Shakespeare did NOT write Shakespeare. (Mark Twain: "Is Shakespeare Dead?")

[Bill Ryan]

.
Hello, Folks: this is another conspiracy, a most interesting one that some of you may not have heard about.

Many, many, MANY researchers, historians, authors, actors and actresses profoundly suspect (and many of them are 100% certain) that William Shakespeare (the simple, everyman guy from Stratford-on-Avon) did not write the works famously attributed to him.

Below is a hilarious 45 minute presentation of the problem — a one-man show, based on a book about all this written by Mark Twain. Twain is acerbic, witty, pointed, and as always, highly entertaining from start to finish. Recommended. :thumbsup:

Here are the facts, for anyone who may not be aware:


Shakespeare never traveled outside of England, and never learned any other language.
He had no university education, and may not even have attended school.
He may actually have been unable to read or write: his parents, wife, and children were all illiterate.
Not one letter from him has ever been found, and no trace remains of any of the original manuscripts.
In his will, he never mentions a single book or play, and appears never to have owned any books at all.
Stratford is not mentioned once in any of his works.
When he died, there was no celebration of the man at the time, at all.
The only thing in his writing is a handful of wobbly signatures, that mis-spell his own name, and it seems he actually may even have had trouble holding a pen.
Meanwhile, his plays and sonnets show a most extremely intelligent, literate, sophisticated, well-connected, well-traveled, and highly educated author, who had a massive vocabulary of 26,000 words (most people use 2,000, even today), understood Italian, French, Latin and Greek, history, medicine, law, falconry, the ways of the Royal high court, and who had clearly traveled in Italy and knew it well.

Go figure. :)

The most likely candidates for who really wrote the plays are (in order, maybe)


Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
Christopher Marlowe.
Francis Bacon.
(many others have been proposed, too, and every one of them is more likely to have written Shakespeare than Shakespeare. :) )

Here’s the presentation of Mark Twain’s book. Hilarious, and again I really do recommend it. Enjoy.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ72Ew1ujlk

[Hervé]

Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?72291-Real-Meaning-of-Shakespear-s-Plays-Joseph-Atwill&p=846367&viewfull=1#post846367) is a good contender too...

[Gillian]

My favourite choice has been, for some years, Edward de Vere. The researcher who put forward his name supported this choice with excellent logic. As Francis Bacon was supposedly QEI's son, probably by Drake rather than the Frenchman she was enamoured with and this I think because of his given name and that would make it the same as his father's. I will enjoy the video when I have walked the dogs.

Another interesting fact about Sir Francis Bacon is that -- and I don't want to get into the "do I believe this?" question because I think it is possible based on what some say the Cabal do -- he is one of those people who never really dies but morphs into another well known character. It has been said that he became St. Germaine.

[Bill Ryan]

.
Note: for members interested in this (and it's very interesting!), there's already a partly overlapping thread, here... it might be worth merging them, and certainly reading this other one.


Real Meaning of "Shakespear's" Plays / Joseph Atwill (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?72291-Real-Meaning-of-Shakespear-s-Plays-Joseph-Atwill)

[Daughter of Time]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owCGyyfLKhY

Anyone seen the film "Anonymous"?

I love this film! It presents a plausible story as to who Shakespeare really was!

Highly recommended if you like a good historical movie and you're interested in Shakespeare and the reign of Elizabeth I.

Roland Emmerich, who directed this film, is a conspiracy theorist. His first blockbuster film was "Independence Day", which I imagine most will have seen.

I love all of Emmerich's films, but the most riveting for me was/is "Anonymous" as it unravels layer after layer after layer of royal and aristocratic secrets, then finally arriving at a shocking conclusion.

[ceetee9]

Excellent video! Thank you Bill.

I've read or viewed a few things in the past regarding this subject, but I don't recall any being as funny and well done as this video. It made me want to learn some more about Dr. Keir Cutler.

Here's another good video, "Shakespeare Crackpot," (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3JJUsbA-SM) by Keir.

[uzn]

My best guess is that Shakespeare was in fact a pseudonym for Sir Francis Bacon´s Literary Workshop. He had a whole Group of Writers working for him!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Pourbus_Francis_Bacon.jpg
He had all the insights into english royality and was frequently in and around the High Society (Elites).
Shakespeare is what the Goddess Athena does before entering Battle. She shakes her Spear. She is the Goddess of Wisdom and has a Cloaking Helmet : Can be Anomymous.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Bacon-Rose.jpg
Here he is at the Library of Congress (Washington DC):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Francis_Bacon_in_the_Library_of_Congress.Jpeg

[Cardillac]

according to Dr. Joseph Farrell it was Edmund de Vere but I bet all three listed authors at least to a certain extent (if not more) contributed something;

just like Scottish musicologist Robert Newman (both of his interviews "The Manufacture of Mozart" and "The Music Industry" are available on RedIceCreations.com) has come to the conclusion that almost everything attributed to Mozart (and many other composers as well) was not written by Mozart but by various other composers; the contributing of all of this music written to and by a 'childhood genious' (a lie), not to mention the financing of all the productions, was most probably invented by a money-hungry group who could make a sale either through financing of new productions or, later, through selling sheet music-

as for Shakespeare: all options are open but we can be sure this dude didn't write one word of what has been attributed to him-

Larry

[kirolak]

Have you read Bill Bryson's book, "Shakespeare"? There is precious little known about Shakespeare, & very little on record. . . even the spelling of his name changed each time he signed a document. . .as was the norm in those times. It's an amusing & easy read, with lots of detail about what we DON'T know about Shakespeare. :)

PS What does it matter who penned the plays & sonnets we all know; the name of the author doesn't detract from the value of the work, does it? A rose by any other name. . .:bigsmile:

[Satori]

J. Thomas Looney, in his work Shakespeare Identified (1920), concludes that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was Shakespeare. A view adopted by many, including Sigmund Freud. I would make light of Looney's last name (as many have) and his connection to Freud, but my last name is also Looney.

PS. I had not watched the video before I wrote this post. Outstanding work and excellent presentation by this gentleman.

[ceetee9]

Have you read Bill Bryson's book, "Shakespeare"? There is precious little known about Shakespeare, & very little on record. . . even the spelling of his name changed each time he signed a document. . .as was the norm in those times. It's an amusing & easy read, with lots of detail about what we DON'T know about Shakespeare. :)

PS What does it matter who penned the plays & sonnets we all know; the name of the author doesn't detract from the value of the work, does it? A rose by any other name. . .:bigsmile:No, I haven't read Bryson's book "Shakespeare" and I agree that the works stand on their own merit, but it does matter who actually penned the works, IMHO--unless, of course, we're ok with "fake history." ;)

[Clear Light]

.
Hello, Folks: this is another conspiracy, a most interesting one that some you may not have heard about.

Many, many, MANY researchers, historians, authors, actors and actresses profoundly suspect (and many of them are 100% certain) that William Shakespeare (the simple, everyman guy from Stratford-on-Avon) did not write the works famously attributed to him.

Below is a hilarious 45 minute presentation of the problem — a one-man show, based on a book about all this written by Mark Twain. Twain is acerbic, witty, pointed, and as always, highly entertaining from start to finish. Recommended. :thumbsup:

Oh my word ! Thanks Bill for the excellent video :yo: I have had to do some digging around today simply because I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing in it !!! But yes, all the "evidence" (or utter absence of) does indeed suggest it is True :shocked:

To paraphrase Mark Twain : "Inferences built upon inferences giving the impression of something quite matter-of-fact" as Shakespeare's "Surmisers" would likely say eh ? LOL :bigsmile:

[Cidersomerset]

Earlier this year was a six part comedy in the style of Black Adder about
Shakespeare and was pretty good and does poke fun at how he wrote
his plays or not.......


A lovelorn loon - Upstart Crow: Episode 1 Preview - BBC Two

VgU-x25LNZ8


Shakespeare has trouble working from home - Upstart Crow: Episode 2 Preview - BBC Two

d6Q4Fau3hoY

Upstart Crow stagione 1 episodio 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWyBvDZpmv4

===================================================
===================================================

QI | Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays?

QMUNqnKOJpQ

Published on 29 Jun 2016
June 29: On this day in 1613, the Globe Theatre burnt down.
For more visit http://qi.com

[Cidersomerset]

England had been in turmoil for centuries foreign wars , civil wars , strife,
feudalism , disease/plague , religious exploitation , the reformation and
two very bloody queens Mary Tudor and Elizabeth Tudor governing in a police
state......Yet life went on leading to the great age of discovery , exploration
unification of the British isles , constant wars (nothing new) Industrialisation
revolution colonies won and lost culminating in the largest empire known to
date , and still influencing world affairs.......

Shakespeare could have been a myth , legend for fear, particularly in the theatre
community who was vilified in Tudor and Stuart England who were paranoid of
propaganda of all types against the power of the church and monarchy , at a time
of great religious wars in Europe and Elizabeth's heir the Scottish king James and
son of her great rival Mary queen of Scots was almost the victim of a catholic
conspiracy in the gunpowder plot. An event celebrated every year with the burning
of Guy fawkes effigy on a bonfire,all around the country and particularly celebrated
here in Bridgwater with the Guy fawkes carnival one of the oldest and biggest in
the world. Also inspiring the face of Anonymous from the movie 'V' for vendetta
coming full circle about a future police state in the UK . This is quite appropriate
today President Obama prosecuted more 'whistle blowers' than all his predecessors
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/05/obama-has-sentenced-whistleblowers-to-31-times-the-jail-time-of-all-prior-u-s-presidents-combined.html
So we are again living in a sort of police state as Snowden and many others have
been pointing out....

( There is plenty I left out in this brief synopsis )

http://www.bridgwatercarnival.org.uk/

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Michael Wood is a very good historian and documentary presenter....

There was a interesting BBC series that speculates whether Shakespeare
wrote his plays or not ? and takes you back to Elizabethan England..

I would not write Shakespeare from history yet......A possible reason
for the lack of documentation and different name spelling and variation
is to do with the political and religious turmoil of the times....


Admin note: December 29th 2020 - the original links here broke due to the removal of the original source account so I've now replaced them via the History TV (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpVEP1d2LPhnhRR_ji1GD7w) youtube page. Perhaps these will remain up for some time to come. So, below the 4 part documentary series - I cannot locate the bonus part 5 at this time (Tintin Quarantino)

In Search of Shakespeare - A Time of Revolution (Documentary)

5VtE2f8g3VA

==================================================


BBC Michael Wood In Search Of Shakespeare 2 of 4 The Lost Years 2005

2HpcW2SPkZw

===================================================

BBC Michael Wood In Search Of Shakespeare 3 of 4 The Duty Of Poets 2005

5plYsT0DHL4

===================================================

In Search of Shakespeare 4of4....Not the best of copies I cannot find a better one...

VXEiBUzjWiA

===================================================

In Search of Shakespeare Part 5 Bonus Episode

AZ01tKrLKJM


William Shakespeare's Coat of Arms

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~shakespeare/poet/coat-of-arms.jpg

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~shakespeare/poet/coat_of_arms.htm


===================================================

Shakespeare's Mother The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman BBC Documentary 2015

kmpiY5kssU4

====================================================
====================================================

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/shakespeare-powerpoint-1225806703713015-8/95/shakespeare-powerpoint-2-728.jpg
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/shakespeare-powerpoint-1225806703713015-8/95/shakespeare-powerpoint-3-728.jpg

Shakespeare Powerpoint
http://www.slideshare.net/ksundberg/shakespeare-powerpoint-presentation-719857

[kirolak]

Yes, I understand your point re fake history, & agree. . . didn't think of it in that light before.

[Maunagarjana]

I'm definitely an "Anti-Stratfordian" (someone who doesn't believe Shakespeare wrote the poems and plays attributed to him). But I'm dismayed that Sir Francis Bacon and Edward De Vere get most of the attention while the person who I think the best candidate is mostly ignored, and that is Sir Henry Neville. There are many reasons to think Neville was the real author. I'll list some.

- He was a distant relative of the actor William Shakespeare.

- He was a relative of Sir Francis Bacon's by way of marriage.

- His nickname was "Falstaff", who is a character in three different Shakespeare plays. Both Neville and the Falstaff character were heavyset men.

- There were seven Shakespeare plays written about English kings named Henry, which is his name.
Henry VI part 1, 2, & 3
Henry IV parts 1 & 2
Henry V
Henry VIII

- He traveled to Italy and Scotland and many other places where the Shakespeare plays were set. In 1578, as a student at Oxford, Neville set out on a tour of Europe which lasted three years, acquiring books for the university. This tour included many locations depicted in the Shakespeare plays, such as Denmark, Poland, Austria, Paris, Prague, Vienna, Padua, Venice, and Rome.

- He was a diplomat to France who spent loads of time writing very eloquent letters in which he used cyphers of the kind you see in the dedication page of Shakespeare's Sonnets. He spent a lot of time as a diplomat waiting for foreign dignitaries to see him (sometimes months and years) so he had plenty of time to write.

- A notebook of his was discovered in the Tower of London where he was once a prisoner because of his involvement in the Essex Rebellion. A rough draft of the first page of Henry V was included inside, as well as a page where he was practicing the signature of William Shakespeare over and over again.

- There are two mentions in Shakespeare's plays of Machiavelli, whose works weren't translated into English for wide public audience at that time. There were translations that were published for a small private audience, and this translation was done by Henry Neville's father. Later, there was a publication of Machiavelli for a large public audience, and this was done by Henry Neville's son.

- Most scholars agree that The Tempest was based on the "Strachey Letter" which described the real events of a group of sailors working for the Virginia Trading Company who got shipwrecked in the Bahamas. But to even have access to the letter, one would need to be on the board of the Virginia Trading Company, because it was proprietary information. Sir Henry Neville was on the board of the London branch of the Virginia Trading Company.


There are more reasons, but I shall leave it at that. If you want to read more about him, I would suggest the book "The Truth Will Out: Unmasking The Real Shakespeare" by Brenda James and Joseph Rubenstein. They make many arguments for why Shakespeare could not possibly be the real author and why the other more talked about candidates are unsatisfactory. https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Will-Out-Unmasking-Shakespeare/dp/0061146498

[ramus]

THANKS FOR THE LEAD .. DAUGHTER OF TIME .... HERE IS A LINK THE THE MOVIE

"ANONYMOUS " 2011 VERY GOOD QUALITY

http://vidzi.tv/ft6mjmgvfacc.html#close CLOSE THE ADVERTISING

BY CLICKING ON THE X'S AND CLOSING THE WINDOWS THAT POP UP,

SAYING : "FLASH PLAYER OUT OF DATE"

[Camilo]

A curious note: In certain circles it's very well known that Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and Mark Twain, were all previous incarnations of Saint Germain.

[Cidersomerset]

Anyone seen the film "Anonymous"?

The link in your post is not working here.....

Anonymous - Trailer

uBmnkk0QW3Q

Uploaded on 7 Apr 2011

Release Date: 4 November 2011 (United States)
Set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England, Anonymous speculates on an issue
that has for centuries intrigued academics and brilliant minds ranging from Mark Twain
and Charles Dickens to Henry James and Sigmund Freud, namely: who was the author
of the plays credited to William Shakespeare? Experts have debated, books have been
written, and scholars have devoted their lives to protecting or debunking theories
surrounding the authorship of the most renowned works in English literature. Anonymous
poses one possible answer, focusing on a time when cloak-and-dagger political intrigue,
illicit romances in the Royal Court, and the schemes of greedy nobles hungry for the power
of the throne were exposed in the most unlikely of places: the London stage.

===================================================
===================================================

I enjoyed the time team series and watched most episodes being a history buff,
and they did one on Shakespeare's House the one below has been blocked...


Time Team Special 48 (2012) - Searching for Skakespeare's house

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLwOUm8xl68&index=49&list=PLeiVjQqfa3MCrYBhwlFerjEzCUkuyvQde

Time Team Specials
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/time-team-specials/episode-guide/

[ramus]

HERE IS ANOTHER LINK , UK HAS SOME OF THESE SITES BLOCKED .

http://putlockers.ch/watch-anonymous-online-free-putlocker.html

ANOTHER : http://watchmoviesonline.biz/watch-anonymous-2011-online.html

[kirolak]

Michael Topper said Shakespeare was indeed Francis Bacon. Who knows; but I highly recommend Bill Bryson's book on Shakespeare, it is well researched & quite amusing. :)

[araucaria]

There is a similar problem for authorship for the works of Homer. Homer was not one blind bard but a whole bardic tradition of oral poetry with a whole set of stock phrases you would use to keep you going and maintain a regular meter. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey contain twenty-four books, which would be like individual sessions. Every performance would be different, until someone put them down on paper. It’s a bit like recording a jazz band, or more likely a compilation of several jazz bands playing standards such as the Wrath of Achilles or Odysseus and the Cyclops. We have the recording, but we don’t have the booklet naming the composer/performers.

