Mercury has
many attributes. He is, as we are reminded, poet, courtier, butler,
teacher, companion, and manager of mirth; he is gentle, sweet,
and a double-dealer. It therefore follows that when anybody identifies
Shakespeare with any of these characteristics, he is thinking of
Mercury. All those allusions to gentle Shakespeare recall his
Mercurial guise. In Eikonoklastes Milton describes Shakespeare
as "one whom we well know was the closet companion" of Charles
I in his prison solitude - thus showing that Milton viewed Shakespeare
as companionable Mercury. Not all readers will find Mercury in
these passages, and we tend to lose sight of the fact that Hilliard
painted his miniature in 1588."
[snip]
Basically what you have is:
A portrait executed in 1588 of a blond man that doesn't look
like any other portrait of Shakespeare.
The man is wearing a hat.
The hat may have a jewel in it.
The jewel could be anything.
The hat has a violet color.
Violet CAN be associated with Mercury.
Most images of the day involving Mercury showed winged feet,
hat, or a cadeucus. The painting has none of these.
A purple hat can be...just a purple hat.
Hotson must make the assumption that whenever anyone
in 1588 saw the color purple, he thought "Mercury". That's just nonsense.
Hotson then has to show that whenever someone thought of
Mercury, they thought of Shakespeare. This connection was
not made until 1614, and even there Freeman was saying
only that the quickness of Shakespeare's mind was like Mercury.
The part about the sonnets and Lord Strange is just another
far-out connection, I'm not going to bother refuting that except
to say that Hotson should have counted, for example, the
number of times the word "strange" is repeated in one act of
Macbeth (6 times in act 1), or MAAN (5 times in act 4 sc 1 alone),
not just in Love's Labour's Lost.
Gary Kosinsky
Weir) wrote:
SNIP
>Fact: Strats, Rowse in particular, are very critical of Hotson.
>Hotson is the Silly Goose of Stratfordianism. I know of at least
>three journal articles [one by Rowse] attacking Hotson for
>his lack of scholarly rigor.
Elizabeth, if you have them handy, could you give me
references for these articles? I'd be interested in reading them.
Thanks.
- Gary Kosinsky
Gary Kosinsky
Weir) wrote:
>gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote in message news:<3ea0e10f...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>...
>> On 18 Apr 2003 19:28:04 -0700, elizabe...@mail.com (Elizabeth
>> Weir) wrote:
SNIP
>> >The future Burgher had just landed in London,
>>
>> I don't think anyone is sure when Shakespeare arrived in
>> London.
>
>The date of Hathaway's last pregnancy and the appearance of
>"Guillimus Shackspere" as a plaintiff show that he was still
>in Stratford in 1585.
But does this show that he was **continously** in Stratford in
1585, or even earlier?
>Most chronologies date his arrival in
>London in 1587 or 1588.
I think they probably do, and I've never understood why.
Granted we have no hard evidence that he was in London at an early
date. But then we don't have that much hard evidence to indicate that
he was continously in Stratford in the early 1580's. Seems to me that
if we're allowed to speculate that he was in Stratford in the early to
mid-1580's, we can just as easily speculate that he wasn't.
>If you subtract all the literary
>evidence that does not directly connect the Burgher to the
>Shakespeare works you have have the first empirical evidence
>that he was in London in the record of his payment to a
>theatre company in, iirc, 1594.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or something
like that?
> The fact that "Shakespeare"
>was paying a theatre company in 1594 and not the reverse
>raises not only the question of why "Shakespeare" never
>appears in any payment book for plays. It also raises the
>possibility that the actual author of the Shakespeare plays
>was also using the name "Shakespeare" in transactions with the
>theatre companies. I wish I could find the webpage that stated
>that a "Francis Bacon" secured a bond for the Globe but alas
>I was an Oxfordian when I saw it.
>
>> > no doubt broke.
>>
>> I don't think anyone is sure what Shakespeare's financial
>> position was in 1588.
>
>His father's financial position was very poor due to a multitude
>of small law suits for unpaid debts. I assume that the son was
>no richer than the father in 1588.
