Hamlet: another Scottish Play? A drink with Earl Showerman at the Blue Boar Tavern

[@joekostka1298]

So super to have you all again! Love being here.

[@duncanmckeown1292]

Yay! My favourite Oxfordian experience returns...and our regular host! Just one observation: I am a great fan of both the estimable Earl Showerman and Dorothea. I agree with Dorothea on much (especially on the dubious persona of Robert Greene!) but I have to agree with Earl over Ophelia. To me the positive proof that she represents de Vere's first wife is this from Hamlet: Hamlet: "For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being good kissing carrion - Have you a daughter?/ Polonius: "I have, my lord."/ Hamlet "Let her not walk in the sun. Conception is a blessing. But as your daughter may conceive - friend, look to it. Polonius/ "How say you by that? (aside) Still harping on my daughter.

[@lifelifewell]

Brand new follower! UK 👋

[@benc8834]

Wow Earl, quite a Gallup! Another grapeshot broadside feel lucky to be hearing this.....I'm only at 17:40 minutes in but another best show ever earl!

[@Nope.Unknown]

Yay🎉 you're back!

[@joekostka1298]

Dorothea, you are correct. Great art doesn't just come out in one day. It is constantly being added to and improved. Writing, Painting, Sculpting, all great art takes time. The Stratford myth claims miracle. It's just hokum.

[@peckerwood6078]

Kudos Earl for the realization that the matter of religion is the driver of the politics involved and is key to this discussion! It’s not that Elizabeth or any other English monarch had a problem with Roman Catholicism but rather that Roman Catholicism has a problem with anyone that did not (does not) acknowledge their supremacy. (pontifical) It’s the subplot that is unspoken and mostly unknown in that the deVere’s primary line (*primogeniture)was decamped to Scotland and were the primary conspirators who murdered Darnley and are profiled in the investigation but were never brought before a court! Edward deVere is involved (I’m a little sketchy on this part) in secret correspondence with a Scotish contact, only identified by a number(like Dee as 007) in the negotiations that brought the Stuarts onto the throne of the UK. Am assuming it was his estranged but not lost, Scotish relatives. *see Earls of Blackwood, Lanarkshire, with whom he was plotting with. The plays the thing to catch the King! Didn’t seem strange that King James I/VI was such a fan boy of Shakespeare & Susan deVere? And Scene!

[@user-martinpd]

A Shakespeare put up to characterization might need a strategy to put across his humanism. Hamlet's character, perhaps faultlessly, seems to be an inverse of Mary the First. All the events of his life are inverses of her life's end. Anyway, the lack of attenders of a funeral could have allusion to the growing unpopularity of the protestants burnings, perhaps the fist pumpers were down to four by the time of the one-hundredth and seventy-ninth burning, or the last eighty of them had only prayer utterers, or no one came to cheer. If Shakespeare defends Mary the First it will read clean to the sensors with the installation of a systematic inversion. All of this mythos-izing of events two or three decades old was performed in front of people who had lived through two children of henry on the throne rather domestically, in London, and it was a civic duty to identify with the monarch, whose duty was to be a kind of Christ. Mary imagined her husband to have put a baby in her belly before her entire realm, twice, Hamlet turned his fianceè into a prostitute in his mind.

[@peckerwood6078]

You make great inferences and insights. The role of the “Queen Consort” of Spain AKA Bloody Mary is vastly unappreciated in this Milieu. She would have gladly burned each and every one of her subjects if it would have won her papal approval! It would have been to her mind “doing them a kindness!”

[@user-martinpd]

​@@peckerwood6078Well, I'm struck by the ritualized washing of the feet of the poor by Elizabeth. We can contrast this with your "come touch my gown" kind of ruler not unheard of in many centuries. I think Catholics meeting clandestinely (again? -it might be our history of the early church is superior or more solidified than then-England's) might show us a parallel economy. We can never be sure how soft or stearn people wanted Jesus to be, but the old iconography, in a display of increasingly admirable, even boggling talent expressed through sculpture and paint, gave us almost whatever we wanted from Jesus. One libertied district was run by a bishop who taxed the prostitution therein. I think James got a gay Jesus, complete with a John to lay on his breast or rustle in the olive trees when Judas gives his kiss. I speak of James the Catholic, and James the new pope of a logicalist protestantism, a cornerer of demons in which I think he believed. Well, you can see why his time might have been sequestered. Go whing arrows at deer James, meet the demons in old women, stay busy, trample grounds and more importantly, *learn that your hunting has angered your subjects.* This anecdote interests me because of the story from his boyhood about having to shout "treason" from his enemy's window. I wonder if it isn't a tale built at first to constrain him, to make of his pastoralism his prison, and which later evolved into a useful way to imply he was murderous. Not importantly really, just in the course of later theopolitics. Or, it might have been a bit of acting of his own from the start. You have to step out of a house to burn it down, especially if you don't want to get caught. You know, people today love the dark ages, it is the pop past. Rennaissance is not fun because of all the grubby effeminacy and our abundance of accurate information. The Greeks and Romans were those aristocrats' dark ages. They hated England, the cold, the Germans, Welsh and Dutch. They hated the court because it was their moribund center. They wanted to be Greeks and Romans, like Miniver Cheevy. So in fact I don't think they looked their monarchs head-on. If they were rake enough, they might seduce a king or a queen, but there wasn't a moral authority in the plays that dared to go against power. I'm not sure what to do with Elizabeth's "Don't you see? I am Richard." Her father set in yet another Orwellianism and everyone had to live with it.