Anonymity is Shakespeare’s day is rather different. I think the current equivalent would be the use of screennames in the alternative media. There was no mainstream theatre, so the theatre could be decried en bloc for much the same reasons as ‘conspiracy sites’ today. No doubt there were several playwrights calling themselves Anonymous. One was likely a closet Catholic defending the divine feminine and avoiding arrest, hanging, drawing and quartering. See this post. Another (ditto) had dealings with what Joseph Farrell calls the ‘Financial Vipers of Venice’ and found a way to settle his differences in a major way with the usurer Shylock: through the courts on a technicality in The Merchant of Venice (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?51483-The-End-of-Days-The-Truth-Hour-George-Green.....&p=576627&viewfull=1#post576627): Yet another Shakespeare (or possibly the same one) revisits Roman history to describe in Elizabethan language a putsch by right-wing patricians against a populist leader, for which the historian Michael Parenti gives a presentday version in his book The Assassination of Julius Casear:
_IO_Ldn2H4o
Another (possibly the same guy) had certainly visited Denmark and found rampant corruption in high places. See this post:

Did you hear this little conspiracy story about a member of an influential family who became a whistleblower after a paranormal experience revealed corruption in high places: a sex scandal and murder?

He survived an attempt on his own life during extraordinary rendition after intercepting a secret message to a foreign power.

He gathered circumstantial evidence of the original murder, suggesting that it was in fact a copycat crime, using the most fanciful methods that would not stand up in a court of law.

He was finally killed by friendly fire which turned out to be a false flag incident, not without taking revenge on his enemies.

You’ve never heard about this? Oh but I think you have! This is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, revered by all, including the very people who love to tell you that conspiracy theorists are nutters.

[Ewan]

Michael Topper said Shakespeare was indeed Francis Bacon. Who knows; but I highly recommend Bill Bryson's book on Shakespeare, it is well researched & quite amusing. :)

I like Bill Bryson, good writer. :)

[Bill Ryan]

.
Hi, Folks — this is all actually pretty interesting (I feel!), for several reasons, and informs some more modern problems maybe quite well. For the sake of the interesting debate, I also add a few thoughts of my own.



I'm not a Shakespeare scholar — at all. I'm an intelligent layman in this area. But in the last week or so, I’ve been rather like Richard Dolan, who back in the mid-90s, as an academic historian, got interested in UFOs and gave himself a short time of intense reading to get to the bottom of it completely. (20 years later, he says he’s still not anywhere close to getting to understanding it all. :) )



The Shakespeare thing is kind of similar. I started reading and watching everything I could, fairly intensely (I found it fascinating), educated myself rapidly, reached a few interim conclusions, but as far as deciding who really wrote Shakespeare’s works, I'm really not much closer to knowing.



To the scholarly debate that's been raging: it’s called the Shakespeare Authorship Question. Good name. That’s like the JFK Assassination Question, or the 9/11 Demolition Question, or the Apollo Moon Landings Question.



The overall situation is about mainstream defenders of a belief system, who often have a personal interest that’s either status-oriented, or financially driven, flatly dismissing and refusing even to consider a well-argued, evidence-rich alternative position. It’s extraordinary. We see this everywhere, of course. NOT just about Shakespeare. :)



Here’s what’s interesting. Those who are defending the mainstream position tend to say things like: “You’re just some kind of conspiracy theorist. I suppose you think there was a second JFK shooter, too.” (They really do say that.)



But then — the ‘anti-Stratfordians’ (those who doubt the mainstream view) usually giggle and scoff at comments like that. They, too, have their own position about ‘other conspiracy theories’, that’s unthinking (and actually, intellectually dishonest). It’s rather like a cold fusion advocate making a joke about flying saucers or Bigfoot. These views are endemic and are everywhere, even among well-informed, specialist doubters in a specific area. They can’t seem to see (or don’t want to see) the analogies and similarities in other fields.



To the Shakespeare problem itself, I feel (provisionally!) pretty sure that the answer lies in that “William Shakespeare” was a brand name. (Just like Homer was, yes.) NOT AN ALIAS. There may have been a number of contributors — including Oxford, Marlowe, Bacon, Amelia Bassano (a fascinating, strong case), and maybe others, too. The very fact that there are so many arguments for each of these being the Bard, points to the notion that maybe they all were.



The guy from Stratford, who was basically an illiterate but fairly smart businessman and trader, and worked as a sometime bit actor, was called William Shaksper. (Note the spelling.) The ‘Shakespeare’ brand name (which at first was hyphenated: ‘Shake-speare’) was a pun, referring to the shaking of a spear, a common idiom in those times. The involvement of Shaksper in the theater in London at the same time was a pure coincidence, and he became a useful, harmless, distracting, patsy, and everyone around at the time knew that. A generation later, after the deaths of everyone involved, the world bought the actually pretty transparent fake story, and academics started to bolster and defend it.

:facepalm:

[Hervé]

Imagine that!

The words and articles published in the Onion (http://www.theonion.com/) becoming the "Word of God (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?86384-Here-The-So-called-Word-Of-God&p=1120106&viewfull=1#post1120106)"... when discovered by geek archeologists of the 3rd millennium... :bigsmile:

[Daughter of Time]

All right, so I'm going to try to make this as painless as possible -

For you - so that every reader may follow and understand

For me- as I'm undertaking the task of explaining it

With all due respect, I am diametrically opposed to the belief that Shakespeare might have been any of the writers mentioned above. The reason i feel this is because Shakespeare's style was/is unparalleled! And while one can argue that every writer has his/her own style, there are certain styles which are simply unique. Shakespeare is unique!

Shakespeare wrote in beats. Every sentence of every single thing he wrote was written in beats - usually 10 beats! As long as the sentences were part of the same thought, every sentence had 10 beats. When the thought changed, the sentence then had more or less than 10 beats. It could be a sentence with as little as two beats to start another thought or to end the current thought, or one as long as 15 beats, but only to start a different thought or to end the current one!

I will try to illustrate this by using some lines from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" - the first argument between Oberon and Titania who are the king and queen of fairies.

Oberon who is Titania's consort has left fairyland to court another female. He now returns and he and Titania get into a long argument. I will spare you the long argument but just present a few sentences.

TITANIA - What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence:
What-jea-lous-o-be-ron-fai-ries-skip-hence (10 beats)

I have forsworn his bed and company
I-have-for-sworn-his-bed-and-com-pa-ny (10 beats)

OBERON - Tarry, rash wanton; am not I thy lord?
Tar-ry-rash-wan-ton-am-not-I-thy-lord (10 beats)

TITANIA - Then i must be thy lady: but I know
Then-I-must-be-thy-la-dy-but-I-know (10 beats)

When thou hast stolen away from fairy land
When-thou-hast-sto-len-a-way-from-fai-ry-land (11 beats)

The last sentence has 11 beats because it is a new thought in which Titania begins to explain that he left her for another and then she goes on with 10 beat sentences until the next thought.

This is how Shakespeare wrote EVERYTHING!!! Everything that pertains to the same thought is written in 10 beat sentences. When the thought changes, the sentence has more or less than 10 beats

Do you know anyone else who has been capable of writing like this? I don't!

To accomplish this rare feat, one would have to be a genius with an IQ on the higher end of the scale. Just think of the massive works with words and words and words, all written in beats of 10! And every time the thought changes, then the beats are no longer 10!

It is these beats that give the actor the clue as to when to make that subtle, seamless transition. The same applies to the sonnets, as they also were written for performance since in those days most people were illiterate and the sonnets were performed before audiences, which they rarely are any more.

The man who wrote those magnificent works had to have been a highly educated, very knowledgeable person. He was most likely a nobleman. An aristocrat. A man of very high station. In those days, a man of high station was not allowed to write literature, and especially plays, as the arts in general were considered unworthy of the attention of a nobleman and very much frowned upon. As such, what makes most sense to me is that this highly talented man never received recognition for his work because no one knew who he was!

And that's my 2 cents on Shakespeare's identity.

P. S. - this is my 1000th post - dedicated to Shakespeare, Titania, Oberon, the faeries and A Midsummer's Night's Dream. I love this play! And I love Shakespeare!

P. P. S. - In my opinion, Shakespeare was the first true feminist. But that's another story...

[araucaria]

All right, so I'm going to try to make this as painless as possible -

For you - so that every reader may follow and understand

For me- as I'm undertaking the task of explaining it

With all due respect, I am diametrically opposed to the belief that Shakespeare might have been any of the writers mentioned above. The reason i feel this is because Shakespeare's style was/is unparalleled! And while one can argue that every writer has his/her own style, there are certain styles which are simply unique. Shakespeare is unique!

Shakespeare wrote in beats. Every sentence of every single thing he wrote was written in beats - usually 10 beats! As long as the sentences were part of the same thought, every sentence had 10 beats. When the thought changed, the sentence then had more or less than 10 beats. It could be a sentence with as little as two beats to start another thought or to end the current thought, or one as long as 15 beats, but only to start a different thought or to end the current one!

I will try to illustrate this by using some lines from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" - the first argument between Oberon and Titania who are the king and queen of fairies.

Oberon who is Titania's consort has left fairyland to court another female. He now returns and he and Titania get into a long argument. I will spare you the long argument but just present a few sentences.

TITANIA - What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence:
What-jea-lous-o-be-ron-fai-ries-skip-hence (10 beats)

I have forsworn his bed and company
I-have-for-sworn-his-bed-and-com-pa-ny (10 beats)

OBERON - Tarry, rash wanton; am not I thy lord?
Tar-ry-rash-wan-ton-am-not-I-thy-lord (10 beats)

TITANIA - Then i must be thy lady: but I know
Then-I-must-be-thy-la-dy-but-I-know (10 beats)

When thou hast stolen away from fairy land
When-thou-hast-sto-len-a-way-from-fai-ry-land (11 beats)

The last sentence has 11 beats because it is a new thought in which Titania begins to explain that he left her for another and then she goes on with 10 beat sentences until the next thought.

This is how Shakespeare wrote EVERYTHING!!! Everything that pertains to the same thought is written in 10 beat sentences. When the thought changes, the sentence has more or less than 10 beats

Do you know anyone else who has been capable of writing like this? I don't!

To accomplish this rare feat, one would have to be a genius with an IQ on the higher end of the scale. Just think of the massive works with words and words and words, all written in beats of 10! And every time the thought changes, then the beats are no longer 10!

It is these beats that give the actor the clue as to when to make that subtle, seamless transition. The same applies to the sonnets, as they also were written for performance since in those days most people were illiterate and the sonnets were performed before audiences, which they rarely are any more.

The man who wrote those magnificent works had to have been a highly educated, very knowledgeable person. He was most likely a nobleman. An aristocrat. A man of very high station. In those days, a man of high station was not allowed to write literature, and especially plays, as the arts in general were considered unworthy of the attention of a nobleman and very much frowned upon. As such, what makes most sense to me is that this highly talented man never received recognition for his work because no one knew who he was!

And that's my 2 cents on Shakespeare's identity.

P. S. - this is my 1000th post - dedicated to Shakespeare, Titania, Oberon, the faeries and A Midsummer's Night's Dream. I love this play! And I love Shakespeare!

P. P. S. - In my opinion, Shakespeare was the first true feminist. But that's another story...
Thank you for an interesting 1000th post. If Shakespeare were writing in French, I would agree that the syllable is the unit of measure. But in English, it is the foot: a group of long (stressed) and/or short (unstressed) syllables. Hence a character in Joyce comments on his name: ‘Malachi Mulligan: two dactyls’. A ten-syllable line is called a pentameter, often of five iambs (one short and one long syllable) – iambic pentameter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_pentameter). A trochee is another two-syllable foot with the long before the short syllable (e.g. apple); a spondee has two long syllables, like the word itself. What you describe as an eleven-beat line would be when you throw in an extra syllable, i.e. a three-syllable foot such as a dactyl or an anapaest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapaest), which changes the number of syllables but not the number of feet. See the section of the above Wiki article titled ‘Rhythmic variation’. The commonest way of doing this is with a ‘feminine’ ending, a final unstressed syllable, but there are various other ways of drawing attention to a particular thing you are saying. The basic meter then is like the basic sound wave you produce by vibrating your vocal cords, a sound that you can modify into the various vowel sounds by changing the position of your tongue. This suggests to me that it is actually easier for poets to use it as their starting point, and the interesting stuff comes in the ways in which they play around in order to produce a tune of their own. I like the way you point out the artistic achievement of the latter, but I think you are overestimating the technical difficulty of the former.

I mentioned French poetry. The twelve-syllable alexandrine alternating feminine and masculine endings in single lines or couplets, and using a variety of rhyming schemes, was a staple of French poetry until Victor Hugo came along and wrote just about everything that could be written using that medium. It was the medium in which a 19th century French poet lived without seeing it any more than the air he breathed. So they were all on the same page as it were, without needing to form a school or anything like that. The same sort of thing very likely happened in Elizabethan England. So when you say, ‘Do you know anyone else who has been capable of writing like this?’ you are begging the question as to how many people wrote Shakespeare’s works. The answer would simply be all the members of this informal group.

These things do happen. The French New Novel was such an informal group of highly original writers working independently within a given zeitgeist. I have a transcript of a conversation in which three of them talk about how they chose the title for one of their novels. X wanted to use a particular title but it was already taken by Y, and Z wanting to use one and then the other of these titles already taken and so had to find one of his own. Three very different books, but actually any of the titles would have been suitable for any of the books. This is one of the ways in which the ‘nouveau roman’ became a movement in the media with no theoretical input binding these writers together at that stage.


P. P. S. - In my opinion, Shakespeare was the first true feminist. But that's another story
I don’t know about the first, I hope not, but yes, he was a true feminist. See this post (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?61859-The-real-Jesus-the-real-Mary-Gnosis-the-Archons-and-the-world-s-first-major-smear-campaign&p=709863&viewfull=1#post709863).

[Cidersomerset]

I don't know if anyone watched the five part documentary by Michael Wood in #14
He is a scholar who can read and speak old English and has done doc's on Beowulf ,
Alfred the Great and other great historical/mythical figures....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wood_(historian)

He points out that Shakespeare's plays are scattered with local Warwickshire
references and dialect words, and follows a logical course and history of a real
person called William Shakespeare. Whether he wrote all the plays , or collaborated
a man from Warwickshires mark is imprinted on some of the works. It is strange
that the 37 known plays were brought together after his death by two close friends
and bound together in a volume, and many other anomalies .But the political and
religious situation plays a massive part in the story. Also stealing each others ideas
was not uncommon. I don't know who the real Shakespear is but his legend will live
on for centuries still to come.....

[Bill Ryan]

To accomplish this rare feat, one would have to be a genius with an IQ on the higher end of the scale.



The man who wrote those magnificent works had to have been a highly educated, very knowledgeable person. He was most likely a nobleman. An aristocrat. A man of very high station.


100% agreed on both counts. :handshake: Whoever wrote the works had a most exceptional, extraordinary mind.




With all due respect, I am diametrically opposed to the belief that Shakespeare might have been any of the writers mentioned above.

Are you saying that even Oxford, Marlowe, Bacon, Bassano (or anyone else nominated, and many have been) couldn't have been the author? In your earlier post #5 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?95596-Mark-Twain-s-Is-Shakespeare-Dead--Shakespeare-did-NOT-write-Shakespeare---&p=1129221&viewfull=1#post1129221), you seemed to think it might have been the Earl of Oxford, so I got confused.

The 10-beat style you're describing is iambic pentameter, but many great writers of that period did use that prolifically, certainly Oxford and Marlowe.

Here's a well-known example from Marlowe...



Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the top less towers of Ilium?
... can you say more?

[araucaria]

I did not know about the suggestion regarding the Sicilian Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza posted by Hervé here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?72291-Real-Meaning-of-Shakespeare-s-Plays-Joseph-Atwill&p=846367&viewfull=1#post846367).
Following the link added to that post by Bill led me to a fairly comprehensive case (http://web.archive.org/web/20010407015949/http://www.clark.net/tross/ws/howdowe.html) for the one-man Shakespeare. This of course is not incompatible with the idea that Crollalanza was that person; on the contrary, it makes more sense. Obviously, it would be politically unfortunate if it were to get out that England’s greatest writer was Italian, and certainly having the man born and dying on St George’s day (the patron of England, who himself probably never existed!) is a bit of a red flag. I personally have no horse in this race because authorship is a very secondary issue. See here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?72291-Real-Meaning-of-Shakespeare-s-Plays-Joseph-Atwill&p=846309&viewfull=1#post846309).

Contemporary literary theory analyzes this situation in terms of the “death of the author” (Roland Barthes)

whereby a piece of writing is to be interpreted independently of any author figure. But if the author is no longer in charge, then readers are free to take their exegesis wherever they will. This is the highly transposable way literary theory tells the reader to get off his knees and play an active role in the read/write process. http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?81805-The-Blog-of-The-Ruiner-Inside-the-Illuminati-Mind&p=956730&viewfull=1#post956730 It is important for the forum that we do not take sides in what amounts to another argument. Authorship is about where we are coming from: the important thing is where we are heading. See this post:

One important notion theorized by postwar writers was to undermine the authority of the author figure (here we refer to the Ego). Roland Barthes even wrote an influential essay called ‘The Death of the Author’. There were practical experiments going on in creative writing workshops (this was long before the Internet) that came up against the problem of clashing Egos.

