SAQ
news Updates
Well,
it’s been a great start to the year for the Shakespeare Authorship Question
movement.
Ros
Barber’s first London course on the Introduction to Who Wrote Shakespeare
appeared to be quite successful with an excellent turnout of interested
students and much interaction and exchange of views. Many, perhaps most, of the
students did not appear to be active in the debate prior to the class. As
expected and as is normal, some were dissatisfied for various reasons. Feedback
she received over questioned assertions or historical possibilities she will
take into consideration for future courses.
The
Stratfordian promoters were so concerned about the course that a major representative
of the Stratford Birthplace Trust was recruited to try and motivate the school
administrator to suppress and stop the class. We can see that this is further
evidence that the current Shakespeare authorship theory is bankrupt and is
sustained only by political pressure.
As
you may recall it was Ros Barber who researched and published the article on
“Shakespeare and Warwickshire Dialect” showing that there actually is no
acceptable evidence that Shakespeare exhibited a dialect with Warwickshire
connections. This was even publicly supported by a mainstream Shakespeare
scholar. The most probable explanation for this is that the Author was not born
and raised in that section of the country. This is further supported by a close
examination of the purported author’s will that was greatly lacking in the
expected references to items of a highly educated and cultured member of the
London literary elite.
Amongst
a mass of other collected evidence demonstrating the great gap of what is known
about the author Shakespeare and the purported author from Stratford, let us
acknowledge now too that the education the Stratford man may possibly have
received as a boy was most probably not remotely sufficient to prepare him to
be a highly educated and cultured literary fellow, let alone a future
playwright. To see this for yourself please see the article by Steven Steinburg
published by the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Steinburg is also the one that
wrote a review of Jonathan Bate’s Debate Fallacies from his contest with Alexander
Waugh in September, 2017.
Steinburg’s
research proved that there was in fact NO “ . . . standardized curriculum
used by all Elizabethan grammar schools that included a comprehensive
uniform collection of classical literary titles” that T.W. Baldwin
asserted in his influential, but unchecked, book William Shakspere’s
Smalle Latine and Lesse Greeke. [Note: Yes, in his many publications
Baldwin often used the spelling ‘Shakspere’.]
Steinburg
writes:
“I
say again, the purpose of Elizabethan grammar schools was to teach students to
read, speak, and write competently in Latin and to indoctrinate them so they
would be faithful Protestants. Underlying [Carol Chillington] Rutter’s argument
is the fantastical notion that young Will Shakspere had his eye on a career as
an author-playwright and that his teachers encouraged and supported such
bohemian ambitions. That is preposterous. At the time Shakspere was presumably
studying at the Stratford grammar school there was not one example of a
self-sufficient professional author in all of England. There is no evidence
that grammar schools pursued such extravagant literary objectives
even in the elite schools. Rutter, obviously, is infected by Baldwin’s naiveté
and his imaginings about the ‘renaissance idea’ that had swooped over
Elizabethan schooling, as Baldwin says (emphasis added):”
What
the historical record actually reveals is that, most probably, the Stratford
Grammar school could NOT have prepared young William to be an extremely
literate, multi-lingual, adult that could move easily among the educated and
literary elite. So some other means to support the traditional narrative will
need to be argued.
Read
Steinburg’s full article here
https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/fake-truth-the-language-of-professional-shakespeare-scholarship/
For
these, and many other reasons, the steady stream of Stratfordian Authorship
believers abandoning the traditional narrative and turning into Authorship
Skeptics and Doubters keeps growing. The list of such publicly acknowledged
doubters on the doubtaboutwill website who have signed the Declaration of
Reasonable Doubt has recently sped past the 4000 mark and continues un-abated
by any resistance.
That’s
a good sign for those who care about the value of historical veracity.