Wasn't this discussed a couple of months ago? I thought his
father actually owned a fair amount of property in Stratford. I'm
aware he had some legal difficulties, but it's not clear to me that
his father was really in such a poor financial position.
>> >How could Hotson imagine that the arrivee could afford
>> >the courtier's clothes or pay Hilliard's fee?
>>
>> As far as the clothes go, Hotson quotes someone named Ruscelli
>> writing in 1566 that:
>>
>> "...in the Device it is not becoming that one should represent
>> men and women ordinarily dressed as they usually are, but that those
>> human figures one represents should somehow wear garments of a strange
>> fashion, and somewhat different from those in which we see them every
>> day." (p. 27)
>
>Ruscelli is talking about costuming, not every day clothing.
Fair enough. And [speculation alert!] isn't it possible that
that was what the subject was wearing ie costuming?
>> So it's not clear to me whether the sitter would even have
>> been wearing those clothes, let allow own them.
>
>Hilliard painted his face in the miniature and then filled in
>a courtier's hat and doublet from some other sitter?
Or from his imagination, yes. Again - total speculation on my
part based on my unfamilarity with the techniques and procedures of
artists in general, let alone Elizabethan artists.
>> As far as paying Hilliard, that would depend on what
>> Shakespeare's financial situation was (assuming the sitter was
>> Shakespeare), which we simply don't know.
>
>The sitter looks very unlike the Droushout image.
True, but they were done by two different artists, thirty-five
years apart.
SNIP
- Gary Kosinsky
Gary Kosinsky
Weir) wrote:
>Other jpgs of Hilliard's miniature show the Unknown Man
>with brown or brown-hazel eyes [just as Bacon's are described]
>while Hilliard shows Oxford as having very light blue eyes.
It should be pointed out that there are **two** copies of the
minature "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand issuing from a Cloud". At the
time Hotson wrote his book, one was in the Victoria and Albert Museum,
and Hotson owned the other.
As you point out, jpg reproductions can differ quite
dramatically. FWIW, one of the copies (the V&A one) reproduced in
Hotson's book shows the subject with blue eyes. The other isn't very
clear.
- Gary Kosinsky
Gary Kosinsky
Weir) wrote:
>I believe that the Hilliard of Oxford is the only reliable image
>we have of him other than a small crude engraving.
And yet Art says it isn't all that reliable. I'm surprised to
learn we don't have a reliable image of Oxford ie: a large portrait
titled and dated by some master painter, as we do of many others of
the Elizabethan nobility.
- Gary Kosinsky
lyra
> Gary Kosinsky wrote in message news:<3ea0e10f...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>...
> > On 18 Apr 2003 19:28:04 -0700,Elizabeth Weir wrote:
> > >Gary Kosinsky wrote in message news:<3e9b3344...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>...
> > >> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
> > >> In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
> > >> by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
> > >> issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
<snip>
> appears in any payment book for plays. It also raises the
> possibility that the actual author of the Shakespeare plays
> was also using the name "Shakespeare" in transactions with the
> theatre companies. I wish I could find the webpage that stated
> that a "Francis Bacon" secured a bond for the Globe but alas
> I was an Oxfordian when I saw it.
There's a reference to Anthony Bacon and the Globe, on this
page...
It is a long page, and I found it froze the screen, so don't visit
unless you want to risk it.
SIR FRANCIS BACON'S
CIPHER STORY.
DISCOVERED AND DECIPHERED BY
ORVILLE W. OWEN, M. D.
VOL. II.
http://members.tripod.com/~neuro_net/fbacncs2.htm
(excerpt)
"A natural comment is, how could these masks be used during the
lifetime of the alleged authors? In the decipherings which will appear
in their regular order, I have found an epitome of the lives of
Shakespeare, Marlow, Green, Burton, Peele and Spenser, under whose
names Bacon concealed the identity of his writings, the circumstances
under which they were employed and the sums of money paid to each for
the use of his name.
