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Steven Brake
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 01 January 2016
Posts: 562
Posted: 21 January 2021 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

@Mark:

As I posted before, JK Rowling got her train stations mixed up when writing Harry Potter, but nobody's suggested that this proves she didn't write Harry Potter.

Conan Doyle doesn't seem to have known if Watson's first names was John or James (Dorothy Sayers ingeniously suggested that John H Watson was John Hamish Watson, with Hamish being the Scottish version of James!), but nobody's suggested that this proves he didn't write Sherlock Holmes.

Of course, writers can and do make mistakes. And there is, as you say, poetic license. In Henry V, the Battle of Agincourt is made the one, crushing victory over the French, rather than a crushing victory followed by further victories until France surrenders. It makes for a neater play.

But the plays make repeated mistakes about history and geography, not just one or two, or dramatic license, that indicate someone who isn't completely familiar with his subject matter. This doesn't prove Will of Stratford's authorship, but it's hard to see how it bolsters Oxford's claim.

Edited to add (sorry, just saw your other post!):I haven't made the claim that Shakespeare read 40 year old obscure legal cases. I've pointed out that the plays repeatedly demonstrate lapses of knowledge inconsistent with a classically educated, well-travelled nobleman.



Edited by Steven Brake on 21 January 2021 at 2:41pm
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Mark Haslett
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Joined: 19 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 6059
Posted: 21 January 2021 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

Steven: This doesn't prove Will of Stratford's authorship, but it's hard to see how it bolsters Oxford's claim.

**

One thing at a time -- The case you are appearing to make is that the Author, whomever it may be, had a second-rate education. The evidence, you say, are "repeated" mistakes   and some accusations from Jonson and Greene.

Nevermind that the mistakes are virtually inconsequential and could be explained by poetic license (what is the point of having a chiming clock? So the audience can hear it, of course-- not to mislead them to a false history of clock-making).

The point is this doesn't add up for Stratford or Oxford or anyone.

For any case to be made with evidence that the plays "demonstrate lapses inconsistent with a classically educated, well-travelled nobleman", the evidence has outweigh other evidence (like the writer's legal and medical knowledge and manner of thought) that the author was indeed a classically educated, well-travelled noblemen.

Your position seems to be that this list does that.

The example of the painting in Lucrece and the legal case in the grave-digger's speech are enough to make me disagree.

And they are only a sliver of the giant mass of knowledge that needs to be explained away in the plays if we are to believe the author faked all his supposed mastery.

Edited by Mark Haslett on 21 January 2021 at 3:20pm
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Mark Haslett
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Joined: 19 April 2004
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Posted: 21 January 2021 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply

Julius Caeser (Folio text):

F1 Clocke strikes
Bru. Peace, count the Clocke.
Cas. The Clocke hath stricken three.
Treb. 'Tis time to part.
Cas. But it is doubtful yet,
Whether Caesar will come forth to day, or no:

Obviously, the staging (even the meter) is written to allow us to hear the clock. The entire play reads as if it's set in Elizabethan England.

Are we to believe Shakeseare "thought" JC lived in England?

It's just a farcical point upon which to pin the idea that the author was obviously just too darned uneducated to know Ceaser didn't have chiming clocks.
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Steven Brake
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Joined: 01 January 2016
Posts: 562
Posted: 21 January 2021 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply

@Mark:

The case you are appearing to make is that the Author, whomever it may be, had a second-rate education. 
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No, not second-rate, but not one that demonstrates an extensive education that Oxfordians claim the author must have had.
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The evidence, you say, are "repeated" mistakes   and some accusations from Jonson and Greene.
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Putting repeated in quotes doesn't refute the fact that they are mistakes. That were repeatedly made. Repeated mistakes, in fact.
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Nevermind that the mistakes are virtually inconsequential and could be explained by poetic license (what is the point of having a chiming clock? So the audience can hear it, of course-- not to mislead them to a false history of clock-making).
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Julius Caesar has a chiming clock. That's historically wrong. It isn't the kind of mistake Oxford, or a classically trained author - like, say Jonson, who scoffed at some the lines Shakespeare (or "the author", if you'd rather) originally wrote as being "ridiculous".

