10 reasons

[alphachapmtl]

Some guy wrote Shakespeare's plays.
I don't know who it is. It's someone I don't know, have never met, would not recognize.
Whoever he is, and I don't really care, let's call him Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is a great one, and still is by any other name.

I'll never forget the King Lear performance I saw more than 30 years ago. What a masterpiece!
I salute you, Shakespeare.

[neufer]

Some guy wrote Shakespeare's plays.

http://www.marysidney.com/
http://www.marysidneysociety.org/
http://www.shakespeare-authorship.org.u ... erbert.htm

[charlieo3]

What's in a name? The play's the thing.
Who said that??

[neufer]

What's in a name? The play's the thing.
Who said that??

The Earl of Oxford

[charlieo3]

That IS the question.

[Beyond]

That IS the question.

imagesCAAE32UM.jpg (7.22 KiB) Viewed 3728 times

Question I say boy, we got enough questions What we need is answers, answers! That's what we need, son, answers. Now go get us some.

[neufer]

That IS the question.

____ Hamlet (First Quarto 1603)

Hamlet: To be, or not to be, I there's the point,

• To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
  No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
  For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
  And borne before an euerlasting Iudge,
  From whence no passenger euer retur'nd,
  The vndiscouered country, at whose sight
  The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.
  But for this, the ioyfull hope of this,
  Whol'd beare the scornes and flattery of the world,
  Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore?
  The widow being oppressd, the orphan wrong'd;
  The taste of hunger, or a tirants raigne,
  And thousand more calamities besides,
  To grunt and sweate vnder this weary life,
  When that he may his full Quietus make,
  With a bare bodkin, who would this indure,
  But for a hope of something after death?
  Which pusles the braine, and doth confound the sence,
  Which makes vs rather beare those euilles we haue,
  Than flie to others that we know not of.
  I that, O this conscience makes cowardes of vs all,
  Lady in thy orizons, be all my sinnes remembred.

[owlice]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[neufer]

• The Tempest, Act II, scene I

[b][color=#FF0000]The king's fair daughter Claribel. Not since widow Dido's time were 'toons graced with such a paragon to their queen.[/color][/b]

---

GONZALO: Methinks our garments are now as fresh as
. when we put them on first in Afric, at the marriage of
. the king's fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis.

SEBASTIAN: 'Twas a sweet marriage,
. and we prosper well in our return.

ADRIAN: Tunis was never graced before
. with such a paragon to their queen.

GONZALO: Not since widow Dido's time.

ANTONIO: Widow! a pox o' that! How came that widow in?
. widow Dido!

SEBASTIAN: What if he had said 'widower AEneas' too?

ADRIAN: 'Widow Dido' said you? you make me study of that: she was of Carthage, not of Tunis.

[Beyond]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Egads

[neufer]

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"Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth." — Albert Einstein‏
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<<At the Science Writers' conference, Theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll explained why there was no need to "sample the moon to know it's not made of cheese.” He said the hypothesis is "absurd", failing against our knowledge of the universe and, “This is not a proof, there is no metaphysical proof, like you can proof a statement in logic or math that the moon is not made of green cheese. But science nevertheless passes judgments on claims based on how well they fit in with the rest of our theoretical understanding.”>>

[neufer]

.

[size=175][color=#0000FF]William Shakespear (1640)[/color] :?:[/size]

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[size=175][color=#0000FF]Francis Bacon (1627)[/color][/size]

---

[Beyond]

Uh-oh, another round of the natives shaking the dust off their Spears.

[neufer]

The curious hodgepodge that is Shakespeare

• by Bob Ellis

Bob Ellis has had a long and close involvement with politics, covering as a journalist twenty-four campaigns in Australia, the UK and the USA, and writing speeches or slogans for Kim Beazley, Bob Carr, Mike Rann and others. Ellis's work for film and stage has won numerous nominations and awards for writing and direction.

<<Strange how people as learned, experienced and stage-wise as John Bell, whom I saw in brilliant conversation with Ron Blair an hour ago, pooh-pooh so loftily and crushingly the Oxford and Neville heresies, and swear blind that Will Shakespeare wrote alone.

For he did not write alone. It is known that the three Henry VIs, A Winter's Tale, Pericles, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Tragedy Of Sir Thomas More and The Yorkshire Tragedy, to name but nine, had other writers.