Anthony Bacon, the foster-brother of Francis, was the unknown owner
of the Globe Theatre. Shakespeare, while uneducated, possessed a
shrewd wit and some talent as an actor. He received, as a bribe, a
share in the proceeds of the theatre, and was the reputed manager.
Bacon, with his court education and aristocratic associations, could
not be known as the author of plays or the associate of play actors,
and put Shakespeare forward as the mask which covered his greatest
work."
Gary Kosinsky
>In article <3ea2121b...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky)
>writes:
>
>>On 20 Apr 2003 01:24:47 GMT, kqk...@aol.comcrashed (KQKnave) wrote:
>>SNIP
>>>Sam Schoenbaum reviews it in the Times Literary Supplement, Oct 28,
>>>1977.
>>
>> Thank you! I will make it a point to look the article up.
>
>I can tell you what he says.
SNIP
Thank-you for the excerpts, Jim.
>Basically what you have is:
>
>A portrait executed in 1588 of a blond man that doesn't look
>like any other portrait of Shakespeare.
>
>The man is wearing a hat.
>
>The hat may have a jewel in it.
>
>The jewel could be anything.
>
>The hat has a violet color.
>
>Violet CAN be associated with Mercury.
>
>Most images of the day involving Mercury showed winged feet,
>hat, or a cadeucus. The painting has none of these.
>
>A purple hat can be...just a purple hat.
>
>Hotson must make the assumption that whenever anyone
>in 1588 saw the color purple, he thought "Mercury". That's just nonsense.
>
>Hotson then has to show that whenever someone thought of
>Mercury, they thought of Shakespeare. This connection was
>not made until 1614, and even there Freeman was saying
>only that the quickness of Shakespeare's mind was like Mercury.
I'm sensing you're not sold, then, on Hotson's theory?
Thanks again for the critical feedback.
- Gary Kosinsky
Elizabeth Weir
[...]
> >Perhaps? You can speculate all you want, Grumman, but keep
> >in mind that the Authorship Dispute will be resolved by facts,
> >not assumptions.
>
> A speculation is not an assumption, wack.
An assumption is something you take for granted without
proof. Look it up.
> In any case, nothing you've said
> about the miniature is other than speculation. You have no record of
> payment for the particular miniature we are talking about.
You--and the rest of the Strats--have no record of payment
to the Burgher for any of the plays.
And isn't it interesting, Grumman, that nearly all the
other playwrights contemporary to the Burgher are shown
in the records to have received payments for their scripts.
And even more interesting is the fact that "Shakespeare"
is shown in the Inns of Court revels account book for
having two plays played at the Inns of Court and yet
for having received NO payment.
How can all this be, Grumman? It makes no sense at all . . .
unless the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon was writing
the Shakespeare works.
> You speculate there
> was a fee and that Shakespeare would not have been able to afford it and that no
> one would have paid it for him.
I'm not speculating that there was a fee. Hilliard
received fees, in fact a fortune in commissions during
his career which, as a spendthrift, he blew away.
Hilliard also had a patent from the Court for the
covering engraved reproductions of all his works as
well.
> >> Hilliard was taken by the young man's looks and portrayed him in
> >> clothes Hilliard made up, or lent to the young man.
> >
> >And the facts to support that are where?
>
> Same place as the facts to support the opposite.
Unbelievable how you Strats rush to cover for each other.
There is no evidence, not even a hint of it, that
Hilliard "made up" or "lent" the young man clothes.
Hilliard painted the rich, the royal and the famous.
He was no Bruegel.
> In fact, Gary posted that what
> I said MIGHT be the case was, from something he read about the practice of
> miniaturists of the time, and we have to consider all possibilities when there
> is no hard evidence, which is the case here.
That's pretty definite.
> >> Or maybe Shakespeare
> >> briefly had a patron.
> >
> >I take note of your "maybe." You admit, Grumman, that there
> >are no facts at all to support the Strat claim that
> >the future Burgher was seeking patronage from Southampton.
