Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 5 - Stanley Wells versus Diana Price

Part 1 of 2

Stanley Wells reviews the paperback (“An Unorthodox and Non-definitive Biography”) on Blogging Shakespeare 8 May 2013.

Diana Price responds to Stanley Wells’s review of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography:

I am grateful to Professor Stanley Wells for following up on Ros Barber’s challenge to him and Paul Edmondson (eds., Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, Cambridge University Press, 2013, launched at the ‘Proving Shakespeare’ Webinar, Friday 26 April 2013). Barber criticized their collection of essays for failing to engage in the arguments presented in Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem ([SUB] Greenwood Press 2001; paperback 2013). As the first academic book published on the subject, it surely should have been addressed in essays relevant to Shakespeare’s biography. But better late than never.

In his review Prof. Wells takes issue with any number of details in my book, but he does not directly confront the single strongest argument I offer: the comparative analysis of documentary evidence supporting the biographies of Shakespeare and two dozen of his contemporaries. That analysis demonstrates that the literary activities of the two dozen other writers are documented in varying degrees. However, none of the evidence that survives for Shakespeare can support the statement that he was a writer by vocation.

But the absence of personal literary paper trails for Elizabethan or Jacobean writers of any consequence is not a common phenomenon; rather, the absence of any literary paper trails for Shakespeare’s biography is a unique deficiency.

In the Webinar, Wells expresses “no objection whatever to the validity of posthumous evidence.” Posthumous evidence can be useful, but it does not carry the same weight as contemporaneous evidence. Historians and critics alike make that distinction (see, e.g., here). Wells relies, as he must, on the posthumous testimony in the First Folio to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. But even if he accepts the testimony in the First Folio at face value, no questions asked, no ambiguities acknowledged, he is still left with the embarrassing fact that Shakespeare is the only alleged writer of consequence from the time period for whom he must rely on posthumous evidence to make his case.

Wells has himself commented on the paucity of evidence. In his essay “Current Issues in Shakespeare’s Biography,” he admits that trying to write Shakespeare’s biography is like putting together “a jigsaw puzzle for which most of the pieces are missing” (5); he then cites Duncan-Jones who “in a possibly unguarded moment, said that Shakespeare biographies are 5% fact and 95% padding” (7). One difference, then, is that my work has no need for “guarded” moments, particularly as I re-evaluate that 5%.

Instead, of confronting the deficiency of literary evidence in the Shakespeare biography, Wells instead takes exception to particular statements and details in my book. For example, he criticizes my references to Shakespeare’s illiterate household in Stratford, while at the same time I acknowledge that daughter Susanna could sign her name. And yes, she did, once. She made one “painfully formed signature, which was probably the most that she was capable of doing with the pen” (Maunde Thompson, 1:294), but she was unable to recognize her own husband’s handwriting. Her sister Judith signed with a mark. That evidence does not support literacy in the household; it points instead to functional illiteracy.


In another criticism, Wells states that:

“Price misleadingly says that ‘there are ‘no commendatory verses to Shakespeare’, ignoring those printed in the First Folio as well as the anonymous prose commendation in the1609 edition of Troilus and Cressida and that by Thomas Walkley in the 1622 quarto of Othello.”

 In this criticism and elsewhere, Wells disregards the criteria used to distinguish between personal and impersonal evidence, explicit or ambiguous evidence, and so on. Such criteria are routinely used by historians, biographers, and critics. The prefatory material for Troilus and Cressida and in  Othello necessitate no personal knowledge of the author and could have been written after having read or seen the play in question. (As pointed out above, the prefatory material in the First Folio is problematic, but the complexities require over a chapter in my book to analyze.)

[Price then refers to Well’s citation of the William Basse elegy on Shakespeare. And then her response is that:]

The poem itself contains no evidence that the author was personally acquainted with Shakespeare. Whether by Donne or Basse, it is a posthumous and impersonal tribute, requiring familiarity with Shakespeare’s works, and, possibly, details on the funerary monument in Stratford. Wells and Taylor themselves cannot be certain which manuscript title (if any) represents the original (Textual, 163).

