Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 7 - Apprenticeship

The last post emphasized the debate between Wells and Price on the importance of the non-existence of a literary paper trail to support the belief in William of Stratford’s authorship. Noteworthy was the complete absence of acknowledging Price’s research in the new book Shakespeare Beyond Doubt.

But if we review the basic elements of the Stratfordian theory of Shakespeare’s authorship there are some additional points of the story that are fading away.

His assumed apprenticeship

Not that all Shakespeare scholars agree on the basics of his assumed path to being a playwright for the Lord’s Chamberlain’s Men, but one prominent argument is that, like for other professions, there was an apprentice system that playwrights evolved through and it’s implied that this was the only way that Shakespeare’s plays could have made it to the stage. For instance, we find:

“Theater companies were extremely busy. They would perform around six different plays each week, which could only be rehearsed a couple of times beforehand. Also, there was no stage crew like we have today; every member of the company would have to help make costumes, props and scenery. The Elizabethan acting profession worked on an apprentice system, making it very hierarchical. Even Shakespeare would have had to rise up through the ranks.” http://shakespeare.about.com/od/theglobe/a/Th_Expereince.htm

So this is the story of his professional beginnings. It sounds sort of reasonable. He could have had a sound grammar school education and then worked his way up the theatrical ladder. But more than that, there were some ‘lost years’ that he certainly learned and developed on his own and for his apparent plan to be a playwright. So we also find this:

“The second period [of lost years] covers the seven years of Shakespeare's life in which he must have been perfecting his dramatic skills and collecting sources for the plots of his plays. "What could such a genius accomplish in this direction during six or eight years? The histories alone must have required unending hours of labor to gather facts for the plots and counter-plots of these stories.” and “…sometime between 1585 and 1592, it is probable that young Shakespeare could have been recruited by the Leicester's or Queen's men. Whether an acting troupe recruited Shakespeare in his hometown or he was forced on his own to travel to London to begin his career, he was nevertheless an established actor in the great city by the end of 1592.                      http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/shakespeareactor.html

The problem with this apprenticeship assumption is that the actual evidence, in his case, appears to contradict it. According to Irvin Leigh Matus in Shakespeare, IN FACT, “Shakespeare fits into the pattern of the free-lance playwright according to his earliest quartos. The title page of the first of his published plays Titus Andronicus (1594), states that it found its way into the repertory of three acting companies—those of the Earls of Derby, Pembroke and Susex.” He provides more evidence regarding Henry VI part 2 and The Taming of the Shrew and concludes “Clearly, Shakespeare got around until he began his association with the Chamberlain’s Men some time in 1594 and thus became the first playwright known to be affiliated exclusively with one acting company.” So, while not yet with any London theatrical company, he was reading histories to collect facts for plots. No doubt he also read some other literature to collect more plot ideas.

Are we really to believe that, beginning sometime after 1585, he spent years unknown as an apprenticed actor and then playwright in an “extremely busy” theater company rehearsing several plays a week while also helping to “make costumes, props and scenery” and then also spend “unending hours of labor” reading histories, the classics, and an enormous amount of other literature, and then ‘graduate’ from his apprenticeship and LEAVE his sponsoring company to be a free-lance playwright writing first rate plays?

Let’s compare that scenario (ignoring for now all other circumstantial evidence) with another in which someone with no need for manual labor, who didn’t wander around during some lost years, but who, from earliest years, spent a great many hours as a youth with the best tutors, highest educated gentry and nobility in London, ready access to many of the most complete libraries, and at least with many years of tangible connections to the practice of masques and plays, and who THEN found a way to submit plays to a theatrical company without his/her name attached.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 6 - Stanley Wells vs Diana Price

