Friday, April 13, 2018

Barber's University Course; Shakespeare's Grammar School Education Reviewed


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.

No comments:

Post a Comment