Re Stratford Monument: A Riddle And Its Solution

[tom c]

Does Peter Farey, author of the above subject, still use this site? If so would you please contact me sometime.

regards

[Peter F.]

Now there's a coincidence. First time I've looked in for
about a month. Please don't tell me you're a Marlovian.

Peter F.
<http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey>

[tom c]

Hi Peter F. A pleasure to hear from you.

Marlowe? no way! but I am interested in your site write-up. Have you managed to get any further with the Stratford plaque under the 'monument'? Or have you given it up?

Tom C.

[Peter F.]

tom c wrote:
>
> Peter F. wrote:
> >
> > tom c wrote>
> > >
> > > Does Peter Farey, author of the above subject, still use
> > > this site? If so would you please contact me sometime.
> > >
> > > regards
> >
> > Now there's a coincidence. First time I've looked in for
> > about a month. Please don't tell me you're a Marlovian.

> Hi Peter F. A pleasure to hear from you.
>
> Marlowe? no way!

For this relief, much thanks.

> but I am interested in your site write-up. Have you managed
> to get any further with the Stratford plaque under the
> 'monument'? Or have you given it up?

How much "further" do you think it is possible to go? I have
provided an interpretation which makes sense (at least to me)
and explained why I claim that a meaning like this must have
been included deliberately. What more do you want? If you
would like to know my latest reasons for claiming the latter
to be true, however, they can be found on the IMSS website at
<http://www.marloweshakespeare.org/files/Riddle_of_the_Monument_March._03_2012.pdf>

Peter F.

[tom c]

Thanks for that. What I should have asked you is are you still involved with that subject? You have indeed covered a great deal on the subject.

You said in your explanation that only one name is on the tombstone : Jesus, and from that point you extended to the name of Christ and eventually to Christ-ofer etc.

I admire anyone who spends so much mental effort in getting to the bottom of a very deep, complex riddle. It takes a great deal of dedication.

That said, I wonder what your reply might be when I say that: the tombstone bears no person's name whatsoever. It is a misconception made by many who investigate that stone, even the chapel authorities make the same error.

Because the stone is where it is causes much of the problem - the chapel and surroundings etc.

A careful look at the five letter group in the middle of the top line shows that they are as follows: iESVS.

What true Christian of that era would allow the name of their god to be engraved with a small initial letter? The first letter is a small i, and it's made much larger than the rest in the group, in fact, a kind of arch is set over the group, so as to add credence. Where is there another example of writng iesus or christ or god the father or the virgin mary or john the baptist... or even the holy bible - all without an initial capital? Even Satan and Judas Iscariot are given that much respect. It might be said that it's simply a fancy capital I device with a dot on the top, but what it really is a small i engraved big. But what purpose does it serve?

Something which has often crossed my mind (assuming it really was the Christian name) is why forbear to dig, anything "for iesvs sake"?

I wanted to address this matter to someone who has experience of that stone, and who has seen it first hand. I hope you don't take this as a negative post, that is not my intention.

Regards

Tom C.

[David L. Webb]

In article <7d5b9098-3b4c-4f6a...@googlegroups.com>,

"Peter F." <pet...@rey.myzen.co.uk> wrote:

> tom c wrote:
> >
> > Peter F. wrote:
> > >
> > > tom c wrote>
> > > >
> > > > Does Peter Farey, author of the above subject, still use
> > > > this site? If so would you please contact me sometime.
> > > >
> > > > regards

> > > Now there's a coincidence. First time I've looked in for
> > > about a month. Please don't tell me you're a Marlovian.
> > Hi Peter F. A pleasure to hear from you.

> > Marlowe? no way!

> For this relief, much thanks.

Don't you mean "For disbelief, much thanks", Peter?

> > but I am interested in your site write-up. Have you managed
> > to get any further with the Stratford plaque under the
> > 'monument'? Or have you given it up?

> How much "further" do you think it is possible to go?

Quite a bit. For example, Art has gone *much* further. Of course,
it has taken him "round the bend", but that's an occupational hazard.

[tom c]

****
Further thoughts on the plaque inscription: the second line is indented, it forces the end of the line against the border. It is peculiar that only that line is subjected to a shift out of alignment.

=> TERRA TEGIT, POPVLVS MAERET, OLYMPVS HABET. =>
****
>
>
>
> Regards
>
>
>
> Tom C.

[tom c]

I should add (as it seems you are into Christopher Marlowe) the following info. You may already know about it, but here it is anyway:

The 'monument' structure in the chancel is set quite high on the north facing wall. (To put this another way: it is not set LOW) It is squeezed in between a window and a Tudor-headed side entrance door.
Apparently, the head of that (Tudor) door opening depicts St Christopher. Coincidence or what?

>
> >
>
> >
>
> > Regards
>
> >
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > Tom C.

[tom c]

> The 'monument' structure in the chancel is set quite high on the north facing wall. It is squeezed in between a window and a Tudor-headed side entrance door.
>
> Apparently, the head of that (Tudor) door opening depicts Saint Christopher. Coincidence or what?

The structure is actually set high, so that in partly blocks the light from the window behind it. To put this another way: it is not set LOW, so as to hinder, or obstruct, or even MAR the light.

Perhaps 'light' is part of the cryptology. Christopher MAR LOW?

SAINT? STAIN? mark?

Full many a glorious morning have I seen* **
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,* **
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west* with this disgrace: * doorway is west of 'monument'.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out! alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain* when heaven's sun staineth. ***

Sonnet XXXIII

Only one occourence of 'stain/staineth' in sonnets.

By the way: ref line fourteen 'heaven's sun': the chancel in that church is known as a 'weeping' chancel, because it leans slightly out of line from the main plan of the church site, which is cruciform, and the chancel is where the head of the victim of a crucifixion would be. The chancel leans to the north but the rest of the church does not. It seems that this effect is caused by constructing the chancel in a different season than the rest of the building. The whole cruciform is aligned so that the 'head' of the cross points east, the sun therefore rises behind the head:


(chancel door/window)
N
W E |) rising sun
S


The left side of the sonnet would be the 'west' side, and that word can be seen as acrostic. FFKGA SEW B T YS: WEST leaves FFKA BYS: there is a KAY, which leaves FFBS, and because it seems only one man used KAY when writing 'KEY', it might even be that the two initials FB are his. But that still leaves G FS: F starts the first line and S starts the last.

The G starts line 4. The 4th word in the sonnet starts with g.
The 4th word in line 4 is 'with'.

Could it mean that we must put F 'with' S? But what purpose would that serve?

Could it mean 'wit h' FS?

What's h? The 8th letter of the alphabet?.. . . . the 8th word in sonnet is 'seen', and line 8, first word has 8 letters: Stealing unseen to west* with this disgrace:
If we 'steal' STEALING it leaves unseen as first word.... Apologies for rambling.

It's hard to say where this is going, perhaps it's something to do with eyes? But up to now we have: WEST KAY FB.


.... just a few ideas.

>
>
>
> >
>
> > >
>
> >
>
> > >
>
> >
>
> > > Regards
>
> >
>
> > >
>
> >
>
> > >
>
> >
>
> > >
>
> >
>
> > > Tom C.

[Peter F.]

Tom C. wrote:
>
> You said in your explanation that only one name is on the
> tombstone : Jesus, and from that point you extended to the
> name of Christ and eventually to Christ-ofer etc.
>
> I admire anyone who spends so much mental effort in getting
> to the bottom of a very deep, complex riddle. It takes a
> great deal of dedication.

Thank you, but in fact discovering it was relatively easy. It
was the finding of a way to demonstrate that it cannot have
happened just by chance that took the most effort.

> That said, I wonder what your reply might be when I say that:
> the tombstone bears no person's name whatsoever.

I would say that you are quite clearly wrong.

> It is a misconception made by many who investigate that stone,
> even the chapel authorities make the same error.
>
> Because the stone is where it is causes much of the problem -
> the chapel and surroundings etc.
>
> A careful look at the five letter group in the middle of the
> top line shows that they are as follows: iESVS.
>
> What true Christian of that era would allow the name of their
> god to be engraved with a small initial letter?

Since you clearly believe that nobody would, the obvious answer
is that it isn't a lower case 'i' after all. In fact the careful
look that you recommend shows it to be a capital 'I' which (like
the 'G' of 'GOOD' and the 'B' of 'BLESTE') is made larger than
the rest. The top of the 'I' is symmetrical in a way that a
lower-case 'i' is not, and the apparent dot is too far to the
right to have been intentional. Whether the initial letter is
upper or lower case, however, it still spells the name.

> The first letter is a small i, and it's made much larger than
> the rest in the group, in fact, a kind of arch is set over the
> group, so as to add credence.

There is no such arch on the grave itself; that was the invention
of whoever it was that did the copy of the inscription placed on
the grave.

> Where is there another example of writing iesus or christ or god

> the father or the virgin mary or john the baptist... or even
> the holy bible - all without an initial capital?

i dunno, did archie ever mention them

> Even Satan and Judas Iscariot are given that much respect. It
> might be said that it's simply a fancy capital I device with a
> dot on the top, but what it really is a small i engraved big.
> But what purpose does it serve?
>
> Something which has often crossed my mind (assuming it really
> was the Christian name) is why forbear to dig, anything "for
> iesvs sake"?

Because it comes across as far more emphatic than "pretty please"?

> I wanted to address this matter to someone who has experience of
> that stone, and who has seen it first hand. I hope you don't
> take this as a negative post, that is not my intention.

Not at all.

Tom C. wrote:
>
> Further thoughts on the plaque inscription: the second line is
> indented, it forces the end of the line against the border. It
> is peculiar that only that line is subjected to a shift out of
> alignment.
>
> => TERRA TEGIT, POPVLVS MAERET, OLYMPVS HABET. =>

What happens in the English pentameter is hardly relevant to what
should be done in the Latin hexameter. The second and fourth lines
on the grave are indented too.

> I should add (as it seems you are into Christopher Marlowe)
> the following info. You may already know about it, but here it
> is anyway:
>
> The 'monument' structure in the chancel is set quite high on the

> north facing wall. (To put this another way: it is not set LOW)
> It is squeezed in between a window and a Tudor-headed side ent-

> rance door. Apparently, the head of that (Tudor) door opening

> depicts St Christopher. Coincidence or what?

Inaccurate, I would have said. See
<http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7117/7497272742_05dbcf52a3_o.jpg>

> The structure is actually set high, so that in partly blocks the
> light from the window behind it. To put this another way: it is
> not set LOW, so as to hinder, or obstruct, or even MAR the light.

So what? You cannot think for even a nanosecond that it might have
been placed in such a manner as a hidden message?

> Perhaps 'light' is part of the cryptology. Christopher MAR LOW?

O Lor, you can.

<SNIP>

As for the rest, I'm sorry, but unless you can come up with a
hidden message which actually *says* something, to a reasonably
acceptable level of grammar, and can demonstrate why the ability
to find it couldn't have happened just by chance, I'm really not
interested.

Peter F.
<http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey>

[tom c]

On Tuesday, October 1, 2013 11:45:07 AM UTC+1, Peter F. wrote:
> Tom C. wrote:
>
> >
>
> > You said in your explanation that only one name is on the
>
> > tombstone : Jesus, and from that point you extended to the
>
> > name of Christ and eventually to Christ-ofer etc.
>
> >
>
> > I admire anyone who spends so much mental effort in getting
>
> > to the bottom of a very deep, complex riddle. It takes a
>
> > great deal of dedication.
>
>
>
> Thank you, but in fact discovering it was relatively easy. It
>
> was the finding of a way to demonstrate that it cannot have
>
> happened just by chance that took the most effort.
>

If what you say is true - you obviously believe it to be - then how come your findings are relatively unknown?

>
>
> > That said, I wonder what your reply might be when I say that:
>
> > the tombstone bears no person's name whatsoever.
>
>
>
> I would say that you are quite clearly wrong.
>

Clearly wrong?

>
> > It is a misconception made by many who investigate that stone,
>
> > even the chapel authorities make the same error.
>
> >
>
> > Because the stone is where it is causes much of the problem -
>
> > the chapel and surroundings etc.
>
> >
>
> > A careful look at the five letter group in the middle of the
>
> > top line shows that they are as follows: iESVS.
>
> >
>
> > What true Christian of that era would allow the name of their
>
> > god to be engraved with a small initial letter?
>
>
>
> Since you clearly believe that nobody would, the obvious answer
>
> is that it isn't a lower case 'i' after all. In fact the careful
>
> look that you recommend shows it to be a capital 'I' which (like
>
> the 'G' of 'GOOD' and the 'B' of 'BLESTE') is made larger than
>
> the rest. The top of the 'I' is symmetrical in a way that a
>
> lower-case 'i' is not, and the apparent dot is too far to the
>
> right to have been intentional. Whether the initial letter is
>
> upper or lower case, however, it still spells the name.
>
>

In this matter it is you who are wrong. You say it's a capital Ibecause the top of the letter is symmetrical. It's true that it's an I but the dot on top makes it look like a small i made big. That letter is much larger than even the G, and if the dot on top is included, it towers above all the others. I cannot understand how someone who says they have looked at that stone can fail to notice the 'apparent' large round dot set on top of that letter.

How do you reckon the dot is too far to any side? The rubbing I possess shows the dot to be set on the top of the letter.

It's true that a name is spelled, but you miss the point entirely peter.

>
> > The first letter is a small i, and it's made much larger than
>
> > the rest in the group, in fact, a kind of arch is set over the
>
> > group, so as to add credence.
>
>
>
> There is no such arch on the grave itself; that was the invention
>
> of whoever it was that did the copy of the inscription placed on
>
> the grave.

I agree with that entirely.

>
>
>
> > Where is there another example of writing iesus or christ or god
>
> > the father or the virgin mary or john the baptist... or even
>
> > the holy bible - all without an initial capital?
>
>
>
> i dunno, did archie ever mention them
>
>

eh? Don't yo mean Archie?

>
> > Even Satan and Judas Iscariot are given that much respect. It
>
> > might be said that it's simply a fancy capital I device with a
>
> > dot on the top, but what it really is a small i engraved big.
>
> > But what purpose does it serve?
>
> >
>
> > Something which has often crossed my mind (assuming it really
>
> > was the Christian name) is why forbear to dig, anything "for
>
> > iesvs sake"?
>
>
>
> Because it comes across as far more emphatic than "pretty please"?
>
>

eh?

>
> > I wanted to address this matter to someone who has experience of
>
> > that stone, and who has seen it first hand. I hope you don't
>
> > take this as a negative post, that is not my intention.
>
>
>
> Not at all.
>
>
>
>
>
> Tom C. wrote:
>
> >
>
> > Further thoughts on the plaque inscription: the second line is
>
> > indented, it forces the end of the line against the border. It
>
> > is peculiar that only that line is subjected to a shift out of
>
> > alignment.
>
> >
>
> > => TERRA TEGIT, POPVLVS MAERET, OLYMPVS HABET. =>
>
>
>
> What happens in the English pentameter is hardly relevant to what
>
> should be done in the Latin hexameter. The second and fourth lines
>
> on the grave are indented too.

The meter is not in any way relevant to my point. It is the fact that whoever designed the plaque, designed the second line so that it almost runs into the right hand border. When such plaques are made, a series of layout lines are drawn so as to ensure all the letters fit the space. What has the meter got to do with the physical layout? Why are you comparing the Latin with the English?
>
> The form of the lines on the stone are a separate matter. There are ten lines of text on the plaque, and only one line is pushed so far to the right side, that it almost touches the border. Surely that's a reasonable point to address?

>
> > I should add (as it seems you are into Christopher Marlowe)
>
> > the following info. You may already know about it, but here it
>
> > is anyway:
>
> >
>
> > The 'monument' structure in the chancel is set quite high on the
>
> > north facing wall. (To put this another way: it is not set LOW)
>
> > It is squeezed in between a window and a Tudor-headed side ent-
>
> > rance door. Apparently, the head of that (Tudor) door opening
>
> > depicts St Christopher. Coincidence or what?
>
>
>
> Inaccurate, I would have said. See
>
> <http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7117/7497272742_05dbcf52a3_o.jpg>
>

> I fail to see what you are getting at: is there no St Christopher? The plaque is very close to the doorway, and the doorway is Tudor in design. It seems to me that both might have been constructed at the same time.

>
> > The structure is actually set high, so that in partly blocks the
>
> > light from the window behind it. To put this another way: it is
>
> > not set LOW, so as to hinder, or obstruct, or even MAR the light.
>
>
>
> So what? You cannot think for even a nanosecond that it might have
>
> been placed in such a manner as a hidden message?
>
>
> > Perhaps 'light' is part of the cryptology. Christopher MAR LOW?
>
>
>
> O Lor, you can.
>
>
>
> <SNIP>
>

> It was for your benefit peter. I thought there might be something about Marlowe which might interest you, but there you go. Nothing lost.

>
> As for the rest, I'm sorry, but unless you can come up with a
>
> hidden message which actually *says* something, to a reasonably
>
> acceptable level of grammar, and can demonstrate why the ability
>
> to find it couldn't have happened just by chance, I'm really not
>
> interested.
>
>

>
> Peter F.
>
> <http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey>

Fair comment. Thanks for sharing a little of your time.

[Peter F.]

Tom C. wrote:
>
> Peter F. wrote:
> >
> > Tom C. wrote:
> > >
> > > You said in your explanation that only one name is on the
> > > tombstone : Jesus, and from that point you extended to the
> > > name of Christ and eventually to Christ-ofer etc.
> > >
> > > I admire anyone who spends so much mental effort in getting
> > > to the bottom of a very deep, complex riddle. It takes a
> > > great deal of dedication.
> >
> > Thank you, but in fact discovering it was relatively easy. It
> > was the finding of a way to demonstrate that it cannot have
> > happened just by chance that took the most effort.
>
> If what you say is true - you obviously believe it to be -
> then how come your findings are relatively unknown?

Most arguments of an anti-Stratfordian type are relatively unknown,
but I'm not sure that this particular one is any less well known
than any of my other arguments in favour of Marlowe. The item on
my website has had several thousand visitors since I first posted
it there. I get two or three unique visits to that page every day
and, although I don't know the numbers, I guess that the other
version - to which I provide a link below - must get a similar
number. Whether the ideas are accepted is of course a whole nother
matter!

> > > That said, I wonder what your reply might be when I say that:
> > > the tombstone bears no person's name whatsoever.
> >
> > I would say that you are quite clearly wrong.
>
> Clearly wrong?

Yes, clearly. As you acknowledge below, "It's true that a name is
spelled", and if it isn't a person's name, what on earth is it?

> > > It is a misconception made by many who investigate that stone,
> > > even the chapel authorities make the same error.
> > >
> > > Because the stone is where it is causes much of the problem -
> > > the chapel and surroundings etc.
> > >
> > > A careful look at the five letter group in the middle of the
> > > top line shows that they are as follows: iESVS.
> > >
> > > What true Christian of that era would allow the name of their
> > > god to be engraved with a small initial letter?
> >
> > Since you clearly believe that nobody would, the obvious answer
> > is that it isn't a lower case 'i' after all. In fact the careful
> > look that you recommend shows it to be a capital 'I' which (like
> > the 'G' of 'GOOD' and the 'B' of 'BLESTE') is made larger than
> > the rest. The top of the 'I' is symmetrical in a way that a

> > low-case 'i' is not, and the apparent dot is too far to the

> > right to have been intentional. Whether the initial letter is
> > upper or lower case, however, it still spells the name.
>
> In this matter it is you who are wrong. You say it's a capital I
> because the top of the letter is symmetrical. It's true that it's
> an I but the dot on top makes it look like a small i made big.

You ignore my point about it being symmetrical. There are two things
which differentiate a capital 'I' and a lower case 'i', and the
symmetry or asymmetry at the top is one of them. Just look at
the two examples above.

> That letter is much larger than even the G, and if the dot on top
> is included, it towers above all the others. I cannot understand
> how someone who says they have looked at that stone can fail to
> notice the 'apparent' large round dot set on top of that letter.

Of course I can see it, but the question is whether it formed part
of the original design or whether it is an accidental chip in the
stone. I say that it is the latter, because it is offset to the
right in a way which would have been unintentional and (as you point
out) makes it "tower above all the others".

> How do you reckon the dot is too far to any side? The rubbing I
> possess shows the dot to be set on the top of the letter.

And slightly to the right, not precisely above it as it should be?

> It's true that a name is spelled, but you miss the point entirely
> peter.

I thought I had understood it. It was that the name of Jesus, if
spelled "jesus" is (in your words) "no person's name whatsoever".

> > > The first letter is a small i, and it's made much larger than
> > > the rest in the group, in fact, a kind of arch is set over the
> > > group, so as to add credence.
> >

> > There is no such arch on the grave itself, that was the invention

> > of whoever it was that did the copy of the inscription placed on
> > the grave.
>
> I agree with that entirely.

