Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Jacobi and Rylance Discuss Reasonable Authorship Doubt



Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare’s Official Final Curtain

Along with the usual celebrations, talk, and articles of the traditional Shakespeare of Stratford, there were several from the non-Stratfordian  groups, as previously announced.

But before mentioning them, I just want to point out how not only are the scholars of both sides in agreement that Shakespeare, the Author, has purposely erased clear indications of himself for the most part from all of his works, but he also sanctioned and recommended such self-erasing. I came across this while reading Macbeth. At the end of Act 2, Scene 3 he has Malcolm say:

“But shift away. There’s warrant in that theft
Which steals itself when there’s no mercy left.”

So, we know that Marlowe certainly had such a ‘warrant’. And so did Francis Bacon as he mentioned once that  his life had been threatened. Oxford too seems to have had warrant for later in his life for hiding his authorship. In any case, the Author clearly approved of this if there seemed some justification for it.

Now to the latest news stories:

Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance discuss The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the death of Mr. William Shakspere of Stratford, Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance reaffirm their support for the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare, which they launched in the UK in a signing ceremony in Chichester, West Sussex,

Note, they both describe when and how they became doubters in the first place as well as some of the characteristics they see in whomever was the true Author.. They also mention how the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt has been updated in response to some criticisms of it, showing their openness to revise their stance as new facts or logical arguments come in. You can read more about that here:



Then there was also a 7 minute interview on NPR;s Morning Edition:

2 Shakespearean Actors Revive Debate Over The Bard’s Identity


which can also be listened to as a podcast on Broadway_World.com:





Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Is Shakespeare Studies Broken??



Here are some philosophical musings on scholarly research in general. As I came across them I wondered to what extent they related to research in areas touching on Shakespeare, and of course the Authorship question. Maybe some of you wouldn’t mind pondering over the same issues.

This week there were two more fascinating articles on the crisis in science respectability. The stories have been coming out for years. It seems now though that it has come to a head and must be dealt with for the sake of the legitimacy of the scholarly enterprise. Here’s one of the recent articles:

www.slate.com/articles/technology/future...ood_for_science.html

One quote from it is that “Lots of researchers had previously believed that trying out many types of analyses was a form of rigor; they were homing in on conditions that revealed the truth of their hypotheses. In fact, researchers were gaming analyses to gain publications, albeit often unwittingly.

Another comment was that “Some experts, like Stanford’s John Ioannidis, famous for his calculations that most published research findings are false, worry that special labels for replication or negative result relegate good work into a second-class status; journals devoted entirely to negative results popped up some time ago, but many scientists are not interested in publishing in them.”

The other article “Science is broken” was more comprehensive. It refers to this article: www.firstthings.com/article/2016/05/scientific-regress

theweek.com/articles/618141/big-science-broken

Here’s one quote: “Advocates of the existing scientific research paradigm usually smugly declare that while some published conclusions are surely false, the scientific method has "self-correcting mechanisms" that ensure that, eventually, the truth will prevail. Unfortunately for all of us, Wilson makes a convincing argument that those self-correcting mechanisms are broken.”

You’ll see if you peruse them that it’s not just one scientific field, though Psychology seems to have received most of the attention. There have also been several medical journal top editors that have said similar things about their field. Richard Smith, who was editor of the prestigious British Medical Journal from 1991-2004 wrote in a blog "Most of what is published in journals is just plain wrong or nonsense," says Smith, "The evidence, as opposed to the opinion, on prepublication peer review shows that its effectiveness has not been demonstrated and that it is slow, expensive, largely a lottery, poor at spotting error, biased, anti-innovatory ... prone to abuse, and unable to detect fraud,"
blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2011/11/11/richard-smi...ness-of-peer-review/

Back to another quote from Science is Broken: “Then there is outright fraud. In a 2011 survey of 2,000 research psychologists, over half admitted to selectively reporting those experiments that gave the result they were after. The survey also concluded that around 10 percent of research psychologists have engaged in outright falsification of data, and more than half have engaged in "less brazen but still fraudulent behavior such as reporting that a result was statistically significant when it was not, or deciding between two different data analysis techniques after looking at the results of each and choosing the more favorable."

And here’s a nice one: "The greatest scientific pioneers were mavericks and weirdos. Most valuable scientific work is done by youngsters. Older scientists are more likely to be invested, both emotionally and from a career and prestige perspective, in the regnant paradigm, even though the spirit of science is the challenge of regnant paradigms."