>
> When did I do that? His preface to Venus and Adonis is clearly an attempt to
> win patronage from Southampton,
Hardly. Strats are so hard up for facts that
they must manufacture them. There is Z E R O evidence
that Southampton patronized the Burgher. Except for what
sounds like a payoff carried from Southampton to the
Stratford Burgher mentioned in Rowe's light weight bio.
Common sense tells us that Southampton, who was piss poor
just as his father before him was piss poor, had no cash
for patronage but Southampton was in the perfect position
to carry his dearest friend Essex' considerablecash to Stratford
on behalf of Essex just when Essex was pinned to the mat by the
Privy Council on the allegation that Essex was providing
patronage to the concealed author of the then-anonymous
play Richard II.
> which he clearly got. But Southampton is not
> the only one he may have gotten patronage from.
All right, Grumman. Put your evidence that Southampton
gave patronage to the Burgher on the table. Consider the
space below to be the table.
-----------You---Don't---Have---The---Proof--------------
-----------==--------------------------------------------
> >There is, however, a plethora of fact to support the claim that
> >Bacon was seeking patronage from Essex and how better than
> >through Essex' intimate young friend Southampton. Bacon
> >had a powerful motive to dedicate the poem to Southampton and
> >in fact Bacon attained patronage from Essex in 1592 when the
> >V & A was being circulated in manuscript.
> >
> >Strats have to remain stubbornly ignorant of the culture of
> >the Elizabethan Court to sustain the claim that the future
> >Burgher dedicated the V & A to Southampton to gain patronage.
>
> I don't know why we're discussing this. All I will say is that it was common
> practice for writers to write poems in attempts to gain patronage.
If you can come up with proof that Southampton, who was the
poorest peer in the realm after the destitute Oxford, gave
any patronage--a pence--to the Burgher for the V & A or
Lucrece I will become a Strat on the spot. You have
only *assumptions* which you confuse with fact.
> >> Or had money and was vain enough to order the portrait.
> >
> >You and Hotson seem to think that assumptions and facts are
> >the same thing.
>
> Right. That's why I use "maybe" and "perhaps."
That's all ya got, Grumman.
> >> >On the other hand Hotson has probably united author and work
> >> >since the sitter's genetic checklist is a perfect match for the
> >> >physiognomy and odd coloring of the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon.
> >>
> >> Sorry, no, Elizabeth. The Renaissance Genius (you really must capitalize the
> >> latter, Elizabeth!) FranCIS Bacon was at that time posing for the Statue of
> >> Liberty.
> >
> >There's far more fact to support Bacon as the subject of both
> >Hilliard's miniature and the Saunders portrait starting with the
> >facts that Bacon already had one Hilliard and that Bacon was
> >a Saunders.
>
> >We don't know what the Burgher looked like.
>
> We have two certain likenesses of him.
Bull. Strats wish.
> >The ridiculous
> >Droeshout looks nothing like the Hilliard or the Saunders
> >but we do have enough images of Bacon from his youth and
> >middle age to know that his colouring and features are a
> >match for both paintings. The Hilliards--there are at least
> >three without provenances that match Bacon's features--and the
> >Saunders fill in a thirty year blank in which we have no
> >identified portraits of Bacon. That makes no sense because
> >Bacon was at Court during most of that period.
> >
> >The English were plagued with amateur painters and inferior
> >professional painters so we don't have any really realistic
> >paintings of Bacon as we have from great Dutch portraits
> >of Essex and Southampton. Consequently we have many versions
> >of Bacon which nevertheless share common genetic traits in terms
> >of his eye, hair and beard coloring, baldness, his straight
> >nose and small mouth, eye lid fold, shape of ears, etc..
> >The several Hilliards, the Saunders and the VanMander
> >"chess portrait" all perfectly match Bacon's genetic check list
> >and in every case there is a physical resemblence to Bacon.
>
> And not one of them says it is of Bacon. Nor does any Bacon scholar say any of
> them is of him that I know of, just wacks like you.
It's pretty extraordinary that the Saunders not only looks
like Bacon, is the right age, has the same uncommon genetics
and that Bacon descends from the Saunder's family line. All the
Strats have is the ridiculous Droeshout, a parody no doubt
commissioned by the master parodist Jonson.
