Shakespeare’s French Obsession: New Historicism and the Authorship Debate - Elisabeth Waugaman

[@ronroffel1462]

An excellent critique of Stratfordian ignorance of the French characters in Love's Labour's Lost and measure for Measure and the political intrigues which surround both plays. There is a deeper connection to de Vere and Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham that is not covered in this video. De Vere's uncle, by marriage to his father's sister Frances, was Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey (and originator of the "Shakespearean" sonnet form) who was a grandson of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norffolk. Charles Howard was a first cousin of Henry and another grandson of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk. This family connection would explain how he knew of the rules for the Order of St. Clare (25:30). All he had to do was make a family visit to the Lord Admiral. Another way he could have known is through Howard's patronage of the Lord Admiral's Men acting company or through de Vere's service as captain of a small fleet of ships in 1588 when the Spanish Armada was defeated. Shakspere of Stratford could never have traveled in those high aristocratic circles in Elizabethan England, nor could he have entered the Bodleian Library at Oxford unless he was a student and there is no record he went to any university or law school. This is important, since for both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, there is an almost complete record of students from the founding of both universities. There goes the Folger's alleged scholarship on the politics behind Lover's Labour's Lost and Measure for Measure.

[@ElisabethWaugaman]

Thank you for bringing up the Howard connection with the Rules of Saint Clare. You are absolutely correct: this is an important point. I couldn't cover everything in the time I had, so thank you again for explaining how Shake-speare could have accessed this knowledge. Oxford and Howard both had acting troops so it makes perfect sense they shared information about what their acting troops were doing.

[@patricksullivan4329]

"Incredible improbabilities" sums it up exactly. Any statistician would recognize the impossibility of Shaksper being the author when confronted with this evidence. And there's even more not mentioned here.

[@drakedorosh9332]

Great information.

[@mississaugataekwondo8946]

This is another example of superior Oxfordian scholarship.

[@joecurran2811]

Brick by brick...

[@DrWrapperband]

Superb ....

[@gerhardrohne2261]

its well known that angloamerican shakespear-scolars dont know much of foreign languages - so italian french and german authors dont exist-until translated ( for the british and american academe the times of a carlyle have long gone)

[@EruditeDM]

I have read there were other older hamlet plays performed, and that Shakespeare’s version supplanted all of those previous playwrights. It was not a new subject on the London stage, but his version triumphed.

[@joecurran2811]

That's an argument from silence. Where is the evidence for what you have read?

[@ElisabethWaugaman]

Thank you for bringing up the "Ur-Hamlet" theory which imagined that there was a "Hamlet" play Shakespeare must have seen and used to write his "Hamlet." Academics theorized the earlier play must have been written by Thomas Kyd, because he knew French. The problem with this theory is that no copy of an earlier "Hamlet" survives, and there is no history of performance for such a play. Scholars, like Harold Bloom, do not accept this theory.

[@EruditeDM]

@@joecurran2811 Hi Joe. I’m not prepared for a scholarly debate. You may be right.

[@donnapido3824]

Please look into the suppressed scholarship from North Africa that identifies Shock Spur as Shaykh Zubair. He looks very LLevantine in most of his portraits. The Brits can't bear the possibility that their greatest writer could have been anything but english so they made up the story that he NEVER stepped outside of England. Even now scholars wonder where the name Othello came from. It's a fairly common Lwoo name shared by a string of Nilotic communities through the Sudan and East Africa. Venetians were so notorious for taking slaves in the Nile Valley from the 4th century onward that a Pope in the 1200s excommunicated the whole City. Their cover was that they were looking for the remains of St mark. It's hardly surprising that a Moor of Venice would have a Lwoo name

[@ElisabethWaugaman]

Lee Durkee's great new book, "Stalking Shakespere," tells the story of the many portraits that have been identified at one time or another as being Shakespeare: none of them can be conclusively proven to be Shakespeare. Questioning Shakespeare's identity can open up new ways of thinking about the plays, which can be illuminating. Then the serious work begins of sifting through and weighing the evidence.

[@TheNickman66]

The problem with this approach is that Shakespeare undoubtedly plagiarised every play he wrote. He was a poet. He took the form of Marlowe’s blank verse and added rhyming verse. He took whole swathes of North’s Plutarch and turned it into poetry. The man from Stratford was a poet. You don’t need an education for that. Take stuff from the learned wits of Cambridge and turn it into masterpieces. By having a good ear. By imagining how each character would act in a situation. He was an actor after all. These Cambridge men weren’t. Yes - the man from Stratford with little Latin and less Greek actually polished existing plays and writings into the greatest works of his or any age.

[@joecurran2811]

That in no way explains the references to Beowulf. There was only one copy available in England at the time, and what's more, it hadn't been translated. Try again.

[@sicnarf423]

Also Mozart did not write his music. He is the music equivalent of Shakespeare

[@ElisabethWaugaman]

Mozart did write his music-that's how others could play it, (Sometimes, he would write the musical accompaniment, but not his own part, which he would write later.) His father was a gifted musician who taught Mozart and his sister music from a very young age. Both children were gifted musicians. although Mozart far surpassed his sister. Like Mozart, Shakespeare had an amazing education as we know from his literary texts- knoweldge of Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, even a knowledge of Beowulf, for which there was only one copy in all of England. It belonged to Lawrence Nowell, one of Oxford's tutors.

[@professorsogol5824]

The Oxfordians have a huge problem: Their candidate,Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, indisputably died in 1604, prior to the dates of either Macbeth or The Tempest.

[@RichardWaugaman]

Anyone who makes this ridiculous statement is the one with the "huge problem." We don't know when the plays were written. E.K. Chambers admitted his dating speculations were based on the lifespan of Shakspere. So, circular thinking at its worst!

[@ElisabethWaugaman]

Richard Whalen's article on the dating of the plays proves this "huge problem" is a myth : . In 1908, Abel Lefranc observed Shakespeare's plays were written to be performed first at court and later for the public. Mainstream Strafordians now agree with this. This means the plays were performed at court before being performed in public without necessarily keeping records of a previous court performance. With the Stationer's Office, registration was not automatic and was even sometimes used to delay publication of a work, which may have been written before it was registered. The Office of Revels began keeping serious records only in 1579 with the appointment of Edmund Tylney to the office in order to facilitate censorship. Even with that, records of when Shakespeare's plays were first performed are far from settled, cf. Whalen's article for a detailed play by play discussion.