You’re welcome! It’s a really exciting find. I’m looking forward to more analysis from the dig and what else you find.

If you’re looking into college degree programs, you don’t need to have any professional training! Prepare your audition for a BFA degree in Musical Theatre and go for it! The point of a BFA is to train you, so they expect that you won’t be ready for professional work-that’s why you go to college. To get the training. But, if you aren’t invited to join a BFA degree program, look for BA degrees that allow you to take voice lessons and dance classes as elective credits. And also ask if pursuing the BA will still give you plenty of opportunities to put the work from those classes in practice through the shows they produce. Good luck and break a leg!

Thanks for watching!

Shakespeare had about the same vocabulary as most poets of the era. You can thank a couple of Oxfordians at Claremont-McKenna College for setting that one straight. See? You guys ARE useful on occasion.

When you leave your mind too open, passersby use it as a rubbish bin. And stop calling me Shirley.

Two very critical theatre-goers for sure!

This is something I try to point out when I teach it. It’s a Latin phrase for a Greek practice. Which, in the history, is important because a lot of what survives of Greek literature and history is in Latin, thanks to the Romans’ copying efforts.

Exactly, it came out of Vaudeville.

Thank you 🙏🏻

Haha!! I like it!

"Both these men had good cause to disguise their identities as playwrights in the 1590s." Why? "And BOTH these possible authors were very much better qualified to have written the plays than tan the Stratford man who had left his older wife and three children, and run away to London to join the theatre." How so? Christopher Marlowe wrote in a completely different style to Shakespeare, with different interests, imagery, use of languages, etc., and Edward de Vere could barely write at all in any language. Very pretty handwriting, but the content was abysmal.

@@Nullifidian You asked a specific question. Why disguise their identities? 1. Marlowe had been accused of treason and was apparently dead, under circumstances that clearly involved a plot. This event was just weeks before the publication of Venus and Adonis under the name of Shakespesre The poem is remarkably similar to Hero and Leander by Msrlowe, but more mature, and in a different poetic format - verses not couplets. 2. The Earl of Oxford. People of his rank did not normally publish plays which were for the entertainment of the masses, unlike poetry which could be circulated in the court. Edward deVere"s poetry is pretty and bland. He could never have written the sonnets. As for your comments about Marlowe's style and content, I disagee. Tambourlaine is the sort of immature adventurous stuff you expect from a young writer. Marlowe's othrr works prefigure Shakespeare, end to end. The resolution of Two Gentlemen.... is badly conceived and nasty.... Shakespeare/Marlowe needed to think that one out again. The criticisms are that Marlowe couldnt write women .... and i go back to the catfight in Tambourlzine ... He could not write Humour? What nonsense! Different preoccupations? No. Developing style, becoming more sophisticated. Why had Marlowe not written romantic tragedies? Because he simply had not got to Romeo and Juliet yet? Why us the merchant of Venice more developed than the Jew of Malta? Age and experience. Why is Picasso's sentimental Blue Period different to his abstracted figure compositions of thirty years later?