Thank you.

> > > Where is there another example of writng iesus or christ or god

> > > the father or the virgin mary or john the baptist... or even
> > > the holy bible - all without an initial capital?
> >
> > i dunno, did archie ever mention them
>
> eh? Don't yo mean Archie?

no but i did spell it wrongly its archy as in archy and mehitabel

> > > Even Satan and Judas Iscariot are given that much respect. It
> > > might be said that it's simply a fancy capital I device with a
> > > dot on the top, but what it really is a small i engraved big.
> > > But what purpose does it serve?
> > >
> > > Something which has often crossed my mind (assuming it really
> > > was the Christian name) is why forbear to dig, anything "for
> > > iesvs sake"?
> >
> > Because it comes across as far more emphatic than "pretty please"?
>
> eh?

Oh for Chrissake think about it, Tom!

> > > I wanted to address this matter to someone who has experience of
> > > that stone, and who has seen it first hand. I hope you don't
> > > take this as a negative post, that is not my intention.
> >
> > Not at all.
>

> > > Further thoughts on the plaque inscription: the second line is
> > > indented, it forces the end of the line against the border. It
> > > is peculiar that only that line is subjected to a shift out of
> > > alignment.
> > >
> > > => TERRA TEGIT, POPVLVS MAERET, OLYMPVS HABET. =>
> >
> > What happens in the English pentameter is hardly relevant to what
> > should be done in the Latin hexameter.
>

> The meter is not in any way relevant to my point. It is the fact
> that whoever designed the plaque, designed the second line so that
> it almost runs into the right hand border. When such plaques are
> made, a series of layout lines are drawn so as to ensure all the
> letters fit the space.

One of the strange features of the monument (which I draw attention
to in my essay at
http://marloweshakespeare.org/files/Riddle_of_the_Monument_March._03_2012.pdf)
is the apparent mismatch between the quality of the inscription's
workmanship and that of the rest of the monument. This is just one
example of it.

> What has the meter got to do with the physical layout? Why are you
> comparing the Latin with the English?

The first two lines are in Latin hexameters, the next six are in
English pentameters. That the second line in one case is treated in
a way which is different from how (say) the second, fourth and sixth
lines are treated in the other is hardly surprising.

> The form of the lines on the stone are a separate matter. There are
> ten lines of text on the plaque, and only one line is pushed so far
> to the right side, that it almost touches the border. Surely that's
> a reasonable point to address?

Not for me, but if you want to address it, go right ahead.

> > > I should add (as it seems you are into Christopher Marlowe)
> > > the following info. You may already know about it, but here it
> > > is anyway:
> > >
> > > The 'monument' structure in the chancel is set quite high on the
> > > north facing wall. (To put this another way: it is not set LOW)
> > > It is squeezed in between a window and a Tudor-headed side ent-
> > > rance door. Apparently, the head of that (Tudor) door opening
> > > depicts St Christopher. Coincidence or what?
> >
> > Inaccurate, I would have said:
> > <http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7117/7497272742_05dbcf52a3_o.jpg>
>
> I fail to see what you are getting at: is there no St Christopher?

You tell me. I certainly can't see one!

> The plaque is very close to the doorway, and the doorway is Tudor
> in design. It seems to me that both might have been constructed at
> the same time.

The whole chancel was refurbished almost certainly at the same time
as the monument was erected, but there is no mention of anything as
drastic as reshaping the lintel of the door to the charnel house.

> > > The structure is actually set high, so that in partly blocks the
> > > light from the window behind it. To put this another way: it is
> > > not set LOW, so as to hinder, or obstruct, or even MAR the light.
> >
> > So what? You cannot think for even a nanosecond that it might have
> > been placed in such a manner as a hidden message?
> >
> > > Perhaps 'light' is part of the cryptology. Christopher MAR LOW?
> >
> > O Lor, you can.
> >
> > <SNIP>
>
> It was for your benefit peter. I thought there might be something
> about Marlowe which might interest you, but there you go. Nothing
> lost.

No indeed, and thank you for thinking of letting me know of your
thoughts on the subject. I'm sorry if I haven't treated them with
the respect you might have felt they deserved.

> > As for the rest, I'm sorry, but unless you can come up with a
> > hidden message which actually *says* something, to a reasonably
> > acceptable level of grammar, and can demonstrate why the ability
> > to find it couldn't have happened just by chance, I'm really not

> > at all interested.

>
> Fair comment. Thanks for sharing a little of your time.

No problem.

Peter F.

[Sneaky O. Possum]

"Peter F." <pet...@rey.myzen.co.uk> wrote in news:1bee5715-6dbb-4928-
a559-fd8...@googlegroups.com:

> Tom C. wrote:
>>
>> You said in your explanation that only one name is on the
>> tombstone : Jesus, and from that point you extended to the
>> name of Christ and eventually to Christ-ofer etc.
>>
>> I admire anyone who spends so much mental effort in getting
>> to the bottom of a very deep, complex riddle. It takes a
>> great deal of dedication.
>
> Thank you, but in fact discovering it was relatively easy. It
> was the finding of a way to demonstrate that it cannot have
> happened just by chance that took the most effort.

Much more complex messages have happened just by chance:

http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html

The trick, of course, is to start with what one wants to find and work
backwards. If one is determined to find some form of the name
'Christopher Marlowe' in the inscription on Shakespeare's monument, one
will find it. Whether anyone meant it to be found is a far more dubious
proposition: the 'solution' requires a great deal of fudging, starting
with the assumption that the reader will somehow infer that the
inscription is directing him to look at a slab on the floor, find the
name 'Jesus', and conclude that there is a hidden name beginning with
the title 'Christ'.

One of the many problems with this is that the educated 17th-century
reader would be rather more likely to infer that the name he was meant
to find was an Anglicized form of 'Jesus,' viz., 'Joshua.' As it
happens, the minor English poet Joshua Sylvester was born a year before
Shakespeare and died two years after him. (So far as I know, Sylvester
has not yet been proposed as a candidate for the authorship of
Shakespeare's works.)

But supposing the reader rejects the logical reading 'Joshua' and
instead concludes that he is meant to find a name beginning with
'Christ'. Having made that leap, he is left high and dry, because the
puzzle setter forgot to indicate that the letters in 'far more' have to
be rearranged. This was an egregious oversight.

Worse, there is more than one way to rearrange the letters in 'far
more'. The letters are a perfect anagram of 'Fearmor', an Irish surname
that crops up in the records of the Elizabethans and Stuarts: in 1576
Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lady Dorothy Stafford, and divers others of worship
wrote letters recommending one Nicholas Fearmor for the post of
undersheriff of Norfolk, and a Sir George Fearmor is mentioned in Robert
Cecil's papers for the year 1605. I find no record of a Joshua Fearmor,
but it is a plausible name.

And what of the 'cost' that supposedly transforms into 'ley'? While the
OED entry for 'lay' does include "The act of imposing a tax; an impost,
assessment, rate, tax", it should be noted that the only citations for
the spelling 'ley' are both taken from the first volume of Sir James
Allanson Picton's compilation of selections from the Municipal Archives
of Liverpool (1883). Since 'ley' is attested from nowhere else in
England, we have no reason to suppose that anyone except a Liverpudlian
would think to connect 'cost' and 'ley.'

And the synonymy is questionable in any case. The first OED citation is
excerpted from the following "It is agreed by the Mayor and Bailiffs
with a full consent of the whole Assembly of the Burgesses of Liverpool,
that there shall be hired a clerk that can sing his plain song and prick
song, and play on the organs--5 marks--and it is to be levied by force
of one ley yearly to be gathered by the Bailiffs for the time being"
(Vol. I: 95). The meaning 'cost' for 'ley' is not possible here -
"levied by the force of one cost yearly" is gibberish.

The second 'ley' citation is a bit more promising - "It is also agreed
that a Ley or Taxac[i]on of xii[l] be imposed upon the Towne for payeing
of the Quarterage of the horse," etc. - but the passage dates from 1647.
Thus the entire framework erected to show that '-ley' is a possible
interpretation of 'then cost' rests on a single Civil-War-era entry in
the municipal records of Liverpool!

And what of the spelling 'Christofer Marley'? While it is true that
Marlowe himself spelled his name thus in his only extant signature, that
signature dates from 1585. To people who bought his plays in quarto, he
was 'Chri. Marlow' (/Edward the second/), 'Christopher Marlowe' (/The
Tragedie of Dido/), 'Christopher Marlow' (/The Massacre at Paris/), or
'Christopher Marlo' (/The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta/), but
never Marley. In Jonson's prefatory First Folio verse the spelling is
'Marlowe' ('Marlowes mighty line'). He is 'Christopher Marloe' on the
quartos of /Hero and Leander/ and 'Kit Marlow' to Thomas Nashe; in
Thomas Thorpe's dedication to Marlowe's translation of Lucan, his name
is given as 'Chr. Marlowe', and he is 'C. Marlow' on the title-page of
/Certaine of Ovids Elegies/. I doubt that a 17th-century puzzle-solver
would have had any idea who 'Christofer Marley' was.
--
S.O.P.

[Peter F.]

Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>
> Peter F.wrote:

> >
> > Tom C. wrote:
> > >
> > > You said in your explanation that only one name is on the
> > > tombstone : Jesus, and from that point you extended to the
> > > name of Christ and eventually to Christ-ofer etc.
> > >
> > > I admire anyone who spends so much mental effort in getting
> > > to the bottom of a very deep, complex riddle. It takes a
> > > great deal of dedication.
> >
> > Thank you, but in fact discovering it was relatively easy. It
> > was the finding of a way to demonstrate that it cannot have
> > happened just by chance that took the most effort.
>
> Much more complex messages have happened just by chance:
>
> http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html

Excellent! Not that any of them are "messages", of course; only a
name within a passage in some way related to death (and Moby Dick
has plenty of such passages!)

But your point is perfectly valid. Of course it's possible for
quite extraordinary things to happen just by chance, and this is
why I always stress that simply finding an apparent message isn't
enough. One must also (as I say above) find a way of demonstrating
why it is almost impossible that it happened just by chance.

> The trick, of course, is to start with what one wants to find
> and work backwards. If one is determined to find some form of
> the name 'Christopher Marlowe' in the inscription on Shakespeare's
> monument, one will find it.

Possibly, although that was not how I found it in this case. As I
have explained many times, it arose from a discussion we were
having here on HLAS about just what the poem meant. In particular
we thought it strange that it seemed to suggest that the "Passenger"
couldn't read, when they would have had to be able to read to
understand the exhortation. I simply wondered if the word "read"
might mean "solve" or "work out" instead, and the rest just
followed from that thought.

> Whether anyone meant it to be found is a far more dubious
> proposition:

Yes I agree. Hence what I say above.

> the 'solution' requires a great deal of fudging, starting with
> the assumption that the reader will somehow infer that the
> inscription is directing him to look at a slab on the floor,
> find the name 'Jesus', and conclude that there is a hidden name
> beginning with the title 'Christ'.

No, that's not how it works. The words themselves ask the reader
to "Read (i.e. work out) if thou canst *who* (my emphasis) ..."
is "in" the monument with Shakespeare. Personally, I don't think
it was ever intended to be solved by some random passer-by, but
was always meant to be something known about only by those who
were privy to the true story anyway.

> One of the many problems with this is that the educated 17th-
> century reader would be rather more likely to infer that the
> name he was meant to find was an Anglicized form of 'Jesus,'
> viz., 'Joshua.' As it happens, the minor English poet Joshua
> Sylvester was born a year before Shakespeare and died two years
> after him. (So far as I know, Sylvester has not yet been proposed
> as a candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's works.)

Yes indeed. There are many possible answers to what the first part
of the name is. The only way of knowing which one is intended is
to see whether it contributes to a complete answer. Try as I can,
I can find no way of getting "Sylvester" from the remainder. And
I presume that you can't either, or you would have certainly
mentioned it!

> But supposing the reader rejects the logical reading 'Joshua'
> and instead concludes that he is meant to find a name beginning
> with 'Christ'. Having made that leap, he is left high and dry,
> because the puzzle setter forgot to indicate that the letters in
> 'far more' have to be rearranged. This was an egregious oversight.

Yes, I'm afraid that Ximenes would have been rather sniffy about
that. But this was in days before crosswords, and before such
guidelines had been developed. The fact is, of course, that the
flexibility which seems to have been allowed in such word puzzles
(cf "raw" + "lie" = Raleigh) would have probably made "Christ" +
"far more" + "lay" (Christfar Morlay) acceptable enough for his
name, but I like to think that they would have preferred the
rather more elegant solution.

> Worse, there is more than one way to rearrange the letters in
> 'far more'. The letters are a perfect anagram of 'Fearmor', an
> Irish surname that crops up in the records of the Elizabethans
> and Stuarts: in 1576 Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lady Dorothy Stafford,
> and divers others of worship wrote letters recommending one
> Nicholas Fearmor for the post of undersheriff of Norfolk, and a
> Sir George Fearmor is mentioned in Robert Cecil's papers for the
> year 1605. I find no record of a Joshua Fearmor, but it is a
> plausible name.

Splendid! But (subject to what you say below) that answer would
leave the "then cost" bit orphaned, don't you think? As with
today's crosswords, one must eventually choose that solution
which seems most satisfactorily to match all of the clue.

> And what of the 'cost' that supposedly transforms into 'ley'?
> While the OED entry for 'lay' does include "The act of imposing
> a tax; an impost, assessment, rate, tax", it should be noted
> that the only citations for the spelling 'ley' are both taken
> from the first volume of Sir James Allanson Picton's compilation
> of selections from the Municipal Archives of Liverpool (1883).
> Since 'ley' is attested from nowhere else in England, we have no
> reason to suppose that anyone except a Liverpudlian would think
> to connect 'cost' and 'ley.'

Well done. It is incredible that in all this time nobody has come
up with this (in my view fairly obvious) objection before. The OED,
however, gives the *first* time when something appears in print.
It doesn't pretend to offer all uses. You will note that the best
answer (and the one I would have much preferred to offer) was the
definition for "lay", "A bill, score, reckoning". Unfortunately the
entry showed that they had found only one use of the word in this
sense (the "-1" after "Obs. rare"). There is no such indication for
"an impost, assessment, rate, tax."

If you really object to this, however, then we might consider the
use of the word "lay", as it appears in 2 Henry VI. "a wager, bet
or stake", which is of course a cost if one loses.

Clifford. My soule and bodie on the action both.
York. A dreadfull lay.

The question for me is not whether it is a particularly good clue,
but whether the author would have felt that it was good enough to
achieve his purpose, given the extremely difficult task he had set
himself in containing two entirely different yet coherent messages
within the same set of words. In his position I certainly would
have done.

> And the synonymy is questionable in any case. The first OED
> citation is excerpted from the following "It is agreed by the
> Mayor and Bailiffs with a full consent of the whole Assembly of
> the Burgesses of Liverpool, that there shall be hired a clerk
> that can sing his plain song and prick song, and play on the
> organs--5 marks--and it is to be levied by force of one ley
> yearly to be gathered by the Bailiffs for the time being"
>
> (Vol. I: 95). The meaning 'cost' for 'ley' is not possible here -
>
> "levied by the force of one cost yearly" is gibberish.

Wow! You can't imagine how delighted I am to have someone trying
to refute my arguments with actual facts for once, rather than
with snide comment and ad hominem argument. Where is this to be
found? Not by the general public, I'll be bound.

Your assumption that there should be "synonymy" (lovely word)
isn't really sufficient, however, since such a clue would usually
also be answered by example too. e.g Large animal = elephant;
tax = cost.

> The second 'ley' citation is a bit more promising - "It is also
> agreed that a Ley or Taxac[i]on of xii[l] be imposed upon the
> Towne for payeing of the Quarterage of the horse," etc. - but
> the passage dates from 1647.

You seem to be implying that the second time we know that it
appeared in print (the first we know of being in 1558) people
would still be scratching their heads and demanding know what
this twerp was talking about.

> Thus the entire framework erected to show that '-ley' is a
> possible interpretation of 'then cost' rests on a single
> Civil-War-era entry in the municipal records of Liverpool!

You might like to rethink this "summary" in the light of what
I say above.

> And what of the spelling 'Christofer Marley'? While it is true
> that Marlowe himself spelled his name thus in his only extant
> signature, that signature dates from 1585. To people who bought
> his plays in quarto, he was 'Chri. Marlow' (/Edward the second/),
> 'Christopher Marlowe' (/The Tragedie of Dido/), 'Christopher
> Marlow' (/The Massacre at Paris/), or 'Christopher Marlo' (/The
> Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta/), but never Marley.
> In Jonson's prefatory First Folio verse the spelling is 'Marlowe'
> ('Marlowes mighty line'). He is 'Christopher Marloe' on the
> quartos of /Hero and Leander/ and 'Kit Marlow' to Thomas Nashe;
> in Thomas Thorpe's dedication to Marlowe's translation of Lucan,
> his name is given as 'Chr. Marlowe', and he is 'C. Marlow' on
> the title-page of /Certaine of Ovids Elegies/. I doubt that a

> 17th-century puzzle-solver would have had any idea who 'Christ-
> ofer Marley' was.

Very true. But, as I explained above, I don't see this as being
intended for the playgoing public, but for those who knew the true
story. Among these I would include George Peele ("Marley, the
Muses' darling") and the Privy Council ("Christofer Marley of
London, gent.") both of which came within a week or two of his
alleged death.

For me, however, what makes this so convincing is that, even
though we might feel that in the context of today's word puzzles
it may stretch the rules a bit, there are very good reasons for
believing the attempt of the author to say that "Marley" was in
some way "in" the monument with Shakespeare was genuine. I have
tried to show why I believe this to be the case on pp.4-9 of my
essay on the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society website at
<http://www.marloweshakespeare.org/files/Riddle_of_the_Monument_March._03_2012.pdf>.

So far, nobody has been prepared to offer any sort of rebuttal of
the argument I present there. I have great hopes of you, however.

Peter F.
<http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey>

[Sneaky O. Possum]

"Peter F." <pet...@rey.myzen.co.uk> wrote in

news:0017fbcf-8ab4-4623...@googlegroups.com:

> Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>>
>> Peter F.wrote:
>>

>> > Thank you, but in fact discovering it was relatively easy. It
>> > was the finding of a way to demonstrate that it cannot have
>> > happened just by chance that took the most effort.
>>
>> Much more complex messages have happened just by chance:
>>
>> http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html
>
> Excellent! Not that any of them are "messages", of course; only a
> name within a passage in some way related to death (and Moby Dick
> has plenty of such passages!)

There are, perhaps, better examples, e.g., the fact that the phrase "The
jubilee day of Victoria, queen and empress" is a perfect anagram of the
phrase "Joys are never quite complete if a husband die," a message which
is obviously relevant - and entirely coincidental. (That anagram was
invented in 1887, by the way - see /Truth/, Vol. 22, No. 550 [14 July
1887], p. 85.)

[material redacted]

>> The trick, of course, is to start with what one wants to find
>> and work backwards. If one is determined to find some form of
>> the name 'Christopher Marlowe' in the inscription on Shakespeare's
>> monument, one will find it.
>
> Possibly, although that was not how I found it in this case. As I have
> explained many times, it arose from a discussion we were having here
> on HLAS about just what the poem meant. In particular we thought it
> strange that it seemed to suggest that the "Passenger" couldn't read,
> when they would have had to be able to read to understand the
> exhortation.

That reading ignores the first line, which is the key to the second. As
the OED notes, one sense of 'can' is to express possibility: "To be
permitted or enabled by the conditions of the case; /can you..?/ = is it
possible for you to..?" Since the first line establishes that the reader
is a passenger ("a person who passes by or through a place; a traveller,
/esp./ a traveller on foot"), and that he seems to be in a hurry, since
he is going by so fast, the second line may be sensibly interpreted to
mean "read this if you have the time," etc.

Note that this sense is not extinct even today: if you ask someone to
stop and pick up something on the way home and he says "I'll do it if I
can," you understand him to mean that he may not have time to do it,
not that he may lack the ability to do it.

[additional redaction]

>> the 'solution' requires a great deal of fudging, starting with
>> the assumption that the reader will somehow infer that the
>> inscription is directing him to look at a slab on the floor,
>> find the name 'Jesus', and conclude that there is a hidden name
>> beginning with the title 'Christ'.
>
> No, that's not how it works. The words themselves ask the reader
> to "Read (i.e. work out) if thou canst *who* (my emphasis) ..."
> is "in" the monument with Shakespeare.

But what is the reader to make of the phrase 'whom envious Death hath
plast with in this monument'? If Marlowe's name was in fact placed in
the inscription, it was placed there by the creator of the inscription -
did he want the decipherer to associate him with Death? A bit ominous,
that. And of course the inscription is on the monument, not in it.
Somehow the solver knows, without being told, that only certain parts of
the inscription are relevant, and which parts those are. Curious.

