10 reasons

[Ann]

I'd just like to say, Ann hath a way with words!

Thanks, starstruck! Ann hath a way with words - Shakespeare's wife with words, too! That's a real compliment!

Ann

[neufer]

I'd just like to say, Ann hath a way with words!

Thanks, starstruck! Ann hath a way with words - Shakespeare's wife with words, too! That's a real compliment!

Shakespeare's wife was illiterate.

You're not quite THAT phoney, Ann.

<<Anne Hathaway is believed to have grown up in Shottery, a small village just to the west of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. She is assumed to have grown up in the farmhouse that was the Hathaway family home, which is located at Shottery and is now a major tourist attraction for the village.>>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A January 17, 1579 entry in the Stratford Church Register:
marriage of *William WILLSONNE & Anne HATHAWAY of Shotterye*
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1582. On 27th November a licence was issued in the Registry of the
. Bishop of Worcester authorising the marriage of William Shaxpere
. to Anna Whateley of Temple Grafton.
.........................................................................................
1582. On 28th November the Bishop of Worcester insisted upon a
. marriage bond exempting him from all liability should
. there be any irregularity in the speedy marriage of
. "William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey of Stratford
. in the Diocese of Worcester. maiden..."
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August 6, 1623: Maffeo Barberini elected Pope URBAN VIII
August 6, 1623: Anne Hathaway dies
...........................................................
August 6, 1640: Ben Jonson is BURIED UPRIGHT against the wall of his crypt.
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[Ann]

Shakespeare's wife was illiterate.

You're not quite THAT phoney, Ann.

Another compliment! This is my lucky day!!!

Ann

[neufer]

Shakespeare's wife was illiterate.

You're not quite THAT phoney, Ann.

Another compliment! This is my lucky day!!!

Remember that long after the Greeks invented atomic theory and scientifically measured the size of the Earth; Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei were convicted of disagreeing with the established wisdom of the day that blindly accepted a literal interpretation of the "historical record."

Some time after that John Thomas Scopes was convicted of disagreeing with the established wisdom of the day that blindly accepted a literal interpretation of the "historical record."

You and owlice appear to be firmly on the side of the established wisdom of the day that blindly accepts a literal interpretation of the "historical record."

They say you can lead a girl to Vassar but you can't make her think!

[bystander]

Wow, Art! You make a brilliant argument for the Electric Universe / Plasma Cosmology ! (or whatever)

[neufer]

Wow, Art! You make a brilliant argument for the Electric Universe / Plasma Cosmology ! (or whatever)

I thought that I was making an argument for the fact that Shakespeare History as practiced is totally anti-scientific.

This fact was forcefully brought home recently when "the powers to be" abjectly refused to excavate the Globe Theatre:

<<The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and was destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613. A second Globe Theatre was built on the same site by June 1614 and closed in 1642. The precise location of the building remained unknown until a small part of the foundations, including one original pier base, was discovered in 1989 beneath the car park at the rear of Anchor Terrace on Park Street. As the majority of the foundations lie beneath 67—70 Anchor Terrace, a listed building, no further excavations have been permitted.>>

Apparently they never have any qualms about putting a car park into "a Grade II listed [19th century] building."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It should be pointed out, however, that no one has yet adequately explained how the Sun, "though it contains almost 99.9 percent of the solar system's mass, contains just 1 percent of its angular momentum" without invoking some sort of "Electric Universe / Plasma Cosmology." (Ditto for Cosmic Rays.) While I am totally sympathetic with the need to respond to (if not to outright suppress) wild scientific speculation here at the Asterisk* I would not be sympathetic at all to the automatic suppression of testable ideas in peer reviewed literature. No authorship doubts are currently allowed in peer reviewed English Literature journals. That is the reason (and the only reason) that there are so few outspoken anti-Stratfordians among Shakespeare scholars.

<<The nebular hypothesis was first proposed in 1734 by Emanuel Swedenborg and later elaborated and expanded upon by Immanuel Kant in 1755. A similar theory was independently formulated by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796.

In 1749, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon conceived the idea that the planets were formed when a comet collided with the Sun, sending matter out to form the planets. However, Laplace refuted this idea in 1796, showing that any planets formed in such a way would eventually crash into the Sun. Laplace felt that the near-circular orbits of the planets were a necessary consequence of their formation.

In 1755, Immanuel Kant speculated that observed nebulae may in fact be regions of star and planet formation. In 1796, Laplace elaborated by arguing that the nebula collapsed into a star, and, as it did so, the remaining material gradually spun outward into a flat disc, which then formed the planets.

