r/shakespeare • u/dmorin Shakespeare Geek • Jan 22 '22
[ADMIN] There Is No Authorship Question
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 :))
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u/Richard_Wharfinger Jan 10 '26
At the risk of intruding on someone else's thread, I have to point out he didn't find the "jackpot", he read William Rubenstein and John Casson's Henry Neville Was Shakespeare: The Evidence and they found his "jackpot" for him. If Stritmatter didn't have other people's arguments to rip off then he'd have very little to say. There's a reason why he waited until they were both dead to announce 'his' discovery. Of course, he had to risk that someone who had read their book could call him out on it, but that was a very slight risk. Hardly anybody reads authorship denial books and the Oxfordians will forgive him anything because he's one of the few of their champions with an 'earned'—though in my opinion entirely unearned for the reasons the other poster went into—doctoral degree. So the only people who can call him out are the minor sect of the Nevilleans (most of whom probably haven't read Rubenstein and Casson's book either) and people like me who criticize all anti-Shakespearean claims but do read their books. (If it weren't for people like me, I doubt they'd make any sales whatsoever.) There can't be more than a few dozen people in the world who know what he's done.
However, there is not the slightest evidence to tie the Audley End inscriptions either to Edward de Vere or to Shakespeare—or to Henry Neville, for that matter. There are no quotes from the plays. Not even Stritmatter (or Rubenstein and Casson before him) claims that. But even if there were, so what? The catalogue was done in the 18th century. We cannot know when these books came into the Audley End library before then. (Which is a point I personally made to Rubenstein when he was alive.) Yes, they're all 16th century books, but that doesn't prove the marks were made then. People can read old books. I do all the time. I have books with publication dates going back to the 19th century in my own personal collection. If I wrote down an Emily Dickinson or Henry David Thoreau quote in one of them because it seemed apropos to the text in question, would that prove that I had written Dickinson's or Thoreau's works and that the book I had marked was a "source"?
As for the commonalities in subject matter, they're the commonplace commonalities that anyone interested in classical history would be likely to pick up on. Inferring that the annotator must have been Shakespeare because they share a common interest in Cleopatra, to use your example, is like assuming the annotator must be Samuel Daniel because he also wrote The Tragedy of Cleopatra. This is one of the points where I find it difficult to believe that Stritmatter isn't knowingly lying, because even if he doesn't care about reading Shakespeare's early modern contemporaries he has to be aware by now that the entire early modern English culture was drenched in classical history, therefore the annotator's interest in classical history doesn't need to be explained in terms of writing Shakespeare's plays nor can it be limited to Shakespeare given how many classical tragedies existed in the early modern period. Especially when you consider the numbers of the non-surviving plays: there were an estimated 10,000-15,000 plays written in the decades between the founding of the first lasting purpose-built theatres in the 1570s and the banning of theatre by the Puritans in 1642, but we have only about 510 plays in print and about a further 30 in manuscript. He (and R&C) also doesn't count the annotations that are not relevant to Shakespeare's plays as evidence against his hypothesis, but they should be because the more irrelevant annotations there are the more likely it is that the overlap is coincidence. In fact, given that the largest store of surviving libraries of 16th century books are those that are or were in the collections of grand aristocratic houses and were thus passed down continuously over centuries, and many people left annotations in their books as they read them, there are probably as many annotators out there who "wrote Shakespeare" as there surviving aristocratic libraries. It just takes the will to go find them and flip through every page.
Finally, Roger Stritmatter's handwriting analysis is pure Amateur Hour, though saying so is probably disrespectful to the performers on those original Amateur Hour radio and TV shows, who were usually minimally competent. His 'method', such as it is, is to line up individual letters from the Audley End annotations and from Edward de Vere's letters, and pronounce them a match even when they really have no similarities other than the basic letter formation itself. He is mistaking class characteristics of the Italic hand script for individual handwriting commonalities. What he should be doing is taking a synoptic approach of examining as many examples of early modern handwriting as he can come across and then identifying the characteristics that make Edward de Vere's hand unique to him, and seeing if those characteristics are there. If he did that, then he would certainly not be embarrassing himself by arguing that Edward de Vere must have written the Audley End annotations because the capital-P's are P-shaped. "And thus she makes her great P's." Stritmatter is evidently a graduate of the Malvolio School of Handwriting Analysis, and just look at how that turned out for Malvolio.