Wells concludes that “of course, she can produce not a single scrap of positive evidence to prove her claims; all she can do is systematically to deny the evidence that is there.” Questioning the evidentiary value of existing documentation is not the same thing as denying that documentation. It is true: I cannot prove that the man from Stratford was not the writer the title pages proclaim him to be, because one cannot prove a negative. However, I do demonstrate why there is an overwhelming probability that he did not write the works that have come down to us under his name. If he wrote the plays and poems, he would have left behind a few scraps of evidence to show that he did it, as did the two dozen other writers I investigated.

It is regrettable that Prof. Wells characterizes my book as an attempt to “destroy the Shakespearian case.” My book is an attempt to revisit the evidence and to reconstruct Shakespeare’s biography based on the evidence. Finally, I do not claim that my biography is “definitive.” But I think it is a step in the right direction.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 4 Barber and Peter Farey

Next is a snippet from Ros Barber again, and this time with one of her Marlovian cohorts, Peter Farey

They primarily take issue with the anti-Marlowe argument in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt. But one of their points is more general:

Thus it is clear that despite the generally improved tone of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, the defenders of the orthodoxy continue to hold the line that authorship questioners are morally or logically deficient, and the question itself invalid.  Charles Nicholl demonstrates a clear distaste for "the interrogative syntax much favoured in authorship literature."  We, on the other hand, insist that questioning is a legitimate human activity, central to all research in both the humanities and the sciences.  And though it is possible that the Shakespeare authorship question will never be settled, we refer Charles Nicholl and the contributors and editors of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt to this quote from French philosopher and humanist Joseph Joubert:

"It is better to debate a question without settling it,

than to settle a question without debating it."

http://marlowe-shakespeare.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-marlovian-review-of-shakespeare.html

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 3 - Ros Barber

and then Marlovian Ros Barber’s own review of SBD.

If the distinguished contributors to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt hope their book will place the traditional author of Shakespeare’s canon where the title claims and settle the Shakespeare authorship question for once and for all, they are likely to be disappointed. In the hands of twenty-one eminent Shakespeare scholars, the case for William Shakespeare of Stratford sounds plausible enough, and will reassure the already convinced as well as those who would like to be. But anyone versed in the primary material of the authorship question will emerge essentially unsatisfied. Although a well-written, accessible and interesting read, it is riddled with the common misunderstandings that characterise this ‘dialogue of the deaf’ and contains factual errors that suggest certain contributors haven’t done their homework. Nevertheless it is full of fascinating information for initiate and expert alike, and (with the exception of Paul Edmondson’s final chapter), reasonable in tone.

Though Shakespeare Beyond Doubt aims to ‘bring fresh perspectives to an intriguing cultural phenomenon’, it is in many ways a reprise of James Shapiro’s Contested Will, side-stepping recent scholarly work on the authorship question to focus extensively on examining the ‘pathology’ and psychology of Shakespeare skeptics.  

Though the belated entry of orthodox academics into this 156-year-old controversy is a welcome development, there are two major problems with Shakespeare Beyond Doubt. One is a blatant attempt to win the debate through semantics. Throughout the book, the editors Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson decree that those who don’t agree with them be described not with the well-established term ‘anti-Stratfordian’, but with the hackle-raising ‘anti-Shakespearean’. Their justification is that ‘to deny Shakespeare of Stratford’s connection to the work attributed to him is to deny the essence of, in part, what made that work possible … Shakespeare was formed by both Stratford-upon-Avon and London.’ Yet the contested connection between Shakespeare of Stratford and the work attributed to him is the authorship question. Were it supported by incontestable evidence (rather than such fragile evidential scraps as the disputed Hand D in Thomas More) there would be no need for their book. The term ‘anti-Shakespeareans’ is also fundamentally inaccurate: the person Ben Jonson referred to in the First Folio as ‘the AUTHOR William Shakespeare’ is esteemed as highly by those who question his identity as by those who don’t.