The nebular hypothesis initially faced the obstacle of angular momentum; if the Sun had indeed formed from the collapse of such a cloud, the planets should be rotating far more slowly. The Sun, though it contains almost 99.9 percent of the system's mass, contains just 1 percent of its angular momentum.

In 1978, astronomer A. J. R. Prentice revived the Laplacian nebular model in his Modern Laplacian Theory by suggesting that the angular momentum problem could be resolved by drag created by dust grains in the original disc which slowed down the rotation in the centre. Prentice also suggested that the young Sun transferred some angular momentum to the protoplanetary disc and planetesimals through supersonic ejections understood to occur in T Tauri stars. However, his contention that such formation would occur in toruses or rings has been questioned, as any such rings would disperse before collapsing into planets.

The birth of the modern widely accepted theory of planetary formation—the Solar Nebular Disk Model (SNDM)—can be traced to the works of Soviet astronomer Victor Safronov. His book Evolution of the protoplanetary cloud and formation of the Earth and the planets, which was translated to English in 1972, had a long-lasting effect on the way scientists thought about the formation of the planets. In this book almost all major problems of the planetary formation process were formulated and some of them solved. Safronov's ideas were further developed in the works of George Wetherill, who discovered runaway accretion. By the early 1980s, the nebular hypothesis in the form of SNDM had come back into favour, led by two major discoveries in astronomy. First, a number of apparently young stars, such as Beta Pictoris, were found to be surrounded by discs of cool dust, much as was predicted by the nebular hypothesis. Second, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, launched in 1983, observed that many stars had an excess of infrared radiation that could be explained if they were orbited by discs of cooler material.>>

[neufer]

....................................................
All truth passes through three stages:

• First, it is ridiculed.
  Second, it is violently opposed.
  Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

- As cited in Truth : Resuming the Age of Reason (2006) by Mahlon Marr; the earliest attribution of this to Schopenhauer yet found dates to around 1986; it is also sometimes misattributed to George Bernard Shaw, and a similar statement is often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
--------------------------------------------------------
It has been said that the reception of an original contribution to knowledge may be divided into three phases:

• during the first it is ridiculed as not true, impossible or useless;
  
  during the second, people say that there may be something in it but it would never be of any practical use;
  
  and in the third and final phase, when the discovery has received general recognition, there are usually people who say that it is not original and has been anticipated by others.

[a note at the bottom of the page adds: This saying seems to have originated from Sir James Mackenzie
(The Beloved Physician, by R. M. Wilson, John Murray, London)]

- William Ian Beardmore Beveridge, in The Art of Scientific Investigation (1955), p. 113
....................................................
The four stages of acceptance:

• 1. This is worthless nonsense.
  2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
  3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
  4. I always said so.

- J. B. S. Haldane, Journal of Genetics 1963 (Vol 58, p.464) in a review of 'The Truth About Death'.
--------------------------------------------------------

[geckzilla]

So why isn't peer-review of authorship questions allowed?

[neufer]

So why isn't peer-review of authorship questions allowed?

The prestigious Shakespeare Quarterly doesn't explicitly state that it will reject authorship question articles but they clearly do.

Likewise the Folger allows for talks on authorship only by published diehard Stratfordians like: James Shapiro, Jonathan Bate, and Bill Bryson:

James Shapiro: April 16, 2010

Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture 2010: Jonathan Bate: April 26, 2010

Words on Will: Bill Bryson: October 29, 2007

Most egregious of all, perhaps, is the fact that diehard Stratfordians (e.g., Stanley Wells, Ernst Honigman, Jonathan Bate, Park Honan, etc.) regularly award each other the annual Hoffman Prize that was set up specifically by a Marlovian to promote Marlovian research:

<<Calvin Hoffman, author of The Murder of the Man who was Shakespeare (1955), died in 1987, still absolutely convinced that Marlowe was the true author of Shakespeare's works. Anxious that the theory should not die with him, he left a substantial sum of money with the King's School, Canterbury—where Marlowe went as a boy—for them to administer an annual essay competition on this subject. The Trust Deed stipulated that the winning essay should be the one:

...which in the opinion of the King's School most convincingly authoritatively and informatively examines and discusses in depth the life and works of Christopher Marlowe and the authorship of the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare with particular regard to the possibility that Christopher Marlowe wrote some or all of those poems and plays or made some inspirational creative or compositional contributions towards the authorship of them. (Emphasis added)

The adjudication of the prize has always been delegated to an eminent professional Shakespearean scholar and, despite Hoffman's clear intentions, the winning essay has very seldom espoused the Marlovian cause, the prize usually going to essays along entirely orthodox lines. The prize is of several thousand pounds (UK). A further stipulation of the initial Trust Deed was that:

If in any year the person adjudged to have won the Prize has in the opinion of The King's School furnished irrefutable and incontrovertible proof and evidence required to satisfy the world of Shakespearian scholarship that all the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Christopher Marlowe then the amount of the Prize for that year shall be increased by assigning to the winner absolutely one half of the capital or corpus of the entire Trust Fund...