> Personally, I don't think it was ever intended to be solved by some
> random passer-by, but was always meant to be something known about
> only by those who were privy to the true story anyway.

Why would those who were privy to the true story be interested in a
hidden message in a Warwickshire village church that told them nothing
they didn't already know? And if they were the only ones who were meant
to know about it, why did they conceal the message in a place where any
literate passenger could come across it and potentially decipher it, and
then direct said passenger to do so? And include sixteen seeming
anomalies to alert said passenger to the fact that there was more there
than met the eye?

[yet further redaction]

>> But supposing the reader rejects the logical reading 'Joshua'
>> and instead concludes that he is meant to find a name beginning
>> with 'Christ'. Having made that leap, he is left high and dry,
>> because the puzzle setter forgot to indicate that the letters in
>> 'far more' have to be rearranged. This was an egregious oversight.
>
> Yes, I'm afraid that Ximenes would have been rather sniffy about
> that. But this was in days before crosswords, and before such
> guidelines had been developed. The fact is, of course, that the
> flexibility which seems to have been allowed in such word puzzles
> (cf "raw" + "lie" = Raleigh) would have probably made "Christ" +
> "far more" + "lay" (Christfar Morlay) acceptable enough for his
> name, but I like to think that they would have preferred the
> rather more elegant solution.

There was less flexibility than one might think. The 'raw-lie = Raleigh'
rebus uses regional pronunciation to convey the message: Aubrey reports
that he heard his grandmother say "they were wont to talk of this rebus"
in her youth, and his grandparents were Somerset folk - it seems
unlikely that people from, say, Yorkshire would have found the rebus
intelligible. Regional variations in pronunciation are still common in
England, and were much more so in the 17th century: whoever composed the
inscription could not have known how his readers would pronounce the
words.

>> Worse, there is more than one way to rearrange the letters in
>> 'far more'. The letters are a perfect anagram of 'Fearmor', an
>> Irish surname that crops up in the records of the Elizabethans
>> and Stuarts: in 1576 Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lady Dorothy Stafford,
>> and divers others of worship wrote letters recommending one
>> Nicholas Fearmor for the post of undersheriff of Norfolk, and a
>> Sir George Fearmor is mentioned in Robert Cecil's papers for the
>> year 1605. I find no record of a Joshua Fearmor, but it is a
>> plausible name.
>
> Splendid! But (subject to what you say below) that answer would
> leave the "then cost" bit orphaned, don't you think? As with
> today's crosswords, one must eventually choose that solution
> which seems most satisfactorily to match all of the clue.

And as I note below, 'Price' is a most satisfactory interpretation of
'cost'. Thus we have our mystery man's full name: Joshua Fearmor Price.
A redoubtable fellow, by the sound of it!

>> And what of the 'cost' that supposedly transforms into 'ley'?
>> While the OED entry for 'lay' does include "The act of imposing
>> a tax; an impost, assessment, rate, tax", it should be noted
>> that the only citations for the spelling 'ley' are both taken
>> from the first volume of Sir James Allanson Picton's compilation
>> of selections from the Municipal Archives of Liverpool (1883).
>> Since 'ley' is attested from nowhere else in England, we have no
>> reason to suppose that anyone except a Liverpudlian would think
>> to connect 'cost' and 'ley.'
>
> Well done. It is incredible that in all this time nobody has come
> up with this (in my view fairly obvious) objection before. The OED,
> however, gives the *first* time when something appears in print.
> It doesn't pretend to offer all uses.

In the case of 'lay' as 'The act of imposing a tax,' etc., the OED
offers eight citations, ranging from 1558 to 1888: though this may not
be comprehensive, it is more extensive that your comment suggests.

There may well be other instances of 'lay/laye/ley' being used to mean
'the act of imposing a tax' or 'a tax', but where are they, and would
they have been likely to be known to the people who were in on the
secret of Marlowe's survival? As I note below, both Marlowe and
Shakespeare used 'lay' quite often, but neither of them ever used it in
the sense of 'a tax', and Marlowe never used it in any sense that could
conceivably mean 'a cost'.

> You will note that the best answer (and the one I would have much
> preferred to offer) was the definition for "lay", "A bill, score,
> reckoning".

That may well be the best answer for a modern reader who is trying to
wrest 'lay' from 'cost,' but it is unclear whether it would have even
been a possible answer for a 17th-century reader. A survey of
17th-century print usages of 'cost' suggests that 'price' would have
been a more logical inference for such a reader, and there were people
with the surname 'Price' (from the Welsh 'ap Rhys') in England at that
time - the same volume of the Privy Council's acts that mentions the
summoning of Marlow/Marley also mentions "James Price, one of the
Ordinary Yeomen of her Majesty's Chamber," and "one Edward Price of
Weston in the countie of Somerset". Whether there was anyone named
Joshua Fearmor Price, I do not know; but there could have been.

> Unfortunately the entry showed that they had found only one use of the
> word in this sense (the "-1" after "Obs. rare"). There is no such
> indication for "an impost, assessment, rate, tax."
>
> If you really object to this, however, then we might consider the
> use of the word "lay", as it appears in 2 Henry VI. "a wager, bet
> or stake", which is of course a cost if one loses.
>
> Clifford. My soule and bodie on the action both.
> York. A dreadfull lay.

Whether a 16th- or 17th-century reader would have thought that a wager
is a cost if one loses is by no means clear; nor is it clear that said
reader would jump from 'cost' to 'a cost' - they are not the same thing.
Indeed, the use of the word on the monument is more similar to 'price':
"whose name doth deck this tomb far more than cost" may reasonably be
interpreted as "whose name beautifies this tomb far more than the money
that was spent on it does."

(Did Marlowe ever use 'lay' as a noun? I find numerous instances of its
uses as a verb, in both the plays and the non-dramatic verse (e.g., 'O,
Faustus, lay that damnèd book aside', 'Lay hands on that traitor
Mortimer!', 'If they would lay their crowns before my feet', 'Idly I lay
with her, as if I loved not,' 'For she doth lay more colours on her
face,/Than ever Tully used his speech to grace'), but not a single
instance of the noun.)

(Not that Shakespeare commonly uses it as a noun: though the word
appears nearly three hundred times in his works, I count only four
nominal uses, twice in the sense of 'bet' and twice in the sense of
'song' - most famously in the splendid opening lines of the poem usually
called 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', 'Let the bird of loudest lay/On the
sole Arabian tree/Herald sad and trumpet be,/To whose sound chaste wings
obey'.)

> The question for me is not whether it is a particularly good clue,
> but whether the author would have felt that it was good enough to
> achieve his purpose, given the extremely difficult task he had set
> himself in containing two entirely different yet coherent messages
> within the same set of words. In his position I certainly would
> have done.

But we moderns cannot know if our sense of 'cost' would be intelligible
to a 17th century reader It is by no means clear that anyone at the time
the inscription was created would have made the association 'cost = a
cost = a tax = ley' or "cost = a cost = a bill = lay'. "Cost = price,"
on the other hand, is quite likely: see, for example, the OED's citation
of Bishop Joseph Hall (1616), "For cost of clothes, for price of
vessels".

And if the author was trying to encode some form of Marlowe's name, he
had the option of using the syllable 'lo-' instead of 'ley', and it is
not hard to think of ways to work 'low' or 'lo' or synonyms thereof into
a monumental inscription. For that matter, it is not hard to think of
ways to work an actual synonym for 'ley' (e.g., 'field') into a
monumental inscription.

Nor was the task so extremely difficult: modern crossword-setters come
up with more elegant wordplay every day, and they labour under the twin
burdens of rules and standardized spelling.

>> And the synonymy is questionable in any case. The first OED
>> citation is excerpted from the following "It is agreed by the
>> Mayor and Bailiffs with a full consent of the whole Assembly of
>> the Burgesses of Liverpool, that there shall be hired a clerk
>> that can sing his plain song and prick song, and play on the
>> organs--5 marks--and it is to be levied by force of one ley
>> yearly to be gathered by the Bailiffs for the time being"
>>
>> (Vol. I: 95). The meaning 'cost' for 'ley' is not possible here -
>>
>> "levied by the force of one cost yearly" is gibberish.
>
> Wow! You can't imagine how delighted I am to have someone trying
> to refute my arguments with actual facts for once, rather than
> with snide comment and ad hominem argument. Where is this to be
> found? Not by the general public, I'll be bound.
>
> Your assumption that there should be "synonymy" (lovely word)
> isn't really sufficient, however, since such a clue would usually
> also be answered by example too. e.g Large animal = elephant;
> tax = cost.

But 'tax' != 'cost'; as noted above, one has to go from 'cost' to 'a
cost' (i.e., an expense) before one can get to 'a tax'.

>> The second 'ley' citation is a bit more promising - "It is also
>> agreed that a Ley or Taxac[i]on of xii[l] be imposed upon the
>> Towne for payeing of the Quarterage of the horse," etc. - but
>> the passage dates from 1647.
>
> You seem to be implying that the second time we know that it
> appeared in print (the first we know of being in 1558) people
> would still be scratching their heads and demanding know what
> this twerp was talking about.

My point was simply that a modern reader could conceivably substitute 'a
Cost' for 'a Ley' in that passage, i.e., "a Cost or Taxation of twelve
pounds."

In addition to the point I raised above, viz., that those who knew the
true story had no need for a hidden message, there is also a problem
with their being around to read such a message: Peele seems to have died
in 1596, and the Privy Councillors who summoned Marlow/Marley before
them in 1593 had the same problem: only three of them made it to the
17th century, and of those, the last (Lord Buckhurst) died in 1608. The
Queen, who would presumably also have been in on the secret, died in
1603; Robert Cecil died in 1612. The date of William Danby's death is
unknown, but there is no record of him after 1593, and there is no
record of Robert Poley after 1601, the same year that Nicholas Skeres
was apparently sent to Bridewell, whence he is not known to have
emerged. Lord Strange died in 1594, and of course Shakespeare himself
died in 1616.

When they died, it seems they took the spelling 'Marley' with them: by
the time of Shaksper's death in 1616, the 'o' was pretty firmly embedded
in Marlowe's surname.

(I note that Ingram Frizer lived until 1627, but he had settled down in
Eltham by 1604 and seems to have spent the rest of his life there.)

> For me, however, what makes this so convincing is that, even
> though we might feel that in the context of today's word puzzles
> it may stretch the rules a bit, there are very good reasons for
> believing the attempt of the author to say that "Marley" was in
> some way "in" the monument with Shakespeare was genuine. I have
> tried to show why I believe this to be the case on pp.4-9 of my
> essay on the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society website at
> <http://www.marloweshakespeare.org/files/Riddle_of_the_Monument_March._03_2012.pdf>.
>
> So far, nobody has been prepared to offer any sort of rebuttal of
> the argument I present there. I have great hopes of you, however.

I see no reason to rebut the argument, provided one agrees that the best
solution to the puzzle is Joshua Fearmor Price.
--
S.O.P.

[Paul Crowley]

1On 07/10/2013 01:46, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:

IVDICIO PYLIUM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM,
TERRA TEGIT, POPULUS MÆRET, OLYMPUS HABET

STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST?
READ IF THOV CANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH HATH PLAST
WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE: WITH WHOME,
QVICK NATVRE DIDE: WHOSE NAME, DOTH DECK YS TOMBE,
FAR MORE, THEN COST: SIEH ALL, YT HE HATH WRITT,
LEAVES LIVING ART, BVT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.

> [material redacted]

> That reading ignores the first line, which is the key to the second. As
> the OED notes, one sense of 'can' is to express possibility: "To be
> permitted or enabled by the conditions of the case; /can you..?/ = is it
> possible for you to..?" Since the first line establishes that the reader
> is a passenger ("a person who passes by or through a place; a traveller,
> /esp./ a traveller on foot"), and that he seems to be in a hurry, since
> he is going by so fast, the second line may be sensibly interpreted to
> mean "read this if you have the time," etc.

I don't agree with much Peter says, but here
he has a better argument. The sentiment "read
this if you have the time' is far too banal to be
worth stating.

There are three main ways we can approach
this topic
A) The Strat -- it's all pretty much above board.
B) The Anti-Strat -- it's peculiar and needs
explanation
B_0) Peter's weird Marlite version.

The Strat '. . it's above board' account does not
work; the standard biographers prefer to ignore
the wording, but when they do comment they
admit its strangeness.

Peter's weird version is too fantastic to merit
discussion. No one would construct such an
odd puzzle nor expect anyone to work it out.
His inability to put himself in the place of his
proposed puzzle-compiler is related to the total
vagueness of the Marlite theory generally. It
fails to indicate who was behind the plot, who
provided the money,or why they went to such
trouble, or who financed the First Folio and
the monument, and why. With that kind of
background, investigators can pursue little in
the way of enquiry, other than to seek
enciphered or encoded messages -- as we
used to see with the Baconians

> [additional redaction]

>> Personally, I don't think it was ever intended to be solved by some
>> random passer-by, but was always meant to be something known about
>> only by those who were privy to the true story anyway.
>
> Why would those who were privy to the true story be interested in a
> hidden message in a Warwickshire village church that told them nothing
> they didn't already know? And if they were the only ones who were meant
> to know about it, why did they conceal the message in a place where any
> literate passenger could come across it and potentially decipher it, and
> then direct said passenger to do so? And include sixteen seeming
> anomalies to alert said passenger to the fact that there was more there
> than met the eye?

Sound points. An Oxfordian answer -- to the general
question -- would be that something obviously had
to be written on the monument. Its dominant function
was keep happy the occasional tourist and any local
who happened to read it. So it was to be kept vague
and ambiguous, and must say nothing clear nor
explicit.

Ideally, it should also contain a different message for
those who knew the truth. I have to admit that I can
see nothing beyond "the judgement of piles . and
the art of a marrow', and a weak play on the absence
of any writing from the Stratford man (i.e. 'all that he
hath writt' = zero).

It seems to me that little thought went into the
inscription. Those responsible for the cover-up
probably did not expect anyone of significance to
see it, let alone study it. It was a necessary job,
done in a rush, with time only a few passing
aspersions directed towards the Stratman.

The name used is 'Shakspeare' i.e. without the 'e'
of 'Shake'. Spelling DID matter to those involved;
'Shake-speare' (with or without the hyphen) is the
form that appeared on nearly all the canonical works,
That would indicate that the monument was for the
Stratford man (or more likely IMO his father) -- and
having no particular allusion to the poet. The
' . . read if thou canst . .' would be an ironic reference
(a) to the illiteracy of the populace at which it was
nominally aimed, and (b) to the blank sheets that
the Stratman or his father would have produced if
they had ever been asked to write.

> There was less flexibility than one might think. The 'raw-lie = Raleigh'
> rebus uses regional pronunciation to convey the message: Aubrey reports
> that he heard his grandmother say "they were wont to talk of this rebus"
> in her youth, and his grandparents were Somerset folk - it seems
> unlikely that people from, say, Yorkshire would have found the rebus
> intelligible.

People who discussed Raleigh had some interest
in history, and would have known the story
According to Winton, who quotes Aubrey, this
word-play and the supporting verse, came from
the Elizabethan court.

'The foe to the stommacke, and the word of disgrace
Shewes the gentlemans name with the bold face.'
(Traditionally, this was the answer of a gentleman called
Noel to a couplet Ralegh composed on his name:
'The word of deniall, and the letter of fifty
Makes the gentlemans name that will never be thrifty.'
Noe L.)

I would bet that the original wording was closer to:

'The foe to the stommacke, and the word of disgrace
Shewes the jack's name with the bold face.'

Btw, Raleigh used the spelling 'Rauley' in 1584
and then switched to 'Ralegh'. Possibly that was
to minimise the word-play on 'lie'. Also many
more words (in the good Southern of the educated
classes of the day) ending on "y" or "ey" then
rhymed with 'eye' (as against rhyming with 'see')
than do now. You can see this in the poetry where
the modern pronunciation routinely produces bad
rhymes and weak (unstressed) line-endings

That thereby beauties Rose might neuer die, 1:2
His tender heire might beare his memory: 1:4

> And if the author was trying to encode some form of Marlowe's name, he
> had the option of using the syllable 'lo-' instead of 'ley', and it is
> not hard to think of ways to work 'low' or 'lo' or synonyms thereof into
> a monumental inscription. For that matter, it is not hard to think of
> ways to work an actual synonym for 'ley' (e.g., 'field') into a
> monumental inscription.
>
> Nor was the task so extremely difficult: modern crossword-setters come
> up with more elegant wordplay every day, and they labour under the twin
> burdens of rules and standardized spelling.

Indeed. Peter's 'solution' implies an extra-
ordinarily clumsy, quite talentless and hopelessly
incompetent puzzle-setter. It would have been
easy for him to write that the poet 'marred' some-
thing 'low', and to also allude to (say) Canterbury,
Cambridge, and cobblers.

>> So far, nobody has been prepared to offer any sort of rebuttal of
>> the argument I present there. I have great hopes of you, however.
>
> I see no reason to rebut the argument, provided one agrees that the best
> solution to the puzzle is Joshua Fearmor Price.

Good point. Given the flexibility Peter allows
himself and the ingenuity of his proposed 'solver',
almost any name can be found in the text.


Paul.

[tom c]

> READ IF THOV GANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH HATH PLAST

GANST is the fourth word so why does everyone write CANST?

>

[tom c]

Answer:

When Dugdale made his copy of the monument text he changed GANST to CANS'T.

Also according to Dugdale's copy: this is what the fourth line of English text should look like:

QVICK NATVRE DYED: WHOSE NAME, DOTH DECK THE TOMBE,

So we must assume that the current spelling is wrong? I think not.

When Dugdale made his drawing of the effigy holding the cushion vertically, and the arms of the effigy in that peculiar pose, and when he wrote cans't instead of gans't, he did so (imo)to attract attention to certain points about the monument which are cyphered 'signals'.

[Sneaky O. Possum]

tom c <them...@btinternet.com> wrote in
news:24406890-a9ad-4823...@googlegroups.com:

>> READ IF THOV GANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH HATH PLAST
>
> GANST is the fourth word so why does everyone write CANST?

Are you assuming the inscriber was using a poetically aphaeretic form of
'beganst'? That almost makes sense.
--
S.O.P.

[Peter F.]

Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>
> Peter F. wrote:
> >
> > Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
> > >
> > > Much more complex messages have happened just by chance:
> > >
> > > http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html
> >
> > Excellent! Not that any of them are "messages", of course; only a
> > name within a passage in some way related to death (and Moby Dick
> > has plenty of such passages!)
>
> There are, perhaps, better examples, e.g., the fact that the
> phrase "The jubilee day of Victoria, queen and empress" is a
> perfect anagram of the phrase "Joys are never quite complete
> if a husband die," a message which is obviously relevant - and
> entirely coincidental. (That anagram was invented in 1887, by
> the way - see /Truth/, Vol. 22, No. 550 [14 July 1887], p. 85.)

That's good. Indeed the whole point of the anagram game is to
see if it is possible to find a message which was clearly not
intentional (as when people's names are used, e.g the Jacobean
one: James Stuart = a just master).

Yes, I don't recall anyone suggesting that at the time, and it
does make a sort of sense. "Stay if thou canst" would have made
that clearer of course. Be that as it may, this really was how
I came to be trying to find a better explanation than those on
offer.

> [additional redaction]

[ditto]

> But what is the reader to make of the phrase 'whom envious
> Death hath plast with in this monument'? If Marlowe's name
> was in fact placed in the inscription, it was placed there
> by the creator of the inscription - did he want the decipherer
> to associate him with Death? A bit ominous, that.

One of the dafter ideas in the overt meaning of the inscription
is that the fact of his Death has somehow placed Shakespeare
*within* the monument. To say that Shakespeare is either
inscribed (or commemorated) *in* (not within) it does make far
more sense, but that does also require it to be mean that
someone else is "in" there with him.

> And of course the inscription is on the monument, not in it.

That would be the more common usage, but doesn't the etymology
of the word inscription imply otherwise? In any case, my pref-
erence is to read it as "commemorated in".

> Somehow the solver knows, without being told, that only
> certain parts of the inscription are relevant, and which
> parts those are. Curious.

I don't understand this. Every bit of the poem is relevant.

> > Personally, I don't think it was ever intended to be solved

> > by some random passer-by, but was always meant to be some-

> > thing known about only by those who were privy to the true
> > story anyway.
>
> Why would those who were privy to the true story be interested
> in a hidden message in a Warwickshire village church that told
> them nothing they didn't already know?

Given the esteem in which the author Shakespeare was held, it
was certainly thought appropriate that there should be a monument
to his memory. If not in Westminster Abbey (and we may ask why
not) then in the apparent place of his birth. However, those who
knew that he was not the true author would have not liked it
apparently confirming what they knew to be untrue, as well as
ensuring that the true author remained unmemorialized. To have
both an overt meaning with what the story was and a covert one
acknowleding the true one would have provided a neat solution.