This forum, and especially the Village, is working towards finding a solution to collective creative writing that avoids the clash of Egos, i.e. by looking after each other first, rather than imposing our own views. We all contribute our differently coloured tiles to the evolving mosaic, hence the magic fairytale element. In other words, the medium is the message, and the message is love.

[Bill Ryan]

It is important for the forum that we do not take sides in what amounts to another argument.

Of course. :thumbsup: This is just a very fascinating (and rather academic!) discussion between friends.

In the field of the 'Shakespeare Authorship Question', there's sometimes some animosity between the 'Stratfordians' and the 'anti-Stratfordians' (i.e. those who do and don't believe this was the Stratford man who somehow did it all himself) — although the Stratfordians do tend to be scornful and dismissive of their critics, inappropriately and sometimes rather nastily so.

Among the anti-Stratfordians, there are the Oxfordians, the Baconians, the Marlovians — and as best as I can see, most of them are pretty good friends, united by a kind of common greater cause.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/images/smilies/0802%20Sun.gif

[Cidersomerset]

There are lots of vids on the subject on the web going over much the same
arguments one I found is a debate held at Ye Old Cock Tavern, Fleet, Street
London, organised by the Central London Debating Society, held on 30 April
2014. Chair: Alain English. Speakers: Prof William Leahy, Dr Rosalind Barber,
Alexander Waugh, Professor Emeritus Alan Nelson, Dr Duncan Salkeld.


Quite a lively debate and mirrors the pro and Anti Stratfordians v Oxfordian
debate plus possible others......

qEgCuQJQ6oY


==================================================

A fun note Shakepeare with or without an 'e' well we have had a similar
'e' problem here Bridgwater with or without the 'e' . Bridgwater was a
inland seaport until the 1970's and many sailor from the town helped
explore and settle the new world and there are several Bridgewaters
around the world and it was also spelt that way in old English documents.
This applies to many other spelling anomalies and it just 'tickled' me...LOL


http://www.bridgwaterheritage.org.uk/Bookshop/Revens.JPG
http://www.bridgwatermercury.co.uk/resources/images/4557476.jpg

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5257819-bridgwater-with-and-without-the-e

[Ba-ba-Ra]

I'm trying to find the book I have (had?) that claims that Francis Bacon wrote under pseudonym Will-I-AM Shake-Speare, because he was frustrated at not being acknowledged as the son (illegitimate) of Queen Elizabeth I and Lord Leicester (Robert Dudley) born 4 months after a secret wedding ceremony. The Queen, wishing to retain her "Virgin Queen" status and afraid that if she acknowledged her marriage she must give power to the ambitious Leicester and/or feared that the people would prefer her male heir - refused to allow Francis, on pain of death, to assume his true identity.

Allegedly Francis was raised by foster parents Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne Bacon.

Through Bacon's frustrations, he wrote as Shakespeare, but left ciphers in his works telling his true identity.

There is much debate about his ciphers. Here's one link that leads to others. http://shakespeareauthorship.com/bacpenl.html

[araucaria]

Of course. :thumbsup: This is just a very fascinating (and rather academic!) discussion between friends.
Thanks Bill. I did not mean to suggest anything else. Discussions between friends are good because they help us to hold less dogmatic opinions about things. I find it helps to be in two minds about many if not most things, which in a sense undermines or qualifies the ‘truthseeker’ enterprise itself. This is possibly because we hold on tightest to what is most fragile or we are least sure about. Maybe the past is as malleable as the future (the Mandela effect in spades), and we are trying to decide what to do with both. If we want a future that is truly open and full of potential, maybe we need to see the past in a similar light.

I have a 1970 book by the author Anthony Burgess called Shakespeare, which I can’t reread because I am allergic to a fungus in the paper. But he says Shakespeare did die on April 23rd, and supplies photographic evidence that he was baptized on April 26th, so maybe I am wrong on the matter of his dates (friendly discussion with self). I did note one example however of Burgess matching a line of text with the supposed biography. John Shakespeare, he says, was a glove-maker in Stratford, and likely butchered the calves himself to get the calfskins. This he links to something Hamlet says in response to Polonius who recalls (another play within the play), ‘I did enact Julius Caesar; I was killed in the Capitol; Brutus killed me;’ to which the Prince replies, ‘It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there’. The ‘brute’ and the ‘capital’ are obviously puns, but where did the ‘calf’ come from? According to Burgess, it came from home. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t; the broader message though is that we all bring extraneous material to what we say and write.

I haven’t read Bill Bryson’s book, but in Mother Tongue he writes, ‘according to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before’ (p.69). My point is to do with the discrepancy with the figure in the opening post: 26,000 (Mark Twain’s figure?). The smaller figure makes a single author that much more likely. A lot of the new words have Latin or Greek roots and are placed in apposition with an old English synonym, which is compatible with a foreigner speaking his own language and translating as he goes along. The result is a master wordsmith, and maybe we are talking about just one guy with a special gift. Just how above average he actually was also needs to be relativized; we live in a vastly more literate age, but here (http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/05/vocabulary-size)are some possibly surprising stats showing that dumbing us all down is not working all that well.

The important issue here also affects things like assessing alternative media material. How far can we take multiple indications such as the above reference to a calf to attribute a whole body of work to a single source? This is a question of particular interest to people like art historians, who also have artists’ pupils as well as fakers to contend with. The issue is about consistency: internal consistency is a criterion for identification, but we know that internal inconsistencies are also possible. Borges, who translated Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ into Spanish, noted how in two different places he says he was born in two different places. This is the point I was making about the poet’s meter: it gets interesting precisely when something unexpected happens. There is no suggestion that ‘Leaves of Grass’ had multiple authors or that Whitman wasn’t sure of his own birthplace. Something else is going on, but what? Evil, deceitful intent? I don’t think so. Fiction is fun, and errors, deliberate or otherwise, are enlightening.

[Daughter of Time]

Very interesting discussion indeed - not argumentative - just a discussion! I appreciate it.

So, pardon me for being unclear. I apologize. I should have posted my experience of Shakespeare, which is subjective!

I have a theatrical background. In my first studies of Shakespeare, back in my early 20s, we had a teacher who had done the bard all his life. He taught us that no one, ever, had managed to write exceptionally beautiful, poetic historical plays in iambic pentameter, and while others tried, no one succeeded the way he did! No one even came close! We did not study Marlowe, or Bacon, or anyone else. This was the theater (in Canada we spell it theatre) so we studied Shakespeare as it is still very popular in Canada and everything we were told was learned religiously and no one questioned it.

Years later, in a production of a Shakespeare play, we had coach who had worked for The Royal Shakespeare Company in London, England, and he said the same thing. This was re-reinforcement that Shakespeare was unique in his style, ability, knowledge, intelligence, etc.,

Why did I choose to say "beats" instead of "iambic pentameter"? Well, when a company who is presenting a Shakespeare play goes into rehearsals, the director never says "let's study the iambic pentameter of this play". S/he says "let's break down this play into beats". At least, this has been my experience with Shakespeare plays, and I've been in a few. Is this purely a Canadian thing? Probably not! But I don't know. Also, beats is something which for the purpose of this thread is easier to understand for the average lay person of any educational background. To a person with limited education "iambic pentameter" may sound somewhat alien. And as stated in my unclear post, I wanted every reader to understand the "beats".

About my post #5 - again, I was not fully clear. I did not believe that it was necessarily "The Earl of Oxford" who wrote the Shakespeare works, but someone of his station. Someone who was high born who had intelligence, knowledge, talent, etc., and a passion for writing which he could not divulge to the members of his caste because it would not have been accepted. As wrong as I may be, it doesn't feel right to me that the works might have been written by different writers. I remain convinced that the works were written by one person.

Ultimately, will we ever know the true identity of this genius writer? Maybe! Since we have entered the era of disclosure it is possible that things currently unknown may come to light.

P. S. - Cider: thank you for yet another video which i will watch later. I think authorship does matter. I feel it matters to give credit where credit is due even if the author has been long gone. I, for one, would really like to know who this genius was, his background, his education, his life experience, etc., etc., etc.,

[Bill Ryan]

I haven’t read Bill Bryson’s book, but in Mother Tongue he writes, ‘according to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before’ (p.69). My point is to do with the discrepancy with the figure in the opening post: 26,000 (Mark Twain’s figure?).


26,000 is quite widely quoted by a lot of people, but I don't know the source reference behind all that. Happy to accept Bill Bryson's figure!

17,677 is still an enormous number. That's half as many again as the number of different words in the King James Bible — which was edited by Francis Bacon, of course. That's 12,143, reference here (https://amazingbibletimeline.com/blog/q10_bible_facts_statistics).

[araucaria]

I haven’t read Bill Bryson’s book, but in Mother Tongue he writes, ‘according to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before’ (p.69). My point is to do with the discrepancy with the figure in the opening post: 26,000 (Mark Twain’s figure?).


26,000 is quite widely quoted by a lot of people, but I don't know the source reference behind all that. Happy to accept Bill Bryson's figure!

17,677 is still an enormous number. That's half as many again as the number of different words in the King James Bible — which was edited by Francis Bacon, of course. That's 12,143, reference here.

Well, there are three factors here.
1) The modern figures I referenced involve people motivated to do a test, all 2 million of them.

Most adult native test-takers range from 20,000–35,000 words
Average native test-takers of age 8 already know 10,000 words
Average native test-takers of age 4 already know 5,000 words
2) The foreign element strikes me as crucial. Master a foreign language to say all the things you say in your mother tongue: in theory you will have doubled your vocabulary without taking on board any new concepts; but of course in practice you will have broadened your horizons as well. An Italian would answer that description, but so might an English Shakespeare – except that it is a very unEnglish thing to do.:facepalm:

3) You would need to be a polymath, interested in a broad range of subjects.

Taking James Joyce as ticking all three boxes and hence a possible equivalent in the modern era, I came up with this article titled ‘Shakespeare’s Vocabulary Considered Unexceptional’ which concludes, ‘The vocabulary king among writers is Joyce, whose vocabulary towers over Shakespeare’s (Finnegans Wake was not included) even with a significantly smaller corpus. https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/shakespeare_unexceptional_vocabulary/

I also came up with a mathematical study, ‘Estimating Vocabulary Size’ by Alvar Ellegard (ISSN: 0043-7956 (Print) 2373-5112 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwrd20 ), which whittles down ‘Hanley's Word Index to James Joyce's Ulysses, which yielded 29,899 word-form units in a text mass of 260,430 running words’ to ‘18,400 lexical units’. His Shakespeare wordcount is based on the linguist Otto Jespersen’s figure of 15,000 and he gives 6,568 for the Bible. An elaborate method is described for calculating a theoretical value for lexical units in a text mass of 1 million words. Corrected for length, Shakespeare clocks in at 72% of this figure, very high for his day and roughly double the result for the Bible, but TS Eliot reaches 85%, while James Joyce’s Ulysses ‘places him about 32% above the theoretical V value for a theoretical sample text of that size.’ Meanwhile, owing to its varied content, an ordinary newspaper is as high as 65% of the theoretical value. Despite problems with the calculations for Joyce,

The fact that James Joyce's Ulysses actually exceeds the theoretical value is a corollary of Joyce's stylistic technique, which, by means of associative linkings, attempted to bring the whole complexity of one man's experience into the space of a book treating of a single day's happenings. The Ulysses vocabulary warns us that the theoretical values are not theoretical maxima.The point is that Joyce was a single human being who composed books that – purely on this statistical criterion – dwarf Shakespeare’s. This is with Finnegans Wake being discounted because it contains borrowings from many different languages and thousands of puns and porte-manteau words, enough to make parts of Ulysses read like Enid Blyton. So there is nothing superhuman about ascribing the complete works of Shakespeare to one man. But he would need to be something very special.

On the subject of Joyce, it is incorrect to state as in the OP that he discounts the idea of Shakespeare the man from Stratford. In he presents a discussion between an almost lapsed young Catholic and a sceptical Jew who draws a parallel between the Bible and Shakespeare:

—You as a good catholic, he observed, talking of body and soul, believe in the soul. Or do you mean the intelligence, the brainpower as such, as distinct from any outside object, the table, let us say, that cup. I believe in that myself because it has been explained by competent men as the convolutions of the grey matter. Otherwise we would never have such inventions as X rays, for instance. Do you?
Thus cornered, Stephen had to make a superhuman effort of memory to try and concentrate and remember before he could say:
—They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for the possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause Who, from all I can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other practical jokes, corruptio per se and corruptio per accidens both being excluded by court etiquette.
Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of this though the mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth still he felt bound to enter a demurrer on the head of simple, promptly rejoining:
—Simple? I shouldn't think that is the proper word. Of course, I grant you, to concede a point, you do knock across a simple soul once in a blue moon. But what I am anxious to arrive at is it is one thing for instance to invent those rays Röntgen did or the telescope like Edison, though I believe it was before his time Galileo was the man, I mean, and the same applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natural phenomenon such as electricity but it's a horse of quite another colour to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God.
—O that, Stephen expostulated, has been proved conclusively by several of the bestknown passages in Holy Writ, apart from circumstantial evidence.
On this knotty point however the views of the pair, poles apart as they were both in schooling and everything else with the marked difference in their respective ages, clashed.
—Has been? the more experienced of the two objected, sticking to his original point with a smile of unbelief. I'm not so sure about that. That's a matter for everyman's opinion and, without dragging in the sectarian side of the business, I beg to differ with you in toto there. My belief is, to tell you the candid truth, that those bits were genuine forgeries all of them put in by monks most probably or it's the big question of our national poet over again, who precisely wrote them like Hamlet and Bacon, as, you who know your Shakespeare infinitely better than I, of course I needn't tell you.Stephen Dedalus’s theory, which he believes less than Joyce himself did (according to friends), is that the artist and his life are indistinguishable. Anthony Burgess in my previous post was only a tiny foretaste. Presented scoffingly: ‘It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.’ Presented more seriously:

—All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex. Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.
(...)
—The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by a name:
Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit,
bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.
Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
—But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began impatiently.
Art thou there, truepenny?
—Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I mean when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l'Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet's drinking, the poet's debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal. (...)
—Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries? John Eglinton's carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid for ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.

—She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he lay on his deathbed.
(...)
John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.
—The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got out of it as quickly and as best he could.
—Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
(...) (...)

—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.
(...) (...)
—As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in Coriolanus. His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in The Tempest, in Pericles, in Winter's Tale are we know. Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess. But there is another member of his family who is recorded. Etc. etc. And scoffingly: ‘Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.’

[Bill Ryan]

The modern figures I referenced involve people motivated to do a test, all 2 million of them.
Most adult native test-takers range from 20,000–35,000 words


People motivated to take a vocabulary test are hardly typical of the population! :)

From http://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0073123587/student_view0/chapter3/how_much_do_you_know_about_vocabulary_.html





It is difficult to measure vocabulary size accurately. Total vocabulary size varies greatly from person to person, but people typically use about 5,000 words in their speech and about twice that many in their writing. A college-educated speaker of English could have a vocabulary as large as 80,000 words. Shakespeare, whose body of work is considered the greatest in English literature, used more than 33,000 words in his plays. This is an astonishing number, especially considering that he was writing 400 years ago.

[araucaria]

The modern figures I referenced involve people motivated to do a test, all 2 million of them.
Most adult native test-takers range from 20,000–35,000 words


People motivated to take a vocabulary test are hardly typical of the population! :)

From http://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0073123587/student_view0/chapter3/how_much_do_you_know_about_vocabulary_.html





It is difficult to measure vocabulary size accurately. Total vocabulary size varies greatly from person to person, but people typically use about 5,000 words in their speech and about twice that many in their writing. A college-educated speaker of English could have a vocabulary as large as 80,000 words. Shakespeare, whose body of work is considered the greatest in English literature, used more than 33,000 words in his plays. This is an astonishing number, especially considering that he was writing 400 years ago.

Sure, but my point is that there were two million of them; they are way above average, but they show that Shakespeare’s vocabulary does not make him superhuman or too good to be true, just ahead of his time, and making good use of his talent.

Some of today’s people might be Scrabble champions, but do they have anything interesting or useful to say? You can build a bigger house with more bricks, but can you build a beautiful one? What happened to ‘small is beautiful’?
The great French tragedian Jean Racine (who wrote plays like Phèdre, Esther, Athalie or Andromaque) is noted for his great sobriety in all matters including vocabulary, so much so that people actually tend to understate the number of words he used (around 2,000; some say only 600). The French ‘mots’ (words) sounds the same as ‘maux’ (evils), enabling Paul Valéry to say ‘entre deux mots il faut choisir le moindre’ (you must choose the lesser of two (evil) words). Marcel Proust said that fine books are written almost in a foreign language, meaning ordinary words made to sound very different.