@@arealphoney I'm going to have to break this into two sections. Part 1 of 2: "Marlowe had been accused of treason...." No, he hadn't been! Marlowe was under investigation, not accused, of potentially being the owner of a heretical pamphlet advocating Arianist opinions. He died before the investigation could be concluded. And the evidence that the Privy Council wasn't taking the charge seriously is that they let him roam freely on his own recognizance, only having to check in once a day with the Council to ensure that he hadn't skipped out. If they thought they were apt to punish him severely, he'd have been in prison. Had it been treason, he would _definitely_ have not been able to wander around at large. "...and was apparently dead, under circumstances that clearly involved a plot." That "clearly" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in lieu of evidence, but that's also one of the questions: why was he dead? This was not an era of Interpol and extradition treaties. Had Marlowe simply _left_ for the Continent, there would have been nothing the Privy Council could have done to touch him. Marlovians have to make excuses for why their candidate was a dead man, but I don't have to go along with their excuses as my operating assumptions. "This event was just weeks before the publication of Venus and Adonis under the name of Shakespesre" But _Venus and Adonis_ was already in the hands of the printers by 18 April 1593, when it was entered into the Stationers' Register. That's _before_ any of Marlowe's legal troubles, which were only pursuant to the raining of Thomas Kyd's lodgings on the suspicion that he had written a threatening and xenophobic anti-Dutch pamphlet. That didn't happen before mid-May, and by the end of the month Marlowe was dead. Now, under your hypothesis, in the heat of the moment of faking his own death, rather than just letting _Venus and Adonis_ go as a posthumously published work, as almost _all_ his works were other than the two parts of _Tamburlaine_ (and those had only been published anonymously), _Edward II_ , and _The Jew of Malta_ (and neither of these latter two early quartos survive from his lifetime, so we can't tell if Marlowe was credited there either, but probably not since most early modern plays were published anonymously), he decided to carve out an exception for _Venus and Adonis_ and have it published under the pseudonym that in the spur of the moment he decided he would commit to writing under for the rest of his life. He didn't want to publish _Doctor Faustus_ , _Dido_ , _The Massacre at Paris_ , or any of his acknowledged poetry-not his translations of _Amores_ by Ovid, not his translation of the 1st book of _Bello civili_ by Lucan, not _Hero and Leander_ , not "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"-but he did want to publish this and wanted it to be credited to his pseudonym for some bizarre reason, despite the fact that posthumous publication was nothing uncommon. And Richard Field, the printer, said, "Of course! We can disassemble all of the already printed sheets we've collated and bound and then reset up to eight pages of type by hand and then we have, of course, despite the scarcity and expense of paper, a thousand sheets just lying around idle that can be used to re-print the dedication with this name-what did you say it was?-"William Shakespeare" on it! Then rebind the entire print run and get it into the stationers' shops! And you want it all done in a fortnight? No problem!" Honestly, you can't possibly know _anything_ about early modern printing if you think this scenario is even remotely within the realms of possibility. This wasn't an era when you could change the dedication in your word processing program and then upload to a print-on-demand program on Amazon. Moreover, Shakespeare's name isn't on the title page, but on the dedication that was a request for patronage. Why would Marlowe do that, since it would only undermine the attempt to keep secret that Shakespeare was a false name? How was Henry Wriothesley supposed to send money to a non-person? Finally, we have notice of Shakespeare as both an actor and a playwright as early as 1592 in Robert Greene's posthumous pamphlet _A Groats-worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance_ , well before Thomas Kyd's and Christopher Marlowe's legal troubles. Greene died in September 1592 and the theatres were shut down due to unrest and kept closed by plague starting in July 1592, therefore the only way that Greene could have paraphrased the line from Shakespeare's _3 Henry VI_ and attributed it to a figure he identified obliquely as "Shake-scene" is if he had seen it staged sometime in the first half of the year. That places the composition of the _Henry VI_ plays sometime c. 1590 - 1591, or at a push the first few months of 1592. "The poem is remarkably similar to Hero and Leander by Msrlowe, but more mature, and in a different poetic format - verses not couplets." Considering that _Hero and Leander_ is incomplete because of Marlowe's early death, you're basically affirming that he couldn't have possibly written it. Either that or he achieved artistic "maturity" in a a few days. "2. The Earl of Oxford. People of his rank did not normally publish plays which were for the entertainment of the masses...." That's because they didn't _write_ plays for the public theatres. Why should they have? There was no status to writing plays and what an author was paid for a play in this era-about £6-wouldn't have kept de Vere in scented gloves for a fortnight. Writing for the public theatres involved knowing what forces were at the troupe's disposal and carefully dividing up the play to permit doubling and even tripling of roles, writing for the strengths of the various cast members, writing around the properties they owned, writing around their physical characteristics, etc. It is as impossible for Christopher Marlowe to have written for a company he had never clapped eyes on-the Lord Chamberlain's Men were created in 1594, a year after his death-as it is for Edward de Vere to have written plays for production in the public theatres from his armchair. This is why the dramatic form that aristocrats did write in was the closet drama. These were purely literary plays that did not require one to write for any specific number of actors, did not require scenery, did not require costuming, and were never meant to be staged and therefore did not involve stage dancing, singing, sword-fighting and other specialized skills. "...unlike poetry which could be circulated in the court." Which, of course, poses the question of why Shakespeare's first two attributed works were his narrative poems, while his plays went unattributed until 1598 even though they started being published in 1594. "Edward deVere"s poetry is pretty and bland. He could never have written the sonnets." That's not the only thing he couldn't have written. He couldn't have written the narrative poems or the plays either. He spoke, wrote, and spelled in an incommensurate rustic East Anglian dialect, far from Shakespeare's Midlands speech. He consistently spelled "you" as "yow" and "like" as "leke" and pronounced it like the vegetable, the leek, so if he'd had the writing of Shakespeare we'd be talking about the play _As Yow Leke It_ . "As for your comments about Marlowe's style and content, I disagee." Of course you do. You think if it uses "thee" and "thou" and goes ti-TUM, ti-TUM, ti-TUM, ti-TUM, ti-TUM that it's Shakespeare. "Tambourlaine is the sort of immature adventurous stuff you expect from a young writer." That is not the point. "Marlowe's othrr works prefigure Shakespeare, end to end. The resolution of Two Gentlemen.... is badly conceived and nasty.... Shakespeare/Marlowe needed to think that one out again." So your evidence for a Marlowe work that prefigures Shakespeare is a Shakespeare play. Do you have any of these "prefigurings" that _don't_ circularly assume your conclusion?