It is thought the Porter scene in Macbeth was a 'turn' done, in stand-up comedy style, by the actor. It is thought that the Falstaff scenes might have been in part improvised, or co-written, by the company clown Will Kempe, who in his book Morris-Dancing From John O' Groats To Land's End showed how good a writer he was.

It is also known that parts of Dr Faustus were not by Marlowe, Beaumont wrote plays with Fletcher, Fletcher with Shakespeare, Webster with Beaumont, Webster with Ford, and it is not known for certain who wrote The Spanish Tragedy or The Revenger's Tragedy or the Ur-Hamlet, though Kyd, Tourneur and Shakespeare when young, or Kyd perhaps, or Greene, are at present the prime suspects.

It is, however, certain that about 20 per cent of Julius Caesar was written by Tom North and all of it, including the ghost scene, cribbed from his translation of Plutarch, and about 30 per cent of Antony and Cleopatra. It is also certain that at least one scene, the 'strawberry' scene, of Richard III was lifted word for word from St Thomas More's unfinished biography of him, and the 'never a borrower nor a lender' speech of Polonius was one Lord Burleigh gave unremittingly to anyone who, in his blithering old age, would listen to him.

The 'hey ho, the wind and the rain' song, which appears in both Lear and Twelfth Night, may have been by another hand (the tune certainly was) and a good deal of Hamlet's philosophising was derived from Montaigne and the witch's chant from a Scottish cult known to James I, a direct descendant of Macbeth.

So here we have, almost for certain, 'Shakespeare' working with 22 collaborators in 18 years. Or perhaps only 18. It is not too big a stretch, I submit, m'lud, for 'Shakespeare' to be someone other than Will Shaxper, the jobbing actor, theatre co-owner, grain merchant, real estate speculator and part-time stage director.

In the modern age, films written by the Hollywood Ten were signed — as in The Front — by men of lesser talent who won Oscars for them; C Day-Lewis, the Poet Laureate, a royalist snob like Edward De Vere, wrote, fearful of exposure, detective stories under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake; Gore Vidal ditto under the name Edgar Box; Orson Welles claimed to have written all of the works on his Radio Theatre when other hands, Howard Koch, the co-author of Casablanca, among them, wrote most of them, including the War Of The Worlds script that rocketed Orson to world fame; John F Kennedy signed a book, Profiles of Power, that was written by Ted Sorensen and won the Pulitzer Prize; Paul Keating 'owned' a Redfern Speech that was written by Don Watson and praised world-wide; Julia Gillard 'gives' Gallipoli speeches written by Carl Green; and there were even the strange sur-titles, 'Verdi's Othello', 'Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet', and 'Barry Kosky's King Lear'.

For now as then, authorship is a fluid concept. I wrote episodes of Number 96 that Don Cash and Bill Harmon in some way 'owned'. My wife Anne Brooksbank wrote episodes of A Country Practice that Jim Davern still makes big money from. Woody Allen and Mel Brooks wrote sketches that Sid Caesar miraculously 'owned' and made famous,' Big Julie, I told him, don't go, already'; and so on.

Even so, it was in 'Shakespeare's' time that actors, musicians, royal patrons added lines and scenes (as Hamlet did to The Mousetrap) to texts that differed from week to week and town to town; a longer version at Bankside, a shorter version at Richmond, and so on.

And it may well be that Will Shaxper, as Andrew Upton does now, overvalued his contribution to a text that arrived by messenger from time to time from a lordly, diffident aristocrat, that wrote and did not sign it.

Will would have copied it out several times, or bits of it, in his own hand, and given it to actors that he then cast and directed in it, playing some of the parts himself, as Orson did in his various adaptations of Conrad, Melville and HG Wells; but that is hardly 'writing the plays', as John Bell said he did.

It is worth noting that the Earl of Oxford died in 1604, and that Macbeth, premiered that year, is half as long as Hamlet, and its hero/villain has no death speech as do all his predecessors, perhaps because the playwright died before he could supply it or work the play over; and that no other dying hero thereafter (Coriolanus, Timon) has one either.

So Doug Quixote's idea that fragments of eight or nine plays were worked on by De Vere's Men not always competently makes some sense.

Nothing after Othello actually works. Cymbeline is ridiculous, and described by the supportive Dr Johnson as 'unresisting imbecility'. Pericles uses a rough-hewn verse form that seems alien to its 'author'. Henry VIII is a cock-up; The Tempest full of lordly debating points but free of narrative.

