| Author |
|
John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 134254
|
| Posted: 03 May 2025 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | 1
|
post reply
|
|
To paraphrase Voltaire, it is difficult to free people from the chains they revere.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Steven Brake
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 01 January 2016
Posts: 685
|
| Posted: 03 May 2025 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | 2
|
post reply
|
|
@JB: So Burbage - and I suppose one should add Heminges, Condell, Jonson, Fletcher, Middleton, Nash, Beaumont, etc - were all fooled, or knew the truth and either chose to conceal it or were compelled to do so?
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Mark Haslett
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 6850
|
| Posted: 03 May 2025 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | 3
|
post reply
|
|
Another thought experiment.
We know that Phillip Sidney and Edward De Vere and other aristocrats
planned to elevate the English language in the 1570s through plays and
poems. Shakespeare completed this project, somehow.
So consider:
Imagine the year is 1957. An official government history declares that the
atomic bomb—completed in 1945—was not the result of the Manhattan
Project, but the invention of a young man from Springfield, Illinois.
This boy, poorly educated and unknown to the scientific community, died in
1950—twelve years after the bomb was completed, seven years before his
name is ever associated with it. No one in Springfield recalls him working on
nuclear physics. No scientist in Los Alamos ever met or heard of him. Yet
his name appears, out of nowhere, on the title page of a commemorative
pamphlet about the bomb.
From that moment on, he’s remembered as the lone genius behind it all—
while the actual architects, despite their documented collaboration and
correspondence, fade into footnotes.
Would we believe that?
The Shakespeare story is the same.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Steven Brake
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 01 January 2016
Posts: 685
|
| Posted: 04 May 2025 at 7:21am | IP Logged | 4
|
post reply
|
|
Mark Haslett wrote: The Shakespeare story is the same.
SB replied: Except it isn't.
While William Shakespeare lives, plays under his name are being performed by the theatrical troupe that he is a member of - first The Lord Chamberlain's Men, then The King's Men.
While William Shakespeare lives, plays with his name on them are published (if not always with his consent - the "bad quartos").
While William Shakespeare lives, he is specifically identified as the author of a dozen plays by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia.
While William Shakespeare lives, he is also teased, even scorned, in The Parnassus Plays for presuming to compete with his supposedly superior university educated contemporaries.
While William Shakespeare lives, he is named among a list of people in the royal charter creating The King's Men in 1603. Also included in this list are Henry Condell and John Heminges.
In 1616, Condell and Heminges (amongst others, including Richard Burbage, the greatest actor of his age, and who is also included in the names in the royal charter of 1603) are named in the will of William Shakespeare who dies in Stratford-Upon-Avon.
In 1623, the First Folio is published, containing plays identified by Heminges and Condell as having been by the man they'd known.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Matt Reed
Byrne Robotics Security
Robotmod
Joined: 16 April 2004
Posts: 36304
|
| Posted: 04 May 2025 at 7:56am | IP Logged | 5
|
post reply
|
|
Who here is keeping tabs on the number of authorship threads populating this board?
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12878
|
| Posted: 04 May 2025 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | 6
|
post reply
|
|
While there is no direct paper trail from Stratford Will to the plays and poems, it's not like there's a total dearth of evidence that the man was involved in the theater and with other noted theater folk and publishers, etc.
The frustration for Stratfordians -- even absent any doubt that Shaksper was Shakespeare -- is that there are a decent amount of non-theatrical papers about Stratford Will, there are some papers about his connections to the theater, but nothing survives (or, if one is a doubter, nothing ever existed) about the when, where, why, and how of Stratford Will as the author of any of the works. Anybody would wish that the kind of direct evidence that exists for contemporaries of Shakespeare also existed for the author.
Yet, it's not undeniably ridiculous for an honest inquirer to affirm that Stratford Will wasn't some utterly random person who somehow deliberately or inadvertently (or something in between) ended up being identified as the author.
For example, Richard Field was the publisher of Shakespeare's big splash poems, and Field was from Stratford, like Shaksper. (Roger Lock and Allen Orians, also from Stratford, were London stationers.) At that point, one may stop and declare: "that's still not a direct paper trail showing that Field knew Shaksper as the author, or even knew him at all." Fair enough. And yet, this is the kind of circumstantial evidence that does exist, it's not fabricated. And there's clearly more of the same in the record. The circumstantial evidence requires Stratfordians to create arguable connections in place of a direct paper trail. There's logic asserted to support those connections. And there's logic asserted to reject them.