Part 2 of 2: "The criticisms are that Marlowe couldnt write women .... and i go back to the catfight in Tambourlzine ..." That wasn't my point either, but if you think that flyting is a unique quality to Marlowe that shows his insight into women, then you haven't understood early modern theatre. "He could not write Humour? What nonsense!" And if you think that the encounter between Zenocrate and Zabina is funny, then your mind will be blown when you get around to reading early modern playwrights who could actually write humor like Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, and Middleton. ZABINA. Base concubine, must thou be plac'd by me That am the empress of the mighty Turk? ZENOCRATE. Disdainful Turkess, and unreverend boss, Call'st thou me concubine, that am betroth'd Unto the great and mighty Tamburlaine? ZABINA. To Tamburlaine, the great Tartarian thief! ZENOCRATE. Thou wilt repent these lavish words of thine When thy great basso-master and thyself Must plead for mercy at his kingly feet, And sue to me to be your advocate. ZABINA. And sue to thee! I tell thee, shameless girl, Thou shalt be laundress to my waiting-maid.- How lik'st thou her, Ebea? will she serve? EBEA. Madam, she thinks perhaps she is too fine; But I shall turn her into other weeds, And make her dainty fingers fall to work. ZENOCRATE. Hear'st thou, Anippe, how thy drudge doth talk? And how my slave, her mistress, menaceth? Both for their sauciness shall be employ'd To dress the common soldiers' meat and drink; For we will scorn they should come near ourselves. ANIPPE. Yet sometimes let your highness send for them To do the work my chambermaid disdains. Yeah, that's a laugh riot. "Different preoccupations? "No. Developing style, becoming more sophisticated." And becoming more sophisticated required dropping his interest in the figure of the overreacher that links _Tamburlaine_ , _Doctor Faustus_ , _The Jew of Malta_ , _Edward II_ , and _The Massacre at Paris_ ? The only play he ever wrote that didn't feature an overreacher was _Dido, Queen of Carthage_ , and there he was dramatizing Virgil probably for performance at Cambridge. Whereas Shakespeare's only overreacher character is Richard III, and that play was written in his youth when he was still under Marlowe's influence, probably while Marlowe was still alive, since it so clearly carries on from _3 Henry VI_ , which as mentioned was already on the boards by 1592. Furthermore, aside from the fact that their careers clearly overlapped while Marlowe was still alive and that Shakespeare showed little interest in the kind of characters Marlowe was interested in, there's also the fact that Marlowe's plays are richer in foreign languages, particularly Latin, richer in the depth and variety of classical allusions, and feature celestial metaphors and imagery, whereas Shakespeare's metaphors and imagery is frequently botanical. Marlowe would have had to have forgotten most of what he knew about classical literature and completely changed his manner of expression to have written the works of Shakespeare. "Why had Marlowe not written romantic tragedies? Because he simply had not got to Romeo and Juliet yet?" Yeah, I'm sure that Marlowe was just waiting to write a heterosexual love tragedy, once he also forgot that he was gay along with forgetting that he was knowledgable in classical literature. Even _Dido_ , which could be considered Marlowe's love tragedy, begins with Jupiter playing with his boytoy Ganymede in language that leaves no doubt about the nature of their relationship. Ditto _Edward II_ , which is shockingly blunt if you know even a little bit about classical mythology and history, in which Marlowe cloaks his references to homosexual love. And, of course, the early modern period was the great era of classical learning in grammar schools, so these allusions must not have passed by the understanding of much of the audience. "Why us the merchant of Venice more developed than the Jew of Malta? Age and experience." And the fact that it was written by a different playwright. One who wasn't dead at the time. Aside from the fact that death is bad for one's productivity, there's also the small fact that we've traced Shakespeare's sources, and they're inconsistent with a man writing in secrecy from the Continent after faking his own death. Take _The Comedy of Errors_ . On the basis of verbal parallels in the text to Shakespeare's play, it's likely that William Warner's translation was the source for Shakespeare's play. Though not published until 1595, and we know that Shakespeare's play was performed in 1594, the play was entered in the Stationer's Register on 10 June 1594 and the printer's address to the readers notes that Warner did these translations "for the use and delight of his private friends", so that the translation existed in manuscript before it was printed. Interestingly, Warner dedicated a prose tale called _Pan His Syrinx or Pipe_ (1585) and a long epic, _Albion's England_ (1586), to Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon and the Lord Chamberlain, who was the patron of Shakespeare's company at the time. Or take the plays _The True Chronicle History of King Leir_ and _The Troublesome Raigne of King John_ . Scholars accept that the parallels in these works are so close that Shakespeare must have had the plays at his elbow as he wrote them. The same thing is observed of the prose romances _Rosalind: Euphues Golden Legacy_ by Thomas Lodge (the major source of _As You Like It_ ) and _Pandosto; or, The Triumph of Time_ by Robert Greene (the major source of _The Winter's Tale_ ). And then, of course, there are all the works Shakespeare based on Holinshed's _Chronicles_ , the North translation of Plutarch's _Lives_ , etc., etc., etc. All of these works have clear publication histories _in England_ , but it's unclear how they could have found their way to Marlowe living in secret exile. Are you suggesting that when Marlowe faked his death, he also had the foresight to not only have his library shipped over but also to have new works delivered to him as they became available? And, of course, if I were exiled on the Continent, the first thing I'd think of to do would be to write plays not for any _local_ theatre performance, but for performance back home where I could neither see them nor benefit from their sale. After all, it's not like the Elizabethans cared what literature came over from the Continent and weren't constantly on the lookout for Catholic propaganda being smuggled onto their shores. And shipping by sail was absolutely 100% secure. There were never any shipwrecks, incidences of piracy either official (with letters of marque supplied by the government) or unofficial, or anything else that might interfere with the regular commerce between Marlowe and the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men. And when revisions were required, as they might be from the Master of the Revels all the way down to the individual actors, it was no problem at all for the scripts to be returned to Marlowe and then shipped again back to London. No doubt such quick correspondence was conducted by e-mail. And they doubtless sent Marlowe an e-mail about William Kempe leaving the company, which is why Marlowe knew not to write a clown's role in _Julius Caesar_ . Then the sent an e-mail attachment with Robert Armin's résumé and headshot, so he knew that his the new comic actor could sing, and therefore for the first time wrote a singing comic role in the First Gravedigger in _Hamlet_ , and then wrote more singing roles for him like Feste in _Twelfth Night_ and the Fool in _King Lear_ . If you look into it for longer than three seconds, anti-Shakespearianism involves one in an enormous number of absurdities.

@@Nullifidian , I was not using the xat fight in Tambourlaine as indicative of humour. It was the interaction between women i was considering. The Jew of Malta is a piece of dark satirical comedy. There is comedy in Faustus. There are many comedic scenes in Tambourlaine. Marlowe could write comedy. That is the point, not whether the slab ofvtext uou have pasted is comedy. And, yes. I have no doubt that other writers wrote about women. However, one of the petsistent criticisism about Marlowe is that he did not. In discounting Marlowe as a possible author of Shakespeare, one must consider the usual criticisms whether YOU mentioned them or not. Other than his presumed, but highly suspicious death. These reasons that I have cited are those that are usually given.

So then the fact that Christopher Marlowe spelled his only signature "Christofer Marley" means we should exclude him from having written his own works?

@@Nullifidian , Of course not. A variation in signatures by a person who signs their name frequently is normal. However. The Shaksper signatures are only one of many reasons why the doubters doubt that the Stratford man was the writer. The nature of the signstures snd lack of other written msterial is supporting evidence, not the whole case.

@@arealphoney It's a good thing for you, because the case of Marlowe is on all fours with that of Shakespeare. Marlowe left no other examples of his handwriting other than that one signature, since the sole manuscript leaf of _A Massacre at Paris_ is in a scribal hand, not Marlowe's handwriting. Whereas Shakespeare has six or seven signatures to his name and the three manuscript pages of Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ , so we actually have _more_ for Shakespeare than we do for Marlowe. Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ can be linked to Shakespeare not only by the paleographic analysis, but also the style, imagery, verbal habits, spelling, subject matter, and instances of self-plagiarism that connect this manuscript with _Coriolanus_ and a scene in _Henry VIII_ that scholarship independently identifies as Shakespeare's. It's also been identified as Shakespearian by corpus stylometry.

Why is it "simpler" to posit a completely unevidenced secret author than it is to conclude that the actor was also a playwright in a time when the actor-playwright was a recognized figure (Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Nathan Field, Robert Armin, etc.)?

@@Nullifidian , Read the sentence. The video presumes that Anti-stratfordians believe that the Stratford man stayed in Stratford. They do not. They are well aware that the Stratford man went to London, etc etc etc. The fact that the Stratford man went to London etc etc etc, supports the Stratfordian beluef that he was the playwright. It ALSO supports tge case that he was the broker who handled the plays for another (the author), which he could hardly have done if he remained in Stratford. I was correcting the erroneous suggestion concernung what Anti-ratfordians generally believe about the Steatford man. Believe it or not, most confurmed Anti-Stratfordians have done a fair bit of homework. You will find a great number of ignorant people who blithely state "Of course Shakespeare wrore Shakespeare!" You would be hard pressed to find a confirmed Anti-Stratfordian who was not fairly familiar with Shakespeare's known biography, for example. Questioning and investigation are not the foundations of ignorance.