The amount in this case would run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The original hopes of Hoffman himself may have been largely ignored.>>

To its credit, at least, the prestigious Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference named _SHAKSPER_ is honest about rejecting articles that "are clearly irresponsible, offensive, or apart from SHAKSPER’s purpose, including those concerning the so-called 'Authorship Question.'"

Which is why The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt is necessary.

[Ann]

Art wrote:

Remember that long after the Greeks invented atomic theory and scientifically measured the size of the Earth; Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei were convicted of disagreeing with the established wisdom of the day that blindly accepted a literal interpretation of the "historical record."

Some time after that John Thomas Scopes was convicted of disagreeing with the established wisdom of the day that blindly accepted a literal interpretation of the "historical record."

You have a point here, Art. My colleague Arnost, who is not only a teacher but also a geologist, has told me that there was a professor of geology here in Sweden whose influence was such that students of geology at Swedish universities were told that continental drift was a myth, just because the professor didn't believe in it. Of course, this farce couldn't be upheld for long, and when the professor died (which he did before he retired, I think) his many critics at the universities took over completely, and continental drift became the established truth practically overnight. Or at least that's the way Arnost tells it. Perhaps he exaggerates. I don't doubt for a moment, however, that there is a grain of truth in his story.

You and owlice appear to be firmly on the side of the established wisdom of the day that blindly accepts a literal interpretation of the "historical record."

Let me question your claim that I accept the scholarly view of Shakespeare "blindly".

In any case, siding with the accepted view of anything doesn't automatically make you wrong. Opposing it doesn't always make you right.

Some time ago, a Swedish guy thought he'd make some money out of the 2012 hoopla, so he wrote to the biggest debate forum here in Sweden and asked for money, so that he could build a huge bunker in a good-sized hill in southern Sweden, where everybody who had contributed money to his bunker could hunker down when the comet hit us. The guy called the comet Niburu, and he told us that he had to build his bunker now, because the comet was already visible as a bright red eye in the sky. I posted a comment where I told him that I had looked at the sky the previous night, and no bright red thing had been visible there. Could he help me find it by telling me the general part of the sky where I could see the red thing? Was it close to where the Sun sets in the evening, in the west? Was it close to where the Sun rises in the morning, in the east? Was it close to where you can see the Big Dipper, in the north? Or was it in the opposite side of the sky from the Big Dipper, in the south? The guy posted a comment where he said that you don't need directions to find his red eye in the sky, but if I couldn't find it, I was welcome home to him, so that he could show it to me! He asked me to remember that people had laughed at Einstein, too, but now everybody believes in that guy!

So my verdict is that the upholders of the established truth may be either right or wrong, but opposing them doesn't automatically make you right. Opposing the established "experts" doesn't automatically make you the next Einstein. It doesn't even automatically make you a champion or a prophet of the next Einstein.

If you are right, however, and you can accumulate enough evidence in your favor, then history will prove you right no matter what I or all those other annoying little teases may say to you.

Sometimes the truth may be buried so deep that it will remain forever hidden in the dust of time. Then we may never know the truth. And then we can take a vote. But I don't know about that vote, Art. To me, taking a vote is a way to express your wishes for the future. Should that politician be elected or should s/he not? Should we drill for oil in Alaska or should we not? Should taxes be raised or should they be lowered, or should they remain the same? We vote to express our wishes for the future. In fact, we vote because we try to influence the future, to have a say about our own future.

We can also take a vote to express our thoughts about the past. Who was the greater seafarer, Ferdinand Magellan or Francis Drake? Was Napoleon greater than Nelson? We can vote about that kind of thing. But surely we can't vote to decide who was the first person to sail around the world? If Ferdinand Magellan was actually that person - and he was - then surely we can't change the past retroactively by voting for Francis Drake as the first circumnavigator of our planet?

And if we don't know who wrote the works of Shakespeare, the surely we can't pick a winner in the past by voting for him? Surely our vote will not trickle down the centuries and "wrench the quill out of the Stratford man's hand" and put it in the hand of the Earl of Oxford?