Which is why Shakespeare is not held in such high regard in France. James Joyce rather shared this view, claiming Ibsen ‘towers head and shoulders above him when it comes to drama’. While obviously Joyce takes sides in the above debate, (although when he died he was planning a final book that would have been ‘very simple and very short’), it is made the subject of a violent dispute between his feuding twins, Shem the Penman and Shaun the Post. Shaun the Postman cannot write letters, only deliver them: How all too unwordy am I, a mere mailman of peace’, delivering an outrageous trgedy of postcards (‘outragedy of poetscalds’) and a comedy of errors from the academy of letters (Acomedy of letters’). For him the shaman Shem is a shameful sham (faker, forger): ‘every dimmed letter in it is a copy... the lowquacity of him... the last words is stolentelling’ [storytelling]....
As Hélène Cixous notes in her essay ‘Thoth et l’écriture’, the language (‘slanguage’) is like money in a capitalist system coming under a communist takeover. There is the chant ‘So vi et!’ (so be it?), Shem is a ‘bogus bolshy’ [Bolchevik]; you also find an allusion to the Cheka (ancestor of the KGB), and to Beria (‘berial’). Shaun tells the fable of the serious, industrious ant and the irresponsible artist grasshopper (the Ondt and the Gracehoper); the ‘Gracehoper had jingled through a jungle of love and debts’ until he had ‘not one pickopeck of muscow-money’. Nowadays the same situation might be viewed in terms of an invasion of foreigners (words or people) taking over the language or country. Which suggests that the Clinton-Trump debate merely offers two presentations of the same side of this argument.

This is just the politico-economic aspect of an ideological divide that goes much deeper. The debate goes all the way back to Socrates and beyond: the issue of whether writing is a ’remedy’ (pharmakon) to boost the memory – ‘writing, examined separately but ultimately equated with philosophy and rhetoric, is somewhat deprecated; it is stated that writing can do little but remind those who already know’, or actually some kind of poison: you have the ‘living, breathing discourse of one who knows, of which the written word can only be called an image’ (hence the notion of fakery). See here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)).

This rhetorical view of writing, which is Shaun’s, is teleological or instrumental. You have something to say, and an imperfect tool with which to say it. Shem on the other hand is engaged in something different, for brevity’s sake a ‘poetical’ use of writing, no longer as a tool but as an art form to be explored. The symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé said ‘languages are imperfect, being several with no supreme one’, but that ‘poetry makes up for this defect’. Any ‘message’ is a possibly surprising byproduct of this exploration: there is the joke about the little old lady who said, ‘how can I know what I think until I’ve seen what I said?’ There is a hugely playful element in all of this; on the other hand it is a risky open-ended business; it has a deliberately uncontrolled quality, and a huge vocabulary is just one way of enjoyably letting things get out of control. If on the other hand you are a serious person needing the safety of certainty, then you will see it as dangerously subversive. This is where things do indeed get deadly serious; Finnegans Wake as a way of defusing the deadly danger is all about burying ancient sins, digging them up for disclosure, then moving on by rising above it all.

Getting back to Shakespeare, in Shakespeare’s day, you could get hanged, drawn and quartered for this sort of thing. Shakespeare of course was not so much a writer as an actor and playwright. To that extent, he was like Socrates, who committed nothing to paper. I read somewhere that he was not overly interested in what became of his manuscripts, suggesting a performer whose job was done. The Folio edition would then be more in the way of a pharmakon, a remedy for loss of the memory of his live performances. Hence the texts, like the records of Plato, are somewhat rhetorical until their poetry is revived or rejuvenated in performance.

Hence there is the danger that Shakespeare after Shakespeare becomes a revival of Shakespeare’s ghost. For someone like Joyce to demonstrate Shakespearean qualities means being totally Joycean; on a more general level, this is a call for absolute personal authenticity. The part of Shakespeare’s plays I would be most interested in are the parts that he improvised. You have the play within a play in Hamlet, where Hamlet brings in some players to improvise a scene re-enacting his father’s murder. This is an example of abandonment of control in purely theatrical terms. What Shakespeare himself got up to is the crucial element we shall never know; but the only way to find out, even very approximately, is by personal exploration.

[Anka]

I go to Mark Twain's hand :), but it's not a choice at all, maybe there were more "twisted" literary times, but literature was a real awakening in every letter at that time.
It is not for nothing that his books have been adapted for screen cinema.
Tragedy and comedy unite history in a self (spear over time) unshakable spirit, so we have the work, that's important.

But I know what it's like to seek the truth. In socialism at school "I learned" a kind of history (our history is closely linked to literature because most writers were also included in politics), after the end of socialism a "new one" appeared, and now we are under the influence of other interest groups that keep our history in their pocket, but if we have perseverance and years at our disposal or maybe just patience , we can easily find any document attesting to the truth. Many libraries remained, old books do not lie, the literary spirits of those times signed the entry into decades of an awakening.

Maybe the truth of a nation still matters, but fewer and fewer are still looking for it.
Speaking of my region, the Academy good missions leaves much to be desired in times when people need it more and more.
The mission of the Academy in the declaration of the signatories, does not reflect the spirit of a nation that must understand now the times alone, we are the signatories of our own awakening in a world where we do not have all the instructions at hand, the power of speech no longer exists.Many, under honorary titles, dissociate themselves from any initiative to stand up and speak for the people (and not for politicians or organized groups), many (with all philosophical or theological training) do not even have the cadence to write to encourage spirits!

Maybe it doesn't matter more than the work itself, for me, who found so many variations on everything I looked for in my literature, the great writers of very old times were almost all friends, so their ideas somewhere "in the middle" were united, even if it was a different literary approach, the work itself attracted my calling.
I remember first of all the written work even if I know the author. The work defines the spirit, not the one who wrote it. I know this because I dislike copyright and related laws, I don't want any reward for what, "I would be or not to be"in what I want to offer for the world as "I" can.:flower:

Each work is by tradition but also by quality, a symbol,
"Quod bonum felix faustumque sit!"

[Bill Ryan]

:bump: :bump: :bump:

[araucaria]

:bump: :bump: :bump:

As a contributor to this thread which has been bumped twice over – which is how this post dated 9th September came to be thanked on 28th July – I have been at a loss as to what to add. Here is a tidbit from Anthony Burgess’s 1984 novel Enderby’s Dark Lady which brought itself to my attention this week.
This fictional account describes how in 1610 the forty-six year old Shakespeare (4+6=10 he notes) came to revise Psalm 46 in the King James Version of the Bible, which came out the following year. He changes just two words: the 46th from the beginning, ‘tremble’ becomes ‘shake’; the 46th from the end, ‘sword’ is changed to ‘speare’. I have just downloaded an Internet version, which makes this story ring true in every particular. It may of course just be Burgess’s imagination in overdrive, but the evidence is there on the page.


Psalm 46
King James Version

46 God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

2 Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;

3 Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.

4 There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.

5 God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.

6 The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.

7 The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.

8 Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth.

9 He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.

10 Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

11 The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.

[araucaria]

I read this book decades ago and had clean forgotten how it ends. The last chapter brings us right on the topic of this thread. A drama historian on an Earth in our future decides to travel back to ‘B303 England’ because ‘I have to know whether William Shakespeare really wrote those plays’. He goes pretending to be a young playwright from Norwich bearing, the complete works of Shakespeare hand copied in the Elizabethan style on… acidfree paper.


Shakespeare turns out to be a bit of a ‘monster’, he fancies this pretty young man and when he doesn’t get his way with him he throws him out. But first they get to talk of his plays: ‘Heliogabalus. A Word to Fright a Whoremaster. The Sad reign of Harold First and Last. The Devil in Dulwich. Oh, many and many more.’ You get the picture. He has already seen one of these ghosts, who came from High Germany. ‘Go to’, he says; ‘Are there not other worlds, like unto our own, that sorcery can make men leave to visit this?’ Some of the complete works end up on the fire, but many are saved. He comes across The Merchant of Venice. ‘Shakespeare had toyed with the idea of a play like this himself. And here it was, ready done for him, though it required copying into his own hand that questions about its provenance be not asked.’ So he is a special kind of forger.

What happens is a reversal. In light of this future supplies his own work is too full of magic. Let me quote the final paragraphs.

… Those plays Schleyer had brought had been good plays, but not, perhaps, quite so good as these.
Shakespeare furtively, though he was alone, crossed himself. When poets had talked o the Muse had they perhaps meant visitants like this, no screaming feebly in the street, and the German Schleyer and that one who swore, under torture, that he was from Virginia in America, and that in America they had universities as good as Oxford or Leyden or Wittenberg, nay better? Well, whoever they were, they were heartily welcome as long as they brought plays. That Richard II of Schleyer’s was, perhaps, in need of the amendments he was now engaged upon, but the earlier work untouched, from Henry VI on, had been popular. He read the top sheet of this new batch, stroking his auburn beard finely silvered, a fine grey eye reading. He sighed and, before crumpling a sheet of his own work on the table, he reread it. Not good, it limped, there was too much magic in it. Ingenio the Duke of Parma said:
Consider gentleman as in the sea
All earthly life finds like and parallel
So in far distant skies our lives be aped
Each hath a twin each action hath a twin
And twins have twins galore and infinite
And een these stars be twinn’d
Too fantastic, it would not do. He threw it into the rubbish box which Tomkin would later empty. Humming a new song of the streets entitled ‘Leave well alone’, he took a clean sheet and began to copy in a fair hand:
The Merchant of Venice, A Comedy
Then on he went; not blotting a line.The joke of course is that this inferior ‘real Shakespeare’ is something concocted in 1984 by the author of A Clockwork Orange and a biography of Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess himself… This was a few years before the real-life story of Dolores Cannon working through a colleague with Nostradamus. See here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?109753-The-Wuhan-Coronavirus-Covid-19-the-Honey-Badger-virus&p=1340272&viewfull=1#post1340272)and here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=658113&viewfull=1#post658113).


The issue here is that no one seems to be doing any creative writing. I have my own experience on the question of the ‘Muse’, which is more on the lines of ‘10% inspiration, 90% perspiration’. Writing is hard work, but with plenty of practice you gain a little speed and dig a little deeper. So basically, inspiration is a return on investment (perspiration). Of course, there is an inborn propensity for this kind of work, but this merely focusses on the personal aspect, whereas the issue here focusses on the collective aspect, whereby every writer is a reader, operating both in time and outside of time. The Borges story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote)’ comes to mind.

[Tintin]

Admin note: December 29th 2020 - the original links here broke due to the removal of the original source account so I've now replaced them via the History TV (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpVEP1d2LPhnhRR_ji1GD7w) youtube page. Perhaps these will remain up for some time to come. So, below the 4 part documentary series - I cannot locate the bonus part 5 at this time (Tintin Quarantino)

In Search of Shakespeare - A Time of Revolution (Documentary)

5VtE2f8g3VA

==================================================


BBC Michael Wood In Search Of Shakespeare 2 of 4 The Lost Years 2005

2HpcW2SPkZw

===================================================

BBC Michael Wood In Search Of Shakespeare 3 of 4 The Duty Of Poets 2005

5plYsT0DHL4

===================================================

In Search of Shakespeare 4of4....Not the best of copies I cannot find a better one...

VXEiBUzjWiA

===================================================

===================================================

Shakespeare's Mother The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman BBC Documentary 2015

kmpiY5kssU4

====================================================


:bump: ing for information only - see Admin note in red :highfive:

[pueblo]

Haven't seen Count St. Germain mentioned as a candidate in this thread......no Theosophists around? :)

[Journeyman]

Haven't seen Count St. Germain mentioned as a candidate in this thread......no Theosophists around? :)

Ah, but Francis Bacon has already been mentioned and obviously they're the same person... :sherlock:


Researcher Alan Green thinks there's a hidden message in Shakespeare's tomb:

https://tobeornottobe.org/

There's some fun stuff there as well as the threat of 'Merch' by which I believe we can expect tat bearing a logo rather than Shylock...

[Mare]

Haven't seen Count St. Germain mentioned as a candidate in this thread......no Theosophists around? :)

Actually St Germaine is mentioned on the very first page of this thread by the seemingly slumbering member Camilo. All very interesting though, and I will start paying more attention. After watching some of the Michael Wood series 'In Search of Shakespeare' (only episode 3 appears to work in the links) I think there was a lot more to Shakespeare than a mere Warwickshire yokel with a catchy moniker. I will however reserve judgement until I've learned more.

[araucaria]

Writing/playwrighting as a subversive activity. This BBC programme, which makes a decent case for Shakespeare being exactly as described on the tin, does what Shakespeare did with his history plays based on Holinshed and others. Based on what little hard evidence is available, it presents a historical account of the bard’s life as a commentary on the current situation. It does so probably not (entirely) deliberately: when it was made, I doubt whether the parallel with Brexit – then Rome, now Brussels— would have been noticeable. Or the parallel with America today. What we are talking about is a retreat towards archetypal human behaviour patterns that move into a timeless realm where prophecy emerges from history. Shakespeare himself describes on a small scale what he is doing on a much larger scale, in the process making sense of Anthony Burgess’s suggestion of time-travelling visitors, which may just be an interesting metaphor for artistic ‘inspiration’: no visitors needed if you can go there yourself.

WARWICK. There is a history in all men’s lives
Figuring the natures of the times deceased;
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginnings lie intreasurèd.
Such things become the hatch and brood of time;
And by the necessary form of this
King Richard might create a perfect guess
That great Northumberland, then false to him,
Would of that seed grow to a greater falseness,
Which should not find a ground to root upon
Unless on you [his successor Henry IV] I propose to take a serialized look at Shakespeare’s world view in relation, first to the history he presents (1), secondly to his own day (2), thirdly to Britain today (3), and finally to the USA today (4).

(1) The histories are a mixture of something akin to tragedy affecting the elite (mostly power struggles among the nobility) and comedy (mostly verbal and other slapstick among ordinary people, typically unsavoury types such as the population of taverns and bawdy-houses (drunkards and thieves). The link between the two worlds takes both inanimate and animate form: wealth and one of the best-loved characters in English literature.
(1.a.) First, money. Rising to the top is achieved by taxation of one’s subjects, at every level of society. Maintaining power involves suppressing rebellions caused by overtaxation. In those days, disloyalty to the king was treasonous (whereas nowadays it is disrespect of the constitution and the law). Treason was like a one-way valve on the cash flow system. Rather than give way and reverse the flow, it would be ‘off with their heads’ and confiscation of the rebel’s property. Henry IV’s death-bed recommendation to his son is then, instead of asset-stripping his own English lords, to go and pillage the French. Unfortunately, he was speaking as someone who had had a reign of quelling domestic rebellion, and although he himself, after his predecessor Richard II had exiled him and confiscated his property, had deposed the king precisely upon his return from a long period away in Ireland.

Henry V was historically a good pious man, as well as a brave warrior, and his reaction is to seek the French crown only insomuch as it is due to him, otherwise not. He consults the Archbishop of Canterbury to make sure what is the Christian thing to do. Unfortunately, a project in the pipeline inherited from Henry IV was planning to strip the Church of about half of its assets, and so naturally the Archbishop of Canterbury recommends a diversionary war. While making contemporary political and economic sense, this hawkish approach is hardly Christian, and Shakespeare emphasizes how even back then the Church has become totally beholden to the financial system. Unfortunately, a major expedition to France would leave him exposed to incursions from Scotland, so he leaves three-quarters of his troops at home.

(1.b.) England’s best-loved character is Sir John Falstaff, an impoverished knight who hangs out with the dregs of society, whores, thieves, tavern-owners… and also with the young Prince Hal. He is a fat slob soaked in sherry and claret, what we might call a populist in modern terminology. Falstaff is suddenly disowned by Hal when he becomes King Henry V, and soon dies of despair and grief. This is not a flip-flop on Henry’s part, more like reaching the time to take action following a field survey in which he discovers that the above-described ‘soak the rich’ policy extends all the way down to create grassroots poverty and crime. He has been acting like a modern anthropologist studying shamanism: you have to drink the ayahuasca. Henry disowns Falstaff, but not the ordinary people. We see him in France fraternizing with his troops while also taking along, as well as his Englishmen, an Irishman, a Scotsman and a Welshman for ‘comic’ effect – the formula for a modern joke in action and a somewhat united kingdom a century before the United Kingdom really came into being.

(1.c.) Piety here involves holding everything and everyone together. Henry V takes a tiny force to campaign in France, and after capturing Harfleur, he needs to evacuate through Calais. Hence the Battle of Agincourt was not intended as a famous victory, it was more of a defensive battle like Dunkirk in 1940, as desperate as the Spartans at Thermopylae; except that it saw a somewhat miraculous outcome helped along by some useful generalship. It involved an element of class warfare, since thousands of French nobility on horseback had to stoop to fend off the English peasant archers. They were not supposed to get killed at all: they came for the joust, and at worst they would be captured and pay a ransom: the real spoils of war. Unfortunately, after heavy overnight rain, the horses turned the place into a mudbath, and the bowmen on either flank created a bottleneck where the wounded horses deposited their riders in a huge pile to suffocate.