But the most significant failing of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt is that it attempts to support the orthodox position using evidence the sceptics do not contest – that there was an author widely known as ‘William Shakespeare’ – while failing to address recent scholarship. The most glaring omission is Diana Price’s 2001 Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, the first book on the authorship question to be published by an academic press. The authors cannot be unaware of the most notable advancement in Shakespeare authorship studies in the last fifteen years, and yet it is mentioned precisely nowhere. For the second academic book on the subject to pretend that the first doesn’t exist is disingenuous and unscholarly, and suggests orthodox scholars cannot answer Price’s arguments. Richard Paul Roe’s 2011 The Shakespeare Guide to Italy, the culmination of twenty years’ research which persuasively demonstrates Shakespeare’s first-hand knowledge of Milan, Verona, Mantua, Venice, Padua, Lombardy, Florence, Pisa, and Sicily is also notable by its absence, as is this author’s 2010 non-Stratfordian essay published in the peer-reviewed Routledge journal Rethinking History. Hardy Cook’s ‘Selected Reading List’ is more of a ‘Selective Reading List’, and sidelines recent and authoritative non-Stratfordian texts, highlighting early (19th Century) and poorly-written ones.

Throughout the volume, and despite significant developments in non-Stratfordian research in the last decade, only arguments advanced prior to 1960 are acknowledged. Paul Edmondson claims that those he perceives as his ‘antagonists’ ignore evidence, yet himself presides over a volume of essays that demolishes straw men while skillfully eliding the more challenging work of contemporary researchers. Weighing this approach against the accepted principles of academic argument, one must ask whether Shakespeare Beyond Doubt is genuinely a work of scholarship, or simply a skilful piece of propaganda.

Written on May 10th, 2013 

http://rosbarber.com/review-shakespeare-beyond-doubt/#more-1855

http://rosbarber.com/proving-shakespeare-webinar-transcript/

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 2 - Proving Shakespeare

The Proving Shakespeare Webinar of April 26, 2013.

One of the first attempts of representatives of the two sides discussing the dispute, and that’s connected to the current “Shakespeare Beyond Doubt” publications, has taken place in a webinar involving Paul Edmondson, Stanley Wells and Marlovian Ros Barber who has written a novel  of Christopher Marlowe as the hidden Shakespeare. The transcript is an interesting read.

Barber became interested in the dispute after watching the film “Much Ado About Something” and since then has become another skeptic.

Here are some things said in the webinar:

RB: “…but I think that it’s actually important to look at the evidence that is argued, that is put forward on both sides…”  “So I actually welcome the absorption of this question into professional academic circles.

PE: It’s interesting, isn’t it, how many academics try to avoid this issue…

They all think the authorship discussion should be participated in by the academic community.

[Note: There’s a mention of an unusual argument:]

PE: Now in our book there is a chapter by Matt Kubus which sort of mops up, at the last count, seventy-seven of the nominees, in which he says ‘Mathematically, each time an additional candidate is suggested, the probability decreases that any given name is the true author.’

RB: I want to query that, because I want to know is that mathematically true? Do we have any mathematicians listening in to the webcast who could actually tell me whether that’s a true statement or not?

Note--My own first thought is this idea is senseless. Would it follow that if a crime was suspected in a hotel, that the greater the number of hotel guests, then the less likelihood that any crime actually was committed? That seems to be what the argument is implying. How is that logical?

There is much time in their discussion trying to get the other side to see their evidence, or to see their interpretation of the same evidence. This is especially true in regards to the idea that another person could be used as a front for another, and that what appears to be his name, and references to him or his name, aren’t strong enough evidence to many people that he actually wrote the works attributed to him. So the very idea of what constitutes evidence is debated. Is it possible for two opposing sides to agree on the validity of posthumous evidence?

This is a good beginning to this new stage of the debate and if the two sides can continue talking we may see some progress toward a broader appreciation of the amassed evidence that is yet to be satisfactorily explained.

