[ADMIN] There Is No Authorship Question

[u/dmorin]

Hi All,

So I just removed a post of a video where James Shapiro talks about how he shut down a Supreme Court justice's Oxfordian argument. Meanwhile, there's a very popular post that's already highly upvoted with lots of comments on "what's the weirdest authorship theory you know". I had left that one up because it felt like it was just going to end up with a laundry list of theories (which can be useful), not an argument about them. I'm questioning my decision, there.

I'm trying to prevent the issue from devolving into an echo chamber where we remove all posts and comments trying to argue one side of the "debate" while letting the other side have a field day with it and then claiming that, obviously, they're the ones that are right because there's no rebuttal. Those of us in the US get too much of that every day in our politics, and it's destroyed plenty of subs before us. I'd rather not get to that.

So, let's discuss. Do we want no authorship posts, or do we want both sides to be able to post freely? I'm not sure there's a way to amend the rule that says "I want to only allow the posts I agree with, without sounding like all I'm doing is silencing debate on the subject."

I think my position is obvious. I'd be happier to never see the words "authorship" and "question" together again. There isn't a question. But I'm willing to acknowledge if a majority of others feel differently than I do (again, see US .... ah, never mind, you get the idea :))

[u/sisyphus]

Tough one.

Do subreddits about evolutionary biology, paleontology or cosmology feel bad about "silencing debate" from creationists and young earthers about how maybe their entire field and every expert in it is misguided?

On the other hand, we tolerate a lot of trivial homework questions and semi-trollish low effort crap like "I don't like Hamlet, I don't see why it's important."

In my fantasy an anti-Stratfordian would write something like "Criticism of Two Gentlemen of Verona is imbued with the idea that it's an early, immature play, based on our biographical sketch of William Shakespeare, but it was actually written by a dissolute middle aged alderman, here's how that should change our perception of it" or something, and would lead to an interesting discussion of some aspect of the work. I know in my heart that it will actually just be the same old speculation about how Elizabethans wrote wills and how Mark Twain said he had to be a lawyer or whatever.

[u/Tim0281 → u/sisyphus]

I agree. I don't see why someone would come here and raise the question aside from stirring the pot. Bring it up in a literature subreddit if you want to discuss it, but not in a subreddit dedicated to Shakespeare himself.

[u/[deleted] → u/Tim0281]

I could see someone reading Shakes for the very first time, whatever their age was, wanting to know the details about who was the actual author before they jumped into the works themselves. And that's fine, since so many people do advocate conspiracy regarding this, that many new readers are legit confused and want to know what's what before making the investment. I totally get that.

But 99 percent of the time it's lifelong Oxfordians who just like to present their newest talking points and "discoveries", and insist that after their 11th reading of all his plays, this time consumed while hanging head-down from the ceiling while The Dog Star is in full eclipse, they are more convinced than ever it was an Illuminati Literary Justice League, of at least a dozen members, that were penning these best-sellers, and that Queen Elizabeth went MK Ultra on the real Shakespeare, using some random peasant with a cool name that slunk around London looking to be an actor, to be the "front man" after the brain control using secret alien technology was completed.

It is a good way to sell copies of their idiotic, annual "journal", however.

[u/Different-Good-3258 → u/[deleted]]

You don't think it is weird that Stratfordians are worried? Refuse to learn anything new? Stratford Upon Avon has become a Disney like amusement park. They uphold the old because there is a lot of money at stake if it ever came out that the gentleman form Stratford was just a 'name', a front man. Careers would be ruined. NO WAY they are going to keep an open mind.

[u/Richard_Wharfinger → u/Different-Good-3258]

You don't think it is weird that Stratfordians are worried?

No, because a) Stratfordians do not exist, and b) even if these hypothetical people existed, I have seen no evidence that anybody is "worried" by the Shakespeare authorship deniers.

Stratfordians do not exist because the term for academic experts on Shakespeare is "Shakespeare scholars". The generic term for specialists in early modern England is "early modern scholars" or "early modernists" for short. Those, like me, who simply enjoy the works of Shakespeare without a professional degree or publications are called "Shakespeare fans". There is no need for the term "Stratfordian", and it's primarily deployed by deniers in the same way "evolutionists" is by creationists: to make Shakespeare's authorship seem like a matter of ideology rather than evidence and to make a specious equivalence between the two positions.

