Last Will. & Testament Literary Paper Trails

[@anthonymccarthy4164]

Diane Price is one of my intellectual heroes for her brilliantly original and eminently level-headed research into this question.

[@richardwaugaman1505]

Brendan, don't feel bad--think of how many Shakespeare "experts" are still taken in by it. This is an important topic to explore psychologically. Whatever happened to our cherished ideal of academic freedom? An English professor told me years ago that it would be "academic suicide" for a graduate student to explore the authorship question open-mindedly for their dissertation. The concept of groupthink is extremely helpful in trying to understand what's going on with Shakespeare "scholars" and the many people who still trust them.

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

Silly experts, relying on the evidence and not their perceived psychological profile of a guy who lived and died in a very different world from ours.

[@brendanward2991]

I still can't believe I was taken in by the Stratfordian myth for so long. It's preposterous.

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

And I can't believe you fell for the smoke and mirrors presented here.

[@brendanward2991]

@@Jeffhowardmeade Zzzzzzzz...

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

@@brendanward2991 I didn't mean THAT kind of smoke.

[@butterflymoon6368]

what myth???

[@PhilipBaltimore-xi7du]

I remember seeing this on public television years ago. Is the whole thing available anywhere?

[@butterflymoon6368]

This is so odd. I wonder if it was a group of people working under one name. The writing style (not technically as in handwriting but as in - the way plays were structures etc.) is the same, though, no? Could it have been another well known playwright who wanted to use a pen-name to make a distinction between his normal work and this work? The way musicians do? Maybe this playwright was already famous for a certain type of work but was too scared to branch out into this different, maybe more experimental work than he was known for just in case the audience wouldn't accept him or his new work? It was too risky to use his normal name?

[@JSTNtheWZRD]

The three I like but there's more: Marlowe, Stratford, DeVere. Though I can prove all three to some degree - it's truth is still a mystery.

[@butterflymoon6368]

I promise I will stop typing 🤯. Just one more. 'where did he learn?' is probably the most interesting question here and what would likely lead to the truth. My guess is simply that he knew someone who knew Italy very well. He knew someone who was well travelled. Unless he managed to travel illegally as a stowaway. I think he had a memory like a sponge and was nosey and observant enough to absorb stories from people who travelled. Goodnight.

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

If he knew someone who knew Italy well, that person would have asked him why he got so many things wrong. He got almost nothing correct.

[@butterflymoon6368]

@@Jeffhowardmeade Why is everyone saying he knew a lot about Italy? Do you have a link to studies that show what he got wrong, out of interest?

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

@@butterflymoon6368 They're claiming he knew a lot about Italy because Edward De Vere traveled there and they want to show that Shakespeare, who has no record of having left England, could not have known this or that about the place. Yet he makes such basic errors as placing Padua in Lombardy when it was part of Veneto. He thought Venice had a duke and Verona had a prince. Whenever he mentions a titled person -- just the sort of people an earl would have been hanging with -- he gets it wrong. He thought Verona had sycamore trees and that the River Adige was tidal like the River Thames. He didn't know about the Ghetto, and thought Shylock was the only Jew in Venice, which didn't have canals, so far as he knew. The few things he got right were either well known throughout Christendom, like the University at Padua, or pure coincidence, like mentioning St. Peter's church in Verona, when every city had at least one St. Peter's church, if not more. Shakespeare was writing public entertainments, not travel guides or history books. When the histories said Banquo was a henchman for Macbeth, yet King James claimed Banquo as an ancestor, Shakespeare made him a good guy. When he needed to give the Protestant King of Navarre three companions, he picked the names of three actual nobles, giving no thought to the fact that one was Catholic and the mortal enemy of the other two. He gives landlocked Bohemia a coastline. He gets money conversions wrong. He invents absurd laws in faraway places because his plot requires it. Hey, they were just stage plays, not great literature. Once a play had ended its run, who would care?