Also:

“Why, then, is our scientific process so structured as to reward the old and the prestigious? Government funding bodies and peer review bodies are inevitably staffed by the most hallowed (read: out of touch) practitioners in the field. The tenure process ensures that in order to further their careers, the youngest scientists in a given department must kowtow to their elders' theories or run a significant professional risk. Peer review isn't any good at keeping flawed studies out of major papers, but it can be deadly efficient at silencing heretical views.”

From another article on the continued search for the nature of Dark Matter “I think it’s very, very healthy for the field that you have people thinking about all kinds of different ideas,” said Bullock. “Because it’s quite true that we don’t know what the heck that dark matter is, and you need to be open-minded about it.www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016...-disk-theory/478488/

Someone also posted this quote from that maverick Einstein “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matter.”

A somewhat related article was also recently published in The Week, though it focused more on religious attitudes. Why is doubt difficult?
theweek.com/articles/615132/why-doubt-difficult

And I’ll just post one quote from it: “The natural condition of humanity, you might say, is relatively passive, dogmatic belief in whatever the political, moral, and religious authorities teach in a given time and place about right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust — and about God or the gods.”

Now, while it seems that about every other scholarly field in academia is reflecting on its research and publication processes affecting the quality of its research, and already making serious adjustments in them, I saw nothing about any such concern in the areas of Literature, even that of Shakespeare Studies which has increasingly attempted to be more “science” based and replicable. If those in the field show no interest in re-examining their research rigor, peer-review biases, or tolerance (yet alone acceptance) of possible pioneers who seem like mavericks or weirdos that might shake the boat, then why not just drop the pretense? Obviously, such an honest revaluation and self-correction of this field cannot be done while forever suppressing the authorship question, such that only unintimidated Italian journals might publish such topics.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

News - 3 non-Stratfordian articles in the Journal of Early Modern Studies - Price, Barber, Leahy



And now for some real news on the Authorship front, of which there is much:

The biggest news seems to me the publishing or three articles by non-Stratfordians in the Journal of Early Modern Studies.

Diana Price has extensively examined “Hand D and Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Literary Paper Trail” showing that the current push to just declare Hand D to have handwriting that is a certain match with Will Shakspere’s signatures is not justified by the accepted standards of handwriting analysis and authentication. In other words, it’s just another finding that was manufactured to try and bolster the belief in Stratfordian theory.


The second article is by Ros Barber who wrote about the claimed evidence for “Shakespeare and Warwickshire Dialect”. Barber found that the claims were either a) errors of fact, b) well-known or widely-used words; c) poetic inventions, and d) those derived through circular reasoning.


There was also a very recent column on this in The Conversation that’s worth a read:


She notes here in the comments that:
“But if you haven’t time to read the academic article, you don’t need to take my word for it. Professor David Crystal, acknowledged as the world’s foremost authority on Shakespeare’s language, emailed me after the article’s publication, and though I have no right to quote our private correspondence, his response to another person has now been posted on a public forum, so I think it is probably okay to share it here. David Crystal said:

“Regardless of her position on the SAQ, she is totally correct in her analysis. This is precisely the reasoning that I did not include any references to Warwickshire dialect in Shakespeare’s Words. Anyone who has studied historical dialectology would see straight away that the attribution of words to Warwickshire alone has no basis in reality, and I would never recommend anyone using such a flimsy argument to support the Stratfordian argument. AFAIK, none of the scholars in question have any background in historical dialectology.”

So yes, the Stratfordians must stand down on this one. There are plenty of other (stronger) arguments that can be used in defence of WS of Stratford.”

Interesting, it seems that one of the top Stratfordian apologists has a Ph.D. in linguistics but was totally oblivious to the weaknesses in this evidence.

And finally, William Leahy examined the field of Shakespeare biographies and his article is “ ‘the dreamscape of nostalgia’: Shakespearean Biography: Too Much Information (but not about Shakespeare)



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The other big announcement is from the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition which is celebrating its 10th anniversary along with its seminal Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. Its signatories continues to grow apace.  The announcement mentions that:

“The overall Declaration signatory count recently went above 3,300, including 1,265 with advanced degrees (551 doctorates, 714 masters degrees), and 560 current or former college or university faculty members. It is a very well-educated group, with 77% college graduates, and 50% of these also having advanced degrees.”

Several new “Notables” have signed on, including a President Emeritus of the National Press Foundation, a prominent award winning and very prolific author, the Director of the Walther-Schücking Institute for International Law, a bi-cultural poet and translator of literature, and the co-directors of a Theatre Company in Sydney, Australia.

See the full announcement and the names and detailed backgrounds of these new ‘Notables’ here (including various international celebrations of the SAC’s anniversary):