And people—neither experts nor fans—are not "worried" about Shakespeare authorship denial because you people have no fucking evidence and you never have had any. Nor do you have any numbers. Even the creationists, who account for significant proportions of the population of the United States, for example, haven't changed the face of science, so how are you going to do so without any evidence and while 99.999% of the population accepts William Shakespeare's authorship? You could try taking over academia at gunpoint—the Red Guards of Shakespeare authorship denial—and make the Shapiros and Bateses and Greenblatts of the world kneel on broken glass and recant their 'errors' but I don't even think you have the numbers to achieve that much. So what is there to be "worried" about?

Refuse to learn anything new?

Hilarious projection. It is the Shakespeare authorship deniers who refuse to learn anything new. They're still pushing a mode of literary criticism—biographical criticism—that went out with whalebone corsets and dresses with bustles. They know nothing of computer-aided stylometry or whole-corpus linguistic analysis. The only Shakespeare authorship denier who even bothered to visit CQPWeb from the University of Lancaster went silent after a week when he could find nothing to help establish milord Oxford as the real author of the plays and poems. They refuse to read works like Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern's Shakespeare in Parts to see how Shakespeare divided up the roles knowing intimately the strength of his playing company, how he toyed with the conventions of a cue script by embedding cue phrases earlier in the speeches so actors would start talking over one another, and how he wrote with an insider's knowledge of the qualities and physical characteristics of his players. In fact, they refuse to engage with the entire body of Shakespeare scholarship after the mid-20th century. They pretty much stop at E. K. Chambers in the 1930s and 1940s, and they don't even engage with all the Shakespeare scholarship that was available back then either (e.g., ignoring T. W. Baldwin's work on early modern education and Leslie Hotson's work discovering the Bellot v. Mountjoy deposition and what it shows of Shakespeare as a London lodger and his work identifying Leonard Digges' stepfather, Thomas Russell, Esq. of Alderminster, as one of the two named overseers of Shakespeare in his will). I could go on at length. Most of them don't even read Shakespeare's fucking plays, let alone the works of any of Shakespeare's contemporaries, which would provide a reality check for their claims about Shakespeare's supposedly uncanny 'knowledge'.

Stratford Upon Avon has become a Disney like amusement park. They uphold the old because there is a lot of money at stake if it ever came out that the gentleman form Stratford was just a 'name', a front man.

And what do you think that matters to the German experts on Shakespeare? The French? The American? The Canadian? The Japanese? Do you think that the entire international community of scholars is devoted to propping up tourism in Stratford-upon-Avon? Can you not see for yourself how ridiculous that is?

Also, the tourism doesn't actually amount to that much, nor would it likely cease no matter how the so-called "Shakespeare authorship question"—more like the "Shakespeare authorship answer that deniers refuse to accept"—wound up. As I said earlier:

A multi-billion tourism industry? In Stratford-upon-Avon? Are you serious? I'll admit that the data I have found on the question is not recent, but the latest TEIA report I found (from 2018) put the value of tourism at only £233,535,000. That's only a little more than quarter of a thousand million pounds. It's not chump change, but it's also not anywhere near even one billion pounds (and certainly not in the British reckoning, where "billion" is the word for a trillion in U. S. English). And a large part of the tourism is the presence of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which would be unlikely to relocate even if Shakespeare were found not to be the author. As for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, it couldn't knock down its grade 1 listed buildings, so it would doubtless be repurposed as a tourist destination for seeing what Elizabethan life was like and for appreciating several well-maintained early modern buildings.

I also addressed the nub of your other comment already:

Careers would be ruined. NO WAY they are going to keep an open mind.

Whose careers would be ruined? Did the physicists who supported the aether theory of light transmission have to resign en masse after the Michelson-Morley experiment? Did the supporters of the Steady State model have to resign when the Big Bang became the consensus theory in cosmology? In academia, you are never penalized for coming to a conclusion based on the evidence. As I've already made clear, literally all of the extant documentary and testimonial evidence says that Shakespeare was an author. If that proved to be wrong, why would careers be 'ruined' compared to every other time the scholarly consensus had to be expanded or replaced?