Here’s the link to the webinar discussion:

http://rosbarber.com/proving-shakespeare-webinar-transcript/

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (SBD) - 1 Introduction

Here begins a series of posts on the new book Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (2013) from a cadre of Shakespeare scholars purporting to demonstrate that the man from Stratford, and only him, could have been the primary author of the Shakespeare works.

Long ago in one of my posts here I wrote that the evidence for the Stratford actor/businessman must be hidden away in some secret vault where only establishment scholars could come and view the unassailable proof of his authorship. This was because so many highly educated Shakespeare enthusiasts that had actually examined the available evidence found it far too lacking as any kind of proof to overcome the apparent chasm of the Stratford man’s life and, as the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt says: “Shakespeare’s works that show extensive knowledge of law, philosophy, classical literature, ancient and modern history, mathematics, astronomy, art, music, medicine, horticulture, heraldry, military and naval terminology and tactics; etiquette and manners of the nobility; English, French and Italian court life; Italy; and aristocratic pastimes such as falconry, equestrian sports and royal tennis.”

Finally, we are told, we will be provided the evidence and arguments from some of the most authoritative Shakespearean scholars in the world that will prove why the Stratfordian model is beyond any ‘Reasonable Doubt’. There have been previous books attempting to prove the Stratford man’s authorship. The best I think is by Irvin Leigh Matus in Shakespeare, IN FACT, 1994. But I found nothing in it that precluded the alternative scenario of a hidden author using the businessman/actor from acting as a front man. And even he had pointed out how very few Shakespeare scholars had yet examined any of the authorship evidence themselves.

So it still may seem somewhat new to them if they have not yet delved into the matter thoroughly. In any case, this new book, by several scholars this time, again attempts to make modern and familiar what appears to many as supernatural, and to ensconce ourselves in the reasonableness of what Shakespeare might, in a jest, call “A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor”.

We now find that both sides of the dispute are in agreement that ‘the authorship question’ is important. Professor Shapiro lamented the lack of scholarly interest in the topic; the stylometric analysts Elliott and Valenza agreed, the leaders of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust now say it’s important, and now also many other scholars supporting them say it’s important. So, from any Shakespeare enthusiast, we shouldn’t hear “it’s [the authorship question] not important” or “it doesn’t matter who wrote them”. Now, more Shakespeare enthusiasts, are likely to become at least somewhat knowledgeable about the basic arguments on both sides of the question. Just gathering one-sided arguments to use as ‘ammunition’ is not going to show any intellectual maturity. The main problem is that perhaps no one can review close to what all has been written about so many alternative candidates. Fortunately, the response [by The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition] to the orthodox side has also just now been published so the two viewpoints can be contrasted, even though it can’t possibly contain all the detailed evidence for any alternative candidate. This book is also called “Shakespeare Beyond Doubt?” (but it ends with a question mark. It’s primary authors are John Shahan and Alexander Waugh.

We hope also that we are finally moving beyond the name calling, slanders, and insinuations that ‘doubters’ are  ‘Holocaust deniers’, vampires, psychologically aberrant, mentally deficient, etc. Why would anyone have implied such a characteristic to so many high-achieving intellectuals like Henry James, Walt Whitman, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mortimer Adler, Harry Blackmun, leading Shakespearean actors such as Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, and some modern authors on this topic like Peter Usher, Ph.D, professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Peter Sturrock, Ph.D, a Stanford astrophysicist, and Barry Clarke, a writer of logic puzzles for MENSA? These are not people who should be in strait-jackets and locked in dark rooms, just because, like Galileo, they “looked through the telescope”!

More recently, on the mainstream or establishment side of the debate, there is the emphasis on not questioning any approved ‘authority’ on the topic. For instance, Paul Edmondson of the SBT wrote:  “There is the loaded assumption that even though one may lack the necessary knowledge and expertise, it is always acceptable to challenge or contradict a knowledgeable and expert authority. It is not. (If the focus of this volume [SBD] were about a specialized area of nuclear physics those last two sentences would not even have been necessary.) But one characteristic of the Shakespeare authorship discussion is its apparent generosity of scope in which everyone can have their say, ignore the evidence for Shakespeare, propose alternative nominees, contradict authorities and feel empowered.”