[@nicpanagopoulos3469]

About Dorothea's argument that Ophelia is more like Oxford's daughter than Anne Cecil, maybe she could be both. Regarding the name Ophelia which contains the word "daughter" as Dorothea said, Anne Cecil was Cecil's, i.e. Pollonius' daughter. Bravo Dorothea for arguing that the classics offer universal models for human behavior which hasn't changed a bit since ancient times! Just to add to what Earl says about the ghost in Hamlet which isn't in the French or Scandinavian sources. In Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, Orestes asks his father's spirit over his grave to inspire his revenge. So there is a vengeful ghost there too.

[@irtnyc]

Dorothea is wrong about Ophelia. The name not a Latin construct. It's Greek. Is there any evidence the character is ever printed as O-filia -filiae or anything latin? Two seconds on the search engine of your choice reveals: (a) ōphéleia (ὠφέλεια), help, aid, benefit; and (b) first used by Jacopo Sannazaro in 1504 poem 'Arcadia' spelled as "Ofelia". It appeared in Shakespeare's Hamlet almost a century later. Separately, it is always the case there are many possible and fun etymologies for anything in any poem, but especially The Works. Consider O as in "Oh" (exclamation, but also slang for vagina); and zero ie naught, as in Much Ado About Nothing. No-thing is also vernacular slang for vagina in this era, is it not? Consider Act 3 Scene 2: QUEEN Come hither, my dear Hamlet, sit by me. HAMLET No, good mother. Here’s metal more attractive. Hamlet takes a place near Ophelia. POLONIUS, to the King Oh 🤣ho! Do you mark that? HAMLET Lady, shall I lie in your lap? 🤣 OPHELIA No 🤣 my lord. HAMLET I mean, my head upon your lap? [Note: this is a sex gag] OPHELIA Ay, my lord. HAMLET Do you think I meant country 🤣matters? [This is said: "Cunt-ry"] OPHELIA I think nothing 🤣my lord. HAMLET That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs. 🤣 OPHELIA What is, my lord? HAMLET Nothing. 🤣 OPHELIA You are merry, my lord. HAMLET Who, I? OPHELIA Ay, my lord. HAMLET O 🤣God, your only jig-maker. What should a man do but be merry? For look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within ’s two hours. OPHELIA Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord. HAMLET So long? Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables. O 🤣heavens, die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year. But, by ’r Lady, he must build churches, then, or else shall he suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is “For oh 🤣for oh 🤣 the hobby-horse is forgot.” The trumpets sounds. Dumb show follows. 🤣 I defer the subject matter experts on whether the hobby-horsing is playing to the groundlings, or beating the censors to erudite ears; or both. It would be interesting to look at the bad quarto and ur-Hamlet for how this evolved. I haven't.

[@peckerwood6078]

As far as the Earl of Oxfords Latin, Greek etc. what he did understand full well was that Latin was the language with which the Church, writ Large, yoked Monarchs, countries & cultures to their service. The KJV was officially sanctioned and disseminated whereas simply owning a Geneva Bible like the one that belonged to Edward deVere was an offence punishable by death and being burnt at the stake under the reign of Queen Mary (1553-1558) the Sister of Elizabeth. A rather sudden and monumental change of fortunes! More study & discussion required!

[@irtnyc]

This is false. The Geneva Bible didn't exist during the reign of Mary. Definitionally. They wrote it in Geneva because they were exiles... from Mary. See Wikipedia article for Anthony Gilby, including: "The Geneva Bible: After the Marian persecutions began, English Protestants went to Geneva. It was here that translators, including Gilby, worked on what would come to be known as the Geneva Bible.[12] Later, after Mary's death, many of the exiles returned to England in 1558, but Gilby stayed in Geneva to complete the Geneva Bible, along with William Whittingham. Whittingham was the inspiration for this resourceful, yet prodigious task of translating the Bible because it was an extension of his New Testament of 1557. Gilby played an important role in Whittingham’s idea for the Bible. Whittingham himself gave witness to Gilby’s role in the translation of the Geneva Bible and recorded it in a piece entitled Livre des Anglais.[13]" And: "Once the Geneva Bible was finished, Gilby finally returned to England in May 1560 and his masterpiece was published only a few weeks later." See also, Wikipedia article for Rowland Hill, who set and published Gilby's bible: "The Geneva Bible: Frontispiece of the 1560 Geneva Bible, bearing Hill's name In 1560 the Geneva Bible was published by Sir Rowland Hill,[22] and he has subsequently been culturally associated with it.[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] He was involved with the network of Marian exiles." "This is the bible that was used by William Shakespeare,[32] Oliver Cromwell,[33] John Knox,[34] John Donne,[35] and others. It was also one of the Bibles taken to America on the Mayflower.[36] The frontispiece is understood to have been the inspiration for Benjamin Franklin's design for the Great Seal of the United States.[37][38]" Respectfully, A descendant of the Tyndales, with another ~10 folks called Rowland in the family free.