​@@arealphoney (Part 1 of 2) "Read the sentence. "The video presumes that Anti-stratfordians believe that the Stratford man stayed in Stratford. "They do not. "They are well aware that the Stratford man went to London, etc etc etc. " Actually, I've argued with anti-Shakespearians who _have_ claimed that Shakespeare was paid to remain in Stratford well out of the way and that was what the purchase of New Place was for (Shakespeare must have been very trusting to have lent his name out as early as 1593 but not had his reward until 1597), and I had to provide the evidence that he was on tax rolls in St. Helen's Bishopsgate, was called as a witness in a lawsuit over a marriage portion in his capacity as a lodger with the Mountjoys in Silver Street, Cripplegate, and that he was an actor with a London theatre company. (Naturally, my interlocutors ignored all of this evidence.) Not all of the anti-Shakespearians have an agreed approach to this subject. In fact, the general characteristic of anti-Shakespearianism is complete and mutually exclusive confusion. "It ALSO supports tge case that he was the broker who handled the plays for another (the author), which he could hardly have done if he remained in Stratford." And how does it support that, since the role of broker was _not a possible career path_ in early modern theatre? There were around fifteen playhouses in the London area not counting the ones associated with the royal court or the Inns of Court, which mostly got the plays of the public theatres secondhand, and there were half a dozen inn yards in which plays were performed by troupes without a dedicated London home. In order for a "broker" to be a viable career path, there has to be a large enough theatre community for a middleman to get his nose in. But public theatre was barely 15 years old by the time Shakespeare got to London. There is no evidence that the role of "play broker" existed in early modern theatre, because the playwrights could deal with the theatre companies themselves. Henslowe records many payments in his diaries, including payments to save playwrights from debtors' prison or advances on their promised plays, but none to any brokers acting for the playwrights. And if Shakespeare was a "broker", why on earth would he solely deal with _one company_ ?! The essence of an agent or broker's role is to query as many possible places as might be interested in what the agent or broker has to offer. But everything Shakespeare wrote after 1594 is all for one company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men. And why would Shakespeare's name be on the works at all? That was not necessary for a "broker". Most early modern plays were published anonymously, and playbills didn't carry the identifying information about the author until well into the Restoration era (we have an extant letter from John Dryden, a playwright himself, commenting on the change)..Even Shakespeare's own p[lays were published anonymously from 1594 through 1597, despite the fact that his name was already on _Venus and Adonis_ in 1593 (and that identification, as I've shown you, _had_ to predate Marlowe's legal troubles). It also makes a hash of the earliest recorded reference to Shakespeare as an actor and a playwright. Robert Greene's _Groats-worth_ was a wounded yawp from his deathbed because he was dying in poverty-he had to instruct his wife settle up with the couple who took him in, otherwise he would have died in the gutter without a clean shirt on his back-and he blamed the actors for their ingratitude. He called them "crows" or "puppets" who merely mouthed the lines the playwrights created. Shakespeare, therefore, was the summit of actorly ingratitude because he dared to think he could write plays as well as any of the rest of them and thus constituted an economic threat to the professional freelance playwrights Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, and Thomas Nashe. Greene warns this trio that they should turn aside from the actors, not letting them have any fresh material from their pens, and seek aristocratic patrons. But that would be absurd if Shakespeare were a mere "broker" because then the playwrights would be getting the majority of their fees through him, with Shakespeare taking only a percentage for bringing the theatre and the playwright together. He wouldn't be a threat to the playwrights, but a supposed aid to their activity. I can understand why you won't like this because _Groats-worth_ was written well before Marlowe's troubles and establishes that Shakespeare was a playwright then, and because Greene addresses Marlowe, and he would scarcely have gone out of his way to warn Marlowe against himself. Nevertheless, it is documentary evidence of Shakespeare's early career and it can't be ignored. "Believe it or not, most confurmed Anti-Stratfordians have done a fair bit of homework." Yeah, I can tell. When one of them claimed that _Henry VIII_ had to have been written in Elizabeth's reign because of the praise of her from Archbishop Cranmer, completely missing the fact that it was described as a new play in 1613 when the Globe theatre burned down; that John Fletcher, the co-author, didn't have an active career before 1606 or 1605 at the earliest; and that the passage also praises Elizabeth's _successor_ including an obvious reference to Jamestown, founded in 1607; it was obvious that this person had done their homework. Another one, and an Oxfordian of a certain prominence online, once claimed in one of her videos that fully _half of Shakespeare's plays_ are dismissed as "problem plays" by Shakespearians and are _never staged_ because they can't fit them in the 'orthodox' framework. This poses the question of how large she thinks Shakespeare's oeuvre is or how large the number of "problem plays" are, and where she got the impression that some of Shakespeare's plays are never staged is beyond me. Shakespeare is a popular enough writer that you can't afford to simply halve the number of plays you'll do without losing ones that people would pay to see. I've even seen all of the _actually identified_ "problem plays" on stage or on DVD. They are _Measure for Measure_ , _Troilus and Cressida_ , and _All's Well That Ends Well_ , with occasionally _Timon of Athens_ and _Coriolanus_ included because of their unsympathetic protagonists. This same woman also once, when stung by an observation about the De Vere Ball that ultra-conservative Curtis Yarvin )a.k.a., Mencius Moldbug) attended to the effect that nobody in the room had read Shakespeare since high school, asked her Twitter followers if any of them had read any Shakespeare since it had last been assigned. Like when I asked you, it was a universal negative. Only one person spoke up and said that she'd recently watched the teen comedy based on Shakespeare's _Taming of the Shrew_ , _10 Things I Hate About You_ . In reply, this woman admitted that she too hadn't read _any_ Shakespeare but had recently seen a movie of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ . And I once dealt with one of the top dogs in Oxfordianism, Alexander Waugh, when he claimed that Portia's name was spelled Portio in all editions of Shakespeare until John Payne Collier standardized the spelling in the 19th century. I had read the First Folio in its entirety (and I've since reread it, celebrating the 400th anniversary last year with a reread) so he _really_ chose the wrong person to lie to about that. He wanted to link it to the lost play _Portio and Demorantes_ , which Eva Turner Clark claimed was actually _Portia and the Merchants_ . It's an ingenious solution, but it's completely at odds with secretary hand, which Clark was evidently ignorant of. So I showed him the 1600 first quarto of _Merchant_ and the 1623 First Folio stage directions where Portia enters with the Prince of Morocco and his train, showing it was spelled with the "a" complete back in the 17th century.

