Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 12 - Claims and Evidence

As I’m skipping the chapters supposedly refuting the cases for Bacon, Marlowe, and Oxford, let’s now take a look at chapter 5 – ‘The unusual suspects’. This chapter has other candidates than the above as its focus but it also has a number of arguments worth reviewing.

The claim is made that, unlike the professional scholars, those favoring any alternative candidate to the man from Stratford, don’t follow the standard scientific method of starting with a hypothesis, then analyzing the data, and then making logical conclusions based on that data.

Unlike the professionals, it’s claimed that the amateurs (a loosely used term since some anti-Stratfordians are professional scholars that publish in this field) begin with an unsubstantiated premise and reason from that. Unfortunately for this argument, it’s both unsubstantiated and false.

It’s unsubstantiated because there is no data presented to demonstrate that none of the proposed candidates have data to support an argument for their premise. In fact, the doubters have been pointing out the lack of corroborating authorship data for the Stratfordian model for decades. But that hasn’t stopped the professionals from assuming their premise that William of Stratford was the writer we know as Shakespeare. There is a pittance of data in the previous three chapters that is claimed to refute the cases for three of the candidates but it’s laughable. And as the doubters have been showing, not only is there a lack of proof of the orthodox position’s premise, they can’t account for much of the data put forth by the opposition of the writer Shakespeare’s qualifications. It’s not a reasonable response, say, to the detailed data showing Shakespeare’s knowledge of Italy, that the author could get it all from books and by casual listening to travelers with first-hand experience in Italy. Which books contain each piece of the data? Or which Italian travelers did William have extensive talks with about their travels? And how did he have this knowledge by the earliest play that contains it?

There is also the claim that “All of these nominations are equally invalid; none has a greater claim than any of the others.” The citation for this claim is the Shakespeare Bites Back: Not So Anonymous ebook, which had each point answered by Exposing an Industry in Denial   http://doubtaboutwill.org/exposing

Again, the claim that all alternative candidate nominations are equally invalid is not substantiated with any evidence. But it is an interesting question that some anti-Stratfordians have considered. It would be helpful if further research was done to try and come to greater agreement on what qualities the writer Shakespeare can be said to have had and then to sift out as many candidates as possible.   But that would require greater cordiality on the side of mainstream scholars. And since there’s been no comparison (that I know of) of all evidence of the various candidates it’s just a senseless statement to say that none of them has a better case than any of the others. How is that conclusion following the standard scientific method? In fact, there’s the additional claim that, by the doubter’s standards of research, “Nearly any name of any person living in Shakespeare’s day” can be a candidate. Here we can witness some pure irrationality. Who do they think will be convinced by such a statement?

It’s also said that “.. we should want to look at the theoretical framework of each case. What kind of an argument is being made?  …then we will make clear just how each argument does not stand up to historical fact and/or rationality.” That seems sensible, but you should not only look at each theoretical framework and the ‘kind’ of argument used within it, you should also look at, and try to understand from the other side’s viewpoint, the data and reasoning that go with them. After reading the three cases from the earlier chapters it’s obvious that this wasn’t done. And since the author believes that they are ALL EQUALLY invalid, it should follow that they will never actually, that is seriously, examine any contrary evidence.

A final statement to comment on from this chapter is that “Do we not see this as a severe problem, not just for the study of Shakespeare, but more importantly for the very way that we conduct historical research?” From what we’ve already looked at, when Diana Price argued against the Stratfordian acceptance of posthumous assumptions of William’s authorship, the rest of us do have a concern with how some of the Stratfordian academics are doing some of this historical research. Certainly the doubters have some flawed data and arguments, and the worst of it is getting winnowed out over time, but when the scholarly community appears to have abandoned rational research on such a fascinating question, you can only expect that it will be filled by some with fewer resources. It’s impressive then that the so-called amateurs seem to be outpacing traditional scholars in this area.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 11 - Delia Bacon

I have no idea how many chapters in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (SBD) I’ll be commenting upon but one that I would not have thought I’d be writing about is the first, which is on Delia Bacon. When I started reading the Shakespeare authorship literature many years ago I did know of Delia Bacon but I had no interest in reading anything about her. And even now I only read some of it because some other authorship authors are writing about her in these books. My thinking has been that in the 150 years or so that she first wrote on this topic that so much more has been discovered and argued, that the current state of the debate, and the current state of the evidence and arguments, would be far more interesting and valuable than any idea or speculation she would have had back in 1857.

And I think that’s still very true. However, I like history and some of the brief retrospective views on her and her writings have been made interesting reading. And the chapter on her in SBD is one of these and well worth the time. Naturally, the primary idea she argued, that the Stratford man couldn’t have authored the Shakespeare works, is considered wrong.  