You may regard such errors as trivial, but to the classically educated, they were hugely significant.
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The point is this doesn't add up for Stratford or Oxford or anyone.
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No, it's not conclusive for Will. But it's difficult to see how such lapses could have been made by Oxford.
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For any case...the author was indeed a classically educated, well-travelled noblemen (truncated your quote to save space - and anyone can see the full quote above)
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No, that's the Oxfordian position. The plays themselves, and the comments of Shakespeare's contemporaries, belie this.
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The entire play reads as if it's set in Elizabethan England.
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Quite; hence Jonson's scorn for Shakespeare's presuming to write upon Ancient Rome despite having such flawed knowledge about it.

Shakespeare again having had the last laugh, of course. Who doesn't know the line "Friends, Romans, Countrymen!" and who can quote anything from Jonson's Sejanus!



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David Miller
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Posted: 21 January 2021 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply

I don't think any real conclusions about The Author of the Works Popularly Attributed to William Shakespeare can be drawn from inaccuracies in the plays.

The Author could have introduced or not corrected errors for reasons ranging from laziness to whimsy. Some could have been introduced by transcribers.

An educated writer could well have been disposed to sacrificing a few trivial facts in service to drama and language. Imposing contemporary culture and technology on the past has a literary tradition dating to The Iliad.
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Mark Haslett
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Joined: 19 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 6059
Posted: 21 January 2021 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply

Steven: Julius Caesar has a chiming clock. That's historically wrong. It isn't the kind of mistake Oxford, or a classically trained author - like, say Jonson, who scoffed at some the lines Shakespeare (or "the author", if you'd rather) originally wrote as being "ridiculous".

You may regard such errors as trivial, but to the classically educated, they were hugely significant.

**
By what authority do you make this claim? The play is not historically accurate in far more ways than this clock. This is for theatrical effect and for the audience's benefit.

With this established, you introduce the claim that classically educated theater folk of the era would find this error unthinkable and would never take such poetic license because... why?

You've mangled my statement before dismissing it as "the Oxfordian position." Why? I didn't say what you reposted and I am not making a case for Oxford. I'm making a case against Stratford.

How many posts is this now where your response to the evidence of the painting in Lucrece and the law case in Hamlet is just to repeat that the errors prove the author couldn't have an exceptional education?

Well, if he didn't have an exceptional education, then how did he write The Rape of Lucrece or Hamlet. Or any of the works outside of Shaxper's Last Will & Testament?

Edited by Mark Haslett on 21 January 2021 at 7:01pm
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Mark Haslett
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Posted: 21 January 2021 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | 7 post reply

For evidence of Law knowledge (which Shaxper would have no access to) I turn to:

Edward J. White whose 1911 "Commentaries on the Law in Shakespeare: with Explanations of the Legal Terms used in the Plays, Poems and Sonnets; and discussions of the Criminal Types Presented" said:

"In Shakespeare’s multiple personalities, there is none in which he appears more naturally and to better advantage than in the role of the lawyer. If true that all dramatic writing is but a form of autobiography, then the immortal Shakespeare must, at some time in his life, have studied law.”

Back in 1869, James Plaisted Wilde (Lord Penzance) spoke of Shakespeare’s “perfect familiarity with not only the principles, axioms, and maxims, but the technicalities of English law, a knowledge so perfect and intimate that he was never incorrect and never at fault... At every turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile, or illustration, his mind ever turned first to the law. He seems almost to have thought in legal phrases...”

B.J. Sokol and Mary Sokol's "Shakespeare’s Legal Language" (2000) has 500 pages discussing Shakespeare’s legal terms and concepts. The authors point out the Author (whoever it is) is basically law-obsessed.

Law schools regularly offer classes with variations on "Shakespeare and Law" and there are many published papers on the topic going at it from all kinds of angles with historical experts pointing out the wide variety of ways the Author fashions legal thinking into the work.