Greg Reynolds
> gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote in message news:<3ea0e10f...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>...
> > On 18 Apr 2003 19:28:04 -0700, elizabe...@mail.com (Elizabeth
> > Weir) wrote:
> >
> > >gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote in message news:<3e9b3344...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>...
> > >> I've been reading Leslie Hotson's "Shakespeare by Hilliard".
> > >> In it, he makes a case for an Elizabethan miniature portrait painted
> > >> by Nicholas Hilliard (currently called "Unknown Man Clasping a Hand
> > >> issuing from a Cloud") as being a portrait of William Shakespeare.
> > >>
> > >> I think it's an interesting book. However, since it was
> > >> published in 1977, and since I haven't seen any reference to this
> > >> portrait being accepted as a Shakespeare portrait by anyone (ie. in
> > >> biographies or articles), I can only conclude it didn't make much of
> > >> an impression on anyone else.
> > >>
> > >> Does anyone know of any articles debunking Hotson's theory and
> > >> where I might find them?
> > >
> > >Does it require an authority to debunk Hotson, the silliest
> > >of the Strat novelizers? Hilliard's miniature is dated 1588.
Elizabeth gets debunked a lot so she ought to know.
> > Yes, it is.
> >
> > >The future Burgher had just landed in London,
So he was the London Gentleman at this time. Say so.
> > I don't think anyone is sure when Shakespeare arrived in
> > London.
>
> The date of Hathaway's last pregnancy and the appearance of
> "Guillimus Shackspere" as a plaintiff show that he was still
> in Stratford in 1585.
Not the births of Hamnet and Judith. They were baptized
Feb 2, 1585, so minus some gestation, please. You're at 1584
on that one.
> Most chronologies date his arrival in
> London in 1587 or 1588. If you subtract all the literary
> evidence that does not directly connect the Burgher to the
> Shakespeare works you have have the first empirical evidence
> that he was in London in the record of his payment to a
> theatre company in, iirc, 1594. The fact that "Shakespeare"
> was paying a theatre company in 1594 and not the reverse
> raises not only the question of why "Shakespeare" never
> appears in any payment book for plays. It also raises the
> possibility that the actual author of the Shakespeare plays
> was also using the name "Shakespeare" in transactions with the
> theatre companies. I wish I could find the webpage that stated
> that a "Francis Bacon" secured a bond for the Globe but alas
> I was an Oxfordian when I saw it.
So Oxfordians are resourceful, BUT special pleaders on behalf of
renaissance genius Francis Bacon are just scatterbrains? Okay.
> > > no doubt broke.
> >
> > I don't think anyone is sure what Shakespeare's financial
> > position was in 1588.
>
> His father's financial position was very poor due to a multitude
> of small law suits for unpaid debts. I assume that the son was
> no richer than the father in 1588.
You really don't need to tell us that you are assuming.
> > >How could Hotson imagine that the arrivee could afford
> > >the courtier's clothes or pay Hilliard's fee?
> >
> > As far as the clothes go, Hotson quotes someone named Ruscelli
> > writing in 1566 that:
> >
> > "...in the Device it is not becoming that one should represent
> > men and women ordinarily dressed as they usually are, but that those
> > human figures one represents should somehow wear garments of a strange
> > fashion, and somewhat different from those in which we see them every
> > day." (p. 27)
>
> Ruscelli is talking about costuming, not every day clothing.
Plus, it's a painting!
Elizabethan Photoshop!
> > So it's not clear to me whether the sitter would even have
> > been wearing those clothes, let allow own them.
>
> Hilliard painted his face in the miniature and then filled in
> a courtier's hat and doublet from some other sitter?
Ever been to a tack room?
> > As far as paying Hilliard, that would depend on what
> > Shakespeare's financial situation was (assuming the sitter was
> > Shakespeare), which we simply don't know.
>
> The sitter looks very unlike the Droushout image.
Oh, I thought you said Sister...