Her writing is considered ‘unreadable’ and practically impenetrable, at least nowadays since back then at least she held the interest of some ‘literary giants’ such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. I won’t summarize the chapter’s distillation of her ideas since Shakespeare enthusiasts should read both this book and the companion SBD(?) book mentioned previously. But I’d like to list some highlights.

For one, it’s stated that her idea that the Stratford Shakespeare wasn’t up educationally or culturally to writing the plays has been “comprehensively refuted by generations of scholars, biographers and critics” as the SBD book says it will demonstrate. But then it’s said that she had a “remarkably innovative and insightful method of reading the plays, as politically incendiary critiques of power and as prescient visions of human liberty”.  Her recasting of the image of Elizabeth I’s ‘Golden Age’ as “a cruel and violent despotism” now “coincides exactly with that critique of power that became” … “a constitutive element in both New Historicist and cultural materialist criticism of Shakespeare”. Plus, her theory of collaborative authorship “is today becoming an influential paradigm in Shakespeare studies”. In several ways she was “ahead of her time”.

So now, though she is still seen as ‘eccentric’ she did also possess some ‘better wisdom’ and she could have “become a founding mother of political Shakespeare criticism, ideological critique and collaborationist bibliography”.  In fact, she “was a remarkable woman”.

Part of this scholarly rehabilitation includes some rebukes to those, past and present, who “sought to undermine her credibility by characterizing her as a madwoman”. This was ‘shameful’, ‘deeply uncharitable’ and a “shabby treatment of an ‘amateur’ scholar by combative professionals”.

This is all very refreshing. And yet, it all seems something like a sugar coating of some still debatable points of argument which the SBT does not seem to want to mutually examine. She was remarkably insightful, but yet, she never produced any ‘direct evidence of any kind’ to endorse her authorship doubts. She was ahead of her time, but yet, she never made that great discovery “to prove her case beyond all reasonable doubt”. She was learned and possessive of wisdom, but yet, neither she nor anyone since has produced “the one single piece of evidence that would connect any of these alternative candidates to the works of Shakespeare”.

There is also tossed in there that “Stylistic similarities, verbal echoes, biographical correspondences between the works of these various writers can certainly be found” with the implied assertion that since they are common that then they must necessarily all be trivial and so no research is required to see if any are statistically significant or declared so by subject matter experts. I wonder how other disciplines view this standard of research in the Shakespeare studies programs.

And it just somehow doesn’t seem quite fair to expect someone from 150 years ago with her first hunch and by herself conducting the very beginnings of her research to have to find at that time “direct evidence” or the great discovery to “prove her case” with that “one single piece of evidence” which is needed to absolutely settle the authorship question once and for all to all concerned. Nor do these seem like the same standards that modern Shakespeare scholars operate under. Does a Shakespeare co-author attribution in modern research use only ‘direct’ but no ‘indirect’ evidence? Do their hypotheses need to be ‘proved beyond any shadow of doubt’ or is strong probability ever allowed? Do they require that ‘one single piece of evidence’ or are multiple lines of converging evidence acceptable?

And for such a lowly ‘amateur’ scholar she seems to have now the appreciative recognition of many a ‘combative professional’ for being so far ahead of her time in many ways.

Naturally, this all got me to thinking about The Winter’s Tale, a kind of parable for our times, I suppose. Leontes, King of Sicily, due to a jealous disposition and his overheated imagination, suddenly believes his beautiful and virtuous Queen Hermione has been unfaithful to him through the agency of his lifelong friend Polixenes. But yet only he sees the ‘ample’ evidence of this, proof actually of his accusation. Here, as in other plays, Shakespeare stages a question of belief or of an accusation based on ambiguous evidence. Obviously, Leontes didn’t catch Hermione in an act of infidelity with Polixenes. Yes, he thinks he sees circumstantial evidence which to him is convincing. However, not all the Lords of the realm, which we might think of as the intellectual class, agree with his conviction, as one Lord says “Beseech your highness, call the Queen again.” [to testify for herself]. But the King will not be moved and even his highest and closest servants are at risk to challenge him. At least, the King will consult the Delphic Oracle which he is sure will pronounce him as correct and just.