I'll cobble together a list of medical-expert references later.

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Steven Brake
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Joined: 01 January 2016
Posts: 562
Posted: 22 January 2021 at 1:35am | IP Logged | 8 post reply

@David:

I don't think any real conclusions about The Author of the Works Popularly Attributed to William Shakespeare can be drawn from inaccuracies in the plays.
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The plays contain errors difficult to reconcile with a classically educated, well-travelled person. They're more consistent with someone who read widely, but didn't always fully understand his sources. 

The First Folio was comprised of plays collected and published by people who had known William Shakespeare and wanted to preserve his memory.

That's a lot to simply ignore. And there's more, of course.

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The Author could have introduced or not corrected errors for reasons ranging from laziness to whimsy. 
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Or perhaps he deliberately put in supposed errors to cleverly conceal his identity? Don't be silly.
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Some could have been introduced by transcribers.
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True. There could be honest mistakes in printing. Or perhaps mistakes made by a collaborator. Although that raises the question of why said collaborator went along with the myth/lie of Will Shakespeare's authorship.
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Steven Brake
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Joined: 01 January 2016
Posts: 562
Posted: 22 January 2021 at 2:16am | IP Logged | 9 post reply

@Mark:
By what authority do you make this claim? The play is not historically accurate in far more ways than this clock. This is for theatrical effect and for the audience's benefit.
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The erudite Jonson scorned Shakespeare's dramatisation of Julius Caesar (quick note - I think I've posted above that he said this in conversation with Drummond; in actual fact, it comes from De Shakespeare Nostrat, in Jonson's Timbers, or Discoveries, posthumously published). To him, the mistakes that Shakespeare made - while possibly seeming negligible to you, or I - were indicative of fundamental failings, or lack of awareness, on Shakespeare's part.

Were Jonson's criticisms symptomatic of jealousy that his lesser-educated friend was producing so much better received work, retreating to pedantry to try and reclaim some degree of high ground? Possibly. And the same may well be true of Greene (if he was the author of A Groats-worth of Wit) and the author(s) of the Parnassus Plays. But the criticisms, however nit-picking they may seem, were made. 
------------------------------------------------------------ -----------------------------------------
With this established, you introduce the claim that classically educated theater folk of the era would find this error unthinkable and would never take such poetic license because... why?
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I don't introduce the claim, I repeat the criticisms that were made. As above, you may find their criticisms pedantic, and they may well have been rooted in indignation and jealousy - but they were made.
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You've mangled my statement before dismissing it as "the Oxfordian position." Why? I didn't say what you reposted and I am not making a case for Oxford. I'm making a case against Stratford.
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With regards to the former, do you mean the quote I truncated, explaining in parenthesis that I'd truncated it, and referring the reader to the quote directly above?

And with regards to your position, my apologies. I assumed you were making a case for, not arguing against.

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How many posts is this now where your response to the evidence of the painting in Lucrece and the law case in Hamlet is just to repeat that the errors prove the author couldn't have an exceptional education?
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What evidence have you provided regarding the painting? You've asserted that the poem of The Rape Of Lucrece directly refers to it. Isn't it possible that any supposed similarities are because they're both works on the same theme?

And why would  knowledge of Hales vs Petit only be available to someone with exceptional education? 
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Well, if he didn't have an exceptional education, then how did he write The Rape of Lucrece or Hamlet. Or any of the works outside of Shaxper's Last Will & Testament?
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If the author did have an exceptional education, why do the plays contain errors that indicate he didn't? Why did contemporary, well-educated writers poke fun and jibe at Shakespeare's lack of learning?
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For evidence of Law knowledge (which Shaxper would have no access to) 
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What is your source for this? Do you have any understanding of Elizabethan England? They were a litigious people. Indeed, one of the things we know about Will of Stratford is that he used the law courts to recover debts. This is something that that alternative Authorship theorists lay stress on, jibing at Shakespeare as a mere debt collector, and noting his his litigious mentality didn't seem to extend to suing over the "bad quortas" of his work that were in circulation.