(Part 2 of 2) I've also been informed that Shakespeare only wrote one non-British play set in a foreign country other than Italy, that Malvolio is a character in _Romeo and Juliet_ , that _Romeo and Juliet_ is entirely in blank verse (I think they got that from Roland Emmerich's _opus stultissimus_ called _Anonymous_ ), that Shakespeare wrote in Old English, that (conversely) there is no such language as Old English, that all English literature written up to the Civil War (I presumed the English, but given the person speaking it might have been the American) was written in "floundering" English-whatever that means, etc., etc., etc. But the best thing I ever saw was on the old IMDB boards for _Anonymous_ . One of the anti-Shakespearians there believed that they had got hold of a _Hamlet_ monologue that completely vindicated a point they were making, and copied and pasted it to the message board. It didn't even need examination to see that it hadn't come from _Hamlet_ . This person had stumbled on _Hamlet_ fanfic and confused contemporary [prose with Shakespeare's early modern verse, thus proving at a single instant that they'd never read the play they were arguing about. But yeah, they've definitely done their homework. Most of them haven't even read the works in full and are just going of half-remembered snippets they Sparks- or Cliff's Noted years ago. Nor have they read the works of the people they want to reassign Shakespeare's oeuvre to. They routinely make overblown claims for Shakespeare's expertise in law, in classics, etc., etc., etc. that could be easily fact-checked if they'd only read something by Shakespeare's contemporaries, but they never do. Shakespeare denial, as I said last time, is a venue for people who hate literature and can't understand it, but who nevertheless believe in the cultural cachet literature carries, and they want a piece of it by engaging with Shakespeare in the only way they know how: by arguing about the authorship instead of reading the works. They think that if they can fool themselves into believing that they've got a true line on the "real author" that suddenly the works will make sense for them. Plus, there's the all too human foolishness of wanting to believe that one is in on a "secret". "You will find a great number of ignorant people who blithely state "Of course Shakespeare wrore Shakespeare!" " On the contrary, I've found that the people who actually engage with Shakespeare-deniers in argument are the most knowledgeable about the early modern period, its theatre, and its literature. I'm fully willing to concede that there may be a large ignorant group that hasn't heard of Shakespeare authorship denialism at all or has paid it scant attention and just accepts the attribution to Shakespeare at face value, but they don't get into arguments with Shakespeare-deniers. Shakespeare-deniers are more ignorant than those who accept Shakespeare's authorship and are willing to make a case for it because the arguments of the Shakespeare-deniers are largely premised on falsehoods, and therefore only ignorant people can fall for them. That was how I was initially convinced of Shakespeare's authorship in the first place. As I mentioned last time, I've been into Shakespeare since I was 8 and the rest of early modern drama since I was 13. And I wanted a place to talk about this, so I visited a newsgroup that was half literary discussion of Shakespeare and the early modern era and half authorship. Though I didn't care that much about the subject of authorship, I couldn't help but have my inbox flooded with messages that were debating it. _Every single time_ a Shakespeare-denier floated a new argument, it got shot down with extensive documentary evidence and scholarship. It didn't take too many reiterations of this pattern before I saw that all of the evidence lay with Shakespeare and there was literally _none whatsoever_ for any alternative "authorship candidate". "You would be hard pressed to find a confirmed Anti-Stratfordian who was not fairly familiar with Shakespeare's known biography, for example." I've found that most of them are entirely ignorant of Shakespeare's _actual_ biography, and that the character who lives in their heads is an invented Shakespeare that pairs nicely with their invented alternative authorship candidates. According to them, Shakespeare was illiterate, which is impossible given his career as an actor-he at least had to be able to read the cue scripts-let alone the substantial evidence of his career as a writer and the six-I'd argue seven-extant signatures that are presumptive evidence for literacy, plus the fact that on the basis of the signatures, the imagery, style, substance, and internal evidence, Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ has been assigned to him. They also accuse him of hoarding grain in a time a famine, when Shakespeare's holdings were all in _malt_ , not grain (called "corne" in the early modern era), that his malt holdings were near the town mean despite the fact that he then owned the second-largest house in Stratford, and despite the fact that the list drawn up was an impartial survey of the holdings of "corne" and malt for the entire town, not just a list of those who were :"hoarding". They claim that Shakespeare's daughters were illiterate (in fact, they usually say "daughter" because they don't know he had more than one-they're experts on his biography) when we have quite a lot of evidence pertaining to at least Susanna Hall's literacy. She left two extant signatures, she probably wrote the Latin epitaph for her mother written from the perspective of Anne's children, she was capable of describing one of her late husband's books to a prospective buyer even though it was in Latin, and her own epitaph describes her as "witty [i.e., learned] above her sex". They do everything that they can to rubbish his reputation and make him look like a greedy, grasping, and flint-hearted man, none of which characteristics are in the least bit relevant to whether he wrote the plays or not. "Questioning and investigation are not the foundations of ignorance." By that standard, Holocaust deniers know more about the Holocaust than historians do; creationists know more about evolutionary biology than biologists do; 9/11 Truthers know more about engineering and aerodynamics than the National Academy of Sciences U. S. A.; HIV/AIDS deniers know more about the virus than virologists; anti-vaxxers know more about immunology than immunologists; relativity-deniers, geocentrists, Sitchinites, Velikovskians, and flat-earthers know more about the universe and planetary dynamics than physicists; proponents of Atlantis know more about geology than geologists; Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists and so-called "sovereign citizens" know more about the law than lawyers, etc., etc., etc. This would be a conspiracy theorists' charter: they could claim expertise merely by the act of denying the "orthodox" view.