Is there any similar Oracle nowadays to settle our authorship question? Are the ‘professionals’, those paid to teach and research all things Shakespeare, to be blindly accepted as Oracles? Is that what they all want and expect? To not be questioned, or challenged, or debated by the modern intellectual class of non-paid doubters? [an increasing group with over 800 with advanced degrees and somewhere around 350 with a Ph.D. and so trained in a variety of ways of research, statistics, critical thinking and analysis]. The doubters have some advantage over the professionals in that they are much more independent of the risk of Groupthink or conformity to group norms that protect the professional’s career. Couldn’t some outside expert reviews be valuable? The closest thing to an Oracle nowadays might be a public panel of independent experts on the various subtopics of Shakespearean authorship evidence. But the ignoring of such a healthy tourney, good physic for the realm, will only continue to fester the kingdom. 

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 10 - Evidence vs Authority

I’m about done with Chaney’s  Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship and there’s one more section in it pertinent to this forum. In his chapter on ‘The profession of consciousness’ which talks much of the play of Hamlet, which he and other scholars are seeing as partly about “consciousness in a state of distraction” they see staged the political question, relevant at the time, of whether someone should “listen to his conscience as the primary voice of authority, as urged by Martin Luther”, “Or should the intellectual listen to the metaphysically sanctioned voice of the ‘father’ exterior to his consciousness (suggested by his father’s Ghost), lodged at the Vatican in the roman Catholic Church”?

This is analogous to the Shakespeare authorship debate since the SBT argues for their sanctioned authority over an individual’s conscience based on a personal examination of evidence. In Hamlet, this ‘interior versus exterior truth’ is presented, it’s speculated, “to help the audience process the great spiritual crisis of the age”.

This search for truth is displayed in various scenes and speech parts of the play, as by Polonious when he says “I will find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the centre” and then devises a meeting with Ophelia to observe him. Claudius also attempts to get at Hamlet’s secret with the aid of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. There is also the prominence of the ideas of doubt and skepticism as in Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia wherein is brought up the Copernicus versus Ptolemaic theories.

Hamlet sought to resolve this question with a test, his Mousetrap play within a play. In other words, he, and the others, sought more evidence. Chaney discusses how Shakespeare stages a similar dilemma in Much Ado About Nothing in which is presented the question of Hero’s supposed unfaithfulness. When she blushes at being accused of sin, her father sees this and “he is convinced that the outward blush reveals her inner truth” of being unfaithful to Claudio.

But then Friar Francis intervenes as he explains how he has often studied Hero’s face and mark’d “A thousand blushing apparitions / to start into her face, a thousand innocent shames”.  So, first appearances need to be more fully considered in the light of all available evidence. This is paired with Dogberry’s suggestion for catching a thief (“take no note of him…let him show himself what he is, and steal out of your company”). Chaney sites another scholar’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s message: “a hypothesis must be checked against a sufficient body of confirmatory data”.

Then, it seems clear that if Shakespeare himself were asked to testify on how this Shakespeare Authorship question should be approached, he would not come down on the side of ‘authority’, but on the side of reasoned examination of all (or at least a sufficient body of) evidence that either confirms or denies an hypothesis. This would also go along with the intent of study as described at the beginning in Love’s Labour’s Lost, that we should seek to know “Things hid and barred from common sense”.

Ironically, we are told by self-proclaimed sanctioned authorities that this approach is ‘anti-Shakespearean’. Just as self-serving evidence was produced against Hamlet to imply his insanity and send him away, we’ve seen the same strategy against Authorship doubters. It will be interesting to see if such a ‘Claudiusonian’ (a vile word!) maneuver is still being attempted.

So now we (or I, as it looks) will take a closer look at this evidence as it has been presented in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (SBD). Since there havn’t been as many critical reviews as I was expecting, (primarily because a response has already been published as discussed here:  http://doubtaboutwill.org/beyond_doubt ) I may need to lock myself in my study and while marking the passing of time, see if I can hammer out some mini-reviews on my own.    

The beginning of SBD shows some promise of even-handedness. In the General Introduction it states “the authorship discussion is a complex intellectual phenomenon well worthy of objective consideration” and “It raises questions about the nature of historical evidence, the moral responsibility of academic enquiry…” This last question was also raised by doubter Keir Cutler, Ph.D. who in his recent book The Shakespeare Authorship Question: A Crackpot’s View in which he quotes Prof. Shapiro who admitted that the Authorship Question “remains virtually taboo in academic circles”.  Keir wonders why academia would make and keep an historical question ‘taboo’ or “walled off from serious study”?  I wonder how well Shakespeare would think that academia is living up to its moral responsibility of enquiry in this instance?

