As I’m skipping the chapters supposedly refuting the
cases for Bacon, Marlowe, and Oxford, let’s now take a look at chapter 5 – ‘The
unusual suspects’. This chapter has other candidates than the above as its
focus but it also has a number of arguments worth reviewing.
The claim is made that,
unlike the professional scholars, those favoring any alternative candidate to
the man from Stratford, don’t follow the standard scientific method of starting
with a hypothesis, then analyzing the data, and then making logical conclusions
based on that data.
Unlike the professionals, it’s claimed that
the amateurs (a loosely used term since some anti-Stratfordians are
professional scholars that publish in this field) begin with an unsubstantiated
premise and reason from that. Unfortunately for this argument, it’s both
unsubstantiated and false.
It’s unsubstantiated because there is no data
presented to demonstrate that none of the proposed candidates have data to
support an argument for their premise. In fact, the doubters have been pointing
out the lack of corroborating authorship data for the Stratfordian model for
decades. But that hasn’t stopped the professionals from assuming their
premise that William of Stratford was the writer we know as Shakespeare. There
is a pittance of data in the previous three chapters that is claimed to refute
the cases for three of the candidates but it’s laughable. And as the doubters
have been showing, not only is there a lack of proof of the orthodox position’s
premise, they can’t account for much of the data put forth by the opposition
of the writer Shakespeare’s qualifications. It’s not a reasonable response,
say, to the detailed data showing Shakespeare’s knowledge of Italy, that
the author could get it all from books and by casual listening to travelers
with first-hand experience in Italy. Which books contain each piece of the
data? Or which Italian travelers did William have extensive talks with about
their travels? And how did he have this knowledge by the earliest play that
contains it?
There is also the claim that “All of these
nominations are equally invalid; none has a greater claim than any of the
others.” The citation for this claim is the Shakespeare Bites Back: Not
So Anonymous ebook, which had each point answered by Exposing an
Industry in Denial http://doubtaboutwill.org/exposing
Again, the claim that all alternative candidate
nominations are equally invalid is not substantiated with any evidence.
But it is an interesting question that some anti-Stratfordians have considered.
It would be helpful if further research was done to try and come to greater
agreement on what qualities the writer Shakespeare can be said to have had and
then to sift out as many candidates as possible. But that would
require greater cordiality on the side of mainstream scholars. And since
there’s been no comparison (that I know of) of all evidence of the various
candidates it’s just a senseless statement to say that none of them has a
better case than any of the others. How is that conclusion following the
standard scientific method? In fact, there’s the additional claim that, by the
doubter’s standards of research, “Nearly any name of any person living in
Shakespeare’s day” can be a candidate. Here we can witness some pure
irrationality. Who do they think will be convinced by such a statement?
It’s also said that “.. we should want to look at
the theoretical framework of each case. What kind of an argument is being
made? …then we will make clear just how each argument does not stand up
to historical fact and/or rationality.” That seems sensible, but you should not
only look at each theoretical framework and the ‘kind’ of argument used within
it, you should also look at, and try to understand from the other side’s
viewpoint, the data and reasoning that go with them. After reading the three
cases from the earlier chapters it’s obvious that this wasn’t done. And since
the author believes that they are ALL EQUALLY invalid, it should follow that
they will never actually, that is seriously, examine any contrary evidence.
A final statement to comment on from this chapter is
that “Do we not see this as a severe problem, not just for the study of
Shakespeare, but more importantly for the very way that we conduct
historical research?” From what we’ve already looked at, when Diana Price
argued against the Stratfordian acceptance of posthumous assumptions of
William’s authorship, the rest of us do have a concern with how some of the
Stratfordian academics are doing some of this historical research. Certainly
the doubters have some flawed data and arguments, and the worst of it is
getting winnowed out over time, but when the scholarly community appears to have
abandoned rational research on such a fascinating question, you can only expect
that it will be filled by some with fewer resources. It’s impressive then that
the so-called amateurs seem to be outpacing traditional scholars in this area.
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