Another modern comparison comes to mind: a 20th century English soccer match, where once or twice an overcrowded stand could spill onto a heavy muddy pitch, with great loss of life. Only here the people getting crushed were those normally sitting in the VIP box. The massacre was worsened when the French, having too many troops, failed to stop fighting, with the result that those taken prisoner became a liability, as they would surely attack from the rear while the English carried on fighting. So to their chagrin, instead of collecting ransoms the poor peasant soldiers had to cut huge numbers of throats. No booty and no money, par for the course. The main positive and unexpected result of the battle was that the men themselves survived to tell the tale. How they did this was through courage. No play-acting at war. That is why the coward Falstaff is dropped from the team: at Shakespeare’s Battle of Shrewsbury, he pretends to be dead, then gets up and ‘kills’ Hotspur, who is already dead. Not good enough.
[…]

[araucaria]

[…]
(2) What came next for the Plantagenets was unfortunate. Henry V, who as the son of the last king (and an early Prince of Wales) was beginning a period of dynastic stability, died young, leaving his young son Henry VI at the tender age of nine months to be caught up in decades of domestic strife known as the War of the Roses, culminating in the reign of Richard III. Most of these kings reigned and died very young. Meanwhile, Henry V’s French widow Catherine had a second son by Owen Tudor. A Tudor in name, a Plantagenet in first name, this posthumous French stepson later became Henry VII. We see here an interesting practical sidestepping of the disputed Salic law whereby a woman might not inherit, since Catherine is the stepping-stone between the defunct Plantagenet dynasty and the subsequent Tudor dynasty, gradually built up, up to and including Elizabeth I in Shakespeare’s day. Unfortunately (the key word in this whole story!), any stabilizing effect was counterbalanced by wild swings within the family, principally with the short reign of Catholic Mary between the Protestants Edward VI and Elizabeth I. You might call it regime change in a one-party system. Yesterday’s loyalty to the crown turned into today’s treason owing to a policy U-turn. For example, the scientist/magus John Dee only just saved his skin before becoming Elizabeth’s unwitting spy. Elizabeth was already queen when Shakespeare was born, but we are talking about major reformation of a millennial religion with a police state to persecute traditional Catholics. We who in outpourings on the Internet bemoan our loss of free speech have actually never had it so good. This is, on one level, what all the play-acting was about: it was designed to get round the censorship to reach a mainstream audience.

(2.a.) On another level, play-acting is presented as something people do in real life. The hunchback Richard III is shown as deliberately playing the villain. While this may be fiction, Henry V’s transformation from playboy to responsible king is largely backed up by history. In Henry V, as in Hamlet, you have a play within the play when Falstaff and Prince Hal rehearse the latter’s coming interview with his father Henry IV, first with Falstaff as the king, then reversing the roles. Either way, this fiction suggests a more fatherly relationship than the real thing. Likewise, it is not entirely clear which of Prince Hal or the maturer King Henry V is closer to the genuine article, as they are both acting out something they are not. The real man is a synthesis of the two ages, boy-man then man-boy. What is being hinted at is a subversive king, aloof yet close to the people, seeking to bring about real change peacefully, which is really the only way to avoid quickly reverting to the same old same old.

So where does the Elizabethan poet-playwright fit in this picture? As described in the videos, Shakespeare was a celebrity entertainer, combining the roles of Broadway, Hollywood, sport and TV soap. So far so good. What he was also doing was acting as a primetime mainstream news channel. But since anything more subversive than Pravda would have been shut down immediately, he wrote history plays for example, which are a combination of the History channel and comedy central, while also dealing indirectly with current affairs. These ‘Queen’s men’, as the troupe was called, had to be careful how much they could get away with. Clearly, reviving the tale of deposition in Richard II the night before Essex’s attempted coup against Elizabeth I was almost fatal since they were called in for questioning and got off with a slap on the wrist (although their client was executed). While the idea was to build up the analogy between then and now, the only safe way would be to educate spectators into working things out for themselves: for ‘the fair reverence of your highness curbs me/ From giving reins and spurs to my free speech’. Art is neither manipulative nor dogmatic, but it can be subversive by using cunning to make a political point, by which I simply mean have some slight impact on the real world. Hence Shakespeare was not only a one-man mainstream media of his day, he was the alternative media too, at a time when our presentday freedom of speech was the stuff of dreams. The message is somewhat paradoxical. After all the young kings with even younger sons, the iron lady Elizabeth was a childless old maid at the end of a very long reign. A whole period of history was coming to an end and the idea would have been to prepare something better to take its place.

So what were Protestants protesting about? Apart from a good deal of corruption and control in the Church of Rome, one of these videos pinpoints the major Catholic issue, namely the divine feminine as personified by the Virgin Mary. (Notice how in the BBC videos, one document is identified as pro-Catholic by its mention of her.) See these posts.
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?61859-The-real-Jesus-the-real-Mary-Gnosis-the-Archons-and-the-world-s-first-major-smear-campaign&p=709863&viewfull=1#post709863
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=974575&viewfull=1#post974575
So we see Shakespeare operating on several levels at once. The videos say Othello is more about racism than about jealousy. I agree, with the added observation that racism is about a person, typically a male, killing the divine feminine, including within himself. The play is still also about jealousy, only not so much Othello’s towards his wife, but Iago’s jealousy of their integration of the divine feminine, thereby enacting the process of change from Catholicism to puritanism. Hence racism and jealousy are fundamentally religious issues.
[…]

[araucaria]

[…]
(2.b.) Although we are looking chiefly at the history plays here, we see a full spectrum of responses to the divine feminine, which serve as a kind of thermometer for everything else that is going on. Note in Henry V the genuine love interest in the closing scenes where the king woos Catherine, daughter of the French king. Tragedy gives way to comedy as the two manage to overcome the language barrier, and also in an earlier scene where Catherine rehearses some English words that sound like bad language in French (‘de foot et de cown’). For Henry V, France is not so much a place for robbing Johnny foreigner as for finding a loving significant other, a wife and mother for his heirs. Compare and contrast King Edward III, ‘the bluntest wooer in Christendom’, and the celibate, sterile Elizabeth whose famous line never made it into Shakespeare: ‘I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a King of England too.’ On the other hand, as we shall see, the young Henry VIII shows veneration for the aspects of the ‘triple goddess’, the chaste wife and later crone (Catherine of Aragon) and the harlot (Anne Boleyn), although divorcing the two which need to be united.

Years later on the home front, as the temperature rises in the wild scenes of internecine feuding in Henry VI Part 3, the feminine element also literally goes crazy. As Queen Margaret watches her husband Henry VI wandering around reading a pious book or disinheriting their son, then sees the boy murdered before her eyes, she gets involved in the actual killing of the then usurper after taunting him over the child he has seen murdered. As the play moves on, you have three old tragic queens, three crones, in scenes reminiscent of the witches in the tragedy Macbeth. The inference being, these things are supposed to happen in the haunted wilderness of Scotland, not south of the border in civilized England, where it would seem however that witchcraft has risen to affect the crown itself.

(2.c.) That said, the history plays are predominantly a man’s world. 3Henry VI is by no means the end of the story, for since it has a climactic sequel, Richard III, it qualifies among the history plays as Shakespeare’s ‘second best bed’. So far, we have been watching a bunch of opportunists in action. One pretender says he would sell out to be king for a year, but he employs no villainy to achieve that ambition. What changes in the last play is that Richard of Gloucester is prepared to go the extra mile to make things happen, by eliminating anyone getting in his way: like Iago, but not averse to getting blood on his own hands. Shakespeare is said by some to have gone over the top in demonizing this hunchback, most notably with the unverified killing of the boy princes in the Tower. He does so the better perhaps to flatter Elizabeth I, because the man who puts an end to it all turns out to be her grandfather, Henry VII. But if the overall idea is to denounce this she-devil on the English throne, that cannot be the whole story. The character of Richard makes huge dramatic sense, bringing the whole saga to a tremendous climax and some kind of closure. Just to what extent it conforms to reality on the ground both then and now is another question, but an interesting one. For where Shakespeare is at odds with accepted history may be due to his own retroactive perspective; in other words, while staging old reigns to shed light on the current one, the reverse process is also happening whereby his current wisdom also sheds light on history, which is precisely why accepted history is always subject to change. Even though he never attended university, the extensive research Shakespeare must have done in order to compose this cycle of plays qualifies him to some degree as a historian with his own specific skill set. In other words, I am describing a self-appointed researcher in the mould of presentday alternative media researchers, often decried because of the inevitably inferior quality that some of their number will inevitably produce. They are on a steep learning curve.

(2.d.) While there may be doubt over some of the intricacies of who did what, how, when and why, what seems uncontroversial is the appalling body count as things spiral out of control: everyone allegedly murdered or executed was indeed murdered or executed. This whole story brings to mind CS Lewis’s wartime Space Trilogy, which culminates in a satanic organization self-destructing in a similar fashion; the culminating feature being a bodiless head kept alive as a form of artificial intelligence in a room where a sash window is designed to operate as a guillotine. Eventually and inevitably, the machine goes into self-replicating mode, and the characters start chopping each other’s heads off to feed it. See this post/thread (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?111554-C.S.-Lewis-The-Space-Trilogy&p=1367817&viewfull=1#post1367817).

What makes Shakespeare’s satanic Richard III totally plausible is when it is seen as a political remake of the Battle of Agincourt, which definitely took place as described. There, you had a huge throng of French nobles come to joust, but with no room to wield their lances, and come to hunt down some peasant soldiers. Jousting is the sport derived from hunting: originally the very real business of putting meat on plates. But when you are wealthy enough to confiscate a serf’s pig, the hungry motive gradually turns into a search for entertainment and amusement – killing humans being some people’s idea of fun. But note also how, alongside war, the executions also fit into this picture, especially in the days of the barbaric hanging drawing and quartering with its cannibilistic overtones of a butcher preparing a carcass of meat. This battle then took place between a bunch of amateurs playing a game, transformed into an epic disaster by the ‘happy few’ professional warriors fighting for their lives as a ‘band of brothers’. With a modicum of organization and serious intent, numbers become meaningless: instead of ‘the more the merrier’ you have effective guerilla warfare, now better known as terrorism. (Interestingly, both the terror attacks in New York (2001) and London (2005) are said by some to have occurred while war games were going on…)

Now do the same in a political context. The later history plays show a bunch of amateurs being outflanked by one professional single-handedly engaging in organized crime to achieve his naked personal ambition. In this sense, Richard III is the ultimate conspiracy theory, but leading to one interesting insight. While it may appear more plausible as a ‘lone nut’ scenario, the emphasis is nonetheless on nobility badly diseased from top to bottom. In a healthy society, the lone nut will be dealt with on an individual basis, but in such a context of mass psychosis, he gets to play out his fantasies. We are talking about a pandemic, with a psychic virus that can be anything from harmless to absolutely lethal.
[…]

[araucaria]

[…]
(2.e.) Shakespeare’s response to this barbaric killing spree is truly revolutionary because it prones peaceful revolution instead of opposing violence with more violence. War in France brings out the worst in his peasantry, who start arguing amongst themselves and challenging each other to duels. A disguised Henry V himself gets into an argument, which he smoothes over when the real fighting is finished. Unfortunately however, the bigger picture tells a different story. His pious son Henry VI basically opts out but cannot survive. Ultimately, the real message seems to be a pessimistic ‘the worst is yet to come’, for any sense of closure is rather marred by this other play outside the history cycle per se: the ‘romance’ of Henry VIII. While this description places Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth in the same category as Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest, the subtext might be seen more as that of Lear and Cordelia in the tragedy of King Lear…

What could get worse? Well, to date, all these murderers had been busy sending their rivals to their Maker: ‘absolved with an axe’. The Church remained strong and stable through its hawkish stance when Henry IV was planning to cut its assets by half. When Henry VIII comes along, his marital affairs are a pretext for a ‘romantic’ cover story, but the main news not recounted is that he is going to confiscate 100% with the dissolution of the monasteries. This opens the door to religious persecutions whereby people were sent not to their Maker, but condemned to Hell fire. Loyalty to the monarch replaced loyalty to God. Furthermore, what makes things so much worse is the way this spreads from the feuding nobility to the entire population, no longer able to go to church (rather like in 2020 in fact). Everyone would have to grapple with the insoluble dilemma of loyalty to Church or State, or to accept the merging of the one with the other, the material ousting the spiritual. This was truly hell, suggesting that after this hell on earth the spiritual hereafter would be just more of the same, and henceforth true religion was so much hopium of the people. Clearly it would be hard to overstate one’s case in demonizing the perpetrators, who, to make matters still worse, were women. For by Shakespeare’s time, Macbeth’s witches had, as we saw earlier, reached the very top, promoted from queen consorts to reigning monarchs as Mary then Elizabeth took the crown. The divine feminine had nowhere to go.

And yet the balanced moral of the tale is that organization is potentially life-saving (Agincourt) as well as potentially death-dealing (the royal court, and later the persecutions). English history is, to some extent at least, a story of channelling government organization towards achieving a society healthier in every way. Success always accompanies failure, and the Elizabethan age was no exception, also bringing a great deal of good to the world, not least Shakespeare himself. We must remember how hard those times were for the majority: infant mortality, early deaths etc. Nowadays, royals produce ‘an heir and a spare’ (the current queen did so twice over!), and they all live to be nearly a hundred. Back then, kings were crowned at ten years or nine months old, and often died in their thirties. Hereditary succession was a good idea to take the ambition out of the primitive electoral process, but Henry VIII had a very real problem producing a male heir even that old after several miscarriages, stillbirths and what have you. He might have been content with Mary had he not been listening to Cardinal Wolsey.

Other early deaths were also common. We have the story of Shakespeare’s colleague and fellow subversive Christopher Marlowe, who fell in with three ruffians, and we only get the survivors’ innocent version of events. Marlowe was lying aggressively on a bed and effectively committed suicide by attacking his killer from behind. In our days of endless crimes committed to silence people (no need to investigate serial climbing accidents among microbiologists for instance, or the closing of a twitter account for that matter), a case could easily be made for this death being no more mysterious than it sounds. Then Shakespeare himself died at just 52. According to the video, it may have been from alcoholic poisoning – not because he had a drink problem as Beethoven did, but just because of the very liquid (boozy) diet of the times. The idea does not… hold much water, but never mind: Shakespeare was past it anyway. Then of course the Globe Theatre was destroyed by an accidental fire on the opening night of Henry VIII, billed with the title All is True. Perhaps one or two of the queen’s spies were in the audience; I for one would not rule out foul play (pun intended). The cover story of calling this play (co-written with one John Fletcher) a ‘romance’ is completely demolished by this whistle-blowing title: if the queen’s spies were not there, then they were unbelievably incompetent.

(2.f.) So, things were getting really bad for all the Queen’s men. Meanwhile, the nation’s affairs were worsening even compared with Richard III’s day, because, as I indicated earlier, the whole population was becoming directly involved and vulnerable to violent death. Henry VIII is also much more subtly subversive than its title suggests, since it is really saying, ‘This much is true… and just the tip of the iceberg’. It is only half a play: at the end we are waiting for Henry VIII Part 2, not to mention the sequels that never came, Edward VI, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 – so many suspension points … --- … that come over as some kind of cryptic SOS, although what we actually get is the prophesy of a long and glorious reign given with 20/20 hindsight. The glorious ending in praise of Elizabeth actually comes as something of a let-down, since Henry VIII already had an heiress and basically all he has done is produce a ‘sparess’, albeit a powerful and much-needed one. A world-shaking Reformation, and it’s back to square one. And despite everything, when the birth of a girl is announced, Henry puts on a brave face (no stage directions) and just tells someone to give an old lady a small amount of money for bringing the news. The only hint of any disappointment is the disgust shown by the woman at the pittance he gives her.

King Henry: Is the Queen delivered?
Say, ‘Ay, and of a boy.’
Old lady: Ay, ay, my liege,
And of a lovely boy. The God of heaven
Both now and ever bless her! ’Tis a girl
Promises boys hereafter. Something strange is going on here: the king ought to have been absolutely livid. But if the overriding concern was to avoid offending an Elizabethan audience or their queen, then why stage the scene at all? And why be insultingly undertipping (insulting to Elizabeth)? It’s stage money after all. It makes no sense. A simpler alternative reading would be to say that the king is acting out his true feelings (‘All is true’): he is perfectly content to have this ‘fair young maid’. But but but… that can’t be right. Can it? Let’s see how it just might be.

With its two seemingly unconnected sections, on the fall of Cardinal Wolsey and the birth of Elizabeth, Henry VIII raises a few interesting problems. We read in the history books that the king worked hard to help get Wolsey elected pope at two conclaves. (If they had succeeded, then the Reformation in England might never have happened.) Or that Wolsey dragged his heels getting papal permission for Henry’s divorce and remarriage. Or that if the king hadn’t been so intent on building a reputation in Europe, he wouldn’t have needed such vast sums to finance his military campaigns (which Wolsey funded notably by making an early start on the dissolution of the monasteries). However Shakespeare/Fletcher give a perspective on this effective and yet totally dysfunctional duumvirate that may not be new to historians but is new to me for one, not having read the play before.