You know you make me want Droeshout
Kick my heels up ... Droeshout
Throw my hands up ... Droeshout
Throw my head back ... Droeshout
Come on now
Don't forget to say you WILL
Don't forget to say
Yeah, yeah, yeah
-O'Kelly Isley, Ronald Isley, Rudolph Isley
> > But it does raise the
> > question(s) of how much Hilliard charged for his work, and how people
> > arranged for his services. Which are good questions.
>
> I cover Hilliard's rates in a post below.
They seem high--thanks for covering them.
Elizabeth Weir
Here's the Rowse citation:
Title: SCHOLARS AND CRACKPOTS , By: Rowse, A.L.,
Contemporary Review, 00107565, Jan95, Vol. 266,
Issue 1548
Here's a few snips in which Rowse, in effect, calls
Hotson "blind" and "a psychological case" but still
milder than some of the insulting things Rowse has
to say about Hotson:
But Hotson was ready to go much further about Shakespeare.
He wrote a whole book, Shakespeare by Hilliard: A Portrait
Deciphered. This refers to the well-known miniature of an
Unknown Man clasping a Hand from a Cloud. Now we all know
what Shakespeare looked like from the authentic portrait
in the First Folio. He had an exceptional brain-pan, a tall
dome of a forehead, large wide-awake eyes, a fleshy sexy
nose, rather hairless cheeks. Hilliard's portrait shows a
totally different shaped face, small eyes, delicate nose,
full moustache and beard. Couldn't Hotson even see?
He naively gave himself away in quoting a psychologist:
'what you see when you look at something depends not so
much on what is there. [his italics] as on the assumptions
you make when you look.'! This gives the whole game away:
it is not the attitude of a realist historian, or even of
any reliable observer. It suggests a psychological case.
In the past week or two I've seen a couple of other articles
quite critical of Hotson but I can't think of the search
terms to find them again. If I do I'll post them.
Art Neuendorffer
> > The date of Hathaway's last pregnancy and the appearance of
> > "Guillimus Shackspere" as a plaintiff show that he was still
> > in Stratford in 1585.
"Greg Reynolds" <eve...@core.com> wrote
> Not the births of Hamnet and Judith. They were baptized
> Feb 2, 1585, so minus some gestation, please. You're at 1584
> on that one.
Hathaway needs less gestation time than most.
"Greg Reynolds" <eve...@core.com> wrote
> You know you make me want Droeshout
> Kick my heels up ... Droeshout
> Throw my hands up ... Droeshout
> Throw my head back ... Droeshout
> Come on now
> Don't forget to say you WILL
> Don't forget to say
> Yeah, yeah, yeah
> -O'Kelly Isley, Ronald Isley, Rudolph Isley
Waaaiiit a minute!
(Droeshout) A little bit softer now
I still remember
When I used to be nine years old yeah, yeah
An' now that I'm grown up
I'm old enough to know
I want to know
I said I want to know right now
And if E.Ver ever leaves me
I don't want nobody else
(Say you WILL) A little bit player now
Art N.
Bob Grumman
>> >in mind that the Authorship Dispute will be resolved by facts,
>> >not assumptions.
>>
>> A speculation is not an assumption, wack.
>
>An assumption is something you take for granted without
>proof. Look it up.
But a speculation is something you suggest without claiming
that it is true. It is, as I said, not an assumption.
>> In any case, nothing you've said
>> about the miniature is other than speculation. You have no record of
>> payment for the particular miniature we are talking about.
>
>You--and the rest of the Strats--have no record of payment
>to the Burgher for any of the plays.
But we have his name on them. The Hilliard does not have its subject's name on
it.
>And isn't it interesting, Grumman, that nearly all the
>other playwrights contemporary to the Burgher are shown
>in the records to have received payments for their scripts.
Absolutely untrue. No records for 11 of Price's sample, including Marlowe and
Spenser! Extremely small records of payment for the 13 others. And the only
evidence of payment for 9 of them is from Henslowe!
>And even more interesting is the fact that "Shakespeare"
>is shown in the Inns of Court revels account book for
>having two plays played at the Inns of Court and yet
>for having received NO payment.