Oxford, dead, was no longer there to give a work its overarching momentum. Minnows shuffled about, trying to sort it. Coriolanus was not performed till 1632, when most of the company were dead; Timon not even in that century.

It is worth looking up Tom North's Plutarch's account (note how the apostrophes accumulate) of the last days of Julius Caesar, and comparing them with Act 2 and Act 3 of 'Shakespeare's' most enduring and accessible work. It was successful, I submit, m'lud, because it was reportage of actual events more than a work of the imagination. It had no more 'author' than Oliver Stone's JFK.

And a great deal of 'Shakespeare's' work was like that.

And Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, suitor of Queen Elizabeth, the first of that name, who sent his wife, Burleigh's daughter, to a nunnery, could have been part of the mix.>>

[Moonlady]

I think there should be a place for alternate theories, but that's it.

I don't like the personality cults used for propaganda by fanatics.


"Sol Robeson: Hold on. You have to slow down. You're losing it. You have to take a breath. Listen to yourself. You're connecting a computer bug I had with a computer bug you might have had and some religious hogwash. You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere." Pi

[Beyond]

The curious hodgepodge that is Shakespeare
by Bob Ellis

After reading that, it looks like my alien theory is down the crapper. I should have known, though, as there are no crop-circle pictures of Shakespeare.

[neufer]

Theatre where Romeo and Juliet was first performed is rediscovered in Shoreditch centuries after it was dismantled

[b][color=#0000FF]The only contemporary illustration, showing a tower-like building flying a flag, thought to be the Curtain in 1600, is an implausibly idyllic scene with a horse crossing green meadows and a charming wooded hill in the background. In reality the site is flat as a pancake, and by 1600 it was a lawless and fairly noisome district just outside the City limits, with slaughter houses and tanneries, and the now buried river Walbrook an open sewer and rubbish dump.[/color][/b]

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[b][color=#0000FF]Remains of Shakespeare’s Curtain theatre are uncovered in east London[/color][/b]

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<<Well preserved remains of Shakespeare's original "wooden O" stage, the Curtain theatre where Henry V and Romeo and Juliet were first performed, have been discovered in a yard in east London.

The Curtain theatre in Shoreditch preceded the Globe on the Thames as Shakespeare's first venue, showcasing several of his most famous plays. But it was dismantled in the 17th century and its precise location lost.

Now part of the gravelled yard in Shoreditch where the groundlings stood, ate, gossiped and watched the plays, and foundation walls on which the tiers of wooden galleries were built have been uncovered in what was open ground for 500 years while the surrounding district became one of the most densely built in London.

Experts from Museum of London Archaeology (MoLA) have found two sections of exterior wall, crucial for giving the dimensions of the theatre, and are confident of revealing more as the site is cleared for redevelopment. An outer yard paved with sheep knuckle bones could date from the theatre or slightly later housing.

It has long been known that the Curtain – named after the ancient road it fronted – was in the area, but its exact site was lost after the building fell into disuse in the late 1620s. The site in Hewett Street is only a stone's throw from a remarkably accurate plaque marking the best guess for its location. The Curtain, built in 1577, was only a few hundred yards from another theatre further along Curtain Road, imaginatively named the Theatre, whose foundations were discovered in 2008, also by MoLA. Both were among the earliest purpose-built theatres in London, and intimately connected with Shakespeare.

When the actor-manager James Burbage fell out with his landlord at the Theatre, the company – according to cherished theatre legend – dismantled the timbers overnight and shipped them across the river to build his most famous theatre, the Globe, on Bankside. Until the new theatre was ready, his company used the Curtain for at least two years from 1597, where Henry V, and it is believed Romeo and Juliet, were first staged. The vivid image of a theatre as a wooden O comes from the prologue to Henry V: "Can this Cock-Pit hold within this Woodden O, the very Caskes that did affright the Ayre at Agincourt?"

Rumours of the rediscovery of the Curtain have caused great excitement in the Shakespearian community, in the middle of the summer-long international festival devoted to his work. Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the reconstructed Globe, described the discovery as "hugely exciting. I love the fact that we are excavating London, and slowly clearing away the miserable piles of Victoriana and Empire, and revealing the wild, anarchic and joyous London which is lurking beneath. It reminds me of the Zocalo in Mexico City, where all the Spanish palaces are slowly sinking into the earth, and the old Mayan temples are being squeezed back up."