At the start of the play, Henry makes clear that he is very happy with his wonderful Spanish queen who has given him a daughter, and he seems content to carry on as before. All of a sudden the need for a male heir seems less important. As I understand it, Wolsey is not against the divorce but against the marriage with Anne Boleyn, mainly because she is a lowly handmaid, not a foreign queen. One feels that if this were the court of France and it was all about lusting after a desirable wench, she would be the king’s mistress, with no constitutional crisis to worry about. So what is going on? We find out when Wolsey’s enemies leak to the king some of his papers and snail mail to the Vatican. In this regard, the play itself would have functioned rather like Wikileaks today, but for safety’s sake the audience would have to join some dots themselves. Notice in passing how the general public nowadays is generally quite conversant with what leaks into the public domain, but much less so with regard to what leaks among political enemies behind the scenes – or for that matter what leaks among political friends and makes them enemies. I may be mistaken, but this seems to be a fairly new feature of the current crisis, at least to the degree it is occurring now.

We learn that Cardinal Wolsey’s vast personal wealth and economic policies (taxation, confiscation, and also extortion) are geared primarily towards buying his election as pope, which amounts at once to criminal (treasonous) embezzlement of state resources and the spiritual sin of simony on a massive scale.

This paper has undone me. ’Tis th’account
Of all that world of wealth I have drawn together
For mine own ends – indeed, to gain the popedom,
And fee my friends in Rome. O negligence,
Fit for a fool to fall by! What cross devil
Made me put this main secret in the packet
I sent the King? We shall look at contemporary parallels to this situation later on. For now, we note a foreign power, the Vatican, effectively siphoning off capital from England directly through the king’s first minister, treason of the highest order of course on the latter’s part, but also a casus belli between two states. However this was a foreign power of a special kind which had rightfully exerted spiritual influence over king and country, but whose influence was now exposed as being utterly corrupt. The Pope was no Catholic; but the king was. This changes the entire picture. Instead of seeing the popular Henry VIII as (a future serial adulterer and) someone wanting a male heir at all costs, his application to the Pope now appears all along to have been a plot contrived to set up and expose Wolsey in order to escape the clutches of this vampire state. The marital separation was never about Catherine or her babies; she was merely the instrument for the divorce with the temporal power of the Church. Cardinal Wolsey never became pope because he was foiled by the king in what amounted to one more treasonous power grab. The divorce was also about removing this temporal power while upholding and enhancing the spiritual power of Christianity. Hence the Protestantism of the time had nothing to do with puritanism, but was ‘High Church’, i.e. Anglo-Catholic as opposed to Roman Catholic. So at the end of the play, this is the religion into which Henry baptizes his daughter Elizabeth: so far so good. All’s well that ends well. Except that Queen Elizabeth was no Catholic.

(2.g.) Except that this was only another beginning: rinse and repeat the previous cycle. The problem is that to save the state, Henry has sacrificed a happy marriage with Catherine of Aragon. In other words, the position of queen of England is no longer a lifetime position but something more resembling an administrative period of office or contract of employment subject to termination at a moment’s notice. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly therefore, the queenship will likely then be subjected to the very same sort of diplomatic and financial shenanigans as those surrounding the papacy, which was the big issue in the first place. In this light, to solve that problem, Henry VIII has opened the floodgates leading to his subsequent marital woes. Reports of treasonous adultery, and treasonous infertility followed by executions and divorces are an exact female parallel to the male goings-on in the above-described transition period from Henry VI to Richard III to Henry VII. One suspects that stories about Henry VIII being a compulsive womanizer are just stories – fake news. Would, for example, a compulsive womanizer spend his ‘salad days’, his best youthful years (nearly two decades), with the same woman? In other words, this promiscuous behaviour was out of character, until something triggered a change. And yet if anyone knows just one thing about Henry VIII, it is that he had six wives. Enough said.

All you Brits who think life on a desert island would be improved by having the Bible and Shakespeare, in these times of lockdown and Brexit, you ARE on a desert island right now. Time to brush up your Shakespeare. :)
[…]

[araucaria]

[…]
(3) Britain today. As I suggested above, the timeless quality of Shakespeare’s approach to human endeavours makes earlier history prophetic of his own age, but also by extension of any other, our own included. Certainly the part of the story saying that ‘the worst is yet to come’ is of obvious current relevance. The idea is that world leaders playing out human archetypes are basically Shakespearean characters. However, it is not a simple one-to-one affair: it is also a matter of what people were doing. Even the historians don’t seem to know of any policy initiatives that Richard III might have taken. For The History Today Companion to British History, the very idea seems to be of secondary importance, concluding with ‘his total failure to live up to a king’s most basic responsibilities: to ensure the survival of himself, his dynasty and his followers’. We’ll look at Boris Johnson and Donald Trump in relation to Falstaff (respectively 3.a. and 4.a.), in relation to Richard III (3.b. and 4.b.), and in relation to Henry VIII (3.c. and 4.c.).

‘What you are’ is basically just your toolbox. If you were a 15-16th century English monarch, you had one set of tools. 21st century political leaders have a different set. The idea is to swap one set for the other and focus on ‘who they are’, which defines how they use these tools. We have a spectrum of English kings, white, black and grey. Henry V was by all accounts a man of principle doing his best for the common good. Richard III in Shakespeare’s account was totally unprincipled, doing nothing for anyone except himself. Henry VIII in my understanding lies in a grey area, by which I mean several things. It can notably mean either unreliably principled or unobviously principled. In my reading of Shakespeare, despite all the tabloid fodder, he turns out to be working for the common good at great personal cost. Grey can also mean either well-meaning but somewhat ineffective or ill-meaning but somewhat effective. In this sense, the well-meaning Henry V may not have been too effective, if only because he died far too young. Meanwhile, the black portrait of Richard III does not necessarily preclude some good having been done by Richard III; we just have little evidence for any. Finally, Henry VIII’s ineffectiveness may be put down largely to the sheer scale of the problem he was facing.

The bottom line when all these factors are taken into account is that history is a societal juggernaut that no individuals can stop: in the words of James Joyce’s character, ‘history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’. We all need to come together, which has to mean not simply dismissing as evil and seeking to eliminate those who try to go it alone. They do this because it is easier for the cowardly individual to have an exaggerated effect on the community by doing things that are bad for it; see this post (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?113467-Happy-New-Year-Avalonians.-Post-a-wish-an-observation-a-rant-a-resolution&p=1400107&viewfull=1#post1400107). Unfortunately, since the ‘monos’ in ‘monarchy’ means going it alone, kingship itself is part of the problem. So kings could do bad things not because of who they were but because of what they were, and then regicides and other rivals would come along and solve nothing. This is the problem that democracy was designed to remedy; unfortunately it spawned populism, which is a pale imitation, a vaccine designed to offset that effect.

In the light of the above three paragraphs, Johnson and Trump would seem to offer two very different shades of grey. Since many see them both as complete populist clowns – often Europeans cannot speak of Johnson without mentioning Trump in the same breath – and since those who take Trump seriously often also take Johnson seriously, it seems a good idea to attempt to prise the two apart.

(3.a.) Taking Johnson first, how does ‘Boris’ compare with King Henry V/Falstaff? (‘I'm voting for Boris because he is a laugh’ (Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson))). Very unfavourably, it must be said. While Henry’s bottom-up handling of the grassroots in a manner compatible with the regal mantle probably brings him about as close as one can get to a democratic 15th century king, Johnson fails in both regards. His closeness to ordinary people is insincere and superficial (populism); he is only interested in garnering their votes; he is clearly a paid-up member of the elite and a not even a renegade in the governing Tory party that has imposed a decade of austerity. But this elite is totally degenerate: they used to say ‘noblesse oblige’ (nobility brings obligations towards others): not any more. Beneath the veneer of jokey affability, this is what makes him a real buffoon with a mental age of about four, not to be taken seriously by anyone, except as a useful puppet by his handler Cummings and his owners.

We have experience in France of what happens when a real bona fide clown runs for office. This was in 1980 when the stand-up comic Coluche, a corpulent fellow in his trademark dungarees, ran for president to denounce the sorry/comical state of French politics. He did so well in the opinion polls that he got scared at having proved his point and backed out. Some say he got a visit from whomever. In 1986, he was killed by a truck in a motorcycle. Some say he was murdered on behalf of whomever. Such theories really don’t add anything to the discussion. My point is that things got too serious; when the going gets tough the tough get going, and the comedians go home. Falstaff was deselected; out of his depth, Coluche walked away (or was deselected). Unfortunately Johnson stayed the course – not unaided: aided in fact by someone (Cummings) who claimed to have gone on a long-distance drive to test his eyesight when already flouting the covid restrictions he himself had introduced. This excuse for an excuse was actually quite an admission: the man in the driving seat was out of control.

Johnson dreamt of being ‘world king’. He is hardly that, but nonetheless this Falstaff has won the top job when the original was sacked for cowardice. Cowardice is often mentioned as a major Johnson failing in his handling (or non-handling) of the pandemic: always too little too late. It also characterizes his less-is-more handling of the Brexit fiasco. Like Falstaff’s prowess in battle, his success is vicarious: the benefits mostly his predecessor’s work, the climbdowns all his own.

However, Johnson’s whole ‘leaver’ stance is contrary to everything Henry V stood for with regard to Europe, being entirely opportunistic, since he wavered until the last minute, even preparing a remainer statement as a possible alternative. Fellow Tory Chris Patten stated that (…) Johnson was ‘one of the greatest exponents of fake [Eurosceptic] journalism’ (Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson)). As we saw in one of my earlier posts, the king saw greater ties with France as positive and beneficial, all the way to a ‘European union’ (marriage) whereby an English king with a French wife might produce a European heir. After three European wars in the space of eighty years, the Common Market started as a postwar attempt at avoiding future wars, and has been hugely successful in that regard despite so much potential for continued discord. This has been achieved as not only economic and political, but cultural and social rapprochement as well has woven a tighter fabric across the continent. These are the ties that are part of many people’s lives and that Johnson’s Brexit is going to weaken or destroy.

I also mentioned the countries of the United Kingdom. In the day of Henry V, an expedition south to France would lead to marauding Scots moving south into England. Not a good idea, and he tried to avoid it, even though it was a mere reflection of his own activity, a play within a play, and in that sense was actually in some way desirable. Today we are seeing the reverse movement: as England recoils from Europe, Scotland recoils from England (as do Ireland and Wales). The UK was a microcosm of Europe: the success of the one mirrors the success of the other; scrapping the one will probably end up with a disunited kingdom.

(3.b.) So much for elements of substance. What about form? As the man who wanted to be king of the world and does not really know what to do with the power he now has, Boris Johnson’s resemblance to Richard III is fairly obvious. Unfortunately, in some respects he is considerably worse. Naked personal ambition can be a good thing if it leads to making an effective contribution. However, given that former PM David Cameron (and also Rees-Mogg) are also old Etonians and members of the infamous Bullingdon Club, it would seem that some kind of game is going on among them to toy with the system in multiple power grabs just for the hell of it. This represents a personal integrity vacuum and a power vacuum to be filled by whoever comes along; hence the extremely dangerous times currently being experienced in the UK and Europe.

Try telling the subjects of Richard III, who reigned for just a couple of years, that the worst was yet to come. Ten years of Tory misrule and counting…. I said that Richard was a professional kingmaker amid a bunch of amateurs. Let me rephrase that: he made it a full-time job, but it was a botched DIY job that involved taking every shortcut and breaking all the rules; so it was a job not made to last. To use a contemporary analogy, it was like going up to the Capitol without an official mandate to pass through the front door, but smashing a window instead, sitting at the Speaker’s desk for a moment, yet totally unable to even begin running the show by actually doing the Speaker’s job. Alternatively, it was like getting into Parliament on false pretences, e.g. through ballot fraud, and going through the motions as prime minister. This may have happened in the UK in December 2019, as I explained in this post (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?109390-UK-Election...-12-Dec-2019-Corbyn-Boris-or-Libs&p=1327262&viewfull=1#post1327262).

(3.c.) Johnson’s obvious connection with Henry VIII is their epic marital history. Johnson’s was of course his own private business, until it became a public issue in various ways as detailed in his Wikipedia entry. A public figure’s children need to be protected, but to refuse to state simply how many he has is hugely counterproductive for someone expecting to be trusted. I have suggested that Henry VIII’s marital woes were not directly of his own making but rather a side effect of his statecraft. Nowadays such a career is all too common, all in the name of greater freedom of course; a lifetime partnership is the exception and no longer even particularly desirable. So Johnson’s CV is entirely of his own making. He has held high office, but he’s no statesman.

The other connection is the idea of Brexit seen in the light of the Reformation. Henry VIII got out of Europe to escape the heavy financial tribute being paid to Rome and the sinful religious influence exerted thereby. Similarly, Brexit was all about recovering £350 million a week paid to the EU, and ‘getting back control’ or sovereignty. Those 350 million sovereigns supposedly earmarked for the NHS go into vaccines and other ‘Moonshots’. The difference between the EU and the Roman Catholic Church back then is that the EU is a partnership freely entered into (like a modern marriage union), whereas Christianity was a no-alternative-but-hell arrangement (like a then marriage). Hence the private personal aspect mirrors the public political aspect. Henry broke with Rome both as king and as husband. Johnson is unreliable on both fronts. I don’t know too much about any breaking of marital vows, but I do recall one incident with his present partner when the police were called out at night for a breach of the peace. This was breaking the law, or since he wasn’t prosecuted, very nearly so (his neighbours certainly thought so). And as we know, he illegally prorogued Parliament, and he passed a bill reneging on his own Brexit agreement signed just eight months earlier, breaking international law ‘in a limited way’. On the other hand, unlike the treasonous Wolsey, Brexit remainers were entirely law-abiding citizens rubber-stamping the status quo, and representing half of the country’s population.
[...]

[araucaria]

(4) USA today. By way of preamble, let me state that in the case of Donald Trump, grey is a pretty extreme version of black on the mainstream outside and white on the alternative inside. This would make him the reverse of a ‘whited sepulchre’, which is how Jesus described the hypocritical Pharisees. In the one case, you would have a profile similar to Johnson’s in the previous post: no need to go over that ground again. Let’s see how the other case pans out; for this, its factuality or otherwise is irrelevant; on the contrary, there might be something here to help the agnostic form an opinion one way or the other. I have noted elsewhere how the reputation as a clown would be a useful and perhaps essential disguise for someone who is basically a secret agent. And while the childish Boris Johnson takes some shoe-horning to fit the Shakespearean script – for he is about as noble and kinglike as he is like Churchill (a fanciful conceit of his) – Donald Trump seems a much better fit.

(4.a.) This double aspect actually matches the portrayal of Henry V rather well, with the Falstaffian association of the youthful Prince Hal becoming part of the makeup of a very serious grown-up. The French nobility were bluffed by the mainstream account when the Dauphin gifted the new king with that well-known ‘treasure’: ‘tennis balls, my liege’. The modern equivalent would be golf balls. If Trump is seen as divisive, it is perhaps mainly because he appears to be deeply divided – possibly with good reason. He may have been best friends with JFK Jr, but he also seems to have been friendly with Epstein. If he was playing the role of Prince Hal here, then he might have first-hand knowledge of some of the goings-on. Maybe he could confirm some of the things that are keeping Prince Andrew away from the FBI. Many accounts of Trump’s planned clean-up of American and world politics – e.g. all the talk of mass arrests – sound like a re-enactment of the Battle of Agincourt preceded by the death sentence on some homegrown traitors who have just recommended the utmost severity for some minor offence:

If little faults proceeding on distemper
Shall not be winked at, how shall we stretch our eye
When capital crimes, chewed, swallowed, and digested,
Appear before us? (4.b.) The contrast with Henry V lies in the fact that compared with the king, who died at 35, the entrepreneur Trump is vastly more experienced in a somewhat similar line of business (compare with Johnson the flippant an unethical journalist). Being in the building industry, he knows his job as project owner, as distinct from architect, as distinct from all the different building trades, and how all these professionals come together to create a quality end product. This is a far cry from the DIY method of Richard III, whose policy seems to be ‘if your only tool is a bulldozer, then everything becomes a demolition job’. Trump’s weakness was his entitlement to the throne: not establishment/bloodline. His strength was perhaps his fitting the job description. There is no need for our present purpose to look at his record, which is as black and white as everything else. The single fact of his election against all the odds, and with no allegations of vote fraud, may be enough to make the point. The yardstick of this success is probably Ross Perot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot), who received just 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992 as a third party candidate. Trump ought strictly to have been a third party candidate too, but his first great victory was winning the Republican party nomination. So the bottom line of the comparison with Richard III is that in 2016 Trump won fair and square, and in so doing put himself in a position to do some governing. Again, what he actually did is not at issue here. And in 2020? It sounds like he defeated Richard of Gloucester, who was nonetheless crowned as Richard III… and who survived for two years until Henry VII came along.