>How can all this be, Grumman? It makes no sense at all . . .
>unless the Renaissance genius Francis Bacon was writing
>the Shakespeare works.
What does this have to do with the Hilliard? I can't asnwer it because I lack
sufficient data. I am rather sure there are many possible explanations besides
your Baconian one. The Renaissance super-genius Oxford, for instance, may have
written them.
>> You speculate there
>>was a fee and that Shakespeare would not have been able to afford it and that no
>> one would have paid it for him.
>
>I'm not speculating that there was a fee. Hilliard
>received fees, in fact a fortune in commissions during
>his career which, as a spendthrift, he blew away.
>Hilliard also had a patent from the Court for the
>covering engraved reproductions of all his works as
>well.
You have no record of payment for the miniature. Therefore, you are speculating
that Hilliard charged a fee for it.
>> >> Hilliard was taken by the young man's looks and portrayed him in
>> >> clothes Hilliard made up, or lent to the young man.
>> >
>> >And the facts to support that are where?
Same place yours are. You speculate that one thing happened, I show by
speculation that many other things could have happened.
>> Same place as the facts to support the opposite.
>
>Unbelievable how you Strats rush to cover for each other.
Actually, I'm sure the miniature has nothing to do with Shakespeare, whoever he
was. I am not covering for an ally, just attacking your stupidity.
>There is no evidence, not even a hint of it, that
>Hilliard "made up" or "lent" the young man clothes.
>Hilliard painted the rich, the royal and the famous.
>He was no Bruegel.
You don't have the names of every person he ever painted. You have no evidence
against my speculation.
>> In fact, Gary posted that what
>> I said MIGHT be the case was, from something he read about the practice of
>> miniaturists of the time, and we have to consider all possibilities when
>> there is no hard evidence, which is the case here.
>
>That's pretty definite.
>
>> >> Or maybe Shakespeare
>> >> briefly had a patron.
>> >
>> >I take note of your "maybe." You admit, Grumman, that there
>> >are no facts at all to support the Strat claim that
>> >the future Burgher was seeking patronage from Southampton.
>>
>> When did I do that? His preface to Venus and Adonis is clearly an attempt to
>> win patronage from Southampton,
>
>Hardly. Strats are so hard up for facts that
>they must manufacture them. There is Z E R O evidence
>that Southampton patronized the Burgher. Except for what
>sounds like a payoff carried from Southampton to the
>Stratford Burgher mentioned in Rowe's light weight bio.
This has been argued sufficiently before. Only someone as insane as you could
say there was zero evidence that Southampton patronized Shakespeare.
>Common sense tells us that Southampton, who was piss poor
>just as his father before him was piss poor, had no cash
>for patronage but Southampton was in the perfect position
>to carry his dearest friend Essex' considerable cash to Stratford
>on behalf of Essex just when Essex was pinned to the mat by the
>Privy Council on the allegation that Essex was providing
>patronage to the concealed author of the then-anonymous
>play Richard II.
evidence that it was anonymous?
>> which he clearly got. But Southampton is not
>> the only one he may have gotten patronage from.
>
>All right, Grumman. Put your evidence that Southampton
>gave patronage to the Burgher on the table. Consider the
>space below to be the table.
>
>-----------You---Don't---Have---The---Proof--------------
I deal in evidence, not proof. I have lng ago stated the evidence more than
once. Too tired to do it again. And you wouldn't understand it, because it
requires the ability to read.
You're right. All we have is his name on them.
What establish Bacon scholar agrees with you?
--Bob G.
Gary Kosinsky
Weir) wrote:
>gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky) wrote in message news:<3ea37bac...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>...
>> Elizabeth, if you have them handy, could you give me
>> references for these articles? I'd be interested in reading them.
>> Thanks.
>Here's the Rowse citation:
>
> Title: SCHOLARS AND CRACKPOTS , By: Rowse, A.L.,
> Contemporary Review, 00107565, Jan95, Vol. 266,
> Issue 1548
Thank-you for the citation and excerpts, Elizabeth. I'll make
it a point to look it up.
- Gary Kosinsky