No, there's nothing wrong with the length of the thread. It's just that sometimes RU-vid does arbitrarily delete posts. I always save mine until I'm _sure_ they've posted, and if they've failed to post then I usually reply with "testing, testing, testing" and if that goes through then I just edit the "testing" comment to contain the text it should have. I replied below to this same comment, but I'm happy to bring it up here too and let this be the new thread. Though, frankly, the thought of a new thread where you will just ignore everything I have to say, ignore all the relevant evidence, and make up crap and then refuse to substantiate even your own assertions gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. Anyway, here's what I posted below: (Part 1 of 3) “We don’t really know what Shakespeare’s handwriting looks like. Six signatures of Shakespeare, found on four legal documents, are the only handwriting that we know for certain are his. This is too small a sample size to make any sort of reliable comparison.” Folger Library website This topic again, even though I didn't even bring Hand D up in the last comment _at all_ ? Come off it. It's as if you're attempting to convince _yourself_ , not me, at this point. The British Library website: "This is part of the only surviving play script to contain Shakespeare's handwriting. Three pages of the manuscript, ff. 8r, 8v and 9r, have been identified as Shakespeare’s, based on handwriting, spelling, vocabulary and the images and ideas expressed." "The certainty surrounding the claim that the man from Stratford is the definitive author of Shakespeare's works raises significant doubts when considering the reliance on Hand D." There is *NO* reliance on Hand D. As I pointed out many times previously, the Prima Facie Case does not rely on Hand D. None of my four circumstantial arguments, that I presented to show you how it's done, relied on Hand D. And, as I've frequently observed and you've just as frequently ignored, if we had no authorial manuscripts for William Shakespeare, then we'd be in the same position as we are with respect to Christopher Marlowe, whose only remnant in his handwriting is a single signature (where he spelled his name "Christofer Marley", by the way), because the one manuscript leaf of _A Massacre at Paris_ has been shown to be in a scribal hand. Yet we accept that Christopher Marlowe wrote the two parts of _Tamburlaine_ , _Doctor Faustus_ , _Edward II_ , _The Jew of Malta_ , _The Massacre at Paris_ , and _Dido, Queen of Carthage_ , as well as _Hero and Leander_ and "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and his translations of Ovid and Lucan. "This assertion hinges on a meager collection of six signatures attributed to Shakespeare, extracted from a mere four legal documents. Such a limited dataset not only undermines the integrity of forensic handwriting analysis but also represents a clear methodological lapse. If you are using Hand D to bolster your argument, then your entire argument comes into question!" First, I'm not using it to "bolster my argument"-I was prepared to leave the subject of Hand D alone ages ago and it is *YOU* who keep on bringing it up even when it's irrelevant, as at present. Second, your self-interested assertions out of your so extensive paleographical expertise _as an actor_ do not sway me. Attributions have been made on far more meager grounds than six signatures, nor are the signatures the only thing tying Hand D to the Shakespeare corpus. They may be what ties it directly to Stratford-upon-Avon because the comparison is to exemplar signatures that came on documents identifying the signer as William Shakespeare of Stratfprd-upon-Avon in the county of Warwick, gentleman, but even without those signatures Hand D tied into the canon can be concluded to be the work of William Shakespeare of Stratfprd0-upon-Avon because we have more than sufficient evidence that the "man from Stratford" was a Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men actor and that the actor was also a playwright. We have John Heminges and Henry Condell testifying that their "Friend, & Fellow" Shakespeare authored "his plays", we have Ben Jonson's reference to Shakespeare as the "swan of Avon", we have Leonard Digges' explicit reference to Shakespeare's "Stratford monument", we have the monument itself that clearly honors a writer and was identified as honoring a famous poet by the 17th century people who saw it and bothered to comment (do you want to step on that rake again, Sideshow Bob?), and we have the fact that the performance data on the quartos of the canonical plays attributed to Shakespeare all credited the playing company as the Lord Chamberlain's Men or King's Men while William Shakespeare was an actor with that company-and Shakespeare's affiliation with the company and its actors can be proven six ways from Sunday. So frankly, even if the handwriting analysis were uncertain, rather than compelling evidence, I would still accept Hand D as overwhelmingly likely to be Shakespeare's because of all the other features that tie it to the canonical works, and thence to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. "This approach compromises the credibility of the findings and questions the professionalism of those making authoritative statements based on such a limited and unrepresentative sample." As if you're any judge of credibility after uncritically endorsing Diana Price's bullshit approach, to say nothing of the crap you've come up yourself with in this conversation, like claiming out of nowhere that William Shakespeare was an illiterate who was put up as a front man by Richard Field for a supposedly "pornographic" poem, _Venus and Adonis_ , that was written by an aristorcrat. Literally not a single point in that claim has been or even _can_ be substantiated with evidence. All you did was reveal that you've never read _Venus and Adonis_ . "What adds to the irony is the hypothetical scenario where an alternative candidate is proposed for the authorship of Hand D. In such a case, the same points raised here would likely be used to challenge the legitimacy of Hand D. This underscores the inconsistency in the current discourse." *HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!* So typical of you and yet so absurd. You *IMAGINE* a response to an alternative authorship candidate being floated for Hand D in the way that most flatters your preconceptions and then you decide that this is exactly what would happen were such an event to occur-even though it hasn't occurred yet; in fact, all other writers who have left anything in their own hand have been considered and rejected, as have all extant scribal hands-and then because you've decided it would happen that way, that's just as good as if it *DID* happen that way. Therefore, this scenario you've conjured up in your own mind thus "underscores the inconsistency in the current discourse". I couldn't have asked for a better example of the truth of my statement that "You're the paradigmatic example of self-delusion." The shit you invent in your own mind becomes the next piece of 'evidence' you refer to. This is perfect. This is *EXACTLY* what you do. "Separating Hand D from the man of Stratford becomes evident, especially if one accepts the legitimacy of the handwriting analysis. As noted by Roy A. Huber of the RCMP, an expert in handwriting analysis, Hand D cannot be conclusively linked to the man from Stratford due to numerous discrepancies. Asserting that Hand D unequivocally represents the man from Stratford appears baseless and exists, it seems, to satisfy a particular orthodoxy." Roy Huber of the RCMP was a forensic document examiner, not a paleographer. He had never examined any document of this age before, he had never examined anything written with a quill pen nor had he ever written with a quill pen himself, so he didn't know how individual the strokes made by a penman can be compared to a ballpoint or calligraphic pen, he'd never read anything written in secretary hand, and he applied a completely inappropriate legal standard where all other possibilities had to be definitively _excluded_ first, which essentially meant that he could have only been satisfied if _every_ document that was ever written in the early modern world survived. And yet despite all this, he didn't _exclude_ Shakespeare as having been the man behind Hand D, so he did not find any _disqualifying_ discrepancies. That Hand D is the work of the "man from Stratford" is simply following the evidence where it leads, rather than dropping it down a convenient oubliette, which would be Diana Price's approach. "The absence of plays, poems, or letters in Shakspere of Stratford's own handwriting raises questions about the Shakespeare Authorship Question." Except a) there isn't any absence until you can _definitively_ disprove that Hand D is Shakespeare's, and b) even if there were such an absence, it would be the same for him as many of his contemporaries (Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, etc.).