One response to this argument would be: On what basis are the mainstream Shakespeare scholars ‘authorities’ on the authorship question? There have been doubters who have spent 20 years or more on the authorship question, or more specifically, on just one aspect of this question. Have any of the mainstream scholars researched the authorship question for that length of time? In addition, why could not an expert, of Shakespeare’s time, in the law, astronomy, music, medicine, seamanship, Italy, and such, challenge a non-expert of these fields but who is a Shakespeare scholar? And what about the beliefs of those tenured professors, like one of mine, who, on the last day of class, said “If you learn ANYTHING in all of your college years, you should at least have learned to question Authority”. Or is intellectual curiosity and independence to be discouraged and suppressed?

In astrophysics Professor Peter Sturrock’s new book, AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question, he suggests an intellectual attitude with these precepts:

·  All beliefs in whatever realm are theories at some level. (Stephen Schneider)

·  Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. (Dandemis)

·  Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. (Francis Bacon)

·  Never fall in love with your hypothesis. (Peter Medawar)

·  It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts. (Arthur Conan Doyle)

·  A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong. (Francis Crick)

·  The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that is most interesting. (Richard Feynman)

·  To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact. (Charles Darwin)

·  It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. (Mark Twain)

·  Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong. (Thomas Jefferson)

·  All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

Does anyone really think that Prof. Sturrock would act as Paul Edmondson claims--that such a scholar would never listen to or consider an objection by a well-informed non-professor on some specific question within that field? And that he would be totally closed-minded to everyone outside of the approved in-group of academic astrophysics researchers? If so, why would scholars like him write books out of their specialty in the first place?

The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt has some commonality to the U.S. Declaration of Independence in the 18^th century. Then the American scientist, statesman, and diplomatic leader Benjamin Franklin, who was in France seeking support for the American cause, was demonized by the then propaganda as a “traitor to his king”, the “dean of all charlatans,” who “deceived the good with his white hairs, and fools with his spectacles”. It kind of makes it seem like he was a part of some feeble-minded conspiracy than one of many individuals that disagreed with a group with great power and self-claimed ‘authority’.

So it looks now that we’re moving into arguments by evidence, which is where the question should be examined. We can imagine the two sides as something like Elizabethan jousters who will take to the field and then have their turns “shaking their lances” at their opponent’s perceived ignorance. I imagine it will be as entertaining as it will be educational for any Shakespeare enthusiast.

Next, we’ll look at some preliminary exchanges.

Shakespeare and Seamanship - Sea, Wind, Sailing terms

Shakespeare’s detailed knowledge in many fields of knowledge is one of the hallmarks that has set him apart from other playwrights. And often of greater interest is that the use of this knowledge, via the terminology of the specialty, is usually precise and unlike that of a layman, even when stretched to metaphorical use in contexts where only an expert is likely to see the parallel to his field.

For instance, in the last post in the series “Was Shakespeare a Lawyer” there was this quote from Shakespeare's Legal Language: A Dictionary (2000) by Sokal and Sokal:

The overall impression given by this Dictionary may well contradict frequently reiterated claims that Shakespeare's interest in law was at best superficial, and that Shakespeare exploited legal ideas, circumstances, and language with no regard for any factor aside from 'poetic' effect. It is our view, derived from cumulative evidence, that on the contrary Shakespeare shows a quite precise and mainly serious interest in the capacity of legal language to convey matters of social, moral, and intellectual substance.