> And if they were the only ones who were meant to know about it,
> why did they conceal the message in a place where any literate
> passenger could come across it and potentially decipher it, and
> then direct said passenger to do so?

Well, as I said, I don't think it was intended for a "passenger"
to do any such thing, and as far as I know none of them has.
Also, as you yourself are demonstrating, one could always deny
that it was intentional.

> And include sixteen seeming anomalies to alert said passenger
> to the fact that there was more there than met the eye?

In most cases those anomalies were a necessary part of getting
the double-meaning to work, and would have been avoided if it
had been possible. I'm prepared to acknowledge, however, that
some of the rest could have been the author showing off a bit.

[yet further redaction]

[ditto]

> > The fact is, of course, that the flexibility which seems to
> > have been allowed in such word puzzles (cf "raw" + "lie" =
> > Raleigh) would have probably made "Christ" + "far more" +
> > "lay" (Christfar Morlay) acceptable enough for his name, but
> > I like to think that they would have preferred the rather
> > more elegant solution.
>
> There was less flexibility than one might think. The 'raw-lie
> = Raleigh' rebus uses regional pronunciation to convey the
> message: Aubrey reports that he heard his grandmother say
> "they were wont to talk of this rebus" in her youth, and his
> grandparents were Somerset folk

His maternal grandmother, Israel Lyte (nee Browne), was from
Winterbourne Basset in Wiltshire, and his paternal grandmother,
Rachel Aubrey (nee Danvers) was a member of a noble family from
the same county. Rachel married John's grandfather, another
John, who had been a ward of Archbishop Whitgift. If it was her
Rachel need not necessarily have picked it up locally, but may
have learned it from her parents who presumably could have heard
it at court, a far more likely source.

> it seems unlikely that people from, say, Yorkshire would have

> found the rebus intelligible. Regional variations in pronun-

> ciation are still common in England, and were much more so in
> the 17th century: whoever composed the inscription could not
> have known how his readers would pronounce the words.

You're not getting it. The only people who were expected to be
able to understand it were those who most probably knew the guy
personally. And I maintain that sufficient flexibility was
accepted for even the name 'Christ' to be pronounced as 'Christ'
in Christopher, which is of course quite different.

> > > Worse, there is more than one way to rearrange the letters
> > > in 'far more'. The letters are a perfect anagram of
> > > 'Fearmor', an Irish surname that crops up in the records
> > > of the Elizabethans and Stuarts: in 1576 Sir Nicholas
> > > Bacon, Lady Dorothy Stafford, and divers others of worship
> > > wrote letters recommending one Nicholas Fearmor for the
> > > post of undersheriff of Norfolk, and a Sir George Fearmor
> > > is mentioned in Robert Cecil's papers for the year 1605.
> > > I find no record of a Joshua Fearmor, but it is a plausible
> > > name.
> >
> > Splendid! But (subject to what you say below) that answer
> > would leave the "then cost" bit orphaned, don't you think?
> > As with today's crosswords, one must eventually choose that
> > solution which seems most satisfactorily to match all of the
> > clue.
>

> And as I note below, 'Price' is a most satisfactory interpret-

> ation of 'cost'. Thus we have our mystery man's full name:
> Joshua Fearmor Price. A redoubtable fellow, by the sound of it!

Absolutely. I see a best-selling novel coming out about about
him any day now.

> > > And what of the 'cost' that supposedly transforms into
> > > 'ley'? While the OED entry for 'lay' does include "The act
> > > of imposing a tax; an impost, assessment, rate, tax", it
> > > should be noted that the only citations for the spelling
> > > 'ley' are both taken from the first volume of Sir James
> > > Allanson Picton's compilation of selections from the
> > > Municipal Archives of Liverpool (1883). Since 'ley' is
> > > attested from nowhere else in England, we have no reason
> > > to suppose that anyone except a Liverpudlian would think
> > > to connect 'cost' and 'ley.'
> >
> > Well done. It is incredible that in all this time nobody has
> > come up with this (in my view fairly obvious) objection

> > before. The OED, however, gives the *first* time when some-

> > thing appears in print. It doesn't pretend to offer all uses.
>
> In the case of 'lay' as 'The act of imposing a tax,' etc., the
> OED offers eight citations, ranging from 1558 to 1888: though
> this may not be comprehensive, it is more extensive that your
> comment suggests.
>
> There may well be other instances of 'lay/laye/ley' being used
> to mean 'the act of imposing a tax' or 'a tax', but where are
> they, and would they have been likely to be known to the people
> who were in on the secret of Marlowe's survival?

The only question worth asking is whether the author of the
inscription could have known it. That he may have had to explain
that bit to the others wouldn't make it any less correct as an
answer. If it was written by Ben Jonson for example, as many
suspect, he may well have picked it up from his fellow-soldiers
in the Low Countries. (or on his way back from Edinburgh in
1620?)

> As I note below, both Marlowe and Shakespeare used 'lay' quite
> often, but neither of them ever used it in the sense of 'a tax',
> and Marlowe never used it in any sense that could conceivably
> mean 'a cost'.
> >
> > You will note that the best answer (and the one I would have
> > much preferred to offer) was the definition for "lay", "A bill,
> > score, reckoning".
>
> That may well be the best answer for a modern reader who is
> trying to wrest 'lay' from 'cost,' but it is unclear whether it
> would have even been a possible answer for a 17th-century reader.
> A survey of 17th-century print usages of 'cost' suggests that
> 'price' would have been a more logical inference for such a
> reader, and there were people with the surname 'Price' (from
> the Welsh 'ap Rhys') in England at that time - the same volume
> of the Privy Council's acts that mentions the summoning of
> Marlow/Marley also mentions "James Price, one of the Ordinary
> Yeomen of her Majesty's Chamber," and "one Edward Price of
> Weston in the countie of Somerset". Whether there was anyone
> named Joshua Fearmor Price, I do not know; but there could
> have been.

I guess so, although the IGI has nobody with that name born in
the 16th century. Even so, the question must be whether the name
of some unknown person (so without any apparent connection with
Shakespeare) is a more likely answer than the name of a well-
known person whose work is universally acknowledged as having
had a huge effect on the works of the Bard. Finding a solution
which "works" is how riddles are solved.

> > Unfortunately the entry showed that they had found only one
> > use of the word in this sense (the "-1" after "Obs. rare").
> > There is no such indication for "an impost, assessment, rate,
> > tax."
> >
> > If you really object to this, however, then we might consider
> > the use of the word "lay", as it appears in 2 Henry VI. "a
> > wager, bet or stake", which is of course a cost if one loses.
> >
> > Clifford. My soule and bodie on the action both.
> > York. A dreadfull lay.
>
> Whether a 16th- or 17th-century reader would have thought that
> a wager is a cost if one loses is by no means clear;

Pretty bleedin' obvious, I would have thought!

> nor is it clear that said reader would jump from 'cost' to 'a
> cost' - they are not the same thing. Indeed, the use of the word
> on the monument is more similar to 'price': "whose name doth
> deck this tomb far more than cost" may reasonably be interpreted
> as "whose name beautifies this tomb far more than the money
> that was spent on it does."

Of course it may! The whole point of a riddle is that it should
offer at least as reasonable an interpretation for the overt
message as it does for the covert one.

> (Did Marlowe ever use 'lay' as a noun? I find numerous instances
> of its uses as a verb, in both the plays and the non-dramatic
> verse (e.g., 'O, Faustus, lay that damnèd book aside', 'Lay
> hands on that traitor Mortimer!', 'If they would lay their
> crowns before my feet', 'Idly I lay with her, as if I loved not,'
> 'For she doth lay more colours on her face,/Than ever Tully
> used his speech to grace'), but not a single instance of the
> noun.)

Great research, but (as Autolycus puts it) "thou hast lost thy
labour." Quite apart from rather unreasonably assuming that
Marlowe would have made use of every word he knew, the question
of whether he was aware of it is rather irrelevant, since I have
never claimed that he played any part in creating the inscription.
Furthermore, his vocabulary in 1593 would have been significantly
expanded by (say) 1622 if he did in fact survive.

> (Not that Shakespeare commonly uses it as a noun: though the
> word appears nearly three hundred times in his works, I count
> only four nominal uses, twice in the sense of 'bet' and twice
> in the sense of 'song' - most famously in the splendid opening
> lines of the poem usually called 'The Phoenix and the Turtle',
> 'Let the bird of loudest lay/On the sole Arabian tree/Herald
> sad and trumpet be,/To whose sound chaste wings obey'.)

Not that any of this is really relevant, but the one use in the
sense of 'bet' is all we need.

> > The question for me is not whether it is a particularly good
> > clue, but whether the author would have felt that it was good
> > enough to achieve his purpose, given the extremely difficult
> > task he had set himself in containing two entirely different
> > yet coherent messages within the same set of words. In his
> > position I certainly would have done.
>
> But we moderns cannot know if our sense of 'cost' would be
> intelligible to a 17th century reader It is by no means clear
> that anyone at the time the inscription was created would have
> made the association 'cost = a cost = a tax = ley' or "cost =
> a cost = a bill = lay'. "Cost = price," on the other hand, is
> quite likely: see, for example, the OED's citation of Bishop
> Joseph Hall (1616), "For cost of clothes, for price of vessels".

This is a very reasonable objection, but assumes a necessary
precision in the use of words which I don't find justified. For
example, that Raleigh rebus has "*The* enemy to the stomach and
*the* word of disgrace", when "a" would be far more appropriate
than "the" in each case. There are of course a host of possible
answers for both of them.

> And if the author was trying to encode some form of Marlowe's
> name, he had the option of using the syllable 'lo-' instead of
> 'ley', and it is not hard to think of ways to work 'low' or
> 'lo' or synonyms thereof into a monumental inscription. For
> that matter, it is not hard to think of ways to work an actual
> synonym for 'ley' (e.g., 'field') into a monumental inscription.

That you could have done better is of course beyond doubt (and
I would be delighted if you were able to show us exactly how
this would be done!) It's just a pity that you weren't around to
help them at the time.

> Nor was the task so extremely difficult: modern crossword-
> setters come up with more elegant wordplay every day, and they
> labour under the twin burdens of rules and standardized
> spelling.

Hmm. I'm not sure that I would equate the creation of one of
today's cryptic crossword clues with a poem which manages to
give two entirely different meanings over six lines of verse!

> > > And the synonymy is questionable in any case. The first
> > > OED citation is excerpted from the following "It is agreed
> > > by the Mayor and Bailiffs with a full consent of the whole
> > > Assembly of the Burgesses of Liverpool, that there shall
> > > be hired a clerk that can sing his plain song and prick
> > > song, and play on the organs--5 marks--and it is to be
> > > levied by force of one ley yearly to be gathered by the
> > > Bailiffs for the time being" (Vol. I: 95). The meaning
> > > 'cost' for 'ley' is not possible here -
> > >
> > > "levied by the force of one cost yearly" is gibberish.
> >
> > Wow! You can't imagine how delighted I am to have someone
> > trying to refute my arguments with actual facts for once,
> > rather than with snide comment and ad hominem argument.
> > Where is this to be found? Not by the general public, I'll
> > be bound.

I really would be interested in knowing where you got the full
text of the Picton quotations, even if such things are not
obtainable by mere mortals like me.

> > Your assumption that there should be "synonymy" (lovely word)
> > isn't really sufficient, however, since such a clue would
> > usually also be answered by example too. e.g Large animal =
> > elephant; tax = cost.
>

> But 'tax' = 'cost'; as noted above, one has to go from 'cost'

> to 'a cost' (i.e., an expense) before one can get to 'a tax'.

And, as also noted above (see Raleigh), this is not a problem.

> > > The second 'ley' citation is a bit more promising - "It is
> > > also agreed that a Ley or Taxac[i]on of xii[l] be imposed
> > > upon the Towne for payeing of the Quarterage of the horse,"
> > > etc. - but the passage dates from 1647.
> >
> > You seem to be implying that the second time we know that it
> > appeared in print (the first we know of being in 1558) people
> > would still be scratching their heads and demanding know what
> > this twerp was talking about.
>
> My point was simply that a modern reader could conceivably
> substitute 'a Cost' for 'a Ley' in that passage, i.e., "a Cost
> or Taxation of twelve pounds."

[snip]

> In addition to the point I raised above, viz., that those who
> knew the true story had no need for a hidden message, there
> is also a problem with their being around to read such a
> message: Peele seems to have died in 1596, and the Privy
> Councillors who summoned Marlow/Marley before them in 1593
> had the same problem: only three of them made it to the
> 17th century, and of those, the last (Lord Buckhurst) died
> in 1608. The Queen, who would presumably also have been in
> on the secret, died in 1603; Robert Cecil died in 1612. The
> date of William Danby's death is unknown, but there is no
> record of him after 1593, and there is no record of Robert
> Poley after 1601, the same year that Nicholas Skeres was
> apparently sent to Bridewell, whence he is not known to have
> emerged. Lord Strange died in 1594, and of course Shakespeare
> himself died in 1616.
>
> When they died, it seems they took the spelling 'Marley' with
> them: by the time of Shaksper's death in 1616, the 'o' was
> pretty firmly embedded in Marlowe's surname.
>
> (I note that Ingram Frizer lived until 1627, but he had settled
> down in Eltham by 1604 and seems to have spent the rest of his
> life there.)

Yes, I think I was aware of all of this (in fact I wouldn't mind
betting that several of these bits of information came from
Wikipedia articles of which I have been the main editor!)
However, I return to the point that I made before, that this was
for those who knew the truth and possibly knew the man himself.
People like Sir Thomas Walsingham (d.1630), Henry Percy, 9th
Earl of Northumberland (d.1632), Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of
Southampton (d.1624) and William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke
(d.1630).

> > For me, however, what makes this so convincing is that, even
> > though we might feel that in the context of today's word
> > puzzles it may stretch the rules a bit, there are very good
> > reasons for believing the attempt of the author to say that
> > "Marley" was in some way "in" the monument with Shakespeare
> > was genuine. I have tried to show why I believe this to be
> > the case on pp.4-9 of my > essay on the
> > International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society website at
> > <http://www.marloweshakespeare.org/files/Riddle_of_the_Monument_March._03_2012.pdf>.
> >
> > So far, nobody has been prepared to offer any sort of
> > rebuttal of the argument I present there. I have great hopes
> > of you, however.
>
> I see no reason to rebut the argument, provided one agrees that
> the best solution to the puzzle is Joshua Fearmor Price.

Oh dear, what a pity. And up until now you were doing so well!

Peter F.
<http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey>

[Peter F.]

Tom C. wrote:
>
> GANST is the fourth word so why does everyone write CANST?

The change to GANST occurred only during the last century, when
the monument was refurbished after its vandalization in 1974.
They also lost a colon after the word DIDE, and replaced the
putti the wrong way round (i.e facing inwards). Apparently that
last error wasn't noticed until 3 years later!

It is possible that they changed it to GANST because they felt
that CANST didn't make much sense (which is where I started).

Peter F.
<http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey>

[Peter F.]

Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>
> Are you assuming the inscriber was using a poetically
> aphaeretic form of 'beganst'? That almost makes sense.

cf in Coriolanus:

When by and by the dinne of Warre gan pierce
His readie sence:

Peter F.
<http://www2.prestel.co.uk>

[tom c]

On Tuesday, October 8, 2013 1:15:36 AM UTC+1, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
> tom c wrote in

No. Whoever designed that lettering on that particular table put GANST in that place for a very good reason. The G is not an error. It is not CANST but GANST. The preceding READ IF THOV gives a slight hint of this.

[tom c]

On Tuesday, October 8, 2013 6:58:39 AM UTC+1, Peter F. wrote:
> Tom C. wrote:
>
> >
>
> > GANST is the fourth word so why does everyone write CANST?
>
>
>
> The change to GANST occurred only during the last century, when
>
> the monument was refurbished after its vandalization in 1974.

And what evidence have you to verify that?

>

> They also lost a colon after the word DIDE, and replaced the
>
> putti the wrong way round (i.e facing inwards). Apparently that
>
> last error wasn't noticed until 3 years later!

Putting a putti in the wrong way is something any common labourer might have done. The structure was designed in separate pieces. But I doubt he took a chisel to the tablet.

>
>
>
> It is possible that they changed it to GANST because they felt
>
> that CANST didn't make much sense (which is where I started).
>
>

That makes even less sense. If it was GANST first and then changed to CANST, that would be a sensible action. The table excluded, there is, and never has been any such word as ganst in the English language. Unless of course we are taking dialects into account. The Northumbrian 'gan' (go) for example.


> Peter F.
>
> <http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey>

[Peter F.]

Tom C. wrote:
>
> Peter F. wrote:
>
> > Tom C. wrote:
> > >
> > > GANST is the fourth word so why does everyone write CANST?
> >
> > The change to GANST occurred only during the last century, when
> > the monument was refurbished after its vandalization in 1974.
>
> And what evidence have you to verify that?

I have many copies of the inscription before that date, both
photographs showing how it has been painted and a rubbing
showing how it was inscribed. Every one of these shows the
word as CANST. I also have a photograph taken at the time of
the vandalism with the bust removed from it's niche (and with
one tassel broken off) and the whole plaque painted over with
the background colour, awaiting the attention of the letter-
painter.

> > They also lost a colon after the word DIDE, and replaced the
> > putti the wrong way round (i.e facing inwards). Apparently that
> > last error wasn't noticed until 3 years later!
>
> Putting a putti

Putto.

> in the wrong way is something any common labourer might have done.

And if the person who was supervising the work had noticed, he or
she might have pointed out the error. But nobody did.

> The structure was designed in separate pieces. But I doubt he
> took a chisel to the tablet.

The GANST is painted over the word which is still inscribed CANST.

> > It is possible that they changed it to GANST because they felt
> > that CANST didn't make much sense (which is where I started).
>
> That makes even less sense. If it was GANST first and then
> changed to CANST, that would be a sensible action. The table
> excluded, there is, and never has been any such word as ganst
> in the English language. Unless of course we are taking
> dialects into account. The Northumbrian 'gan' (go) for example.

That's not so. The OED has the verb 'gin' which, as S.O.P.
pointed out, is an aphetic form of 'begin'. It gives examples
from, among others, Shakespeare's *Cymbeline*, "The Larke at
Heauens gate sings And Phœbus gins arise" and Spenser's
*Shepheardes Calendar*, "The grasse nowe ginnes to be refresht."

In the past tense this becomes 'gan', as in Skelton's *Ware
Hauke*, "This fauconer gan showte", and the second person
singular (THOV) form of this would be GANST.


Peter F.
<http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey>

[tom c]

On Wednesday, October 9, 2013 6:34:26 AM UTC+1, Peter F. wrote:
> Tom C. wrote:
>
> >
>
> > Peter F. wrote:
>
> >
>
> > > Tom C. wrote:
>
> > > >
>
> > > > GANST is the fourth word so why does everyone write CANST?
>
> > >
>
> > > The change to GANST occurred only during the last century, when
>
> > > the monument was refurbished after its vandalization in 1974.
>
> >
>
> > And what evidence have you to verify that?
>
>
>
> I have many copies of the inscription before that date, both
>
> photographs showing how it has been painted and a rubbing
>
> showing how it was inscribed. Every one of these shows the
>
> word as CANST. I also have a photograph taken at the time of
>
> the vandalism with the bust removed from it's niche (and with
>
> one tassel broken off) and the whole plaque painted over with
>
> the background colour, awaiting the attention of the letter-
>
> painter.
>

Where can all this evidence be seen?

[tom c]

On Wednesday, October 9, 2013 9:57:44 AM UTC+1, tom c wrote:
> On Wednesday, October 9, 2013 6:34:26 AM UTC+1, Peter F. wrote:
>
> > Tom C. wrote:
>
> >
>
> > >
>
> >
>
> > > Peter F. wrote:
>
> >
>
> > >
>
> >
>
> > > > Tom C. wrote:
>
> >
>
> > > > >
>
> >
>
> > > > > GANST is the fourth word so why does everyone write CANST?
>
> >
>
> > > >
>
> >
>
> > > > The change to GANST occurred only during the last century, when
>
> >
>
> > > > the monument was refurbished after its vandalization in 1974.
>
> >
>
> > >
>
> >
>
> > > And what evidence have you to verify that?
>

**********************************************

Note:

Just after I had made the above comment concerning evidence, I received my copy of 'Shakespeare' by F. E. Halliday. I had ordered it after reading one of your sites Peter, where you mentioned the book in relation to the monument.

I have to say here, that I was completely wrong about the word GANST: it is shown quite clearly in that book's photograph as CANST. Also, it is quite clear from Dugdale (and others) that it was originally written CANST.

