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:
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:
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.”
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.”
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.
G
M
T
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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.
“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)
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):