The first part of SBD is about the ‘Skeptics’ and has chapters on Delia Bacon, and the three most prominent authorship candidates of Marlowe, Bacon, and the Earl of Oxford. I don’t plan on reviewing their portrayal of the evidence for Marlowe or Oxford since their own proponents are far more capable than I would be. And I’ve already given a link to some Marlovian response. If I find a site that responds to the chapter on Oxford then I’ll include a link to it. And after reviewing the general evidence, probably from both SBD books, then I’ll respond to the chapter on Bacon.

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 9 -Hidden Authorship

Shakespeare’s Hidden authorship

Returning to Chaney’s Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, he writes convincingly that Shakespeare deliberately hid his authorship as part of a long term literary strategy. I’ll just support this with many quotes from his book:

Pg. 3 “Especially when juxtaposed with ‘demi-puppets’, ‘printless foot’ [from The Tempest] comes to stand for an unusual phenomenon neglected in modern Shakespeare scholarship: an invisible poetic authorship produced within the London commercial theatre”.

Pg. 9 Quoting another scholar: “Printed playbooks became respectable reading matter earlier than we have hitherto supposed …” leading Chaney to argue that Shakespeare should be seen as a ‘literary dramatist’ … “composing scripts both for performance and for publication.”

Pg. 11 “…unlike nearly every major author from Virgil to Spenser, Shakespeare rarely presents himself.”

Pg. 11 Quoting Greenblatt “He contrived … to hide himself from view … Shakespeare’s signature characteristic  [was] his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere …”

Pg. 12 “According to this model, Shakespeare’s genius lies in hiding his authorship in order to foreground his characters, to privilege his actors, and to submit himself genially to the authorial anonymity of the theatrical medium.” And “He remains, in fact, the most anonymous of our great writers…”

[Note: This is his personal hypothesis of why Shakespeare ‘hid his authorship’. From what I’ve read he is nearly completely ignorant of any anti-Stratfordian arguments or evidence, so he’s only thinking based on what he is currently able to imagine.]

Pg. 13 Here Shakespeare is described as a ‘ghost’ and quotes Marjorie Garber “Shakespeare as an author is the person who, were he more completely known, would not be the Shakespeare we know.” [Note: I understand what she means, but can she see a more radical interpretation to her statement?]

Pg. 15 Chaney refers to “Shakespeare’s self-concealing counter-authorship” and quotes Bloom “We all want to find him in the sonnets, but he is too cunning for us.”

Pg. 22 “We might say that the blank at the heart of Shakespearean authorship is a self-erasure that opposes the very presence of Spenserian self-writing.”

[This is another conjecture on Shakespeare’s motive for his self-erasure.]

Pg. 22 quoting R. Wilson “… this author’s vanishing act was a deliberate function of his work: that Shakespeare wrote his plays with the conscious intention of secreting himself.

Pg. 23 “He theorized self-concealment as a political strategy of national leadership.”

Pg. 30 “Shakespeare self-consciously conceals his authorship”

Pg. 63 “Shakespeare’s authorship is strange because it deftly conceals the author.” … “Rather than present himself as an author with a literary career in search of fame Shakespeare disappears into the dramaturgy of his works.”

Ironically, while Chaney repeatedly demonstrates and refers to Shakespeare’s deliberate concealment of his authorship status, and at the expense of fame (at least in his lifetime) he still cannot conceive that Shakespeare may not be the actor/businessman from Stratford. It appears he is so immersed in his research, great as it is, that he cannot see outside of the very limiting blinders he’s had on all his life. He doesn’t show any but the most simplistic stereotypical awareness of the authorship skeptic’s evidence and arguments, and none of that from anyone on the doubter’s side of the divide.

I haven’t seen Chaney address the question of why Shakespeare would go to such lengths to hide himself and then not consider how his name, being so prevalent on most of his works, might undermine his self-concealment strategy. [Though I’m only half way through his book so he still might later say something about this anomaly. Perhaps he’d suggest that it’s only his biography  and motives that he wanted to hide, but not his name.]

The last popular myth that’s fading is the story of Will Shakespeare writing plays commercially for fame and fortune.

We’re seeing now from Prof. Cheney and others that Shakespeare was actually doing just the opposite of seeking fame by being ‘Counter’ to expectations for what a laureate or commercial writer would be, especially one that was so concerned about moving up in the world.

“…one of Shakespeare’s major professional goals is to challenge and perhaps supplant the major print-poet of his day.”

Pg. 102 “Shakespeare’s conversation about poetry does not occur in a historical vacuum but responds to a larger conversation about poetry coming out of classical Greece and Rome, migrating to the middle ages, and entering renaissance Europe and England.“  This doesn’t seem to me to fit the idea that he read just to “collect facts and plot ideas” for his commercial labor.