Moreover, it seems also that I was wrong to claim that: the initial letter I in IESVS has a dot on its top. It is true what you said: the dot is one one side, asymmetrical. It seems to have been somewhat enhanced after some work, as the current stone shows it to be larger and quite symmetrical.

I apologise to you Peter, and anyone who has been following this.

*************************************************

[Peter F.]

Tom C. wrote:
>
>Note:
>
> Just after I had made the above comment concerning evidence,
> I received my copy of 'Shakespeare' by F. E. Halliday. I had
> ordered it after reading one of your sites Peter, where you
> mentioned the book in relation to the monument.
>
> I have to say here, that I was completely wrong about the

> word GANST: it is shown quite clearly in that book's photo-

> graph as CANST. Also, it is quite clear from Dugdale (and
> others) that it was originally written CANST.
>
> Moreover, it seems also that I was wrong to claim that: the
> initial letter I in IESVS has a dot on its top. It is true
> what you said: the dot is one one side, asymmetrical. It
> seems to have been somewhat enhanced after some work, as the
> current stone shows it to be larger and quite symmetrical.
>
> I apologise to you Peter, and anyone who has been following
> this.

There's no need for any apology as far as I am concerned. For
me, the whole purpose of posting here was always to find out
where my ideas might have been wrong.

When I was talking about the asymmetry, however, I wasn't really
talking about how the dot is offset, but about the serifs on
the letter 'I'. The capital letter has a serif on both sides at
the top, whereas the lower-case 'i' has just the one on the left.


Peter F.
<http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/>

[tom c]

Yes I see that. Thanks.

[Sneaky O. Possum]

"Peter F." <pet...@rey.myzen.co.uk> wrote in

news:3f0a5983-5036-4a3f...@googlegroups.com:

> Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
[excisions]

>> But what is the reader to make of the phrase 'whom envious
>> Death hath plast with in this monument'? If Marlowe's name
>> was in fact placed in the inscription, it was placed there
>> by the creator of the inscription - did he want the decipherer
>> to associate him with Death? A bit ominous, that.
>
> One of the dafter ideas in the overt meaning of the inscription
> is that the fact of his Death has somehow placed Shakespeare
> *within* the monument. To say that Shakespeare is either
> inscribed (or commemorated) *in* (not within) it does make far
> more sense, but that does also require it to be mean that
> someone else is "in" there with him.

That doesn't address the question of what the creator of the inscription
meant by identifying himself as envious Death.

>> And of course the inscription is on the monument, not in it.
>
> That would be the more common usage, but doesn't the etymology
> of the word inscription imply otherwise?

An inscription is simply something written into something else - in this
case, the stone surface of the monument. (Of course, no form of the word
'inscribe' appears on the monument itself.)

> In any case, my preference is to read it as "commemorated in".

Again, though, that requires the reader to ignore the bit about envious
Death, doesn't it?

>> Somehow the solver knows, without being told, that only
>> certain parts of the inscription are relevant, and which
>> parts those are. Curious.
>
> I don't understand this. Every bit of the poem is relevant.

So what is the relevance of envious Death placing Shakspere (and perhaps
someone else) with in the monument?

>> > Personally, I don't think it was ever intended to be solved
>> > by some random passer-by, but was always meant to be some-
>> > thing known about only by those who were privy to the true
>> > story anyway.
>>
>> Why would those who were privy to the true story be interested
>> in a hidden message in a Warwickshire village church that told
>> them nothing they didn't already know?
>
> Given the esteem in which the author Shakespeare was held,

I'm not sure that's a given. There is reason to believe that Shakespeare
was well-regarded by his surviving colleagues, that his plays were still
popular, and that he was evidently considered something of a celebrity
around Stratford-upon-Avon, but verse drama was still considered a
diversion by the intelligentsia: it wasn't till the 18th century that
Shakespeare came to be considered the equal of Spenser and Milton (and
it wasn't till the 19th that he came to considered the Greatest Writer
Ever).

> it was certainly thought appropriate that there should be a monument
> to his memory.

Presumably Shakespeare's family had something to do with that.

> If not in Westminster Abbey (and we may ask why not)

Because he wasn't held in all that much esteem? Note that Chaucer got a
place in the Abbey primarily because he was living on the Abbey grounds
when he died, and he wasn't commemorated by anything more than a plain
slab till 1556 - over 150 years after his death.

Francis Beaumont, who died the same year as Shakey, did get into the
Abbey (along with his brother, Sir John Beaumont), but he's still
waiting for a monument. Poets have often been made to wait for their
proper honours: Lord Byron didn't get one until 1969.

> then in the apparent place of his birth. However, those who
> knew that he was not the true author would have not liked it
> apparently confirming what they knew to be untrue,

Those who knew that Shakey wasn't the true author were those who
arranged for him to be Marlowe's front man, right? It would seem that
they considered the work to be more important than the man.

> as well as ensuring that the true author remained unmemorialized.

If they had really cared whether Marlowe got the credit, they could have
just published the works under Marlowe's name, couldn't they? Of the
plays generally attributed to Marlowe, only /Tamburlaine/ was published
(anonymously) before the summer of 1593. It's not as though playgoers
and publishers would have raised a fuss if the conspirators had claimed
the works as previously unknown plays discovered among the effects of
the late Ch. Mar.

And if those who knew that Marlowe was the true author cared so much
about him, why didn't they publish a Marlowe folio that included the
plays and non-dramatic verse that are now generally attributed to
Marlowe? That would have been a much better way of memorializing him
than arranging for the inscription on Shakespeare's monument to have a
dodgy double meaning. If a Marlowe folio had been published to
capitalize on the success of the Shakespeare folio, who would have
objected? Not the Privy Councillors of 1593, who were all long dead by
then.

> To have both an overt meaning with what the story was and a covert one
> acknowleding the true one would have provided a neat solution.

It seems to me that publishing a Marlowe folio would have provided a
much neater one.

>> And if they were the only ones who were meant to know about it,
>> why did they conceal the message in a place where any literate
>> passenger could come across it and potentially decipher it, and
>> then direct said passenger to do so?
>
> Well, as I said, I don't think it was intended for a "passenger"
> to do any such thing, and as far as I know none of them has.
> Also, as you yourself are demonstrating, one could always deny
> that it was intentional.

In fact, I would be delighted if it could be shown that there is an
intentionally-concealed message in the inscription. My belief that
Shakes wrote his own works is merely an offshoot of my empiricism: I
hold no brief for the man himself: compared to contemporaries like
Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and Ben Jonson, he's quite dull.

>> And include sixteen seeming anomalies to alert said passenger
>> to the fact that there was more there than met the eye?
>
> In most cases those anomalies were a necessary part of getting
> the double-meaning to work, and would have been avoided if it
> had been possible. I'm prepared to acknowledge, however, that
> some of the rest could have been the author showing off a bit.

Lousy architecture, but lovely gargoyles?

> [yet further redaction]
>
> [ditto]
>
>> > The fact is, of course, that the flexibility which seems to
>> > have been allowed in such word puzzles (cf "raw" + "lie" =
>> > Raleigh) would have probably made "Christ" + "far more" +
>> > "lay" (Christfar Morlay) acceptable enough for his name, but
>> > I like to think that they would have preferred the rather
>> > more elegant solution.
>>
>> There was less flexibility than one might think. The 'raw-lie
>> = Raleigh' rebus uses regional pronunciation to convey the
>> message: Aubrey reports that he heard his grandmother say
>> "they were wont to talk of this rebus" in her youth, and his
>> grandparents were Somerset folk
>
> His maternal grandmother, Israel Lyte (nee Browne), was from

> Winterbourne Basset in Wiltshire and his paternal grandmother,

> Rachel Aubrey (nee Danvers) was a member of a noble family from
> the same county.

Please excuse the error: I had mistakenly assumed that grandfather and
grandmother came from the same area. I will emend the above thus:

Aubrey reports that he heard his grandmother say "they were wont to talk

of this rebus" in her youth, and both of his grandmothers were Wiltshire
folk.

> Rachel married John's grandfather, another John, who had been a ward
> of Archbishop Whitgift. If it was her Rachel need not necessarily have
> picked it up locally, but may have learned it from her parents who
> presumably could have heard it at court, a far more likely source.

If Aubrey had had any reason to believe his gran had gotten the Raw-lye
rebus at court, I think he would have mentioned it: he wasn't one to
miss the chance to mention an association, however tenuous, with someone
famous (see, for example, his mentioning that he "went to schoole at
Blandford in Dorest 4 yeares" with Ralegh's grandsons Walter and Tom).

[further excisions]

>> There may well be other instances of 'lay/laye/ley' being used
>> to mean 'the act of imposing a tax' or 'a tax', but where are
>> they, and would they have been likely to be known to the people
>> who were in on the secret of Marlowe's survival?
>
> The only question worth asking is whether the author of the
> inscription could have known it. That he may have had to explain
> that bit to the others wouldn't make it any less correct as an
> answer. If it was written by Ben Jonson for example, as many
> suspect, he may well have picked it up from his fellow-soldiers
> in the Low Countries. (or on his way back from Edinburgh in
> 1620?)

As far as I can determine, few suspect that Jonson wrote the doggerel on
the monument: the idea seems to have been first proposed by Nina Green
in /Edward de Vere Newsletter No. 9/ (Kelowna, BC: November 1989). I
doubt very much that Jonson had anything to do with it: unlike the
author of the inscription, Jonson he was quite good at both memorial
verses and concealed messages (see, e.g., the Argument that prefaces
/The Alchemist/ and his epigram "To Doctor Empiric").

[still further excisions]

> I guess so, although the IGI has nobody with that name born in
> the 16th century. Even so, the question must be whether the name
> of some unknown person (so without any apparent connection with
> Shakespeare) is a more likely answer than the name of a well-
> known person whose work is universally acknowledged as having
> had a huge effect on the works of the Bard. Finding a solution
> which "works" is how riddles are solved.

That argument looks disquietingly circular. If someone hid a riddle in
the inscription, the solution is whatever that person intended it to be.
The assessed likeliness of proposed solutions is irrelevant: many an
aeroplane has four wheels and flies, but none of them is the solution to
the riddle.

>> Whether a 16th- or 17th-century reader would have thought that
>> a wager is a cost if one loses is by no means clear;
>
> Pretty bleedin' obvious, I would have thought!

It's not obvious at all that they would have used the term 'a cost' the
same way we do.

>> nor is it clear that said reader would jump from 'cost' to 'a
>> cost' - they are not the same thing. Indeed, the use of the word
>> on the monument is more similar to 'price': "whose name doth
>> deck this tomb far more than cost" may reasonably be interpreted
>> as "whose name beautifies this tomb far more than the money
>> that was spent on it does."
>
> Of course it may! The whole point of a riddle is that it should
> offer at least as reasonable an interpretation for the overt
> message as it does for the covert one.

I thought the whole point of a riddle was the omission of an overt
message in favour of a cryptic one meant, as the OED puts it, "to
require ingenuity in ascertaining its answer or meaning": thus, the
the famous inscription on the Shepherds' Monument at Shugborough, O U O
S V A V V, is a true riddle, while the inscription on the Shakespeare
Monument is merely a naff bit of verse.

Der es macht, der will es nicht;
Der es trägt, behält es nicht;
Der es kauft, der braucht es nicht;
Der es hat, der weiß es nicht.

>> (Did Marlowe ever use 'lay' as a noun? I find numerous instances
>> of its uses as a verb, in both the plays and the non-dramatic
>> verse (e.g., 'O, Faustus, lay that damnèd book aside', 'Lay
>> hands on that traitor Mortimer!', 'If they would lay their
>> crowns before my feet', 'Idly I lay with her, as if I loved not,'
>> 'For she doth lay more colours on her face,/Than ever Tully
>> used his speech to grace'), but not a single instance of the
>> noun.)
>
> Great research, but (as Autolycus puts it) "thou hast lost thy
> labour." Quite apart from rather unreasonably assuming that
> Marlowe would have made use of every word he knew, the question
> of whether he was aware of it is rather irrelevant, since I have
> never claimed that he played any part in creating the inscription.
> Furthermore, his vocabulary in 1593 would have been significantly
> expanded by (say) 1622 if he did in fact survive.

You misunderstood my parenthetical aside: I was certainly not assuming
that Marlowe would have made use of every word he knew - I was simply
curious about whether he used the word, and if so, how he used it.

[and further excisions]

>> > > And the synonymy is questionable in any case. The first
>> > > OED citation is excerpted from the following "It is agreed
>> > > by the Mayor and Bailiffs with a full consent of the whole
>> > > Assembly of the Burgesses of Liverpool, that there shall
>> > > be hired a clerk that can sing his plain song and prick
>> > > song, and play on the organs--5 marks--and it is to be
>> > > levied by force of one ley yearly to be gathered by the
>> > > Bailiffs for the time being" (Vol. I: 95). The meaning
>> > > 'cost' for 'ley' is not possible here -
>> > >
>> > > "levied by the force of one cost yearly" is gibberish.
>> >
>> > Wow! You can't imagine how delighted I am to have someone
>> > trying to refute my arguments with actual facts for once,
>> > rather than with snide comment and ad hominem argument.
>> > Where is this to be found? Not by the general public, I'll
>> > be bound.
>
> I really would be interested in knowing where you got the full
> text of the Picton quotations, even if such things are not
> obtainable by mere mortals like me.

I found Picton's book at archive.org:

http://archive.org/details/cityofliverpool00pictrich

Whether the site is available in the U.K. I do not know.

>> > For me, however, what makes this so convincing is that, even
>> > though we might feel that in the context of today's word
>> > puzzles it may stretch the rules a bit, there are very good
>> > reasons for believing the attempt of the author to say that
>> > "Marley" was in some way "in" the monument with Shakespeare
>> > was genuine. I have tried to show why I believe this to be
>> > the case on pp.4-9 of my > essay on the
>> > International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society website at
>> >
<http://www.marloweshakespeare.org/files/Riddle_of_the_Monument_Marc
>> > h._03_2012.pdf>.
>> >
>> > So far, nobody has been prepared to offer any sort of
>> > rebuttal of the argument I present there. I have great hopes
>> > of you, however.
>>
>> I see no reason to rebut the argument, provided one agrees that
>> the best solution to the puzzle is Joshua Fearmor Price.
>
> Oh dear, what a pity. And up until now you were doing so well!

Oh, well, if you /want/ me to rebut the argument, I'll have a go - but
that's a post in itself, don't you think?
--
S.O.P.

[ignoto]

On 11/10/13 3:10 PM, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
> "Peter F." <pet...@rey.myzen.co.uk> wrote in
> news:3f0a5983-5036-4a3f...@googlegroups.com:
>
>> Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
> [excisions]
>>> But what is the reader to make of the phrase 'whom envious
>>> Death hath plast with in this monument'? If Marlowe's name
>>> was in fact placed in the inscription, it was placed there
>>> by the creator of the inscription - did he want the decipherer
>>> to associate him with Death? A bit ominous, that.
>>
>> One of the dafter ideas in the overt meaning of the inscription
>> is that the fact of his Death has somehow placed Shakespeare
>> *within* the monument. To say that Shakespeare is either
>> inscribed (or commemorated) *in* (not within) it does make far
>> more sense, but that does also require it to be mean that
>> someone else is "in" there with him.
>
> That doesn't address the question of what the creator of the inscription
> meant by identifying himself as envious Death.

Moreover, who is that (somewhat) corpulent fellow in the red shirt with
quill poised, who sits smack bang above the inscription(s) (and hence:
lies 'within' the monument?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ShakespeareMonument_cropped.jpg

Ign.

[snip]

[tom c]

Maister Nonsuch

[Paul Crowley]

On 11/10/2013 05:10, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:

> "Peter F." <pet...@rey.myzen.co.uk> wrote in
>

>> Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
> [excisions]
>>> But what is the reader to make of the phrase 'whom envious
>>> Death hath plast with in this monument'? If Marlowe's name
>>> was in fact placed in the inscription, it was placed there
>>> by the creator of the inscription - did he want the decipherer
>>> to associate him with Death? A bit ominous, that.
>>
>> One of the dafter ideas in the overt meaning of the inscription
>> is that the fact of his Death has somehow placed Shakespeare
>> *within* the monument.

The 'cock-up theory' of history is nearly always a
better bet than a conspiracy theory. Here I think
that the most likely explanation is that there was
a misunderstanding between the promoters of the
cover-up (who paid for this monument) and the
composer of this verse. He had assumed (or
gathered) that the monument would be similar to
that for John Combe (i.e like the great bulk of high-
grade church monuments of the age). Maybe the
promoters had planned such a monument at one
stage. When the time came to join the engraving
to the monument as we see it, they could not be
bothered to get it altered.

>>> Why would those who were privy to the true story be interested
>>> in a hidden message in a Warwickshire village church that told
>>> them nothing they didn't already know?
>>
>> Given the esteem in which the author Shakespeare was held,
>
> I'm not sure that's a given.

Nah, What did they know about literature
then? It would be like expecting Titian's
contemporaries, or Mozart's audiences to
appreciate their artistry.

> There is reason to believe that Shakespeare was well-regarded by his
> surviving colleagues, that his plays were still popular,

Wrong -- in its emphasis on 'popularity'. There
are few records of ANY public performances. The
Folio was published in 1623, after a long gap when
no quartos came out. That was a _hugely_
expensive volume, affordable only to the rich (i.e.
the aristocracy and high gentry).

> and that he was evidently considered something of a celebrity around
> Stratford-upon-Avon,

Nonsense. No one -- AT ALL -- gives any indication
that he was 'something of a celebrity. He was not
invited to stay over Christmas with Fulke Greville,
as was his literate neighbour Richard Quiney. The
town council insisted that acting companies did
not enter the town. When one did,. they paid them
to go away.

> but verse drama was still considered a diversion
> by the intelligentsia:

What "intelligentsia" ? Certainly Puritans detested the
theatre. But they did not buy or read the Folio. Those
who did, saw Shake-speare as the greatest writer or all
time -- and said so in the 1630s at the famous debate
in the rooms of John Hales at Eton attended by John
Suckling, Lord Falkland, Roger Boyle and Thomas Stanley,
" . . . respecting the comparative merits of Shakespeare
and the classical poets when the decision was given
unanimously in Shake-speare's favour. . . "
(Gildon, Miscellany letters & Essays, 1694, pp 85-86)

> it wasn't till the 18th century that Shakespeare
> came to be considered the equal of Spenser and Milton

You've been reading Stratfordian lies (i.e the output
of 20th century English Lit. professors).

> (and it wasn't
> till the 19th that he came to considered the Greatest Writer Ever).

Utterly wrong. Learn some history.

>> If not in Westminster Abbey (and we may ask why not)
>
> Because he wasn't held in all that much esteem?

Historical nonsense.

[..]

> Those who knew that Shakey wasn't the true author were those who
> arranged for him to be Marlowe's front man, right? It would seem that
> they considered the work to be more important than the man.

You could say that about the work of any great artist.
But as well all know, it's much easier to understand
and appreciate the work if you know a lot about the
artist and the context in which he worked. You're not
going to grasp much of 'Paradise Lost' if you think it
was written by Tolstoy, nor much of 'Huckleberry Finn'
if you think it was written by Dostoyevsky --- nor much
of 'King Lear' or 'Hamlet' or 'Loves Labours Lost' if you
think they were written by a Stratford yeoman.

[..]

> It seems to me that publishing a Marlowe folio would have provided a
> much neater one.

All good questions for Peter. But I doubt very much
if you will see answers.

> My belief that
> Shakes wrote his own works is merely an offshoot of my empiricism:

Nope. It's merely a product of your conditioning, and
your incapacity to question any of it.

> If Aubrey had had any reason to believe his gran had gotten the Raw-lye
> rebus at court, I think he would have mentioned it:

The fact that it was common court gossip does not
stop it being common gossip among the gentry
generally, especially given that Raleigh was such a
prominent and newsworthy figure -- even after James
so cruelly had him executed.

[..]

>> Finding a solution which "works" is how riddles are solved.
>
> That argument looks disquietingly circular. If someone hid a riddle in
> the inscription, the solution is whatever that person intended it to be.

Establishing objective criteria by which 'solutions' can
been assessed is difficult. You need a good clear head,
a lot of determination, and the willingness to devote
a fair amount of time to the problem. Peter has shown
no capacity whatever.

> The assessed likeliness of proposed solutions is irrelevant:

You could put 'the problem' (the inscription) in front
of 1,000 graduates (or Ph.Ds) and give them some
very strong clues, but none of them (I am certain)
would ever reach Peter's 'conclusion'. It's just too
far-fetched, and too much a product of his own
wishful thinking.

>> Of course it may! The whole point of a riddle is that it should
>> offer at least as reasonable an interpretation for the overt
>> message as it does for the covert one.
>
> I thought the whole point of a riddle was the omission of an overt
> message in favour of a cryptic one meant, as the OED puts it, "to
> require ingenuity in ascertaining its answer or meaning": thus, the
> the famous inscription on the Shepherds' Monument at Shugborough, O U O
> S V A V V, is a true riddle, while the inscription on the Shakespeare
> Monument is merely a naff bit of verse.

