Tom Woosnam - Teaching the Shakespeare Authorship Question

[@patricksullivan4329]

I'll add to this presentation that when the scientist Peter Sturrock looked at Diana Price's chart of literary paper trails, he did a statistical analysis of the odds that Shakspere was actually a writer, given that he lacked what 24 other Elizabethan writers had as proof of their being writers, he concluded those odds were over 100,000 to one against it.

[@truthlove1114]

I can’t get enough of this stuff.

[@EverTheTwain]

same

[@annalisette5897]

Me too. And I like to think and work with theories. And if a Stratfordian catches us discussing possibilities, they reject the whole thing with one short, harsh sentence that pointedly states there was only one Shakespeare and he is not deVere. LOL!

[@squareleg5757]

Bravo! Thank you.

[@niemann3942]

One of the best presentations I've seen for newcomers, simply because it is so hard to argue with. Bravo, Tom!

[@Short-Cipher]

I didn't come to this expecting it to be as highly entertaining and humorous as it was. Wonderfully pertinent information regarding methods to approach (or should I say "disarm"?) the SAQ with Stratforians or the neophyte relayed succinctly and most colorfully. Bravo, Tom Woosnam! 👏

[@matthewmurraybates1]

"Why have biographies at all?" The plays showcase rhetorical skill ( ethos, logos, pathos) and persuasion, and this is a great example of a rhetorical fallacy. It answers the question "Aren't the plays enough on their own?" with a different question, thereby Begging the Question originally asked. Arguably, the plays ARE enough on their own, since we have celebrated them for 400 years with, as he contends, precious little biographical information to add to their interpretation. The Man from Stratford is pretty much a blank slate, and yet we still cherish and perform the plays. What do we know for sure about the writer? That whoever wrote them understood the human condition and could express it with great sympathy and poetry. Correctly attributing credit to the right man is pretty academic to their appreciation as works of art. To answer Mr Woosnam's question - biographies exist primarily to see how famous historical people have become successful, handled challenges and thereby provide material for us to compare ourselves with them. What they don't do is explain genius, or 'define' interpretation. No biography will give us the secret of Mozart, Einstein or any other celebrated cultural figure. We are all suckers for a personality cult, but we must acknowledge the limits this grants us in understanding the Works. The authorship question does nothing to unlock or illuminate the plays. It is ironic that the greatest writing in the English Language is entirely cast aside to pedantically pick over the bones of exactly who held the pen. The line that if we get Shakespeare wrong we 'get the Elizabethan Age wrong' is a HUGE reach. The geo-politics and religious tensions at court? The economic transformation of England due to the privateers looting Spanish gold - we get all that wrong if we don't identify the correct author - really?? So what's the point of biographies etc? We have resumes to get jobs, we read biographies to learn about great lives - and in both there are often errors, lies, and unsubstantiated claims. This is an argument about book-keeping, and Mr W neatly avoids answering what benefit this has to interpreting the actual work. I am open to that discussion. Meanwhile, I contend our time is better spent listening to someone perform the great poetry and plays of a mystery author than the squabbling of academics playing detective over the title page of the book.

[@rstritmatter]

Dear Mr. Bates, You write: "To answer Mr Woosnam's question - biographies exist primarily to see how famous historical people have become successful, handled challenges and thereby provide material for us to compare ourselves with them." This is one reason many biographies exist. There are, however, other, purposes for some biographies, including those that do attempt to understand creative figures and relate their artistic lives to their experiences and influences. This is, in fact, the primary purpose as I would take it of artistic figures as opposed to those written about financial geniuses or business gurus, for example. You continue: "The line that if we get Shakespeare wrong we 'get the Elizabethan Age wrong' is a HUGE reach." Not really, more like one small step for mankind. In fact, many of us who have followed this debate for a few decades and witnessed not only how our growing understanding can transform our knowledge of the plays, but even how it will revolutionize our comprehension of the Elizabethan age by restoring a giant missing piece of Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural history. And one can go on from this, as Professor Delahoyde has done, to argue that if you don't understand the truth about Shakespeare that you also misunderstand the nature of creativity. Certainly the forthcoming *New Shakespeare Allusion Book* by myself and Alexander Waugh demonstrates that if you misunderstand the Shakespeare question you will also definitely misunderstand the creativity of Ben Jonson and many dozens of the earliest Shakespeare commentators, who did not say what they are alleged to have said in the interest of propping up the doctrines of the Church of Stratford. "I contend our time is better spent listening to someone perform the great poetry and plays of a mystery author than the squabbling of academics playing detective over the title page of the book." I propose in reply that we should both listen to and read the plays and poems *and* learn about their history, genesis, and contexts. This will provide a dramatically deeper and more realistically nuanced comprehension of the documents we seek to understand.