Pg. 118 “Shakespeare is a theatrical man who wrote enduring poems that he himself saw published (or saw published through the agency of others); who engaged vigorously the Western poetic tradition”.

Pg. 125 “The Shakespearean dramatic canon can be said to be about the book of scholarship.” Chaney contrasts this with the prevailing story of Shakespeare being a “poet of nature”. Though he wrote for the theater, Shakespeare had a “career-long commitment to creating memorable theatre out of poetry and books.” That is, Shakespeare was extremely bookish and scholarly and not like a common script writer hacking out a scene with other writer and actor friends at a tavern.

It’s starting to look like there are a group of mainstream Shakespeare scholars that, without realizing it, are about to find themselves standing in doubter territory, if they would ever look at the territory itself.

The Shakespeare scholarly and enthusiast community might be wise to consider if this very bookish, self-concealing author might enjoy jesting more than they have given him credit for; that they are not close to being in his element, and that he might indeed create an ‘improbable fiction’ to entice the world, especially those with a kind of Puritanism in them, into being infected with his device. I think the heart of his mystery is still a ways away from being plucked out! Sport Royal!

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - 8 - Collaboration

Shakespeare’s Collaborative writing

The predominant view among scholars is that Shakespeare “worked alongside fellow professionals” in a collaborative writing environment. Or as one person put it “The best analogy is of a team of script writers working on a film or TV series. Shakespeare, Marlowe and an actor (for example, Will Kemp) would get together down the tavern and thrash out a scene, testing lines of verse, entrances and exits, working out blocking with coins on the tavern table”. Another writer sums it as “… all the historical, literary (and these days computational) evidence points to the fact that Shakespeare’s plays were written in collaboration by a group of writers and actors working together to develop pieces of commercial drama”.

Yet, even if the evidence of collaboration were fully accepted, the assertion of “working alongside” is a supposition relying on an accepted premise that best fits the Stratfordian model. What it may as likely indicate is a weakness in hypothesis generation, for can there not be other ways of collaboration than by face-to-face gatherings?

I’m currently reading Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship by Patrick Cheney and have found it to be one of the most insightful books I’ve ever read, showing how he and some other noted scholars are just now piecing together some highly nuanced hidden allusions with the Shakespeare works. He shows how Shakespeare went to great pains to write anonymously, even (“in a collaborative production”). On page 40 he says “We discover a rare instance in which this author resists the material conditions of the collaborative theatre so prominently emphasized in recent Shakespearean criticism”.

If so, then how could so many researchers have assumed otherwise? Perhaps it is because they think of Shakespeare as a typical playwright as far as his life and motives are concerned, though they endow with an exceptional imagination and with knack for turning a phrase. But consider that Shakespeare, the author, wasn’t typical or average, but a master craftsman of all aspects of writing wherein only another master craftsman could perceive his many Tiffany touches. This is the picture coming from Cheney’s book. If so, another hypothesis explaining some of the seeming hands of other (co-author) playwrights in Shakespeare plays is that he could have imitated the styles of others when it suited his purpose. We know that he imitated other writers  and used their plots, songs, phrases, etc. Then it’s only another step to conceive that he also imitated their styles, and that, unlike lesser writers, he didn’t have one style of writing that can always be distinguished from another.

For support, there is the recognition by experts that “Shakespeare rather than Spenser…[possessed] the final consummation of all the potentialities of English” [p. 285 in Shakespeare and Spenser, Watkins, 1950. Also in this book “… each poet alters diction and syntax according to the effect he desires [ 267]”; and “Like Shakespeare, he has range and variety; he is master of more than one style”; and so we can see that like Spenser he would be able produce “… a pattern of intricate verbal sounds so skillful that only careful analysis would reveal it”. So if his purpose required it he could alter his style “... depending on the effect which he seeks [p. 288]”. This is why “His whole method in Coriolanus differs from that in Antony and Cleopatra [p. 288].” Now, Watkins wasn’t speaking precisely about all the varieties of styles examined in stylometric analysis, but the basic argument needs to be considered. This is especially the case knowing as we do that Shakespeare was a master craftsman of grammar, logic, and rhetoric who “… has mastery and easy control over his medium quite beyond the ordinary.” (Shakespeare’s Use of The Arts of Language, Sister Miriam Joseph, 1947.

Consider then that if Shakespeare liked the particular effect that another playwright achieved in some other work, that he could have imitated it for a particular scene or Act or passage. And in cases where the collaboration still seems more likely, that this co-authoring didn’t necessarily happen face-to-face.

Though this touches on the argument of stylometrics I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read about this topic in the two Shakespeare Beyond Doubt books. I may have more to say on it after I have.

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.