A well-recognised system of coding a secret
message is to incorporate it into one that is
apparently innocent. Tudor courtiers were
perfectly familiar with the technique, as seen
(for example) in the poetry of Henry Howard,
Earl of Surrey. The first step in decoding a
hidden message is to identify peculiarities or
features in the cover message which are odd,
don't fit the context or are ungrammatical.
For example, a distinctly odd feature of the
Stratford inscription is the " . . . hath plast with
in this monvment . ." -- but (at least in Farey's
reading) it goes nowhere.


Paul.

[tom c]

Expand please?

[Peter F.]

Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>
>Peter F.wrote:
>>

>> One of the dafter ideas in the overt meaning of the inscription
>> is that the fact of his Death has somehow placed Shakespeare
>> *within* the monument. To say that Shakespeare is either
>> inscribed (or commemorated) *in* (not within) it does make far
>> more sense, but that does also require it to be mean that
>> someone else is "in" there with him.
>
> That doesn't address the question of what the creator of the
> inscription meant by identifying himself as envious Death.

As you know perfectly well, it's a personification of the fact
of Shakespeare's death, which has metaphorically been the
cause of this monument being created. This is what it means
whether or not there is any additional hidden meaning.
Samuel Schoenbaum (A Compact Documentary Life, p.310) never-
theless says "A more serious blunder [than the word SIEH] is
made by the unknown eulogist when he suggests that Death has
placed the poet within the monument."

I interpret it (in both cases) as meaning either that he is
commemorated in it or is there in spirit. As far as I am con-
cerned (pace Ignoto) I don't see the bust as in any sense
"being" the person.

<snip>

>>> Why would those who were privy to the true story be inter-

>>> ested in a hidden message in a Warwickshire village church
>>> that told them nothing they didn't already know?
>>
>> Given the esteem in which the author Shakespeare was held,

>> it was certainly thought appropriate that there should be
>> a monument to his memory.

> I'm not sure that's a given.

It was, according to those who were responsible for the First
Folio and this monument, which appear to me to be parts of the
same project.

<snip>

>> However, those who knew that he was not the true author
>> would have not liked it apparently confirming what they
>> knew to be untrue,
>
> Those who knew that Shakey wasn't the true author were those
> who arranged for him to be Marlowe's front man, right?

Not necessarily. As you have pointed out, most of the major
figures who would (in my opinion) have been involved in that
were dead by then.

> It would seem that they considered the work to be more
> important than the man.
>>

>> as well as ensuring that the true author remained unmemor-

>> ialized.
>
> If they had really cared whether Marlowe got the credit,
> they could have just published the works under Marlowe's
> name, couldn't they?

Apparently not. My guess would be that he had for years lived
in hope that such a thing would happen, but that a decision
was taken, probably by the king himself, that it would just
not be acceptable to honour someone of Marlowe's reputation
in such a way.

But whatever we think may or may not have been likely reasons
for this method to have been chosen isn't really relevant.
All that really matters is whether it is reasonable to claim
that the poem can be interpreted in the way I suggest, and
that it must almost certainly have been done deliberately.
Such a decision should be based upon the text itself and
nothing else. It is the same principle which the Friedmans
adopted in their examination of the various alleged
"Shakespearean ciphers".

<snip>

>> Even so, the question must be whether the name of some
>> unknown person (so without any apparent connection with
>> Shakespeare) is a more likely answer than the name of a

>> well-known person whose work is universally acknowledged

>> as having had a huge effect on the works of the Bard.
>> Finding a solution which "works" is how riddles are solved.
>
> That argument looks disquietingly circular. If someone hid
> a riddle in the inscription, the solution is whatever that
> person intended it to be. The assessed likeliness of
> proposed solutions is irrelevant: many an aeroplane has
> four wheels and flies, but none of them is the solution to
> the riddle.

Very true, and the answer to the "enemy to the stomach and
the word of disgrace might have been "Sackvile" had we not
been told the answer. Unfortunately, however, we do not have
anyone who can tell us what the author had in mind so we have
to base our decision upon our own knowledge. And what we find
is that there is an answer which is, as I said a "well-known

person whose work is universally acknowledged as having had

a huge effect on the works of the Bard." Were it not an
answer which you for other reasons find unacceptable, you
would of course accept this.

>>> Whether a 16th- or 17th-century reader would have thought
>>> that a wager is a cost if one loses is by no means clear;
>>
>> Pretty bleedin' obvious, I would have thought!
>
>It's not obvious at all that they would have used the term
>'a cost' the same way we do.

I didn't say they would. In fact the OED's definition of it,
"Outlay, expenditure, expense", is given as archaic and "Obs."
But this is certainly what a lost wager is an example of.

>>> nor is it clear that said reader would jump from 'cost'
>>> to 'a cost' - they are not the same thing. Indeed, the
>>> use of the word on the monument is more similar to 'price':
>>> "whose name doth deck this tomb far more than cost" may
>>> reasonably be interpreted as "whose name beautifies this
>>> tomb far more than the money that was spent on it does."
>>
>> Of course it may! The whole point of a riddle is that it
>> should offer at least as reasonable an interpretation for
>> the overt message as it does for the covert one.
>
> I thought the whole point of a riddle was the omission of
> an overt message in favour of a cryptic one meant, as the
> OED puts it, "to require ingenuity in ascertaining its
> answer or meaning": thus, the the famous inscription on
> the Shepherds' Monument at Shugborough, O U O S V A V V,
> is a true riddle, while the inscription on the Shakespeare
> Monument is merely a naff bit of verse.
>
> Der es macht, der will es nicht;
> Der es trägt, behält es nicht;
> Der es kauft, der braucht es nicht;
> Der es hat, der weiß es nicht.

Yep that's a Rätsel alright, aber ich habe keine blasse
Ahnung what the answer is. I use the word riddle for the whole
lot, because I'm not really sure what the correct word is for
something that can be read in two different ways, like the
"naughty lady of shady lane" song, or Mortimer's note to
Matrevis and Gurney in *Edward II*. But what I said about it
still applies, that it should offer at least as reasonable
an interpretation for one message as it does for the other.

<snip>

> I found Picton's book at archive.org:
>
> http://archive.org/details/cityofliverpool00pictrich
>
> Whether the site is available in the U.K. I do not know.

Yes, I had no trouble at all in accessing it. Thank you.

<snip>

Peter F.
<http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/>

[onec...@comcast.net]

>>> Whether a 16th- or 17th-century reader would have thought
>>> that a wager is a cost if one loses is by no means clear;
>>
>> Pretty bleedin' obvious, I would have thought!
>
>It's not obvious at all that they would have used the term
>'a cost' the same way we do.

I didn't say they would. In fact the OED's definition of it,
"Outlay, expenditure, expense", is given as archaic and "Obs."
But this is certainly what a lost wager is an example of.

++

God Save those who use the OED for anything after 1800, not that it is indecent nor unreliable alone, but also in its method of accumulation of datum, quixotic and highly selective, and here we have 'obs.' but without description of when 'obs,' neither what 'obs, such as if in writing or in speech [much of current dialectical English being, for example, 'obs'; for 500 years]

Earlier we can find in dictionaries, these;—

COST:

1) loss or risk
2) The mantagreta [Middle English as it is called]
3) a dead body (Devon)
4 A side or region (A.N.)
5) A rib (east)
6) Manner; business ; quality "Swych costus to kythr," [Degrevaut, 364]
7) "Nedes cost," a phrase equivalent to 'positively.' [Chaucer , Cant T 1479]

Then there is

COSTAGE: cost ; expense. [A. N.] "To duel at his costage," [Lincoln MS f. 134''

COSTE: to tempt [Vertegan]

COSTED: richly ornamented

COSTERING: (2) swaggering, blustering [Salop]

COSSICAL: algebraical [DIGGES, in 1579, described the "Arte of numbers cossicall."

Phil Innes

[onec...@comcast.net]

As well as considerations on 'cost' we must also consider to whom the monument was addressed - a fairly convoluted sentiment appearing on it, though could be taken simply for economic brevity in expression, a joke upon the author's own wit. So is it low talk for the people [albeit unintelligible] or otherwise? Better if we knew the author of the inscription, and it is a mere surmise that son-in-law John Hall came up with it to inform the sculptor of Southampton's tomb. Why they, the sculpture and the text are supernaturally ugly is thereby matter of a small purse or a very large wink.

[John W Kennedy]

On 2013-10-14 20:41:16 +0000, onec...@comcast.net said:

>>>>
>>>> Whether a 16th- or 17th-century reader would have thought>>> that a
>>>> wager is a cost if one loses is by no means clear;>>>> Pretty bleedin'
>>>> obvious, I would have thought!>>It's not obvious at all that they would
>>>> have used the term>'a cost' the same way we do.
> I didn't say they would. In fact the OED's definition of it, "Outlay,
> expenditure, expense", is given as archaic and "Obs."But this is
> certainly what a lost wager is an example of.

Get yourself a copy of Lewis's "Studies in Words" and read it. You are
severely lacking in discriminatory skills.

--
John W Kennedy
"Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light."
-- Tom Stoppard. "Night and Day"

[Sneaky O. Possum]

"Peter F." <pet...@rey.myzen.co.uk> wrote in

news:be5cbeaf-8658-4a96...@googlegroups.com:

> Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>>
>>Peter F.wrote:
>>>
>>> One of the dafter ideas in the overt meaning of the inscription
>>> is that the fact of his Death has somehow placed Shakespeare
>>> *within* the monument. To say that Shakespeare is either
>>> inscribed (or commemorated) *in* (not within) it does make far
>>> more sense, but that does also require it to be mean that
>>> someone else is "in" there with him.
>>
>> That doesn't address the question of what the creator of the
>> inscription meant by identifying himself as envious Death.
>
> As you know perfectly well, it's a personification of the fact
> of Shakespeare's death, which has metaphorically been the
> cause of this monument being created. This is what it means whether or
> not there is any additional hidden meaning.

That's not what it means in the hidden message as given in your essay,
to wit - "Stay Passenger, why goest thou by so fast?/Make out, if thou
canst, whom envious Death hath placed with, in this monument,
Shakspeare--with whom living Nature died. Christofer Marley: he is
returned moreover. That HE hath writ leaves Art alive, without a page to
serve (up) his wit." Envious Death hath placed Shakespeare there, but
hath most certainly /not/ placed anyone in there with him. If the verse
does in fact contain a hidden message informing the careful reader that
someone else's name has been placed in the inscription along with
Shakespeare's, what does Death mean /in the context of that message/?

> Samuel Schoenbaum (A Compact Documentary Life, p.310) never-
> theless says "A more serious blunder [than the word SIEH] is
> made by the unknown eulogist when he suggests that Death has
> placed the poet within the monument."

Like the great Homer, Mr Schoenbaum occasionally drowsed. As our own
Ignoto has pointed out, the statue of Shakespeare is indeed placed
within the monument, and it is not unreasonable to conclude that the
author of the verse was alluding to that fact.

> I interpret it (in both cases) as meaning either that he is
> commemorated in it or is there in spirit. As far as I am con-
> cerned (pace Ignoto) I don't see the bust as in any sense
> "being" the person.

The issue is whether the author of the inscription might have seen it in
that sense. It seems quite plausible to me that he could have.

> <snip>
>
>>>> Why would those who were privy to the true story be inter-
>>>> ested in a hidden message in a Warwickshire village church
>>>> that told them nothing they didn't already know?
>>>
>>> Given the esteem in which the author Shakespeare was held,
>>> it was certainly thought appropriate that there should be
>>> a monument to his memory.
>
>> I'm not sure that's a given.
>
> It was, according to those who were responsible for the First
> Folio and this monument, which appear to me to be parts of the
> same project.

What basis do you have for concluding that Shakespeare's family -
the ones who inherited Shakespeare's rather substantial fortune - were
not the ones responsible for putting up a monument to him in their local
church? I have been led to believe that it is common practice for a
man's family to arrange such things.

[deletions]

>> If they had really cared whether Marlowe got the credit,
>> they could have just published the works under Marlowe's
>> name, couldn't they?
>
> Apparently not. My guess would be that he had for years lived
> in hope that such a thing would happen, but that a decision
> was taken, probably by the king himself, that it would just
> not be acceptable to honour someone of Marlowe's reputation
> in such a way.

Unless James I held the rights to some of the plays, I don't see why he
would have even bothered to get involved: there is certainly no evidence
that he had anything to do with the printing of the 1623 folio.

And I see that you have silently passed over my other questions, viz:

"And if those who knew that Marlowe was the true author cared so much
about him, why didn't they publish a Marlowe folio that included the
plays and non-dramatic verse that are now generally attributed to
Marlowe? That would have been a much better way of memorializing him
than arranging for the inscription on Shakespeare's monument to have a
dodgy double meaning. If a Marlowe folio had been published to
capitalize on the success of the Shakespeare folio, who would have
objected? Not the Privy Councillors of 1593, who were all long dead by
then."

James I evidently had no objection to works already attributed to
Marlowe remaining in print - /Tamburlaine/ was reprinted in 1605-6, and
the first extant edition of /Dr Faustus/ was printed in 1604 and
reprinted in 1609: the revised quarto debuted in 1616 and was reprinted
three times during James's reign.

> But whatever we think may or may not have been likely reasons
> for this method to have been chosen isn't really relevant.
> All that really matters is whether it is reasonable to claim
> that the poem can be interpreted in the way I suggest, and
> that it must almost certainly have been done deliberately.
> Such a decision should be based upon the text itself and
> nothing else. It is the same principle which the Friedmans
> adopted in their examination of the various alleged
> "Shakespearean ciphers".

And by the Friedmans' principles, it is not reasonable, as I demonstrate
below.

[further deletions]

> Very true, and the answer to the "enemy to the stomach and
> the word of disgrace might have been "Sackvile" had we not
> been told the answer.

But we weren't told the answer: Aubrey didn't bother to explain the
rebus. The full passage runs as follows:

His beard turnd up naturally.--I have heard my grandmother say that
when she was young, they were wont to talke of this rebus, viz.,

The enemie to the stomack, and the word of disgrace,
Is the name of the gentleman with a bold face.

That's it: the 'Raw-lye' solution is the inference of later editors. Not
that 'Sack-vile' works in any case - Aubrey himself noted that "In queen
Elizabeth's time the apothecaries did sell sack in their shoppes: my
grandfather and severall old men that I knew heretofore did remember it"
Sack was long considered a medicinal beverage - friend rather than foe.

> Unfortunately, however, we do not have anyone who can tell us what the
> author had in mind so we have to base our decision upon our own
> knowledge.

I thought you said we should base it on the text itself and nothing
else. You invoked the Friedmans above, yet you seem to be discarding one
of their critical principles, viz.:

"In general, it can be said that any cipher system, or any method which
claims to follow valid cryptographic procedures, must yield unique
solutions. If in any system two different investigators applying the
same key or keys to the same basic material get inconsistent answers,
the system is self-refuting. In other words, it can be used to show its
own invalidity: with ingenious use, it can be made to produce any answer
you like..."

The answer I like is Joshua Fearmor Price, which I got by applying the
same key or keys to the same basic material - though I blush at the word
'ingenious.' Nevertheless, I fear that my answer and yours cancel each
other out: there is no unique solution, and thus (by Friedmanian
standards, at least) no valid message.

> And what we find is that there is an answer which is, as I said a >
> "well-known person whose work is universally acknowledged as having
> had a huge effect on the works of the Bard." Were it not an
> answer which you for other reasons find unacceptable, you
> would of course accept this.

I have been making an effort to avoid ad hominem in the present
discussion, and I am sorry to say that you are skirting very close to it
with the above. Would you not be offended if I told you that you would
of course accept that your answer is illusory were it not an answer
which you for other reasons find acceptable?

>>>> Whether a 16th- or 17th-century reader would have thought
>>>> that a wager is a cost if one loses is by no means clear;
>>>
>>> Pretty bleedin' obvious, I would have thought!
>>
>>It's not obvious at all that they would have used the term
>>'a cost' the same way we do.
>
> I didn't say they would. In fact the OED's definition of it,
> "Outlay, expenditure, expense", is given as archaic and "Obs."
> But this is certainly what a lost wager is an example of.

Regardless, the problem is that there is no direct way to get from
'cost' to 'ley'. Considering the fact that the word 'lay' functions as a
noun, verb, and adjective, and the OED lists *43* possible meanings for
the verb alone - most of which were accessible to the 17th-century
literati - I find it very difficult to believe that the versifier
couldn't work a direct synonym for 'lay' into the inscription, or even
the word 'lay' itself.
--
S.O.P.

[Paul Crowley]

On 15/10/2013 07:09, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:

>> I interpret it (in both cases) as meaning either that he is
>> commemorated in it or is there in spirit. As far as I am con-
>> cerned (pace Ignoto) I don't see the bust as in any sense
>> "being" the person.
>
> The issue is whether the author of the inscription might have seen it in
> that sense. It seems quite plausible to me that he could have.

It's an absurd proposition -- not to be taken seriously
until there is evidence that some other Elizabethan
or Jacobean referred to the funerary statue of the
person as the real person.

>> It was, according to those who were responsible for the First
>> Folio and this monument, which appear to me to be parts of the
>> same project.
>
> What basis do you have for concluding that Shakespeare's family -
> the ones who inherited Shakespeare's rather substantial fortune - were
> not the ones responsible for putting up a monument to him in their local
> church? I have been led to believe that it is common practice for a
> man's family to arrange such things.

It is certainly not the common practice when that
person is of immense importance to the state or
the country as a whole. Of course, you will say
that no one then knew anything about literature
-- including the poet himself.

Secondly you can see from the monument that it
is about 'Shakspere' and not about 'our beloved
husband and father'.

> But we weren't told the answer: Aubrey didn't bother to explain the
> rebus. The full passage runs as follows:
>
> His beard turnd up naturally.--I have heard my grandmother say that
> when she was young, they were wont to talke of this rebus, viz.,
>
> The enemie to the stomack, and the word of disgrace,
> Is the name of the gentleman with a bold face.
>
> That's it: the 'Raw-lye' solution is the inference of later editors. Not
> that 'Sack-vile' works in any case - Aubrey himself noted that "In queen
> Elizabeth's time the apothecaries did sell sack in their shoppes: my
> grandfather and severall old men that I knew heretofore did remember it"
> Sack was long considered a medicinal beverage - friend rather than foe.

Raleigh's name was the object of scorn among
Elizabethan courtiers for all the well-known reasons.

As Robert Lacey says in his biography:

Posterity has been guilty of both mis-spelling and mis-
pronouncing Walter Ralegh's name. The form most usually
adopted, Raleigh, was in fact never once used by Walter
himself. From 9 June, 1584, when he was thirty, until his death
he consistently signed himself Ralegh, and so this is the
spelling I have adopted.

In his youth he was less methodical, and the variations he
employed indicate clearly the way in which his name was
pronounced - Rawleyghe for example, in 1578. This makes
sense of the many puns made on his name during his lifetime -
'I have heard but rawly of thee,' said James I - and most of the
seventy-three different contemporary spellings of his name were
based on the phonetic interpretation, raw-lee.

Raleich was the spelling used by the French, Ralo and Ralle by
the Venetians and Halley by the Dutch - while the Spaniards
usually referred to him by variations of his first name: Gualtero,
Guatteral, and Gualteral.

To Robert Cecil, Walter was Rawley, Raleigh, and Ralegh; to
King James, he was Raulie and Raleigh; to his wife, Ralegh
(except for her one use of Raleigh); to Henry Howard, Rawlegh
and Rawlie; to the lord admiral, Rawlighe, and to Henry Brooke,
Lord Cobham, Rawlye.

[Paul Crowley]

On 14/10/2013 10:48, Peter F. wrote:

<snip>

>> If they had really cared whether Marlowe got the credit,
>> they could have just published the works under Marlowe's
>> name, couldn't they?
>
> Apparently not. My guess would be that he had for years lived
> in hope that such a thing would happen, but that a decision
> was taken, probably by the king himself, that it would just
> not be acceptable to honour someone of Marlowe's reputation
> in such a way.

Much better reasons are needed for the mounting
and the perpetuating of the cover-up. Many writers
(all decent ones?) have been unpopular with the
authorities of their day, but no monarch or other
ruler has gone to such lengths.

> But whatever we think may or may not have been likely reasons
> for this method to have been chosen isn't really relevant.

Of course it's relevant. Your 'reading' of the
monument is not some pure rational, 'scientific'
and objective analysis of 'the evidence' -- although
that's probably what you think it is. You have a
THEORY -- as does everyone who takes a serious
interest in this field (or in any other field) -- and you
are seeking to prove it. Your theory stands or falls
on (a) your reading of the monument AND (b) on
every other aspect of your theory as you apply it
to the facts of history. That's how all human
enquiry works (including science).