Part 2  of Wells and Edmondson vs Price

Professors Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson reply ("Beyond Doubt For All Time") on Blogging Shakespeare 13 May 2013. Diana Price replies to Professors Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson (14 May 2013) In their blog reply to my response to the BloggingShakespeare 8 May 2013 review of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem (“Beyond Doubt For all Time,” 13 May 2013), Professors Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson acknowledge that writers from the time period are documented to varying degrees, some more, some less. They imply that Shakespeare is in the “some less” category, so there are no grounds for suspicion. As Wells puts it, “The fact that some leave fuller records than others does not invalidate the records of those with a lower score.” Based on surviving evidence that supports his activities as a writer, Shakespeare not only rates a “lower score,” he rates a score of zero. At the time of his death, Shakespeare left behind over 70 documents, including some that tell us what he did professionally. Yet none of those 70+ documents support the statement that he was a writer. From a statistical standpoint, this is an untenable position, as I have argued elsewhere: Even the most poorly documented writers, those with less than a dozen records in total, still left behind a couple of personal literary paper trails. Based on the average proportions, I would conservatively have expected perhaps a third of Shakespeare’s records, or about two dozen, to shed light on his professional activities. In fact, over half of them, forty-five to be precise, are personal professional paper trails, but they are all evidence of non-literary professions: those of actor, theatrical shareholder, financier, real estate investor, grain-trader, money-lender, and entrepreneur. It is the absence of contemporary personal literary paper trails that forces Shakespeare’s biographers to rely — to an unprecedented degree — on posthumous evidence. (“Evidence For A Literary Biography,” Tennessee Law Review, 147) While Wells and Edmondson acknowledge that Shakespeare is the only writer from the time period for whom one must rely on posthumous evidence to make the case, Wells disputes my claim that Shakespeare left behind no evidence that he was a writer. The evidence he cites are “the Stratford monument and epitaphs, along with Dugdale’s identification of the monument as a memorial to ‘Shakespeare the poet’, Jonson’s elegy, and others” — all posthumous evidence. On the distinction between contemporaneous and posthumous evidence or testimony, Wells states: “I do not agree (whatever ‘historians and critics’ may say) that posthumous evidence ‘does not carry the same weight as contemporaneous evidence.’ If we took that to its logical extreme we should not believe that anyone had ever died.” But historians and biographers routinely cite documentary evidence (burial registers, autopsy reports, death notices, etc.) to report that someone died. Wells may disagree with “whatever ‘historians and critics’ may say,” but I employ the criteria applied by those “historians and critics” who distinguish between contemporaneous and posthumous testimony (e.g., Richard D. Altick & John J. Fenstermaker, H. B. George, Robert D. Hume, Paul Murray Kendall, Harold Love, and Robert C. Williams). Jonson’s eulogy and the rest of the First Folio testimony is posthumous by seven years, and it is the first in print to identify Shakespeare of Stratford as the dramatist. Posthumous or not, this testimony therefore demands close scrutiny. And I find in the First Folio front matter numerous misleading statements, ambiguities, and outright contradictions. I am not alone. For example, concerning the two introductory epistles, Gary Taylor expresses caution about taking the “ambiguous oracles of the First Folio” at face value (Wells et al., Textual Companion, 18). Cumulatively, the misleading, ambiguous, and contradictory statements render the First Folio testimony, including the attribution to Shakespeare of Stratford, vulnerable to question. From my earlier response: 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. Prof. Wells now counters that: “Price defends her attitude by saying ‘one cannot prove a negative case.’ Why not? It is surely possible to prove that for example Queen Elizabeth 1 was not alive in 1604 or that Sir Philip Sidney did not write King Lear or that Professor Price does not believe that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote Shakespeare.” Price responds:  There is affirmative evidence that Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. Even allowing for uncertainties in traditional chronology, King Lear was written years after Sidney died in 1586. David Hackett Fischer elaborates on the logical fallacy of “proving” a negative when no affirmative evidence exists (Historians’ Fallacies, 1970, p. 62), and it is in that sense that I state that “one cannot prove a negative.” If there were explicit affirmative evidence that Shakespeare wrote for a living, there could be no authorship debate.  [Price:] Please note: I am not a professor.

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.