Michael Boyd, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, said: "It is inspiring that the Museum of London has unearthed the foundations of the Curtain Theatre. I look forward to touching the mud and stone, if not wood, and feeling the presence of that space where Shakespeare's early work, including the histories, made such a lasting impact." The site is part of a large block owned by a development company, Plough Yard Developments, which plans to incorporate the remains as public open space into a proposed mixed office, retail and residential development, now going for outline planning permission. Therese Bak, of the architects Pringle Brandon Drew, said they were thrilled by the discovery, and hope to incorporate a performance and exhibition space in the new buildings.

Chris Thomas of MoLA, who led the excavation, said the remains were remarkably well preserved, probably because for centuries they remained under open space as the theatre fell out of use and was redeveloped as housing, becoming back gardens, a pub yard – the entrance was probably where the small Victorian pub, the Horse and Groom, a listed building which will be retained, now stands – and then a garage with an inspection pit which, unknown to its builders, almost laid bare the Tudor foundations.

The site has already yielded bits of broken clay pipe, which could date from the theatre, and fragments of later china and wall tiles, but Thomas is confident of finding artefacts as more of the site is uncovered. "On other Tudor theatres we've found quantities of little pottery money boxes, which the punters put the price of admission into on the way in, which were then smashed at the back of the theatre to get the takings – I'm sure some from the Curtain are still there, just waiting for us to find them.">>

[geckzilla]

Sheep knuckle bone pavement?


Where the Streets are Paved with Sheep's Knuckles... by ricksphotos101, on Flickr

[neufer]

Finding Shakespeare
DUBBY BHAGAT, The Himalayan Times, 2012-08-03

KATHMANDU: <<Controversy rises from time to time about who Shakespeare was. This is the suggestion being that the name was given to a barely literate buffoon when the real playwright was the Earl of Oxford, Sir Francis Bacon, the 6th Earl of Derby or Christopher Marlowe. Anonymous argues the case for Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Very few commoners of his time are as well-documented as William Shakespeare. If he had been an ordinary playwright, there would be no controversy over their authorship. But he was the greatest of all writers in English, in some ways the engine for the language’s spread around the world, and one of the supreme artists of the human race.

Because of the ingenious screenplay by John Orloff, precise direction by Roland Emmerich and the casting of memorable British actors, you can walk into the theatre as a blank slate, follow and enjoy the story, and leave convinced — if of nothing else — that Shakespeare was a figure of compelling interest.

The character of Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) is drawn a notch of two above the village idiot. Witless and graceless, there is no whiff of brilliance about him, and indeed the wonder is not that this man could have written the plays but that he could articulate clearly enough to even act in some of them (about which there seems to be no doubt).

Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans), however, seems the very template of genius. His manner, his bearing, his authority, his ease in the court of Elizabeth all conspire to make him a qualified candidate. He was so well-connected with the crown in fact that the movie speculates he may have been the lover of the young Elizabeth (Joely Richardson) or the son of the older Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave). Not both.

The film also plunges us into the rich intrigue of the first Elizabethan age, including the activities of the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid), whose plot to overthrow the queen led to the inconvenience of beheading. Incredibly, for a film shot mostly on German sound stages, Anonymous richly evokes the London of its time, when the splendour of the court lived in a metropolis of appalling poverty and the streets were ankle-deep in mud. It creates a realistic, convincing Globe Theater, which establishes how intimate it really was. The groundlings could almost reach out and touch the players, and in the box seats, such as Oxford himself could witness the power of his work, which was credited to the nonentity

All of that makes Anonymous a splendid experience: the dialogue, the acting, the depiction of London, the lust, jealousy and intrigue. But I must tiresomely insist that Edward de Vere did not write Shakespeare’s plays. Apparently Roland Emmerich sincerely believes he did. Well, when he directed 2012, Emmerich thought there might be something to the Mayan calendar.

In a New York Times article, the Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro has cited a few technicalities: (a) de Vere writes and stars in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he was nine years old, and (b) “he died in 1604, before 10 or so of Shakespeare’s plays were written.”

Why then does this question arise from time to time? I feel it’s because of the distance from then to now and I believe that there is such a thing as ‘scholar speak’ where in Ivy draped university students who have chosen Shakespeare as a thesaural subject must dismiss other contenders to the title of the genius of William Shakespeare and only then may they proceed with their thesis then it’s easy.>>

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[Beyond]

Awwww, he didn't get to the part where the wolf gets his bacon fried. But it was still good!