[@librarylu]

@@butterflymoon6368 See The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels by Richard Paul Roe for what he got right.

[@janenelson3112]

If the poorly educated player turned businessman, William Shakspere, was not William Shakespeare the poet, instead of continuing to ask , if not him, then who? might it be productive to ask: if the monument and epitaph are not about the Stratford man, then who had the power to authorize its installation, the means to commission the monument with its strangely worded epitaph and the motive to mislead the visitor into believing that the Stratford player was the great playwright? In short, if this is a fraud, who organised it, how did they implement it out and most importantly, why? Whose interests were served by such an imposture?

[@rstritmatter]

Fulke Greville was the crown authority in Warwickshire when the monument up. He said he wished to be remembered as the friend of Sir Phillip Sidney and the "master" of Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. There's your chief suspect.

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

@@rstritmatter The Greville quip didn't make it down onto paper until 1670. You charlatans will cut off eulogies after a year in order to claim nobody eulogized Shakespeare, but you'll wait half a century to get an apocryphal quote you can twist into something useful.

[@DrWrapperband]

Moniment !NOT monument!

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

In 1616 they were the same thing.

[@floatingholmes]

@@Jeffhowardmeade Any source for this unsubstantiated assertion?

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

@@floatingholmes Oxford English Dictionary 1971 edition page M-608. "Moniment obs. form of Monument." Early English Books Online returns 98 matches in 51 records for "moniment" between 1532 and 1699. Every last one of them is a variant spelling of "monument". You are presumably referring to the Scottish word "Moniment" meaning a person worthy of ridicule. It's earliest known use is the late 19th Century. Consider it substantiated.

[@stevenhershkowitz2265]

"Moniment" means a person worthy of ridicule. "Stratford Moniment" means that the idea that someone from Stratford wrote the Works is an idea worthy of ridicule.

[@stevenhershkowitz2265]

@@Jeffhowardmeade So the argument is that in the 19th century, someone decided to take the word that was known to all writers as pertaining to Shakespeare's Work - "moniment" - and suddenly transform it into a term of ridicule. The meaning of the word as a term of ridicule must predate Shakespeare or it is a specific insult directed at Shakespeare. It is not the latter, so it must be the former. Ben Jonson used it in the Folio to send the same message as his poem On Poet Ape - Don't believe everything you hear! (but most people are not capable of detecting subtlety and so will believe anything they hear from a source that they consider authoritative). from On Poet Ape: ...Tut, such crimes The SLUGGISH GAPING AUDITOR devours; He marks not whose 'twas first: and after-times May judge it to be his, as well as ours. Fool! as if half eyes will not know a fleece From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece?

[@butterflymoon6368]

Could he maybe not have actually handwritten his plays but rather dictated them to someone? He might have actually been illiterate. It would make sense then if in his later life with that person no longer around, he was left to write his will by himself and so had to teach himself how to write as best he could. I do get that people say there was nothing of Shakespeare in the writing of a Will but it's a Will. Nobody's going to write 'this chest of drawers. to be or not to be.... the property of said heir, that is the question'. It's a fkn Will. I know people will ridicule this idea of him being illiterate but actually, Shakespeare 'writes' musically. If you have any musical ability (that's an internal thing btw not an external ability e.g. you can be musical without playing an instrument) and you're a writer, it would make sense to 'write' the way he does. That's an easy way to memorise your writing too which maybe he would have had to do when the 'quill writer' wasn't around. It's how a rapper would 'write' - they would 'feel' the rhythm of the sentence first and it would be in their heads. It's "easier" to memorise your work when it is musical. Honestly he seems like someone who learned how to manage this disability by incorporating others into his 'writer' persona (i.e. 'staff'). It would make sense that he was a writer who couldn't actually write and therefore became the type of writer who wouldn't need to write at all. I'm waffling. I can't stop thinking about this! Can we have more of this????!

[@Mooseman327]

Stanley Wells was such a lying clown. When it came to Shakespeare, he lied about everything.