Something that perhaps hasn't been brought up (although I've mentioned it in my reply to David Miller - see above) is the role of collaboration, which seems to have been the rule rather than the exception in writing plays. As I've posted above, it's generally accepted that Marlowe was the co-author of the Henry VI plays, and possibly Richard III too. Thomas Middleton's hand has been detected in Macbeth, and also in Timon Of Athens, Measure for Measure and All's Well That End's Well (although it should be noted that scholars dispute this, as they are wont to do).

Did none of Shakespeare's collaborators realise that the man they were purportedly working with was a stooge, or a front man, for another author? Or, if they did know, why did they keep continue to keep quiet about it? 
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John Byrne

Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132135
Posted: 22 January 2021 at 10:25am | IP Logged | 10 post reply

The Author's expertise in various fields--expertise we would expect in a peer of the realm, but not a glover's son from a small town four days ride from London--shines thru in subtle ways. He uses the language of the court, legal and royal, of the armed forces, of botany, of hunting, of so many things, casually, in much the same way I might say my "spider-sense is tingling" since that's a well used part of my lexicon.

The Author has been compared on many levels to Ben Jonson, his closest equivalent. Jonson wrote a play which includes a hunting scene. Jonson himself was not a hunter, so he used a well known reference book--but used all the terms he found there, awkwardly, not at all as a trained hunter would. The Author, on the other hand, used terms and expressions as if they were a natural part of his speech.

(An example is how Shakespeare used falconry terms to describe Desdemona in OTHELLO--and, interestingly enough, uses them exactly how Edward De Vere had used them in a short poem he'd written decades before the play.)

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John Byrne

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Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132135
Posted: 22 January 2021 at 10:29am | IP Logged | 11 post reply

Speaking of Desdemona, THIS...
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Steven Brake
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Joined: 01 January 2016
Posts: 562
Posted: 22 January 2021 at 11:32am | IP Logged | 12 post reply

The Author doesn't display expertise. He (or she! Now there's a plot twist...) constantly makes mistakes that are very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile, with someone classically educated and extensively travelled.

He (or she! I'll just use "he" from now on, though) didn't understand the succession to Richard II, confusing one Edmund Mortimer with another. It's an understandable mistake by someone who read Holinshed's Chronicle and didn't appreciate that he was reading about two different men. It's impossible to understand how it was made by a nobleman like De Vere, who would have prized his pedigree, and, as a necessary corollary, would have known the history of the other English noble families too.

In Richard III, Act II, scene 1, the author has Richard refer to Lord Woodville, Earl Rivers, and Lord Scales as three different people, when they were all one and the same - the latter two titles also being held by Anthony Woodville. Again, it's understandable if the author was low-born and misread his sources, but there's no way that Oxford, or any peer, would be capable of such an error. 

It's also worth noting that De Vere's ancestor, John De Vere, the 13th Earl of Oxford, appears in Richard III (and in Henry VI: Part Three). As the commander of Henry Richmond's forces, he was arguably the principle reason for Richmond's triumph, and the accession of the Tudors as the ruling dynasty. The play gives no sense of his significance. Why not? Wouldn't it have been a good idea of Oxford to have reminded Elizabeth I of the service his family had rendered to hers? Or reminding any future sovereign of the importance of the Oxford name in legitimising their rule over England?

Jonson alternated in his praise of and scorn for Shakespeare, but he never doubted his authorship. And to classically trained critics of Augustan England, it was Jonson, whose plays demonstrated an adherence to classical theories of drama, who was the superior of Shakespeare, whose plays, by contrast, show an utter lack of awareness, or complete indifference, to such theories. Of the 36 plays in the First Folio, how many stick to the classical theories of unity of time, place and action?

And I'm not sure what the link to Hank Whittemore's blog is meant to prove? Pleading for forgiveness, insisting they've been lied about - isn't that the plea made by every accused, or falsely accused, spouse?


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