(4.c.) This segues neatly into Henry VIII and his personal sacrifice (as I see it in Shakespeare) in combating via something less than open warfare a foreign power that is also exerting a subversive influence at home. Back in the eighties, the main plank in Trump’s platform on which he built his political career was the then annual $200 billion the US was giving away in foreign aid to countries such as Japan or Saudi Arabia. Saving that money has always been part of his Make America Great Again policy. Now China would appear to be looming large. Here in Europe, I doubt if even now the perceived threat from China has registered much if at all among non-English speakers not attuned to alternative media ideas. For them the ‘China virus’ is just racism, whereas the formula seems intended to explain not just what is killing America (origin) but also who and how (CCP bioweapon). Henry VIII and his children fought a losing battle, and many of their subjects doubtless had no inkling of the real war that was being fought. This is the point where one would hope any resemblance with Trump would stop.

However, what can be said is that the parallel with the Tudor dynasty works up to a point. And that point is where Shakespeare’s message is ‘the worst is yet to come’. When things are getting worse, the impression is that they cannot get any worse, and yet they often do. Shakespeare notes this with hindsight and projects into the future, which from the standpoint of the history plays is his present. But when we project this further into Shakespeare’s future, i.e. our present, what happens? We expect still worse. But that is not necessarily what we will get. In October, November and December the days get shorter and shorter, and solely on this basis, we should expect January to be still worse. Not so. (This is the mistake of climate scientists in my humble opinion.) When we get past the solstice, we discover that the best is still to come. In other words, both optimism and pessimism can both be wrong when out of season. What we need is a calendar of the longer cycles of the local universe in order to know where we stand right now.

Another approach would be to determine what if anything might be worse than our present plight. Some Elizabethans thought that if they were condemned to hell fire for their faith, life was no longer worth living. The most steadfast became martyrs, the least steadfast became Protestants, and a few diehards became subversives. Shakespeare’s message of subversion is that English Catholicism is the true faith, and therefore that Elizabeth has got on the wrong side of the argument in combatting it. Killing the body was never going to be a solution to an ‘error’ of the soul.

What is worse than hell fire which might be faced by us descendants of the survivors weakened by that purge can only be one thing: various attempts to eliminate the soul altogether. This certainly corresponds to much of the woowoo stuff that is being written in our century. If so, then it is probably true this time that for humans things cannot get any worse than right now, having genuinely nothing more valuable to lose. Things can only cease or improve, and for anyone else for whom such times are good, they can only cease or become not so good.

Yesterday, as I was finalizing my last post and about to press the submit button, Bill Ryan posted this (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100318-The-Qanon-posts-and-associated-US-political-analysis&p=1404961&viewfull=1#post1404961).
What this analysis – 40,000 troops in Washington DC, the first family leaving the White House and advising all supporters to keep well away – basically does is move America onto a hot war footing with China, and D-Day is… tomorrow! We are back with what in December I called ‘the culmination of the atomic age’ (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?113403-Pigtail-Gurl-with-Starfire-Tor-Prophecies-precognitions-and-much-more&p=1399436&viewfull=1#post1399436)

What makes the current situation so hard to comprehend is its magnitude: it is so huge that we can only see it in terms of something smaller, such as election fraud, a bad loser. The furthest our imaginations can push out the envelope in saying ‘the worst is right now’ would have to be World War III. The reassuring thing then becomes that we have already been here: Donald Trump is JFK confronting another, bigger Cuban missile crisis (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?111673-Two-men-who-saved-the-world&p=1370527&viewfull=1#post1370527). Not only that: he is also all at once Henry VIII winning Henry V’s war, Henry VI praying to stop Richard III, Henry VII intervening to stop Richard III – getting the best out of everybody. As we know, this crisis has been building up for centuries.

What I just said – it is so huge that we can only see it in terms of something smaller – also applies to people: they are so huge that we can only see them in terms of someone smaller. The president is inevitably greater than the little incumbent with all his foibles, barely worthy of the office. However, it would be a mistake to see that person as some kind of saviour, since what makes them effective is through working as just another cog in the human machine. We are all so much bigger than we look. Such belittling is the starting point of Henry V, with those insulting tennis balls: ‘tell the pleasant Prince this mock of his hath turned his balls to gunstones’.

The hugeness of Trump’s task is inversely proportionate: to turn nuclear warheads into golf balls. World War III has to be won with no missiles being launched. Those French nobles at Agincourt had no room to wield their lances; more of the same is required here. The odds are hugely against this happening – just as they were then. In his famous D-day minus one ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian’ speech (no, Macbeth: life is not ‘a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing’), Henry V ends with courageous words for those asleep (blissfully unaware) at home:

And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. Some years ago, a French minister, Alain Peyrefitte, wrote a book I have not read, titled Quand la Chine s’éveillera, le monde tremblera: When China awakens, the world will tremble. Taking a leaf out of Shakespeare’s book in copy-editing the translation of Psalm 46 (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?95596-Shakespeare-did-NOT-write-Shakespeare.--Mark-Twain-Is-Shakespeare-Dead--&p=1378508&viewfull=1#post1378508),
let me rephrase that translation: When China takes up the Spear, the world Will Shake.

A good place for me to end this little foray into Shakespeare. See you later.

[araucaria]

In the Guardian today, Edward Docx (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/mar/18/all-hail-the-clown-king-how-boris-johnson-made-it-by-playing-the-fool) eloquently describes what happens in the UK when the Clown assumes the Crown – the point I was clumsily making in my post #52 (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?95596-Shakespeare-did-NOT-write-Shakespeare.--Mark-Twain-Is-Shakespeare-Dead--&p=1404962&viewfull=1#post1404962) above .

While the whole piece is worth reading, let me just quote the references to Shakespeare on topic in this thread:

This is Eastcheap Britain and Falstaff is in charge. It is in the two Henry IV plays that Shakespeare most clearly illuminates the gulf between his great, theatre-filling clown, Falstaff, and the young Prince Hal who will go on to become the archetype of the king – Henry V. At the mock-court of Falstaff’s tavern, we are invited to laugh and drink more ale, pinch barmaid’s bottoms, dance with dead cats and put bedpans on our heads while Falstaff entertains us with stories of his bravery and heroism that we all know are flagrant lies. Says Prince Hal to the portly purveyor of falsehoods: “These lies are like their father that begets them, gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” Meanwhile, the realm falls apart.

Since we have no Hal and have crowned the clown instead, the play we are now watching in the UK asks an ever more pressing question: can Falstaff become Henry V and lead his country with true seriousness and purpose? Or is the vaccine-cloaked transformation now being enacted merely superficial – a shifting of the scenery?

In dramatic terms, just as death reveals the life of the kingly archetype as noble and purposeful, so the clown is revealed as foolish and meaningless. When Hamlet takes hold of Yorick’s skull (another popular clown) in the graveyard, he asks: “Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”

And there’s another moment in Hamlet that’s germane here – the scene where Shakespeare has the prince instruct the visiting actors. Where Hamlet explicitly warns them about clowns. Warns them not to allow the clowns to distract the audience and make them laugh while important issues are being settled. Warns them that there are certain clowns who seek to do this merely to remain in the limelight – with no regard for either the meaning of the play, nor the understanding of the audience.

“Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them,” Hamlet says. “For there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.”

Masks change, not archetypes. The fool still holds the stage. And pitiful ambition is precisely what we are watching.

[Bill Ryan]

For anyone who enjoyed Keir Cutler's one-man show presentation of Mark Twain's "Is Shakespeare Dead?", shown in my opening post (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?95596-Shakespeare-did-NOT-write-Shakespeare.--Mark-Twain-Is-Shakespeare-Dead--&p=1129191&viewfull=1#post1129191):


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ72Ew1ujlk
... here's a follow-up, his second one-man show on the same topic. It's a bunch of fun, makes some beautiful points, and is nearly as good. :sun:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqT5V2xi0zQ

[Bill Ryan]

To bump this thread (which I find fascinating as an intricate historical detective story), there are many parallels with what's happening in the world today. It's very instructive as a study in human nature.


The orthodox opinion (of who really wrote Shakespeare's works), promoted by the mainstream and almost all academia, is: The issue is decided. Don't ask questions. Trust the experts. Shut up.



Doubters of the don't-question-this narrative, which include some highly qualified researchers and scholars, are often ridiculed, subjected to ad hominem attacks, and censored. (Yes, really.)



University teachers who have included the "Shakespeare authorship question" in their courses have frequently been blacklisted. PhD students have been told that if they tackle the subject, they will have their thesis rejected.



Keir Cutler's second one-man show (video in the post above (https://youtube.com/watch?v=tqT5V2xi0zQ)) makes the point that the belief that William Shaxper (the Stratford man's real name) was the author of Shakespeare's works has become a faith-based religion by all definitions of the word. Heretics are excommunicated and called "conspiracy theorists".

[happyuk]

I heartily recommend Bill Bryson's take on Shakespeare. I consider all of his books a joy to read.

https://shop.shakespearesglobe.com/products/bill-bryson-shakespeare

What Bryson manages to achieve, in my opinion, is not only do a sterling job of challenging the set-in-stone myths, factoids and utter untruths about his life, but does it in a way that really brings to life what life must have been like in Elizabethan England, such as what people ate, drank, wore and the conditions they worked in. He notes with amazement, though many of us know this already, that the consumption of beer was a gallon per day per person, not because alcoholism was so rampant, but because it was the water was so dangerous to drink. Other details are quirkily specific, such as the laws about hat-wearing!

Bryson doesn't pretend to be an academic, but simply attacks the subject with a fresh pair of eyes, and is unafraid to call out humbug and hubris where he see it. Like the Jack the Ripper mysteries, the question of who or what Shakespeare really was has also become a thriving industry.

Bryson makes the brilliant point that nobody ever questioned Shakespeare’s authorship in his lifetime. Nor did the two friends and colleagues who prepared the First Folio seven years after his death and put his name and image on the title page.

[Bill Ryan]

Bryson makes the brilliant point that nobody ever questioned Shakespeare’s authorship in his lifetime. And nobody acknowledged it, either. :) Not one person. Zero.

Do watch the first 4 (four) minutes of the very funny — and in my opinion, very astute — video of Keir Cutler's second one-man show a couple of posts above. Link here (https://youtube.com/watch?v=tqT5V2xi0zQ).

If William Shaxper (the businessman and actor) was a playwright, no-one in Stratford was aware of it. The evidence is overwhelming that he could not read or write, and could barely sign his name.

The key to unlock the whole thing, rather too much to discuss in just one brief post reply, is that shake-speare was a pseudonym which was quite often used as an alias to disguise the author of other plays of that age as well.

The name (frequently hyphenated) was entirely based on the spear always held by Athena, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom.

When she shook her spear, the light of knowledge flashed forth, and all the darkness of ignorance fled.


https://i0.wp.com/authorjoannereed.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-07-24-athena-vignette.jpeg?fit=600%2C775&ssl=1

[jaybee]

.
from Bill's post above...

The name (frequently hyphenated) was entirely based on the spear always held by Athena, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom.

When she shook her spear, the light of knowledge flashed forth, and all the darkness of ignorance fled.


This is a very fascinating subject - I watched this last night and although it's long - it held me from beginning to end - (with a little break in the middle to prevent eye strain :) )

I don't want to say too much about it to spoil any surprises - I don't think it's been posted in the thread before...

I was pretty much mind blown -

Let's put it like this.... together with the Bible what other books would it be impossible to get rid of completely because they are so widely disseminated ( in Western culture)....

Just on the practicalities I think the body of work is just too big for one man to have produced - and the fact that there are no manuscripts that survived is telling...

I live just a few miles away from Stratford and I wonder why it was picked to be the birthplace of Shakespeare - (if it was just picked which seems highly likely)..perhaps because it is geographically the centre of England - I think the centre is attributed to Henley-in-Arden now but it depends on how it's calculated and it's in the same general area (Warwickshire) in those days perhaps Stratford was considered to be nearest the centre....

enjoy

Cracking The Shakespeare Code (2017) Full Documentary Movie.... {2:04:36}


XpJzi3Junuc

[happyuk]

Another really interesting talk on this topic by Dr Nick Kollerstrom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Kollerstrom), a science historian, former Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and political activist.


William Shakespeare - the curious case of the Playwright who did not exist.

He has also contributed some really interesting interviews (https://www.richplanet.net/richp_genre.php?ref=242&part=1&gen=2) with Richard D Hall as well.
Enjoy.

RsI8V3Yam7Y

[Delight]

Alexander Waugh (grandson of Evelyn Waugh) is a researcher and this IMO is a fascinating discussion... there has been an ONGOING esoteric secret manipulation of culture.


PROOF Shakespeare Was A RESET ALIAS - Alexander Waugh

Antistratfordian Oxfordian theory: Edward De Vere was indeed Shakespeare.
Alexander Waugh channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHN7...

Video: The Incalculable Genius of John Dee: https://youtu.be/U-PWR7-0Hp4


eojojh04Rzs

[Bill Ryan]

Bumping this thread with a most excellent and concise interview of author Elizabeth Winkler by Chris Hedges of The Real News Network, who clearly knows a lot about the subject. (And so does Elizabeth Winkler!)

For anyone who's new to this topic, this is just 30 minutes long and covers almost the entire series of key questions — including how come so many scholars just will not look at the issue of who actually wrote this huge body of inspired work.

The video title is Was Shakespeare a woman? — but that's clickbait, as the conversation is about FAR more than that. Only Bacon and Marlowe are discussed as possible authors, and only in the last few minutes of the video.

And whether 'Shakespeare was a woman' isn't addressed at all. Elizabeth Winkler's book is called Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature (https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Was-Woman-Other-Heresies/dp/198217126X), but that title is largely clickbait too. :)

For who the author really was (or the authors really were!), there's a ton of material in this Avalon thread. Some might find it academic and arcane, but the whole subject says a LOT about how human nature interferes to obstruct real scholarship — and science, too.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmcpGENoRzs

[Bruce G Charlton]

I have only dipped-into this issue - but I usually drop-out when I realize that so many commenters don't realize how much better a writer/ poet "Shakespeare" (whoever he was) was, than anybody else alive at the time (or before, or since).

By my evaluation; there is nobody known, ever, who could have written the stuff attributed-to Shakespeare - on the basis of what we have of other writers.

If it wasn't Shakespeare of Stratford who wrote the stuff, then it surely wasn't some other writer/ poet of the era, nor any combination of writers. We are dealing with a genius whose work is beyond that of other geniuses. I think that assumption must form the basis of discussion!

This seems to me the key fact about the business; in other words, unless that fact is acknowledged - I see no reason to pay attention to the discussion.

[Satori]

I have only dipped-into this issue - but I usually drop-out when I realize that so many commenters don't realize how much better a writer/ poet "Shakespeare" (whoever he was) was, than anybody else alive at the time (or before, or since).

By my evaluation; there is nobody known, ever, who could have written the stuff attributed-to Shakespeare - on the basis of what we have of other writers.

If it wasn't Shakespeare of Stratford who wrote the stuff, then it surely wasn't some other writer/ poet of the era, nor any combination of writers. We are dealing with a genius whose work is beyond that of other geniuses. I think that assumption must form the basis of discussion!

This seems to me the key fact about the business; in other words, unless that fact is acknowledged - I see no reason to pay attention to the discussion.

The “Shakespeare” from New Place, Stratford, was William Shakspere. That is not a misspelling. Pronounced shack-spear.

For my money, “William Shakespeare” was a pseudonym or nom de plume used by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. See, e.g., Shakespeare Identified, by J. Thomas Looney and the video in post 61 above. I have and have read Looney’s book. I’m no scholar on the subject, but Looney makes a very convincing case for why de Vere was Shakespeare and why Shakspere was not.

[Bill Ryan]

For my money, “William Shakespeare” was a pseudonym or nom de plume used by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. See, e.g., Shakespeare Identified, by J. Thomas Looney and the video in post 61 above. I have and have read Looney’s book. I’m no scholar on the subject, but Looney makes a very convincing case for why de Vere was Shakespeare and why Shakspere was not.I'm far from a scholar in this area either, but to my lay ear the case for de Vere is fairly persuasive. (But it seems it has to be possible there may have been some other authors as well, even if they merely revised some material.)

This is a compelling half-hour video laying out a small mountain of evidence suggesting that Shakespeare = de Vere. Whatever one's views, it's surely very interesting. Looney's 1920 book is referenced in some detail.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoEqxVeV_ho


If it wasn't Shakespeare of Stratford who wrote the sonnets and plays, then it surely wasn't some other writer/ poet of the era, nor any combination of writers. We are dealing with a genius whose work is beyond that of other geniuses.Bruce, many thanks — I can't possibly disagree about the level of genius involved. It does kind of boggle the mind. (I do think we should start a thread on the nature of genius, btw, and its rarity in the modern world.)

In the video I posted (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?95596-Shakespeare-did-NOT-write-Shakespeare.--Mark-Twain-Is-Shakespeare-Dead--&p=1575219&viewfull=1#post1575219) to which you replied, Elizabeth Winkler makes the point that 'Sratfordians' (the name given to those who hold that Shakspere from Stratford was the author) kind of wave their hands about the authorship issue and treat it as if it was some kind of mysterious but important historical text, like the Rosetta Stone, the real author forever lost in time. And therefore, the Stratfordians continue, let's focus only on the wonderful works of genius themselves and nothing else at all.