frkuhrgrgghgb giughfgyhul roguhtiugh eprgijtiuhgt pthijyojyr trhpoijthoijgyth geuthgt aw09ijdir (just breaking up the sameness of the text, lest it get caught in the filter) (Part 2 of 3) "Common sense suggests that a writer of Shakespeare's magnitude would leave some tangible evidence of his craft." Common sense, as I've already said above, would suggest that you go *LOOK* at the survival of public theatre plays in authorial manuscript first before coming to any armchair hypotheses about what we should or shouldn't have. The fact that of the extant plays of Shakespeare every one *BUT* _Sir Thomas More_ were published in the early modern era means that we should look whether there are any authorial manuscripts for public theatre plays that then went on to be printed. And the answer to that is that there are zero. Not a single one until the Restoration. Remember I said I've been reading Thomas Heywood's plays? Last night was _The English Traveller_ . In the preface to the reader, Thomas Heywood explicitly said that even in his _own_ time "that many of them [his plays] by shifting and change of companies have been negligently lost; others of them are still retained in the hands of some actors, who think it against their peculiar profit to have them come in print; and a third, that it never was any great ambition in me, to be in this kind voluminously read." If manuscripts could disappear even in Heywood's own era, and he not have access to them, how likely is it that they will have disappeared after 400 years, especially when in 1642 the Puritans closed the theatres wholesale and broke up and scattered all the playing companies? That was a complete break in the theatrical tradition. The King's Men (for Charles took over his father's patronage of the company) was abolished and the manuscripts they may have retained were no longer of any use to anyone. They couldn't be used for prompt-books because there was no playing company, and if had occurred to anyone that this period of theatrical repression might not last they probably would have felt that the existence of the Folios meant that the texts would be there if they were ever required again. "The last will and testament of Shakspere, spanning two and a half pages, does not hint at his identity as a writer. It seems implausible that the great Shakespeare would forget such a crucial aspect of his identity when drafting his will." My will doesn't identify me as a molecular geneticist. That's not what wills are for. And if this is just a roundabout way of saying that he doesn't have any manuscripts in his will, I would remind you of what we've just learned from Heywood: the manuscripts were retained by the playing companies, not the playwrights, so the manuscripts were not Shakespeare's to bequeath. And if he retained any manuscripts of his non-dramatic poetry, although it's doubtful since it all seems to have been printed, he would have only mentioned them in his will _if_ he had intended them to go to anyone else other than his residuary legatees. You name the person(s) who gets everything else you don't explicitly state in bequests to others so you don't have to redraft your will every time you gain or lose a piece of property. Wills are *NOT* inventories. This is as true now as it was in Shakespeare's day, so Shakespeare authorship deniers have to pretend to ignorance of the very world around them in order to uphold their argument. "It seems implausible that the great Shakespeare would forget such a crucial aspect of his identity when drafting his will." On the contrary, it both seems and *IS* utterly commonplace. But you tell me. E. A. J. Honigmann and Susan Brock gathered together every single will and summary they could find that bore on the 16th-17th century playhouses. Their book _Playhouse Wills: 1558 - 1642_ is still the go-to resource. How many other contemporary playwrights of Shakespeare's made a big deal about how they were writers in their wills? "Shakespeare's works encompass a breadth of knowledge beyond English, delving into multiple languages and areas of expertise." I suppose that you believe if you aren't specific about the languages and areas of expertise, that I'll forget what you've previously claimed and stop pointing out that you repeatedly have run from any specific, text-based discussion of Shakespeare's expertise in Classics. First you tried by changing the subject to his knowledge of France and Italy, but without providing any specific examples, and then when I critiqued that with specifics from the plays you abandoned that subject too and you have never attempted at all to substantiate Shakespeare's allegedly extensive knowledge with reference to the text itself. "Attempts to simplify Shakespeare's intellectual depth to fit the profile of the man from Stratford appear manipulative." It appears "manipulative" to you because it goes against your preconceptions, but to me it's just putting Shakespeare's knowledge in context and being honest about how much he actually gets wrong, which is something that the Shakespeare authorship deniers cannot bring themselves to be. Furthermore, knowing other languages is precisely the profile that "the man from Stratford" should have given a grammar school education. It was, literally, a grammar school where you learned Latin and sometimes Greek. Furthermore, all of the other languages Shakespeare is presumed to know are all Romance languages, and I can testify from personal experience both as a former Classics major and as someone who frequently encounters the Romance languages as an opera fan and traveler that a solid background in Latin makes it much easier to read and comprehend any Romance language, and Shakespeare's background would have been even greater than mine. As a Classics major, I wasn't starting school at 6 a.m. and spending all the succeeding 12 hours on translating Latin into English and English back into Latin like he would have been. Furthermore, in London they had ex-Oxbridge students teaching Latin and Greek, and immigrants teaching French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Arabic, and Turkish. Presumably they'd also do translations upon request. So even if Shakespeare somehow couldn't read French or Italian with his Latin background (though I can with my far poorer education in that language, and despite the fact that French and Italian have had four centuries more to diverge from their vernacular Latin roots), he could have relied on people with that expertise. And let's not forget that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon in the county of Warwick, gentleman, was sufficiently adept in French to take a hand in the marriage negotiations between two groups of native French speakers: Stephen Bellot and the Mountjoy family, with whom he roomed in their house in Cripplegate, London, who were all Huguenot refugees. "While it's conceivable that someone could accumulate the necessary knowledge, the absence of any trace raises skepticism." Yes, the absence of any trace does raise skepticism: specifically, the absence of any trace of evidence from the works that Shakespeare possessed this supposedly incredible knowledge does raise skepticism that this extensive knowledge is actually to be found in the works. Perhaps you could look to that. And since you concede that it is possible to accumulate the necessary knowledge, then this argument fails to exclude Shakespeare from penning the works even if this knowledge did exist in the works and wasn't just a vaporous assertion surrounding them.