Many Marlites would undoubtedly reject your
reading of the monument, but still maintain that
they have a sound theory. The world will disagree,
because they rarely, if ever, articulate any part of it
-- other than regurgitating the standard stuff about
the killing and the 'extent of the Verge' and such
like.

> All that really matters is whether it is reasonable to claim
> that the poem can be interpreted in the way I suggest,

It can't reasonably be interpreted that way -- not
any more than Sneaky's reading into it of Joshua
Fearmor Price.


Paul.

[ignoto]

On 17/10/13 10:19 AM, Paul Crowley wrote:
> On 15/10/2013 07:09, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>
>>> I interpret it (in both cases) as meaning either that he is
>>> commemorated in it or is there in spirit. As far as I am con-
>>> cerned (pace Ignoto) I don't see the bust as in any sense
>>> "being" the person.
>>
>> The issue is whether the author of the inscription might have seen it in
>> that sense. It seems quite plausible to me that he could have.
>
> It's an absurd proposition -- not to be taken seriously
> until there is evidence that some other Elizabethan
> or Jacobean referred to the funerary statue of the
> person as the real person.

Actually, given that no one seems to have raised a murmur about it at
the time (and there is contemporary reporting), the onus of proof would
appear to lie on those propounding the contrary.

In any case there is certainly evidence in relation to the reality with
which people regarded religious icons:

"Other devotions proliferated, with and without encouragement by the
priest and clergy. Statues and images of patron saints were erected in
every parish, and these saints were treated as valuable members of the
local community. They were honoured with flowers, clothing, drapery, and
candles, and given a place of honour in community celebrations. These
saints, as represented in their images, were the special protectors and
intercessors for individuals and for the whole community, and were
expected to repay their devotees in this life and the next."
-Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and
Christian ... edited by John H. Van Engen p221.

To which I would also add the fact that the statue may be a copy of
Shakespeare's death mask:

"The bust displays a blandness and lack of detail which suggests to some
that it was carved from a death mask model. "
-A Shakespeare Encyclopaedia - Page 556

and so 'truly representative' of the author.

>
>>> It was, according to those who were responsible for the First
>>> Folio and this monument, which appear to me to be parts of the
>>> same project.
>>
>> What basis do you have for concluding that Shakespeare's family -
>> the ones who inherited Shakespeare's rather substantial fortune - were
>> not the ones responsible for putting up a monument to him in their local
>> church? I have been led to believe that it is common practice for a
>> man's family to arrange such things.
>
> It is certainly not the common practice when that
> person is of immense importance to the state or
> the country as a whole. Of course, you will say
> that no one then knew anything about literature
> -- including the poet himself.

His importance demonstrated by the fact that he was buried /inside/ the
church.

Ign.

[Paul Crowley]

On 17/10/2013 15:29, ignoto wrote:

>>>> I interpret it (in both cases) as meaning either that he is
>>>> commemorated in it or is there in spirit. As far as I am con-
>>>> cerned (pace Ignoto) I don't see the bust as in any sense
>>>> "being" the person.
>>>
>>> The issue is whether the author of the inscription might have seen it in
>>> that sense. It seems quite plausible to me that he could have.
>>
>> It's an absurd proposition -- not to be taken seriously
>> until there is evidence that some other Elizabethan
>> or Jacobean referred to the funerary statue of the
>> person as the real person.
>
> Actually, given that no one seems to have raised a murmur about it at the
> time

Objections about what? To your crazy reading?
Could I 'read' the inscription as being about an
invasion of space aliens, and then say it must be
true because no one objected to it at the time?

> (and there is contemporary reporting), the onus of proof would appear
> to lie on those propounding the contrary.

So you have the onus of proof in showing that
they were not worried about an invasion from
Betelgeuse-17.

> In any case there is certainly evidence in relation to the reality with which
> people regarded religious icons:

The bust of the Stratman (or, more likely, of
his father) was NOT a religious icon. But even
if it had of been, an allusion to it as though it
was a real person would have been regarded
as heretical. All such icons were being
removed (and usually destroyed) at the time.

> "Other devotions proliferated, with and without encouragement by the
> priest and clergy. Statues and images of patron saints were erected in
> every parish, and these saints were treated as valuable members of the
> local community. They were honoured with flowers, clothing, drapery, and
> candles, and given a place of honour in community celebrations.

All this is about a period before Mary I died (in 1558).

> To which I would also add the fact that the statue may be a copy of
> Shakespeare's death mask:

So what? That would not make it more religious.
Death masks were common. No one referred to
them as the real person.

> "The bust displays a blandness and lack of detail which suggests to
> some that it was carved from a death mask model. "
> -A Shakespeare Encyclopaedia - Page 556

The current bust is bland and idiotic -- but nothing
like a death mask. The original one (seen in
Dugdale) was of a real person -- but still with no
similarity to a death mask. But, even if it had
been, that does not mean that the person was
within the monument, or could be said to be
within the monument.

>> It is certainly not the common practice when that
>> person is of immense importance to the state or
>> the country as a whole. Of course, you will say
>> that no one then knew anything about literature
>> -- including the poet himself.
>
> His importance demonstrated by the fact that he was buried /inside/ the church.

So was John Combe -- with a much finer monument.

It seems that at the time the only issue was
the amount of money you could pay, and -- in
historical terms -- prices were rock bottom.


Paul.

[ignoto]

On 17/10/13 8:14 PM, Paul Crowley wrote:
> On 17/10/2013 15:29, ignoto wrote:
>
>>>>> I interpret it (in both cases) as meaning either that he is
>>>>> commemorated in it or is there in spirit. As far as I am con-
>>>>> cerned (pace Ignoto) I don't see the bust as in any sense
>>>>> "being" the person.
>>>>
>>>> The issue is whether the author of the inscription might have seen it in
>>>> that sense. It seems quite plausible to me that he could have.
>>>
>>> It's an absurd proposition -- not to be taken seriously
>>> until there is evidence that some other Elizabethan
>>> or Jacobean referred to the funerary statue of the
>>> person as the real person.
>>
>> Actually, given that no one seems to have raised a murmur about it at the
>> time
>
> Objections about what? To your crazy reading?
> Could I 'read' the inscription as being about an
> invasion of space aliens, and then say it must be
> true because no one objected to it at the time?

Eh? I'm sure YOU could 'read' it as referring to an invasion of space
aliens (though absurd it certainly makes more sense than your crazy
sonnet readings).

The point being that if the plain meaning of 'within' (as referring to
the statue) was so absurd we could reasonably have expected comment on
it from people who saw it. We get none. E.g.:

"In a copy of the First Folio now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the
following poem is written in a hybrid secretary-italic hand from the 1620s:

Here Shakespeare lies whom none but Death could Shake,
And here shall lie till judgement all awake,
When the last trumpet doth unclose his eyes,
The wittiest poet in the world shall rise.

The same hand has on the same page transcribed the verses from
Shakespeare's monument ("Stay passenger why go'st thou by so fast") and
his grave ("Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear"), so he is obviously
referring to William Shakespeare of Stratford. (Evans 1988) "

http://shakespeareauthorship.com/eulogies.html

etc.

>
>> (and there is contemporary reporting), the onus of proof would appear
>> to lie on those propounding the contrary.

No, the onus of proof is on those who contend that the words mean
something other than their natural or ordinary meaning, as understood in
the 17th century.

> So you have the onus of proof in showing that
> they were not worried about an invasion from
> Betelgeuse-17.
>
>> In any case there is certainly evidence in relation to the reality with which
>> people regarded religious icons:
>
> The bust of the Stratman (or, more likely, of
> his father) was NOT a religious icon. But even
> if it had of been, an allusion to it as though it
> was a real person would have been regarded
> as heretical. All such icons were being
> removed (and usually destroyed) at the time.

Irrelevant. The point is not that the statue was a religious icon; the
point is that people thought material objects could embody spiritual
artifacts.

>
>> "Other devotions proliferated, with and without encouragement by the
>> priest and clergy. Statues and images of patron saints were erected in
>> every parish, and these saints were treated as valuable members of the
>> local community. They were honoured with flowers, clothing, drapery, and
>> candles, and given a place of honour in community celebrations.
>
> All this is about a period before Mary I died (in 1558).

Wrong. People /still/ view material objects as spiritual embodiments.
See, e.g. Religious Statues and Personhood: Testing the Role of
Materiality by Amy Whitehead

>
>> To which I would also add the fact that the statue may be a copy of
>> Shakespeare's death mask:
>
> So what? That would not make it more religious.

I'm not saying that makes it more religious, I'm saying it makes it a
(more) true representation of the author.

> Death masks were common. No one referred to
> them as the real person.

Yet people did (and still do) refer to statues as real persons. Not of
course that I would expect Crowley to be able to encompass such a
thought in the narrow straits of his mind.

>> "The bust displays a blandness and lack of detail which suggests to
>> some that it was carved from a death mask model. "
>> -A Shakespeare Encyclopaedia - Page 556
>
> The current bust is bland and idiotic -- but nothing
> like a death mask. The original one (seen in
> Dugdale) was of a real person -- but still with no
> similarity to a death mask. But, even if it had
> been, that does not mean that the person was
> within the monument, or could be said to be
> within the monument.

Of course the inscription makes to mention of 'person' - that is your
own egregious interpolation. What the inscription says is that
Shakespeare is within the monument and with his statue as his material
representative, that is exactly what he is.

>
>>> It is certainly not the common practice when that
>>> person is of immense importance to the state or
>>> the country as a whole. Of course, you will say
>>> that no one then knew anything about literature
>>> -- including the poet himself.
>>
>> His importance demonstrated by the fact that he was buried /inside/ the church.
>
> So was John Combe -- with a much finer monument.
>
> It seems that at the time the only issue was
> the amount of money you could pay,

As with all things.

Ign.

[Peter F.]

How I see it is that the author Shakespeare consisted of both
of them, the front man and the actual writer. The death of the
front man meant the death of the author Shakespeare, so both of
them are being commemorated in it.

>> Samuel Schoenbaum (A Compact Documentary Life, p.310) never-
>> theless says "A more serious blunder [than the word SIEH] is
>> made by the unknown eulogist when he suggests that Death has
>> placed the poet within the monument."
>
> Like the great Homer, Mr Schoenbaum occasionally drowsed. As
> our own Ignoto has pointed out, the statue of Shakespeare is
> indeed placed within the monument, and it is not unreasonable
> to conclude that the author of the verse was alluding to that
> fact.
>
>> I interpret it (in both cases) as meaning either that he is
>> commemorated in it or is there in spirit. As far as I am con-
>> cerned (pace Ignoto) I don't see the bust as in any sense
>> "being" the person.
>
> The issue is whether the author of the inscription might have
> seen it in that sense. It seems quite plausible to me that he
> could have.

Yes, it's also quite possible that this was what he intended
the casual reader to take it as meaning. This doesn't stop it
being a very odd way of expressing it. Death had placed *him*
in the grave, not in the monument.

<snip>

>>>> Given the esteem in which the author Shakespeare was held,
>>>> it was certainly thought appropriate that there should be
>>>> a monument to his memory.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure that's a given.
>>
>> It was, according to those who were responsible for the First
>> Folio and this monument, which appear to me to be parts of the
>> same project.
>
> What basis do you have for concluding that Shakespeare's family -
> the ones who inherited Shakespeare's rather substantial fortune -
> were not the ones responsible for putting up a monument to him
> in their local church? I have been led to believe that it is
> common practice for a man's family to arrange such things.

Because, as I said, the First Folio and the monument appear to
me to be a part of the same project. Six years after the death
of Shakespeare, in 1622, the First Folio was scheduled to appear
at the Frankfurt book fair, very soon after the most likely date
for the erection of the monument in 1621/2, when a major refur-
bishment of the chancel was undertaken after several years of
neglect, during which it was inaccessible to the public. That
there is no mention of his family might also be an indication?

> [deletions]
>
>>> If they had really cared whether Marlowe got the credit,
>>> they could have just published the works under Marlowe's
>>> name, couldn't they?
>>
>> Apparently not. My guess would be that he had for years lived
>> in hope that such a thing would happen, but that a decision
>> was taken, probably by the king himself, that it would just
>> not be acceptable to honour someone of Marlowe's reputation
>> in such a way.
>
> Unless James I held the rights to some of the plays, I don't
> see why he would have even bothered to get involved: there is
> certainly no evidence that he had anything to do with the
> printing of the 1623 folio.

My suggestion is really that there would have been moves for some
time to get Marlowe pardoned and rehabilitated (with Prospero's
epilogue being part of this process) but that the king had refused
to grant any such thing. To produce a volume of works by Marlowe
which had hitherto been attributed to Shakespeare without James's
permission (which would certainly not have been granted) would
therefore have been appallingly risky

> And I see that you have silently passed over my other questions,

Not silently, I said they were irrelevant. I still do.

> viz:
>
> "And if those who knew that Marlowe was the true author cared
> so much about him, why didn't they publish a Marlowe folio that
> included the plays and non-dramatic verse that are now generally
> attributed to Marlowe? That would have been a much better way
> of memorializing him than arranging for the inscription on
> Shakespeare's monument to have a dodgy double meaning. If a
> Marlowe folio had been published to capitalize on the success
> of the Shakespeare folio, who would have objected? Not the Privy
> Councillors of 1593, who were all long dead by then."
>
> James I evidently had no objection to works already attributed
> to Marlowe remaining in print - /Tamburlaine/ was reprinted in
> 1605-6, and the first extant edition of /Dr Faustus/ was printed
> in 1604 and reprinted in 1609: the revised quarto debuted in
> 1616 and was reprinted three times during James's reign.

There was also a 1612 edition of /Edward II/, and several of
/Hero and Leander/. In fact (unlike the First Folio) all of the
works normally attributed to Marlowe were in print by then. But
this suggestion rather misses the point that it would have been
the unfairness of attributing his works to someone else which
was being addressed, and a collection of his known works would
hardly do anything about that.

>> But whatever we think may or may not have been likely reasons
>> for this method to have been chosen isn't really relevant.
>> All that really matters is whether it is reasonable to claim
>> that the poem can be interpreted in the way I suggest, and
>> that it must almost certainly have been done deliberately.
>> Such a decision should be based upon the text itself and
>> nothing else. It is the same principle which the Friedmans
>> adopted in their examination of the various alleged
>> "Shakespearean ciphers".
>
> And by the Friedmans' principles, it is not reasonable, as I
> demonstrate below.

Oh Lor, not that one again. This was the very issue over which
Terry Ross and I were arguing when, on 12 Dec 2006, he suddenly
upped sticks and left HLAS for good.

[further deletions]

>> Very true, and the answer to the "enemy to the stomach and
>> the word of disgrace might have been "Sackvile" had we not
>> been told the answer.
>
> But we weren't told the answer: Aubrey didn't bother to
> explain the rebus. The full passage runs as follows:
>
> His beard turnd up naturally.--I have heard my grandmother
> say that when she was young, they were wont to talke of
> this rebus, viz.,
>
> The enemie to the stomack, and the word of disgrace,
> Is the name of the gentleman with a bold face.
>
> That's it: the 'Raw-lye' solution is the inference of later
> editors.

By "answer" I meant the name of the person Who was described
as the gentleman with a bold face. This was obviously the
person who was the subject of the chapter within which this
passage is found, viz. Sir Walter Ralegh. No inferring required.

> Not that 'Sack-vile' works in any case - Aubrey himself noted
> that "In queen Elizabeth's time the apothecaries did sell sack
> in their shoppes: my grandfather and severall old men that I
> knew heretofore did remember it" Sack was long considered a
> medicinal beverage - friend rather than foe.

Oh all right. How about "Acheley", Roger of that name, alderman
of London?

>> Unfortunately, however, we do not have anyone who can tell
>> us what the author had in mind so we have to base our decision
>> upon our own knowledge.
>
> I thought you said we should base it on the text itself and
> nothing else.

That related to assessing whether or not an alleged hidden
message was *valid*, not how one might set about solving it.

> You invoked the Friedmans above, yet you seem to be discarding
> one of their critical principles, viz.:
>
> "In general, it can be said that any cipher system, or any
> method which claims to follow valid cryptographic procedures,
> must yield unique solutions. If in any system two different
> investigators applying the same key or keys to the same basic
> material get inconsistent answers, the system is self-refuting.
> In other words, it can be used to show its own invalidity:
> with ingenious use, it can be made to produce any answer
> you like..."

Absolutely right. Indeed this is precisely how I myself set about
demonstrating why ciphers "found" by my fellow anti-Stratfordians
are almost invariably wrong. The Friedmans' book was entirely
concerned with ciphers (which is not what I claim to have found),
but their particular point about needing to show why an alleged
hidden message cannot have happened just by chance applies to any
such message, not just to ciphers.

> The answer I like is Joshua Fearmor Price, which I got by
> applying the same key or keys

No, a key in the Friedmans' context (substitution or transposition
ciphers) has a quite specific meaning which isn't relevant here.

> to the same basic material - though I blush at the word
> 'ingenious.' Nevertheless, I fear that my answer and yours
> cancel each other out: there is no unique solution, and thus
> (by Friedmanian standards, at least) no valid message.

As I say, you are misapplying their rules. Whilst in any word
puzzle like a rebus the author would intend there to be only one
clear answer, the process normally involves selecting the most
likely answer from among various alternatives. In the 'raw-lie'
example, one would one would try various combinations of (say)
bile, pain, ulcer, rot, runs (or raw) with shame, guilt, fib,
ban, bar (or lie), and assume that the only combination which
makes sense will be the answer. If not, then it's the one which
seems most likely to be the one intended.

>> And what we find is that there is an answer which is, as I

>> said a "well-known person whose work is universally acknow-

>> ledged as having had a huge effect on the works of the Bard."
>> Were it not an answer which you for other reasons find
>> unacceptable, you would of course accept this.
>
> I have been making an effort to avoid ad hominem in the
> present discussion, and I am sorry to say that you are
> skirting very close to it with the above. Would you not
> be offended if I told you that you would of course accept
> that your answer is illusory were it not an answer which
> you for other reasons find acceptable?

Yes, I would a bit, since I would have been far more ready
to accept it if the answer had turned out to be Edward de
vere or Francis Bacon than most people would give me
credit for. But I don't see the two situations as really
analogous. I think it highly likely that the name of
Christopher Marlowe was hidden there quite deliberately.
You, on the other hand, don't believe for a moment that
any name is hidden there other than purely by chance. I
simply meant that if we *knew* that one of the two answers
was intentional and, unrelated to this discussion, you were
faced with making the decision as to which of the two it
was, you would, because he was a known person with links to
Shakespeare, choose Marlowe. My argument was in no way
intended to be ad hominem, and I am sorry if it came across
that way.

<snip>

> Regardless, the problem is that there is no direct way to
> get from 'cost' to 'ley'. Considering the fact that the
> word 'lay' functions as a noun, verb, and adjective, and
> the OED lists *43* possible meanings for the verb alone -
> most of which were accessible to the 17th-century literati
> - I find it very difficult to believe that the versifier

> couldn't work a direct synonym for 'lay' into the inscrip-

> tion, or even the word 'lay' itself.

Why are you so keen on synonyms? "Raw" isn't a synonym of
"The enemie to the stomack", nor is "lie" a synonym of "the
word of disgrace". They are both examples, just as a tax is
an example of a cost.

Peter F.
<http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey>

[ignoto]

On 13/10/13 5:20 AM, Paul Crowley wrote:
> On 11/10/2013 05:10, Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>
>> "Peter F." <pet...@rey.myzen.co.uk> wrote in
>>
>>> Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
>> [excisions]
>>>> But what is the reader to make of the phrase 'whom envious
>>>> Death hath plast with in this monument'? If Marlowe's name
>>>> was in fact placed in the inscription, it was placed there
>>>> by the creator of the inscription - did he want the decipherer
>>>> to associate him with Death? A bit ominous, that.
>>>
>>> One of the dafter ideas in the overt meaning of the inscription
>>> is that the fact of his Death has somehow placed Shakespeare
>>> *within* the monument.
>
> The 'cock-up theory' of history is nearly always a
> better bet than a conspiracy theory. Here I think
> that the most likely explanation is that there was
> a misunderstanding between the promoters of the
> cover-up (who paid for this monument) and the
> composer of this verse. He had assumed (or
> gathered) that the monument would be similar to
> that for John Combe (i.e like the great bulk of high-
> grade church monuments of the age).