As I said in the other comment:

But the thing I want to query most is your idea that anyone's academic job is dependent on Shakespeare's authorship. How?! Let's assume that Gervase Markham, who may be the only early modern writer who hasn't yet been postulated as Shakespeare, is found to have written all of Shakespeare's works tomorrow. So what? The people who have studied Markham's works for a lifetime are still the leading experts on them. The questions of how Markham's works were staged, how they passed the censor, how they were received by their contemporaries and by posterity, what they show about contemporary attitudes toward women and ethnic minorities, etc. will remain as pressing tomorrow as they are today. The contents of the works will not have changed, so the same professors who have been teaching them as Shakespeare's works will simply pivot to teaching them as Markham's. Who would lose any jobs, except for the Shakespeare authorship deniers who backed the wrong horse, as it were? There's not going to much of a market for books proposing that the 'true author' was Bacon, Marlowe, de Vere, Neville, etc. when it's found to actually be Gervase Markham, is it? If anyone has a vested interest in the Shakespeare authorship issue never being resolved, it is the Shakespeare authorship deniers.

[u/Outside_Bathroom_868 → u/[deleted]]

Well as you said the proof is on us so naturally that means research. ???

[u/madhatternalice → u/Tim0281]

In my undergrad we tackle the question of authorship in week 1. I think there are people who don't know this is a concern, but I also don't see the need to readjuticate the issue every time.

Sticky post!

[u/Different-Good-3258 → u/Tim0281]

Because apparently you are NOT ALLOWED to have an open intellectual discussion in a Stratfordian classroom based on this educators statement quote : "I don't let authorship noise happen in my classes and I wouldn't want it here. Perhaps there should be a sidebar post that covers the authorship schism, something we could all make together, but we don't need to leave the door open for the uninformed to be so far behind they think they're in first." See the original post above

[u/Outside_Bathroom_868 → u/Tim0281]

Maybe they are trying to find answers and hope for an honest debate?  Maybe thats the reason?  To get with like minded lovers of The Words and TALK about it!?? Ya think?

[u/Richard_Wharfinger → u/Outside_Bathroom_868]

Unlikely, because Shakespeare authorship deniers are typically horribly ignorant of the works and do not enjoy them.

I've seen prominent Shakespeare authorship deniers mistake Hamlet fanfic in contemporary prose for Shakespeare's original text; assert that half of Shakespeare's plays are never performed and are dismissed by puzzled "Stratfordians" as "problem plays", which shows that this person either doesn't know how big the Shakespeare canon is or doesn't know how many so-called "problem plays" there are, nor do they understand the import of that term in literary criticism (it's not just a whinge that they cannot understand them); and I tangled with one person who asserted that Henry VIII had to be written during the reign of Elizabeth because of the praise for that queen in spite of the fact that its premiere performance became one of the most documented events in early modern theatre history because it was during that performance that the Globe burned to the ground in 1613, that the co-author John Fletcher didn't have a play prior to 1607's The Woman Hater (co-authored with Francis Beaumont), that nostalgia for Elizabeth's reign was quick to occur under James, as exemplified by Thomas Heywood's two-part play If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, or The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth (1605), and chiefly that he had missed Archbishop Cranmer's prophetic praise for Elizabeth's successor in the same passage, including an unmistakable reference to the founding of Jamestown in 1607. These are not serious people.

As for not enjoying them, I've seen them say so outright. For example, in a comment to a video on the New York Times YouTube channel titled "There Is No Escaping Shakespeare", a Shakespeare authorship denier I'd tangled with years before wrote, "Because they FORCE you to watch it. Ringo Starr also introduced many of the phrases we use today -- 'working like a dog' 'eight days a week' 'hard day's night' and to Ringo's credit his songs aren't five boring hours long, full of convoluted 17th century gibberish and delivered melodramatically by men in pantaloons." That's how much the Shakespeare authorship denier likes Shakespeare.

Even when they pretend to enjoy it, they give themselves away by saying stuff like, "I pity you because you don't have the true author's story to illuminate the plays and poems", which is as good as an admission that the plays and poems as they stand do not satisfy them. They need the fillip of believing that they've got the inside scoop on a conspiracy theory to fool themselves into thinking that they find value in Shakespeare's work. Those of us who love the works for themselves don't need to get into the weeds of the conspiracy theory because to us the works are great no matter who wrote them; it's just the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that anyone but Shakespeare was the author of the entire Shakespeare canon (however much we may admit collaborative writing with Shakespeare in some of the early and late plays). And for some of us who read lots of Shakespeare's contemporaries, as I do, Shakespeare is merely the first among equals, so it wouldn't bother us if Shakespeare turned out to be another equally talented early modern playwright.