Another area, not yet covered here, is Shakespeare’s precise knowledge and use of the terminology in seamanship. This came to my attention by a recent blog post article by Oxfordian Hank Whittemore. He quotes experts in this field who attest to Shakespeare’s “accurate knowledge of naval matters” and who say things such as that he “made exact use of the professional language of seamanship” and who believed that “the Bard’s knowledge in this area could not have come from books alone.” A reviewer wrote that “… only those who actually served at sea could acquire a profound knowledge of the practice of seamanship and the correct meaning and use of the terms proper to the working of ships”. As usual, there is no evidence whatever that the businessman/actor from Stratford was ever on a ship.

http://hankwhittemore.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/the-sea-and-seamanship-no-61-of-100-reasons-why-edward-earl-of-oxford-was-shakespeare/

He also quotes Dan Brayton from Shakespeare’s Ocean (2012) who wrote “Most current scholarship fails to note the sophistication of Shakespeare’s maritime imagination”.  

Similarly,  in this same volume, Brayton, in mentioning the work of John Gillies, says “Gillies argues that “Shakespeare is demonstrably conversant with quite a variety of geographic discourses and … cartographic genres”. (as was shown for Bacon in the previous post). This can be found at the end of the book in his Notes for chapter 7 “Prospero’s Maps”:

http://books.google.com/books?id=2R9-UC2FHT0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

[Bacon is also known to have visited Elizabethan scholar John Dee who was then a respected cartographer].

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/h698k7r340722k73/

Samuel Johnson suggested that Shakespeare’s naval dialogue may have been the first to be exhibited on the stage. Lord Mulgrave believed “that the Poet must either have drawn his technical knowledge of seamanship from accurate personal observation, or else have had a remarkable power of applying the information gained from others [skills Bacon was known to have]. And he thinks Shakespeare must have conversed with some of the best seamen of the time, as “no books had then been published on the subject.” [Bacon was sent by Queen Elizabeth to sail with the English diplomat Sir Amias Paulet to Paris so he likely sailed with some of England’s best sailors; he was also friends with Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Essex, and others with much sailing expertise].

Then there was a previous book:

Another expert, W. B. Whall  (b. 1837, d. 1925?), who was educated at Oxford before becoming a seaman in 1861 and served with shipmates who were “old men-of-war’s men who had served at sea before 1815”, and then he himself ended up a Master mariner who studied old naval terminology -- “having made a study of these archaic terms” and wrote about sea life and sailor songs. Since no one had yet written about Shakespeare’s knowledge of sailing and his use of naval language, he researched it and wrote Shakespeare’s Sea Terms Explained, 1910. Confirming what has already been said above, Whall writes “Now it is small wonder that a playwright in such times should make use of sea words, but the wonder is that without professional acquaintance he should always use these terms correctly. No modern writer is able to do this. An author who ventures in that direction invariably “gives himself away” unless he is a sailor author: this the writer of the plays never does. ….”For be it noted he essays to write as a sailor, and does so successfully.” He later says “… but the mystery is that sea expressions crop up in quite unexpected places, and that they are all phrased as by a sailor.”  He also writes regarding Shakespeare: “His sea terms are always absolutely correct.” Also, “One thing is certain, that the sea expressions scattered through the plays cannot be understood by the ordinary reader without some help of the kind given here.” And “How did the writer obtain sufficient knowledge of the sea to write like a sailor? That is a question which cannot be answered.” Notice this is the same ability that Shakespeare has with using legal terminology and with the language used in other fields.

He foresees that some will say that anyone of the time could use naval terms. So he writes “It may be advanced that, our modern, colloquial English being so full of sea phrases, there is nothing to be wondered at that the plays are full of them; but these phrases are not used in a technical, professional sense, as Shakespeare uses them,”

And then he continues on pages 21-22 with “There is the further curious fact that only one other Elizabethan writer lards his writings with technical sea terms, and that one is Bacon.” And then a little further on “Shakespeare and Bacon, however, never make a professional mistake, but write like sailors.”

Keep in mind that Whall does not make any reference to the “authorship question” nor does he show any awareness that there was such a thing.