We may never know the truth about Shakespeare. We can argue in favor of our personal "favorite", but we can't "make him the author of the works of Shakespeare" by voting for him.

Ann

[neufer]

We may never know the truth about Shakespeare. We can argue in favor of our personal "favorite", but we can't "make him the author of the works of Shakespeare" by voting for him.

But we can and should try to stop a cabal of diehard Stratfordians from entirely running the show as they have for centuries:

http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php? ... 75#p162118

All published encyclopedias and school texts spout the official Stratford Birthplace Trust line either entirely or as the absolute final word.

And now a diehard Stratfordian by the name of Tom Reedy has even usurped the Wikipedia article on the Shakespeare authorship question (not to mention the never-ending Wikipedia article critical about the movie _Anonymous_).

Societies can only function by trusting its experts as much as possible but in the case of Shakespearean History those "experts" are no better than self serving witch doctors and they should be kicked out.

[Ann]

This post is going to be a long one, even for me. I'm going to try to address the question of what kind of truths are worth fighting for. And then, Art, I'm going to try to address the question of whether fighting for Edward de Vere's authorship of the works of Shakespeare strikes me as a worthy cause to fight for.

Sofia Arkelsten.

Let me start by talking about the ruling party of Sweden, "Moderaterna". Sweden, a classic "social democratic country", now has a right-wing government, like most countries in Europe. The name of this party is, as I said, Moderaterna. One of the representatives of this ruling party is this woman, Sofia Arkelsten. Recently she claimed that her party (or its predecessors) had been the one that made Sweden a democracy by giving everybody the right to vote. She also said that her party had been extremely active in fighting against apartheid in South Africa during the decades when the apartheid system had ruled that country.

Eeeeeehhhh. It so happens that the conservative Swedish party of the early 20th century fought hard against giving everybody the right to vote. The conservative party only gave in when it was obvious that they had lost their majority in the equivalent of the parliament. Similarly, they only reluctantly supported the fight against apartheid, which was a fight led by the Social Democrats.

Moderaterna got him out of here?

This self-aggrandizing claim by Moderaterna led to a lot of jokes in the Swedish blogosphere. Obviously Moderaterna had fought every worthy cause in the history of humanity! Obviously they had always been first! Let's see, it must have been Moderaterna that freed Nelson Mandela from prison in Robben Island!

Moderaterna
got here first?

Obviously representatives of Moderaterna were the first people to set foot on the Moon!

Rosa Parks?

Carl Bildt?

This one is my favorite. Did you know that the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, got the American Civil Rights movement going by refusing to give his seat to a white man on a bus?

This is my point. You can't allow a ruling party, a group of people with a lot of power, to abuse their power by taking credit for good things that they at best had little to do with, at worst actively fought against. You can't let such people convince their electorate that they and their party have given the people everything that is good, while their opponents are responsible for everything that is bad.

Moderaterna deserved being made a laughing stock for making ridiculous claims about their "glorious" past. You can't let powerful people, who can make decisions that directly influence the lives of millions of people, get away with outright lies designed to prettify their past. In this case, fighting for the truth is very important. I can tell you, by the way, that Moderaterna have now backed down, at least from their most magnanimous self-congratulations.

So sometimes it definitely is critically important to stand up and fight for the truth when lies are being spread by powerful people. However, Art, I don't really see how a lot of people will be made to suffer unless they can be convinced that the glover's son from Stratford didn't author the works of Shakespeare, but that the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote them?

Ann

P.S. Okay, this post didn't get to be as long as I had planned, but I could add a few things... maybe I will...

[neufer]

So sometimes it definitely is critically important to stand up and fight for the truth when lies are being spread by powerful people. However, Art, I don't really see how a lot of people may suffer unless they can be convinced that the glover's son from Stratford didn't author the works of Shakespeare, but that the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote them?

You are absolutely right, Ann There are far better causes to fight for than my own.

However, you have misstated "my true cause"
which only amounts to what is simply stated in:
The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt.

My personal interests are somewhat more convoluted however:

• 1) understanding James Joyce's Finnegans Wake;
  2) understanding Shakespeare and
  3) understanding why I and so many other intellectuals evolved into becoming liberal humanists.

My conclusion from a great deal of study is that the Great Books of the Western World have basically been a propaganda tool for an underground liberal antiwar humanist movement... a movement which I, myself, in fact applaud

This is not fundamentally a bad conspiracy IMO but rather a good conspiracy and frankly I am somewhat torn about revealing it. And yet... revealing it has become something of an obsession of mine about which I literally can't help myself.