Nonetheless, the asserted logic behind a doubter rejecting the circumstantial evidence as proof that Shaksper better than any other possible candidate, named or not, would be the author does not mean that the circumstantial evidence is itself a mirage.
To be succinct: it's not impossible that Stratford Will was Shakespeare. For Stratfordians, that's good enough. For doubters, it's not.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12878
|
| Posted: 04 May 2025 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | 7
|
post reply
|
|
QUOTE:
| Who here is keeping tabs on the number of authorship threads populating this board? |
|
|
I'll volunteer. Seems to be about 30 of them, Matt, longer and shorter, and some "stealth" (didn't start that way, but...!).
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 134254
|
| Posted: 04 May 2025 at 2:44pm | IP Logged | 8
|
post reply
|
|
Return to the creation of a “brand”. When De Vere died, those who were making money off his work—without his consent—set about creating a name to go with the Work. Will Shaksper, already having demonstrated himself not at all shy about exploiting works he did not own, steps in to put a face to the name. The First Folio is published, using the name for the first time on a major publication. The printer acknowledges that the name is a pseudonym, spelling it Shake-speare (a lower case letter after a hyphen being a common way in Elizabethan theater of indicating a made up name.) The dedication refers to the Author as if he is dead, almost a decade before the Stratford man shuffles off. Ben Jonson gets involved, manifesting as Stratford Will’s best bud, tho in his lifetime he had little good to say about him.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12878
|
| Posted: 04 May 2025 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | 9
|
post reply
|
|
QUOTE:
| ...we have both been called “mad,” and told that we should be in a lunatic asylum. ...We are simply asking for a discussion. We are putting an idea forward, a theory forward. We are not being rude about it. We are being, I hope, gracious about it. |
|
|
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Mark Haslett
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 6850
|
| Posted: 04 May 2025 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | 10
|
post reply
|
|
Michael: While there is no direct paper trail from Stratford Will to the plays
and poems, it's not like there's a total dearth of evidence that the man was
involved in the theater and with other noted theater folk and publishers, etc.
**
Every time I look closely at a circumstance that suggests Shaksper has a
connection to the writing, it turns out to be vapor.
Take the example of Richard Field, printer of Venus & Adonis and Lucrece.
Evidence shows that he is from Stratford. Great. Coincidence?
Maybe/maybe not. What else do we know?
Field’s father did some business with Shaxper’s father when Shaxper was a
boy. Cool. But we also know Richard Field was in London as an apprentice
by the time young Will Shaxper was 14 years old. Field became the owner of
a long established and successful London print shop when he married his
mentor’s widow. By the time Venus & Adonis was ready for print, 14 years
after Field left Stratford, this new poem had been sanctioned for print by
the Archbishop of Canterbury. Any shop would be happy to print it. Field
bought the copyright, but before it went to print, Field let the publishing
rights for Venus & Adonis go to John Harrison. Field never even owned the
rights to Lucrece, which he printed the following year in his long established
London shop.
Where in this picture do we find evidence of that Shaxper’s special
relationship to Richard Field as a fellow Stratfordian was any part of
anything? Field dealt with the poems as a perfectly disinterested
professional. Don’t we have a circumstance with all the earmarks of a
meaningless coincidence?
I cannot find a Stratfordian point that withstands any scrutiny or helps us
better understand anything in the works.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 134254
|
| Posted: 04 May 2025 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | 11
|
post reply
|
|
As many of you know, there is a personal level to this, for me. “John Byrne” combines two of the most common names in the English language, and many’s the time I’ve been credited with the works and words of other JBs. A week or so back I googled “John Byrne Quotes”, and found that fully half of what was attributed to me came from others of the same name. Tilda Swinton’s significant other for years was a painter and writer named John Byrne, and when he died a while ago there was a flurry of activity in my former ACA classmates, trying to find out if he was me. Despite him being ten years older than me. Growing up in Calgary I shared my name with a local painter known for his Western art. My father compounded the confusion by hanging a print by that other John Byrne in his office at City Hall. There’s a British cartoonist who actually prefaced his website with a notice that he was not the John Byrne who drew the X-Men. If my memory survives a hundred years, how much more blending might there be?
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12878
|
| Posted: 04 May 2025 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | 12
|
post reply
|
|
> Every time I look closely at a circumstance that suggests Shaksper has a connection to the writing, it turns out to be vapor. <
Mark, I think you've been arguing not so much that the circumstances Stratfordians rely upon are "vapor" as opposed to arguing that the suggested pro-Stratford connections based on those circumstance are. For a doubter, the end result is the same, but demonstrable circumstances still have to be dealt with by doubters. I doubt that you'd disagree. :D
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
|
|