Here is what Combe's tomb reads:

"HERE LYETH INTERRED YE BODY OF JOHN COMBE ESQR WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE
YE 10TH DAY OF JULY A DNI 1614 BEQUEATHED BY HIS LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
TO PIOUS AND CHARITABLE USES THESE SUMES INOVING ANVALLY TO BE PAIED FOR
EVER VIZ. XXS FOR TWO SERMONS TO BE PREACHED IN THIS CHURCH. SIX POVNDES
XII & 4 PENCE TO BUY TEN GOVNDES FOR TEN POORE PEOPLE WITHIN YE BORROUGH
OF STRATFORD & ONE HUNDRED POVNDES TO BE LENT UNTO 15 POORE TRADESMEN OF
YE SAME BORROUGH FROM 3 YEARS TO 3 YEARES CHANGING YE PTIES EVERY THIRD
YEARE AT YE RATE OF FIFTIE SHILLINGES P. ANUM YE WCH INCREASE HE
APPOINTED TO BE DISTRIBUTED TOWARD THE RELIEFE OF THE ALMES PEOPLE
THEIRE. MORE HE GAVE TO THE POORE O STRATFORDE TWENTY...[unfinished]"

Note the words: "LYETH INTERRED YE BODY OF JOHN COMBE"

i.e. If the body of Shakespeare was to be interred in the monument there
is every reason to think it would say exactly /that/. Shakey's monument
however does not say /that/.

Ign.

[snip]

[Paul Crowley]

On 18/10/2013 15:14, ignoto wrote:

> Eh? I'm sure YOU could 'read' it as referring to an invasion of
> space aliens (though absurd it certainly makes more sense
> than your crazy sonnet readings).

You will note how Farey's nonsensical theories,
your nonsensical stuff (here about 'Death placing
a bust in a monument') and nonsensical stuff
from others generally, is routinely demolished:
the lack of correspondence between the words
of the text (as we have them) and the theory, and
the inherent illogicality of the relevant theory itself.
Whereas no one ever has ever tried to undermine
my Sonnet interpretations -- showing, for example,
how they don't match the words or are illogical.
Dominic Hughes felt that I had not adequately
'proved' that 'Summer' was appropriate for the
bean-pole Darnley. That was it.

> The point being that if the plain meaning of 'within' (as
> referring to the statue) was so absurd we could reasonably
> have expected comment on it from people who saw it. We
> get none.

The notion that we should get any comments on the
inscription is extraordinarily far-fetched. How many
records do we have of ANY tourists -- or ANY comments
on the monument itself? The inscription is in small letters
high up on the wall of a dark church. How many would
bother to read it, let alone copy it down?

Stratford-upon-Avon was not associated to the poet
until (at least) the publication of the First Folio, and
even then most people probably thought the place
mentioned was near London (and where the 2012 Olympics
were held).

> E.g.:
>
> "In a copy of the First Folio now at the Folger Shakespeare Library,
> the following poem is written in a hybrid secretary-italic hand from
> the 1620s:

Strats will believe ANYTHING. For all I know, (or am
interested in finding out) this could have dated from
the 1920s. (We can be fairly sure that it was not
written before 1620.)

> Here Shakespeare lies whom none but Death could Shake,
> And here shall lie till judgement all awake,
> When the last trumpet doth unclose his eyes,
> The wittiest poet in the world shall rise.
>
> The same hand has on the same page transcribed the verses from
> Shakespeare's monument ("Stay passenger why go'st thou by so
> fast") and his grave ("Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear"), so he is
> obviously referring to William Shakespeare of Stratford. (Evans 1988) "

The level of credulousness that we see among
"Shakespeare scholars" makes witch-doctors
seem the purest sceptics.

> http://shakespeareauthorship.com/eulogies.html

>>> In any case there is certainly evidence in relation to the reality with which
>>> people regarded religious icons:
>>
>> The bust of the Stratman (or, more likely, of
>> his father) was NOT a religious icon. But even
>> if it had of been, an allusion to it as though it
>> was a real person would have been regarded
>> as heretical. All such icons were being
>> removed (and usually destroyed) at the time.
>
> Irrelevant. The point is not that the statue was a religious icon; the
> point is that people thought material objects could embody spiritual
> artifacts.

It's highly relevant. You would not in the present
decade get homophobic or racist statements
(express or implied) on public monuments, whereas
they would have been common 100 years earlier.
Likewise, no one in the 1620s was writing allusions
to beliefs that were then regarded as pagan into
public memorials.

>>> "Other devotions proliferated, with and without encouragement by the
>>> priest and clergy. Statues and images of patron saints were erected in
>>> every parish, and these saints were treated as valuable members of the
>>> local community. They were honoured with flowers, clothing, drapery, and
>>> candles, and given a place of honour in community celebrations.
>>
>> All this is about a period before Mary I died (in 1558).
>
> Wrong. People /still/ view material objects as spiritual embodiments.
> See, e.g. Religious Statues and Personhood: Testing the Role of
> Materiality by Amy Whitehead

It may happen -- but expressions of such sentiments
were not acceptable on public memorials.

> Yet people did (and still do) refer to statues as real persons. Not of
> course that I would expect Crowley to be able to encompass such a
> thought in the narrow straits of his mind.

It may happen -- but expressions of such sentiments
were not acceptable on public memorials.

>> The current bust is bland and idiotic -- but nothing
>> like a death mask. The original one (seen in
>> Dugdale) was of a real person -- but still with no
>> similarity to a death mask. But, even if it had
>> been, that does not mean that the person was
>> within the monument, or could be said to be
>> within the monument.
>
> Of course the inscription makes to mention of 'person' - that is your
> own egregious interpolation. What the inscription says is that
> Shakespeare is within the monument and with his statue as his
> material representative, that is exactly what he is.

If his dead body were there (as so placed by 'Death)
then the statement would make sense. But Death
did not place his bust there. Nor is his bust Shak-
speare. A portrait might also be a 'material
representative' and many monuments have portraits.
But no one would say that the deceased "Mr X" is
"on this monument" nor "within this monument"

>>> His importance demonstrated by the fact that he was buried /inside/ the church.
>>
>> So was John Combe -- with a much finer monument.
>>
>> It seems that at the time the only issue was
>> the amount of money you could pay,
>
> As with all things.

So you agree that William Shaksper was regarded
-- both locally and nationally --- as being of lesser
importance than John Combe?

Btw, there is a good discussion of the issues at:
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article706972.ece


Paul.

[Paul Crowley]

That's the point. Everything written there is clearly
'above board'. No one would think of doubting any
part of it. Simple plain English setting out what the
man wanted -- and all he says reflects his character
and the social mores of the time, in fine, even
magnificent, detail. (Whether or not he got what he
asked for, after his death, would be another question.)
But, in the Stratman's case -- and in nearly every-
thing to do with the author's life -- we get nothing of
the kind. Nothing whatever. Obscurity, uncertainty,
evasion, ambiguity, vagueness, unintelligibilty, doubt,
double-talk,

Is there one simple plain statement anywhere?

OK, I have not so far expressed this as a logical
and scientific argument, but it should be persuasive
to anyone with any sensitivity to history or to human
affairs. In anything to do with the Stratman, or the
identity of the poet, there is a most conspicuous
absence of detail and clarity. This is far in excess
of any possible explanation arising from the passage
of time.

> Note the words: "LYETH INTERRED YE BODY OF JOHN COMBE"
>
> i.e. If the body of Shakespeare was to be interred in the monument
> there is every reason to think it would say exactly /that/. Shakey's
> monument however does not say /that/.

Let's say Thomas Greene was the main government
agent organising the cover-up.

GREENE: Ben, the inscription for the monument.
There are three targets: (a) the local yokels, who
are nearly all illiterate, (b) a few literary tourists who
might get to Stratford and who will be looking for a
memorial to a famous author, and (c) those few who
know the whole thing is fakery.

So do your best with your ambiguity.

--- Two months later --
GREENE: Ben have you got that inscription.
We need it now.

JONSON: I did a quick job. With the Latin
I'm playing on the judgement of piles, and the art
of a marrow, but I'm stuck on a third one. For the
part in English, I just kept it vague -- some words
on the daft 'quick nature' theme, a few slurs
towards the local illiterates and a double-edged
comment on all that the Stratman ever writ.

GREENE: I see you have a couple of lines about
his body being interred. We've changed that and
gone for a less costly memorial -- to better fit the
minor role of the Stratman. I'll just cut those lines
and take the rest now. It will do. Probably no one
will ever see it -- at least not until we're both long
dead and buried.

[BCD]

On 10/18/2013 12:40 PM, Paul Crowley wrote:

[Much snippage]

> [...] You would not in the present

> decade get homophobic or racist statements
> (express or implied) on public monuments, whereas

> they would have been common 100 years earlier. [...]

***Common on public monuments? In the inscription (rather than, say, as
graffiti)? Could you provide some examples?

Best Wishes,

--BCD

[David L. Webb]

In article <l3sj0i$cjj$1...@dont-email.me>, BCD <pilt...@verizon.net>
wrote:

Of *course* not, Brent -- that was *Crowley* whom you just addressed!
Crowley can never be bothered to provide examples supporting his claims,
which he haughtily claims are "obvious". However, he routinely accuses
those whom he denominates "Strats" for their supposed failure to furnish
examples supporting their claims, although many have done so in
abundance -- however, since most sane people who have bested him before
promptly end up in his killfile (or so he claims), he can conveniently
blithely ignore such evidence.

As an example, Crowley has asked for even a single example of a
writer who grew up in an illiterate household. I have mentioned the
example of Mikhail Lomonosov many times. Lomonosov grew up in a remote
Arctic fishing village whose entire population included very few (if
any) literate inhabitants, save a few clergy. Lomonosov not only grew
up in a family in which literacy was not valued, he was actually beaten
by his stepmother for his attempts to learn to read. He learned a
little from the village deacon, but he had no accessible reading
material save religious texts until he was around 15 years of age, when
he obtained copies of a grammar of Old Church Slavonic and a book on
arithmetic; he studied both voraciously, often reading for hours outside
during the frigid Russian winters in order to escape his stepmother's
wrath. When he was eighteen or nineteen, Lomonosov set off -- on foot
-- along the sledge route to Moscow, where by dint of impersonating the
son of an impoverished priest, he managed to wangle admission to the
Slavic Greek Latin Academy, where he completed a twelve-year course of
study in five or six years, graduating first in his class. He went on
to higher education and to an illustrious career as an intellectual
polymath -- he made important contributions in physics (especially
electromagnetic theory), planetary science, chemistry, geology,
engineering, oceanography, philology, art, history, and other fields.
He was also an education reformer and a poet whose work strongly
influenced the early development of the nascent modern Russian literary
language. In short, Lomonosov, despite the intellectual poverty of his
surroundings for the first eighteen years of his life, transformed
himself into one of the leading intellects of the eighteenth century.

Of course, all this has been mentioned before -- repeatedly -- but
since Crowley lets on that he never sees any of my posts, he can
conveniently ignore it -- just as he can ignore all mentions of his
triumphantly dogmatic and hilariously funny exegesis of the "Ray Mignot"
sonnet.

> Best Wishes,
>
> --BCD

[BCD]

***Yes, c'est vrai. And, on the subject of illiterate households, I
pointed out once upon a time to Paul and the world in general that of
/course/ it's hard to find writers who own up to being brought up in
illiteracy, as, if there's any profession which might conceive of its
ambitions being torpedoed by an aura of illiteracy, it's that of the
writer; and so /naturally/ a writer would do his best to cover up the
fact whenever possible. Consequently, rather than to ask for writers
whose biography states them to be illiterate, as there are reasons, as
just stated, for this data to be lacking, it would more appropriate to
ask those who state that writers always come from literate households to
supply direct (not inferential) evidence that particular supposedly
literate parents in question could indeed read and write (not that I
believe it's a necessary condition for there to be a literate child).
For instance, were the parents of Mark Akenside literate? Were the
parents of John Taylor (the "Water Poet") literate? And we might take
this opportunity to observe that said Taylor, a contemporary of
Shakespeare, mentioned S. as a poet, and (in 1620) a dead one at that.
But I like to address Paul with questions concerning his statements
because experience demonstrates that there's a good chance that the
result will be that phenomenon so precious in this too-noisy world,
silence, the sound of one hand clapping (or in this case should I say
the sound of one bowel crapping?). And that's an opportunity not to be
dismissed lightly.

Best Wishes,

--BCD

[Sneaky O. Possum]

"Peter F." <pet...@rey.myzen.co.uk> wrote in

news:8832f8e3-9000-4f3a...@googlegroups.com:

> Sneaky O. Possum wrote:
{material removed}

>> The issue is whether the author of the inscription might have
>> seen it in that sense. It seems quite plausible to me that he
>> could have.
>
> Yes, it's also quite possible that this was what he intended
> the casual reader to take it as meaning. This doesn't stop it
> being a very odd way of expressing it.

Nor does it start it being a very odd way of expressing it.

> Death had placed *him* in the grave, not in the monument.

The only people who have expressed any sense of its 'oddity' are modern
readers, and there are a great many things that seem odd to a modern
reader but would have seemed unexceptionable to a reader of the 1620s.

<snip>

> Six years after the death of Shakespeare, in 1622, the First Folio was
> scheduled to appear at the Frankfurt book fair, very soon after the
> most likely date for the erection of the monument in 1621/2, when a

> major refurbishment of the chancel was undertaken after several years

> of neglect, during which it was inaccessible to the public.

But that suggests that the Marlovians who hypothetically sponsored both
the monument and the folio needed to erect the monument in a church in
Shaksper's home village. Granted that access to Westminster Abbey might
not have been readily available, was there no other site that might have
been appropriate - the Blackfriars theater, or the rebuilt Globe, say?
It makes sense that Shaksper's family would have chosen their home
town's church for a monument to him, but why would people who really
wanted to commemorate Marlowe, and resented Shaksper's getting the
credit for plays he didn't write, have put up a monument in Stratford,
of all places?

> That there is no mention of his family might also be an indication?

In that case, wouldn't the fact that there is no mention of Sir Thomas
Walsingham, Henry Percy, or Henry Wriothesley be evidence against their
involvement? Of course, there is no mention of them in the First Folio,
either, so perhaps they were trying to keep their names out of the
papers. Yet the Folio was publicly dedicated to William and Philip
Herbert by Heminge and Condell, and there is no mention of any of them
on the monument, either.

The monument's possible proximity in time to an announced appearance of
a folio of plays in Frankfurt should be balanced against its actual
proximity in space to the home of William Shakespeare's family.

[deletions]

> My suggestion is really that there would have been moves for some
> time to get Marlowe pardoned and rehabilitated (with Prospero's
> epilogue being part of this process) but that the king had refused
> to grant any such thing.

This would be the same king who employed Ben Jonson to write his court
masques, yes? The one who allowed Jonson who print a folio of his works
in 1616, even though this was the same Ben Jonson who had been charged
with "leude and mutynous behavior" and clapped into the Marshalsea over
/The Isle of Dogs/, the same one who voluntarily went back to prison to
show his solidarity with Chapman and Marston after they offended James
by mocking him in /Eastward Hoe/, the one who (at least according to
Drummond) was called before the Privy Council because of his play
/Sejanus/ and was accused 'both of popperie and treason' by Lord Henry
Howard? The one who killed Gabriel Spencer and almost hanged for it, and
converted to Catholicism while in prison?

What on earth could Marlowe have done to render himself less redeemable
than Jonson?

> To produce a volume of works by Marlowe
> which had hitherto been attributed to Shakespeare without James's
> permission (which would certainly not have been granted) would
> therefore have been appallingly risky

If so, they had the option of producing no volume of works at all,
didn't they? Thomas Walsingham, Henry Percy, William Herbert, and Ben
Jonson all outlived James I; they could conceivably have waited and
tried again with his son Chuck, couldn't they? (If Marlowe was, in fact,
still alive, he would've turned 61 the year James died - old, but not
unusually so: Jonson, who was no poster boy for healthy living, made it
to 65, Thomas Walsingham died when he was in his late sixties, and Henry
Percy, who like Shaksper was born in April 1564, lived till November
1632.)

{snip}

> There was also a 1612 edition of /Edward II/, and several of
> /Hero and Leander/. In fact (unlike the First Folio) all of the
> works normally attributed to Marlowe were in print by then.

If there was an edition of /The Jew of Malta/ in print during James's
reign, it has not survived - the earliest known edition was printed in
1633.

> But this suggestion rather misses the point that it would have been
> the unfairness of attributing his works to someone else which
> was being addressed, and a collection of his known works would
> hardly do anything about that.

If they felt that it was unfair to attribute his works to someone else,
why would they have had any involvement with the publication of the
First Folio?

[additional deletions]

> By "answer" I meant the name of the person Who was described
> as the gentleman with a bold face.

Oh. I thought you meant "answer."

> This was obviously the person who was the subject of the chapter
> within which this passage is found, viz. Sir Walter Ralegh. No
> inferring required.

Just as no inferring is required to suppose that the 'name' referred to
in the inscription on Shakspeare's monument is 'Shakspeare'?

>> Not that 'Sack-vile' works in any case - Aubrey himself noted
>> that "In queen Elizabeth's time the apothecaries did sell sack
>> in their shoppes: my grandfather and severall old men that I
>> knew heretofore did remember it" Sack was long considered a
>> medicinal beverage - friend rather than foe.
>
> Oh all right. How about "Acheley", Roger of that name, alderman
> of London?

In what way is 'ley' a word of disgrace?

{And further deletions}

> As I say, you are misapplying their rules. Whilst in any word
> puzzle like a rebus the author would intend there to be only one
> clear answer, the process normally involves selecting the most
> likely answer from among various alternatives. In the 'raw-lie'
> example, one would one would try various combinations of (say)
> bile, pain, ulcer, rot, runs (or raw) with shame, guilt, fib,
> ban, bar (or lie), and assume that the only combination which
> makes sense will be the answer. If not, then it's the one which
> seems most likely to be the one intended.

I don't believe that's an accurate description of the normal process of
solving a rebus; it would certainly make no sense regarding Aubrey's
rebus, which (as you pointed out) was recorded among his notes about Sir
Walter Raleigh. One would thus only need to try to come up with words
that matched the definitions and could be plausibly converted into the
syllables of Raleigh's name.

>>> And what we find is that there is an answer which is, as I
>>> said a "well-known person whose work is universally acknow-
>>> ledged as having had a huge effect on the works of the Bard."
>>> Were it not an answer which you for other reasons find
>>> unacceptable, you would of course accept this.
>>
>> I have been making an effort to avoid ad hominem in the
>> present discussion, and I am sorry to say that you are
>> skirting very close to it with the above. Would you not
>> be offended if I told you that you would of course accept
>> that your answer is illusory were it not an answer which
>> you for other reasons find acceptable?
>
> Yes, I would a bit, since I would have been far more ready
> to accept it if the answer had turned out to be Edward de
> vere or Francis Bacon than most people would give me
> credit for. But I don't see the two situations as really
> analogous.

It sounds as though you don't think they're analogous because you don't
think I'm nearly as open-minded as you are, but I'm sure that's not what
you meant.

> I think it highly likely that the name of
> Christopher Marlowe was hidden there quite deliberately.
> You, on the other hand, don't believe for a moment that
> any name is hidden there other than purely by chance.

On the contrary, I think there may very well be a name or other message
concealed in the inscription. It may even be Marlowe's name. But I don't
think you've made a plausible case.

> I simply meant that if we *knew* that one of the two answers
> was intentional and, unrelated to this discussion, you were
> faced with making the decision as to which of the two it
> was, you would, because he was a known person with links to
> Shakespeare, choose Marlowe.

I am aware of no rule that states that a name concealed in a message
must necessarily, or even probably, be that of a known person with links
to the person referred to in the message itself, as opposed to (say) the
name of the person who composed the message.

And as far as I can see, the only way we could *know* that one of the
two answers was intentional is by finding documentary evidence of
intent, most preferably from the composer or composers of the message,
but really, any documentary evidence would suffice. What a pity that
Aubrey, that inveterate gossip who was always pestering his
well-connected friends and anyone else he could corner for one more
anecdote, seems to have missed out on any hints or rumours regarding
Shakespear's tomb, even though he seems to have interviewed some
Stratfordians ("I have been heretofore by some of the neighbours, that
when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade," etc.).

> My argument was in no way intended to be ad hominem, and I am sorry if
> it came across that way.
>
> <snip>
>
>> Regardless, the problem is that there is no direct way to
>> get from 'cost' to 'ley'. Considering the fact that the
>> word 'lay' functions as a noun, verb, and adjective, and
>> the OED lists *43* possible meanings for the verb alone -
>> most of which were accessible to the 17th-century literati
>> - I find it very difficult to believe that the versifier
>> couldn't work a direct synonym for 'lay' into the inscrip-
>> tion, or even the word 'lay' itself.
>
> Why are you so keen on synonyms? "Raw" isn't a synonym of
> "The enemie to the stomack", nor is "lie" a synonym of "the
> word of disgrace". They are both examples, just as a tax is
> an example of a cost.

Who's Christofer Martax?
--
S.O.P.