For example: Disclosing the phoniness of Will Shaksper (who died on St. Georges Day of 1616) also means disclosing the phoniness of Miguel de Cervantes (who also died on St. Georges Day of 1616). Don Quixote is clearly an antiwar piece written almost entirely by the English. However, such news, if true, would be devastating to the Spanish.

So, the fact is: if push comes to shove I will not be terribly sad if I go to my grave as something of a Cassandra.

At the same time, it would be nice if I could convince myself that I am not entirely mad.

[Beyond]

At the same time, it would be nice if I could convince myself that I am not entirely mad.

Wouldn't it be nice if we all could.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[rstevenson]

Art is not mad. Art is inscrutable!

Rob

[neufer]

Art is not mad. Art is inscrutable!

Sometimes I'm scrutable.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Scrutable, a. Discoverable by scrutiny, inquiry, or critical examination.

Scrutiny, n. [L. scrutinium, fr. scrutari to search carefuly, originally, to search even to the rags, fr. scruta trash, trumpery.]

[Ann]

Art wrote:

My personal interests are somewhat more convoluted however:
1) understanding James Joyce's Finnegans Wake;
2) understanding Shakespeare and
3) understanding why I and so many other intellectuals evolved into becoming liberal humanists.

Click to view full size image

Well, Art, I'm impressed. I think. Sort of devoting your life to understanding Finnegan's Wake... I would never, ever, even think of doing that.

You know Dante's Hell? (What a question...of course you do.)

Well, in Dante's Hell there is a suitable punishment waiting for every sinner. The way I see it, there must be crime or a sin that forces the sinner to spend eternity making sense of Finnegan's Wake.

For myself - and I don't believe in Hell, obviously - I think it would be sort of nice spending eternity walking around in Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel. Where every book that can be created by scrambling letters into "words" and scrambling "words" into sentences. And then scrambling sentences so that they fill pages and scrambling pages so that they come together in a certain order, forming a book. In this library you would find every book that could ever be written. You would find Don Quijote and The Little House on the Prairie, Epic of Gilgamesh and To Kill a Mockingbird, The Fellowship of the Ring and Almagest. And absolutely everything else, too. Your book would be there, Art, where you would make the perfect case for Edward de Vere as the author of the works of Shakespeare. The book would be there in all its glory, and you would only have to find it.

Imagine wandering about in Borges' labyrinthine library, larger, perhaps, than the known universe. Imagine walking there forever, searching for your perfect book.

My books would be there too. The perfect books that I have wanted to write, but haven't even gotten started on.

Another book in that library is the book that explains absolutely everything about Finnegan's Wake. But since that book does not exist, insofar as Borges' library doesn't exist, you are doing the next best thing by trying to work out the secrets of Finnegan's Wake on your own. I don't understand you, Art. But you are sort of heroic.

Ann

[geckzilla]

"Books Art Hasn't Read"

- a category never to be seen on Jeopardy

[Beyond]

After thinking about it all day.... I find that i have to agree with Rob. Art is inscrutable to everyone, but himself... sometimes.

[neufer]

After thinking about it all day.... I find that i have to agree with Rob.
Art is inscrutable to everyone, but himself... sometimes.

---

[Beyond]

It would seem that Art has just proved my point for me, in the above post. Thanks Art. You're so helpful, always willing to give someone a hand or two

[rupifragum1]

People.... it´s a normal book wrote by a human person. No secrets behind the book, no "Aliens", no plants from another planet. Stop "conspiracy theorys", please.
Sometimes I think that Freud was right. "A big proportion of people in this world need psicological treatement".

[neufer]

People.... it´s a normal book wrote by a human person.
No secrets behind the book, no "Aliens", no plants from another planet.
Stop "conspiracy theorys", please.

Sometimes I think that Freud was right.
"A big proportion of people in this world need psicological treatement [sic]".

Sometimes I think that Freud was right too.

Sigmund Freud: “I no longer believe that… the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him. Since reading Shakespeare Identified by J. Thomas Looney, I am almost convinced that the assumed name conceals the personality of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford… The man of Stratford seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything.”

[Beyond]

Well, whomever Shakespeare really was,an alien he was right about one thing... the whole world is a stage and we are but actors playing out our parts... I hope we have a better ending than the death & destruction & misery the script has been full of so far

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Well, whom[sic]ever Shakespeare really was,an alien he was right about one thing... the whole world is a stage and we are but actors playing out our parts... I hope we have a better ending than the death & destruction & misery the script has been full of so far

“I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away…”

[As quoted in Kenneth Tynan’s Persona Grata
(London : Allen Wingate Ltd., 1953).]