[neufer]

Awwww, he didn't get to the part where the wolf gets his bacon fried. But it was still good!

---------------------------------------------------------------
_ Merry Wives of Windsor > Act IV, scene I (Folio 1, 1623)
.............................................................
SIR HUGH EVANS: That is a good William. What is he, William, that does lend articles?

WILLIAM PAGE: Articles are borrowed of the pronoun, and be thus declined, Singulariter, nominativo, hic, haec, hoc.

SIR HUGH EVANS: Nominativo, hig, hag, hog; pray you, mark: genitivo, hujus. Well, what is your accusative case?

WILLIAM PAGE: Accusativo, hinc.

SIR HUGH EVANS: I pray you, have your remembrance, child, accusative, hung, hang, hog.

MISTRESS QUICKLY: 'Hang-hog' is Latin for bacon, I warrant you.

Eua. That is a good William: what is he (William) that do's lend Articles.

Will. Articles are borrowed of the Pronoune; and be thus declined. Singulariter nominatiuo hic hæc, hoc.

Eua. Nominatiuo hig, hag, hog: pray you marke: genitiuo huius: Well: what is your Accusatiue-case?

Will. Accusatiuo hinc.

Eua. I pray you haue your remembrance (childe) Accusatiuo hing, hang, hog.

Qu. Hang-hog, is latten for Bacon, I warrant you.
-----------------------------------------------------

<<Modern editors, completely misunderstanding the meaning, have usually changed the Folio's 'latten' to 'Latin' and reduced 'Bacon' to 'bacon', which kills the intended allusion and hidden meaning. In fact Mistress Quickly is referring to a witty (but deadly serious) incident concerning Francis Bacon's father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, which Francis recorded for posterity as one of his apophthegms (is defined as a terse, pointed saying, embodying an important truth in a few words'). This was printed as Apophthegm 36 in Resuscitatio, published by Dr. William Rawley in 1671:--

• Sir Nicholas Bacon, being appointed a Judge for the Northern Circuit and having brought his Trials that came before him to such a pass, as
  the passing of Sentence on Malefactors, he was by one of Malefactors mightily importuned for to save his life, which when nothing he had
  said did avail, he at length desired his mercy on the account of kindred:
  
  • 'Prethee,' said my Lord Judge,'how came that in?' 'Why if it please you my Lord, your name is Bacon, and mine is Hog, and in all Ages Hog and Bacon have been so near kindred, that they are not to be separated.' 'I but,' replyed Judge Bacon, 'you and I cannot be kindred, except you be hanged; for Hog is not Bacon until it be well hanged.

This story is told for its value as a parable, which is pointed out by Evans in his rejoinder to Mistress Quickly in the following line,
where he notes that she has spoken a 'prable' (parable) Shakespeare, Merry Wives, IV, i. :--

• Evans. Leave your prables ( o'man)....

'Latten' means a mixture of metals, particularly an alloy resembling or identical to brass. It is used elsewhere in the Shakespeare plays and in Bacon's letters as a word-play on 'Latin'. This word-play forms a series of puns, such that 'latten' infers a debased Latin or secret language, confirmed by the Latin word latentis, meaning concealed. The whole of Mistress Quickly's sentence is a remarkable example of punning, the Latin for 'to hang', for instance, being suspendere. Sus is the Latin for a sow, pig, swine or hog, and pendere means to hang down. The 'warrant' can be rendered in Latin as auctor , a word which is often used by Bacon to denote an inventor or author. Moreover, even Mistress Quickly's name is important in this context for 'quickly' is cito in Latin and cito also means to summon, call forward or name, especially in a court of law, or to call upon a god for help. (see Arden, 'Latten: Its meaning and Intention')>>

[Beyond]

HORRORS, methinks! I was actually following what neufer wrote above. (shuddering wilst shakeing head) It too shall pass.

[neufer]

HORRORS, methinks! I was actually following what neufer wrote above.

(shuddering wilst shakeing head) It too shall pass.

• Accusatiuo hinc

[emc]

What fright doth yon Winslow bake?
Tis the yeast and briquette is the bun.
Arise fired bun and thrill the ravenous coon,
who is ready to lick and smell as thief.
That thou, err made, art far more fire than eats.
Shake Speared