If it wasn't any well-known historical figure (de Vere, Marlowe, Bacon, or any of the others who have been proposed), then it's surely still a compelling detective story to try to discover what unknown person really did write all this marvelous work.

[Bill Ryan]

More on this. I didn't know of Elizabeth Winkler before, so I started to look for more information. Below is another 30-minute interview, in which she sparkles with humor, articulacy and intelligence. I was impressed.

She's far more interested in the phenomenon of what's become a kind of religion-which-must-not-be-challenged (and what it's like to be a heretical journalist asking questions which are taboo), than trying to make a case for any particular author, whether a woman or not. Asking if Shakespeare was a woman was just how she started her journey, so that question has become a kind of brand with which she's associated and identified.

And many Avalon readers, even if they have little curiosity about Shakespeare, might be really interested in the experience of a very smart mainstream journalist who accidentally strays into the minefield of taboo questions which are fiercely protected by academic orthodoxy. There are lessons here.

(Her excellent 2019 Atlantic article, attracting a sudden storm of controversy which shocked her, is here (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076/), and her book is here (https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Elizabeth%20Winkler%20-%20Shakespeare%20Was%20a%20Woman%20and%20Other%20Heresies%20-%20How%20Doubting%20the%20Bard%20Became%20the%20Biggest%20Taboo%20in%20Literature.pdf). I'm going to read it.)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kN09LfI2NQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kN09LfI2NQ

[Michel Leclerc]

I have only dipped-into this issue - but I usually drop-out when I realize that so many commenters don't realize how much better a writer/ poet "Shakespeare" (whoever he was) was, than anybody else alive at the time (or before, or since).

By my evaluation; there is nobody known, ever, who could have written the stuff attributed-to Shakespeare - on the basis of what we have of other writers.

If it wasn't Shakespeare of Stratford who wrote the stuff, then it surely wasn't some other writer/ poet of the era, nor any combination of writers. We are dealing with a genius whose work is beyond that of other geniuses. I think that assumption must form the basis of discussion!

This seems to me the key fact about the business; in other words, unless that fact is acknowledged - I see no reason to pay attention to the discussion.

Any language is worth its greatest poet. Any poet is worth his/her best poem.

All best poems of any greatest poets are equally good.

There are no yardsticks to measure the works of geniuses.

[Matthew]

The Shakespeare plays were spicy and there are too many. My best frame of reference isn't that it was this guy, or that guy, but it was many collaborating. Then this jumps out at me: there's a drinking house/or club, or clicky group, hosted by Shakespeare with actor/theatre buddies and they get drunk because they love beer and good company, with famous theater personalities of the time attending, and they have great banter together which is politically and/or socially spicy, somewhat taboo, but its so funny they're all playing ideas off each other as banter does, getting spicier and more smart-ass, and they have each other in hysterics. It's so much fun but a little too naughty which really propels the group. There are plays in that drunken banter and they can't help themselves but write them into plays, and see what they can get away with, playing off each other, whoever is in attendance. They might have highbrow careers in other fields so this set of plays that evolved from spicy banter is too hot for them so its published with a level of indirection. Then many of those hugely talented people mentioned could contribute, and possible many more. They are all suspects for a reason. I don't know what I'm talking about, but this idea jumps out at me more than trying to fit it into a frame of reference involving one single person. Thinking aloud. Sorry about the big paragraph but this idea is a pure fantasy and doesn't deserve good formatting.

[jaybee]

.
from Bill's post above...

The name (frequently hyphenated) was entirely based on the spear always held by Athena, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom.

When she shook her spear, the light of knowledge flashed forth, and all the darkness of ignorance fled.


This is a very fascinating subject - I watched this last night and although it's long - it held me from beginning to end - (with a little break in the middle to prevent eye strain :) )

I don't want to say too much about it to spoil any surprises - I don't think it's been posted in the thread before...

I was pretty much mind blown -

Let's put it like this.... together with the Bible what other books would it be impossible to get rid of completely because they are so widely disseminated ( in Western culture)....

Just on the practicalities I think the body of work is just too big for one man to have produced - and the fact that there are no manuscripts that survived is telling...

I live just a few miles away from Stratford and I wonder why it was picked to be the birthplace of Shakespeare - (if it was just picked which seems highly likely)..perhaps because it is geographically the centre of England - I think the centre is attributed to Henley-in-Arden now but it depends on how it's calculated and it's in the same general area (Warwickshire) in those days perhaps Stratford was considered to be nearest the centre....

enjoy

Cracking The Shakespeare Code (2017) Full Documentary Movie.... {2:04:36}


XpJzi3Junuc


Hmmm don't know why the above video disappeared - but anyway.... here it is again in 3 parts...

Cracking the Shakespeare Code: The Seven Steps to Mercy - Part 1 | Free Documentary History(50:18)

3XSx72gF0NQ


14 Jul 2021
This is the amazing story of Petter Amundsen, a Norwegian organist, who believes he has deciphered a secret code hidden in Shakespeare’s first folio. The code reveals a treasure map where mythical objects are hidden. We follow Amundsen and Dr. Robert Crumpton, a sceptical historian, on their quest to discover the truth. This first episode examines the codes to be found in Shakespeare’s plays and questions who really wrote them.

In this three part series, we learn how the map functions and about the codes often hidden in Renaissance art. We discover who might have wanted to hide the treasure and how they did it and journey across the world to a tiny island in Nova Scotia in search of the treasure.

The other 2 parts...

Cracking the Shakespeare Code: The Seven Steps to Mercy - Part 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-AcYMK87kQ&t=0s)

Cracking the Shakespeare Code: The Seven Steps to Mercy - Part 3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD-npjOhppg&t=0s)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


It's a long time since I watched this documentary and in the last three years I've watched a LOT of stuff on the subject - I can't remember all the details of this particular documentary so will watch it all again very soon - I happened to see that the video was missing in my post when I was going through this thread again just now... the subject about the authorship of the Shakespeare Plays is VERY intriguing - addictive even :) - I've spent many happy hours getting deeper into the topic....

And it's a topic that goes deeper than deep - it will be interesting revisiting the above documentary having gone on a long journey into the subject -

Edward de Vere17th Earl of Oxford (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere,_17th_Earl_of_Oxford) has to be the leading contender as the true author, IMO....if he didn't write every single word of it himself he was the main historical character pulling it all together... writing and/or directing the whole 'project' (plays and sonnets) there's loads of fascinating research work on the subject and at times it meanders into serious political areas --- for example there is some strong speculation that he and Queen Elizabeth the First may have had a secret child together - and there is also speculation that Edward de Vere was a big part of translating and creating the King James version of the Bible -

It's a huge and fascinating subject .... all of it....there always seems to be more to learn - its a bottomless pit of information and research...

[161803398]

I found the Complete Works of William Shakespeare in the Irish Literature section at a bookstore in Dublin.

[Satori]

The Shakespeare plays were spicy and there are too many. My best frame of reference isn't that it was this guy, or that guy, but it was many collaborating. Then this jumps out at me: there's a drinking house/or club, or clicky group, hosted by Shakespeare with actor/theatre buddies and they get drunk because they love beer and good company, with famous theater personalities of the time attending, and they have great banter together which is politically and/or socially spicy, somewhat taboo, but its so funny they're all playing ideas off each other as banter does, getting spicier and more smart-ass, and they have each other in hysterics. It's so much fun but a little too naughty which really propels the group. There are plays in that drunken banter and they can't help themselves but write them into plays, and see what they can get away with, playing off each other, whoever is in attendance. They might have highbrow careers in other fields so this set of plays that evolved from spicy banter is too hot for them so its published with a level of indirection. Then many of those hugely talented people mentioned could contribute, and possible many more. They are all suspects for a reason. I don't know what I'm talking about, but this idea jumps out at me more than trying to fit it into a frame of reference involving one single person. Thinking aloud. Sorry about the big paragraph but this idea is a pure fantasy and doesn't deserve good formatting.

That’s how SNL skits are developed. Why not Shakespeare?

[Tintin]

.
Hello, Folks: this is another conspiracy, a most interesting one that some of you may not have heard about.

Many, many, MANY researchers, historians, authors, actors and actresses profoundly suspect (and many of them are 100% certain) that William Shakespeare (the simple, everyman guy from Stratford-on-Avon) did not write the works famously attributed to him.


Here are the facts, for anyone who may not be aware:


Shakespeare never traveled outside of England, and never learned any other language.
He had no university education, and may not even have attended school.
He may actually have been unable to read or write: his parents, wife, and children were all illiterate.
Not one letter from him has ever been found, and no trace remains of any of the original manuscripts.
In his will, he never mentions a single book or play, and appears never to have owned any books at all.
Stratford is not mentioned once in any of his works.
When he died, there was no celebration of the man at the time, at all.
The only thing in his writing is a handful of wobbly signatures, that mis-spell his own name, and it seems he actually may even have had trouble holding a pen.
Meanwhile, his plays and sonnets show a most extremely intelligent, literate, sophisticated, well-connected, well-traveled, and highly educated author, who had a massive vocabulary of 26,000 words (most people use 2,000, even today), understood Italian, French, Latin and Greek, history, medicine, law, falconry, the ways of the Royal high court, and who had clearly traveled in Italy and knew it well.

Go figure. :)

The most likely candidates for who really wrote the plays are (in order, maybe)


Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
Christopher Marlowe.
Francis Bacon.
(many others have been proposed, too, and every one of them is more likely to have written Shakespeare than Shakespeare. :) )



Great fun revisiting this thread, and the facts listed above are, I'd be very certain, indisputable.

A 26,000 word vocabulary absolutely rules out one writer being responsible: I've been as certain as I can for quite some time that this really was a collective exercise, astounding in its breadth and symbolism, and meaning, with input most likely from both male and female writers of the time, and as has been mentioned really was an esoteric reset; a reimagining and reinvention of the language to export around the globe, and the resultant exertion of influence: a kind of New Language World Order which eventually all strata of society were to gain access.

I have little doubt that the names mentioned above really did contribute.

If a relatively small group of men in the late 19th century - Rhodes et-al - could shape the entire 20th century in their image, then I rather imagine it was based on some model/practice beforehand, by men of a like-mind :)

Francis Bacon may well have been the Director of Operations - Editor-in-Chief.

https://avalonlibrary.net/Tintin/Various_%28of_interest%29/Francis%20Bacon%20and%20the%20Knights%20of%20the%20Helmet.gif

(For Bacon, see also Peter Dawkins (https://avalonlibrary.net/?dir=Francis_Bacon))

[Tintin]

More on Francis Bacon here (https://sirbacon.org/knightmp.htm). I challenge the one writer hypothesis on the simple grounds that that is to stretch the notion of polymathism to a point that it will inevitably break; that it is fanciful, and perhaps an affront to the Divine creator - or word (Logos), and therefore, ill-logical, the Divine creator being, I would propose, the only true polymath.

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

Extracted from, https://sirbacon.org/knightmp.htm


WILL SHAKSPER OF STRATFORD


The claim that the Stratford legend is well-documented is a two-edged sword. In some ways the actor's uninspiring life story is too well documented. The truth is that the "documented" allusions to Shakespeare fall into two distinct categories, and need to be classified accordingly. Concrete allusions to the family affairs and business activities of the actor and money-lender are quite distinct from the more fanciful allusions to the writer of the drama. Having assumed that Will Shaksper wrote the Plays, the orthodox infer--against all the evidence--that the actor was the kind of man which the Plays themselves show that the author must have been. But the inference is necessitated only by the assumption. To claim all the eulogies intended for the author of the plays as being intended for Will Shaksper of Stratford is, clearly, to beg the whole question of the author's identity.

Shakespearean orthodoxy has become a secular creed; the wildest statements are often made in support of it and the most dubious and counterfeit relics are accepted and worshipped by the credulous. The same historical inaccuracy is employed to denounce a rival theory. It is said, with great ignorance, that Francis Bacon had no interest in the theatre; yet we find him writing masques and revels at Gray's Inn, organizing them in middle life, writing a profound study on the ethics of the theatre, the uses and abuses of "stage-plays", and commending the acting profession as a form of personal training. It is also alleged, with tedious repetition, that Bacon possessed no poetical gifts. Yet Ben Jonson compared him to Homer and Virgil, and Shelley regarded him not only as a poet, but as the greatest philosopher-poet since Plato.*

It is unfortunate that Will Shaksper seems not to have corresponded with anyone. He is not, of course, the only Elizabethan dramatist of whom this can be said, but one would have expected a great writer, who had possessed himself of the highest culture of the age in which he lived, to have taken some interest in contemporary affairs and in other great writers. Most of the writers and dramatists of that day were University men. Spenser, Watson, Harvey, Bacon, Marlowe, Nash and Greene went to Cambridge. Lyly, Lodge, Peele, *Bodley and others went to Oxford. Ben Jonson was educated at Westminster School; Lord Oxford had private tutors and later studied at Gray's Inn.

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

(Tintin note:*Bodley, after whom the Bodleian Library in Oxford is named was an intelligence agent/officer (modern equivalent of MI-6) whose work would often take him abroad.)



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

More, here:


The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, is now in the British Museum. Bacon's handwriting is shown here in half scale facsimile (https://sirbacon.org/graphics/promus2.gif). Note the date. Many of Bacon's "gags" appeared verbatim or closely paralleled in Shake-speare, at a later date.

The Promus

https://sirbacon.org/graphics/promus2.gif

[jaybee]

.

{snipped}

The most likely candidates for who really wrote the plays are (in order, maybe)


Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
Christopher Marlowe.
Francis Bacon.
(many others have been proposed, too, and every one of them is more likely to have written Shakespeare than Shakespeare. :) )



Great fun revisiting this thread, and the facts listed above are, I'd be very certain, indisputable.

A 26,000 word vocabulary absolutely rules out one writer being responsible: I've been as certain as I can for quite some time that this really was a collective exercise, astounding in its breadth and symbolism, and meaning, with input most likely from both male and female writers of the time, and as has been mentioned really was an esoteric reset; a reimagining and reinvention of the language to export around the globe, and the resultant exertion of influence: a kind of New Language World Order which eventually all strata of society were to gain access.

I have little doubt that the names mentioned above really did contribute.



You said..."Great fun revisiting this thread......."..............yes the whole Shakespeare Authorship question is like a 400 year old Soap Opera isn't it... :) .... larger than life characters - twists and turns in dramatic plot lines - arguments - mystery - intrigue - (etc...)

I enjoy the 'Blue Boar Tavern' discussions and this one has a good old gossip about Marlowe and Bacon -

Marlowe, a creative adventurous young man .... and spy...who may (or may not) have met a sticky end stabbed through the eye in a dispute about settling a bill in a tavern...

Bacon... an enthusiastic Big Thinking professor type - aspiring scientist who through lack of funding then went to make a name for himself as a lawyer...


The video is a presentation by the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship so they are all basically in the 'data strongly points to Edward de Vere'... camp.... (or a collaboration where de Vere is the dominant character -) but who knows Bacon and Marlowe could have been dominant players in the real life drama as well.... the whole endevour - the Plays and Sonnets and involvement in the production of the King James Bible....was a HUGE project - more than likely with a hidden agenda + involving secret codes and cyphers and whatnot ............ as a Block Buster Soap Opera it has it all....


Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon: Who Are Those Guys? at the Blue Boar Tavern(1:01:24)

8NIhPE_74ao


20 Jun 2024
Who Are Those Guys: Marlowe and Bacon, and Was One of Them Shakespeare?

Blue Boar Tavern regulars Bonner Cutting, Dorothea Dickerman, Alex McNeil, Phoebe Nir and special guest bartender Tom Woosnam discuss two more fascinating Elizabethan personalities as part of the series “Who Are Those Guys?”

Playwright and spy Christopher Marlowe lived large swaths of his life deeply hidden in the shadows. His dissolute reputation as a “rakehell” was matched only by his shining reputation as one of the greatest dramatists in Elizabethan London. His mysterious and violent death in 1593 has raised questions ever since.

Francis Bacon, philosopher, lawyer and statesman, is considered today to be one of the founders of the scientific method of inquiry. He climbed to the height of political power under King James but suffered an irretrievable fall from grace in 1621.

Get to know these accomplished men, both who have been put forth by their supporters as the hidden face behind the pseudonym “William Shakespeare.”


:thumbsup:

[Michel Leclerc]

Exceedingly interesting. I miss the Italian lady scholar as a potential writer.. (Nonetheless I may be forgiven my conviction that the author of the Sonnets was a man.. ..and that the author of the plays was the author of the Sonnets...)..

Bill (thank you for bringing up this vast subject!), I would like to ask you: what did/do you mean when calling “Shake-speare”'s endeavour “an esoteric reset”? Could you elaborate that statement a little?

[Michel Leclerc]

Sorry Bill, sorry Tintin.

I have just understood that this statement was yours, Tintin.

Could you develop your thought a little? "Esoteric”, yes, I would say, as all great art is.. but then: "reset" – ?