You can find Whall’s book here:

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101066126093;seq=11;view=1up;num=3

Bacon’s writing on Winds and Sails of Ships can be read here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=i_lLAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA571&ots=WroaIjJ5K9&dq=%22francis%20bacon%22%20works%20barents%20-art&pg=PA179#v=onepage&q&f=false

And yet there still does not seem to be a single mainstream Shakespearean scholar that is willing to say publicly that all authorship evidence should be fairly examined. Perhaps this is the only field in all of academia where a beloved theory is desired for its own sake rather than a seeking of historical or scientific evidence-based truth.

Measure for Measure - Running from brakes of Ice

Running from brakes of Ice

As mentioned in the previous post, Bacon has close connections to a primary source for the play Measure for Measure. Recently I came across another one.

In Act 2, scene 1 (around line 40 depending on the edition) we find this passage by Escalus:

“Well, heaven forgive him, and forgive us all.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall:

Some run from brakes of ice, and answer none,

And some condemned for a fault alone.”

There isn’t a clear interpretation on “Some run from brakes of ice”. In the 1997 Folger edition, the full note on page 215 says this:

‘Many changes have been proposed in editorial attempts to give meaning to these words. The most frequent alterations are from “ice” to “vice” and from “brakes” to “breaks”. None of the changes helps significantly. The clause stands in parallel with “some rise by sin” (line 42) and in contrast to “some condemned for a fault alone” (line 44). It may therefore be meant to suggest “some escape punishment for major crimes,” though no emendation thus far proposed captures that meaning . Editors have pointed out an interesting parallel with Claudio’s description of hell as a “thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice” (3.1.138) and have quoted The Three Voyages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions, (1594, 1595, 1596): “the ice whereon we lay . . . brake and ran one peece upon another . . .the ice brake under our owne feet.” Other editors have noted that brakes could be “tortures, traps, or thorny hedges,” as well as “engines of punishment,” “snaffles” or “sharp bits.”

An online edition of the play has even changed “ice” to “office”:

http://www.shakespeareswords.com/Plays.aspx?Ac=2&SC=1&IdPlay=27

Considering that in the First Folio the word is spelt “Ice” with a capital letter “I” it hardly seems reasonable that the intent was the word “office”. But some editors may be a bit desperate to move away from the word “Ice”, especially the kind that ‘brakes’ and that sometimes cause some to run away from. And what in the heck would William of Stratford be doing reading an expeditionary treatise on the arctic anyhow?  Or maybe he just overheard talk of this voyage in one of his visits to the local pub, just as where he had also became an expert in law in a few short years!

Barents’ book is also referenced in Twelfth Night, 3.2 where Fabian mentions “..an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard…”. And then a little later in the same scene does Shakespeare refer to “…more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies” which is thought to refer to a map made by Emmeric Mollineux in 1599 for the purchasers of Hakluyt’s Voyages, “showing more of the East Indies, including Japan, than had ever been mapped before.”

Well, it happens that Bacon is known to have read The Three Voyages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions, (1594, 1595, 1596). He refers to it in his Novum Organum, in which he mentions “in Nova Zembla” and the accompanying note says:

“This of course refers to Barentz’s expedition in search of a North-East passage. He passed the winter of 1596-7 at Nova Zembla.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=fKk8AAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA240&ots=ob7vpw5bex&dq=%22francis%20bacon%22%20barentz&pg=PA240#v=onepage&q=zembla&f=false

If you look for the post earlier in this section (Othello: The Bosphorus) you’ll also see that “Shakespeare” (the author) also seems to have read The Relation of a Journey begun an. Dom. iio, in four books (1615) by George Sandys which describes his travels to the Eastern Mediterranean. Shakespeare mentions both the “Ponticke Sea” and the “Proponticke” within four lines of each other in Act 3, scene 3:

http://nfs.sparknotes.com/othello/page_166.html

or see page 326 in the First Folio Tragedies.

Here is the Bacon reference:

http://archive.org/stream/worksfrancisbaco05bacoiala#page/262/mode/2up

So, I vote for keeping the original as is: “Some run from brakes of Ice”.