[@flyboy712]

I agree. Little is known of Shakespeare, but it seems very important to many people to "prove" that he did not actually write these great works. Why? People love to tear down great men of the past. And if the author was not "Shakespeare", who was it? There is equally no information about that. The whole thing seems pointless.

[@joecurran2811]

​​​@@flyboy712That's interesting because it's Stratfordians that tear him down routinely now - on Italy, the law and other things. Stanley Wells even once said the plays aren't especially learned! They don't think he's such a "great man" now. I call it the Stratfordian climbdown.

[@johnwarner3968]

More convincing evidence! Preaching to the choir as True Believers didn’t need anything more the Shakespeare Identified, amongst many others! Great analysis and talk! Thank you 🙏

[@MartinSoundLabs]

You taught my daughter physics at CSUS and when i met you we discussed Pink Floyd! This is so cool to see we share this Love! Enjoy Retirement!

[@floatingholmes]

Excellent. One must admit, I believe, that Heminges and Condell appearing in both Shaksper’s will and in the pages of the first folio is compelling evidence that the same man is referred to in both. It is the bizarre nature of this connection that thwarts an effort to completely disconnect the Stratford man from the works. Clearly no unambiguous evidence suggests positively that Shaksper was a writer, but the connection seems rock solid unless new evidence arrives to change that.

[@annalisette5897]

A few years ago I warched a documentary which claimed there was another William Shakespeare in London at the pertinent times. According to this show, he was not the man from Stratford who was primarily a businessman. As I recall, this London Shakespeare liked to gamble and had legal trouble because of debt. The viseo claimed this Shakespeare was heavily involved with theaters in London at the right times. I have only seen this information in one documentary. I have never seen it mentioned anywhere else. I am curious and would like to know more. Or, if indeed there are records for the London Shakespeare, might they actually pertain to Stratford Shakespeare when he was in residence in the capital? Or perhaps there is little or no truth behind these claims?

[@MrAbzu]

Here is an observation, Oxford had no need to do what his employees were already doing for him. Every theatrical group, including Oxfords, had half a dozen stock playwrights updating hundreds of plays which were in circulation. Oxford may have revised, he may have edited, he may have even assembled the first folio, it would have been beneath his station for him to have written the plays. I would suggest that Burbage had some heavy duty playwrights so where does Shakespeare really fit in? A bit player, a stage hand, a director, an organizer, more likely providing liquidity. Who wrote Shakespeare? All of the stock writers for all of the theatrical groups from Leicester's Men to the Kings Men is the most likely correct answer. This analysis of Henslow's diary seems to provide useful clues. kzbin.info/www/bejne/i6qQk5uYicSke9k enjoy. Tom is great, he is brilliant and it is a joy to hear him speak.

[@MrAbzu]

This Blanding quote makes the organizational structure of writing plays look a bit compartmentalized. A knowledgeable Lord would write a story line with notable quotes for the stock playwrights. The playwrights would organize the material into acts and sceans with stage direction. This would be followed by rehearsals, critiques, and revisions. And then the performances for the audiences. Players would learn and perform a round Robin of half a dozen plays doing a different play every day. This is suggested by the available evidence and from the overlap of North in Shakespeare..... "Not once, in all that time, have I found anything to disprove the notion that Thomas North wrote source plays for all of the plays in the Shakespeare canon. Nor, however, have I found anything that definitively proves it. Despite the First Folio, there are no surviving plays with Thomas North’s name on them, or even hard evidence that North was a playwright. There are no references to his dramatic works in letters, theater registers, or revels records. There are no surviving documents that place him in Italy in 1570 or Kenilworth in 1575 …. In short, it’s entirely possible McCarthy has devoted a decade and a half of his life to a fantasy - an imaginative and plausible one, to be sure, but a pipe dream, which may prove no less true than the notion that the Earl of Oxford or Sir Francis Bacon secretly penned all of Shakespeare’s oeuvre." Any theory must account for all of the available evidence.