riyughrigb pthiojytihnbg rpgjthpjy thp[iyjptoyk ]tw[hrlhmhrtpwmh wthpiojthp[tjhw thptohjptoqj qth[potjhqtpojh qthptojqhpotjh qtehpthqpotmh (Part 3 of 3) "Shakespeare, a literary giant, delves into history, philosophy, law, and science, showcasing not just linguistic skill but a profound intellect." And his contemporaries delve as much or even more so. If you'd bother to read any of them, you would see that for yourself. There's more law, and more obscure points of law, in _The Devil's Law-Case_ by John Webster than there is in the entirety of the Shakespeare corpus. Ditto _The Case is Altered_ by Ben Jonson, and he had no better academic background than Shakespeare, being forced into a bricklaying apprenticeship at the age of 16 by his stepfather. Comments like this make me wonder how much Shakespeare authorship deniers even understand about Shakespeare. Nobody sits around today and thinks, "Oh, that was an extraordinary legal allusion!" or "Wow, that reference to _Sir Bevis of Hampton_ made my eyes pop!" What impresses those of us who have a passion for Shakespeare is his facility with the English language and the way that his best characters feel like living, breathing individuals, which are two things you don't need a Ph.D. for. It seems to me that you're very much in danger of forgetting that Shakespeare's plays _are_ plays. That they were written to be performed before a large cross-section of the public whose educational backgrounds weren't scrutinized as long as they had sufficient money to pay the entrance fee. So if Shakespeare's audience was capable of understanding the legalisms that Shakespeare occasionally worked into his dialogue (though far less often than many of his other contemporaries), then it would suggest that they were the stuff of common knowledge and experience. You can apply the same observation to every one of Shakespeare's supposedly 'specialist' fields: Classics, medicine, sailing, falconry, tennis, astronomy, etc. E.g., I've already mentioned how there's more detail about hawking/falconry in _A Woman Killed with Kindness_ than in all of Shakespeare and in _The English Traveller_ , which I just read, the servant and con artist Reignald (based on the character type of the clever slave from Roman comedy-in fact this subplot is based on Plautus' _Mostellaria_ ) moves in a moment from name-dropping Alexander, Agathocles (of Syracuse-a real deep cut from Classical history), and Caesar to talking about whether the warrant Old Lionel has secured to have the previous owner of the house attached for murder "runs... without bail and mainprize". These uses of technical terms and details are simply commonplace features of the plays of the day. The plays of all these playwrights, including Shakespeare, had to hit home for their audiences otherwise they'd have rejected their works and turned against the companies for staging them, so allusions like these were clearly no barrier to understanding. "Common sense suggests that creating such an extensive body of work would leave some evidence." Common sense suggests that a lot can disappear after 400 years, particularly when the directly descended family of the playwright dies out in 1670 and the home he lived in was demolished in the 18th century, and when the author in question is a middle-class man for whom the only likely surviving records are legal ones or church registers. We're lucky to have everything we do, quite frankly. But then that's me looking at what remains for other men of Shakespeare's class and profession, and not just imagining what might exist from my armchair. I leave that approach to you and Diana Price. "Occam's Razor points to the possibility that Shakspere served as a front for the real writer(s)." Occam's Razor does no such goddamn thing. Instead, it *REJECTS* the possibility that Shakespeare served as a front man for an unknown number of "real writer(s)" because there's *NOT A SINGLE SOLITARY PIECE OF EVIDENCE FOR IT* . I already explained to you what Occam's Razor was, and your refusal to grasp it shows how stupid and ineducable you are. Occam's Razor proposes that when you have a range of explanations for given observation, you should prefer the one that covers the evidence with the _least_ amount of theoretical entities. Your front man hypothesis, being based on nothing but your own supposition and not a single scintilla of evidence, greatly multiplies the theoretical entities required to carry it through. You need all of the unknown amount of real writers, you need some unevidenced agreement between the writers (or an unevidenced go-between) and Shakespeare to front for this unknown individual or group, and you need some unevidenced way in which Shakespeare can dictate that his name should appear on the works that are to be published under his name. Moreover, you need to explain the four-year gap between the publication of _The Rape of Lucrece_ and the first crediting of Shakespeare on the quartos of plays, even though his plays had been published anonymously as early as 1594, the same year as _Lucrece_ and why some of the plays that were published during this period were either never attributed to Shakespeare before the First Folio or only just a few years before the Folio. You need to explain why the First Folio contained 18 plays never before published when lining up a front man implies an intention to publish. In that respect too, you need to explain the entry in the Stationer's Register staying the publication of _Henry V_ , _Much Ado About Nothing_ , and _As You Like It_ (the last then never being published until the First Folio). And you have to explain why people who would have known Shakespeare professionally and/or personally thought that he was the author, including Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, Henry Condell, John Heminges, John Webster, etc. By contrast, what we have with Shakespeare's authorship is one entity, writing as a house playwright for the company with which the records extensively tie him as an actor and sharer. Said actor and sharer was identified as the author by numerous figures of his time, including many who knew him personally and professionally. He is also identified on some of the publications and in some contemporary testimony as a gentleman when the _only_ armigerous gentleman of his name was the man who was an actor with the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men company. Moreover, all of the credited quartos published in his lifetime identify the plays as having been performed by the company of which he was a member. Now, while stylometry (or the rigorous stylistic analysis that stylometry now automates) has identified other figures as co-authors, thus increasing the number of entitles, it has not increased the number of _theoretical_ entitles because these entities have only been proposed on the basis of textual evidence. You do not have any textual or any other sort of evidence for your front man hypothesis. Therefore, Occam's Razor comes down firmly on the side of Shakespeare's authorship of the canon, supplemented by occasional collaboration with other *KNOWN* playwrights. "The First Folio, by promoting the single-author theory" Once again, being silent on co-authorship is not "promoting" the idea that there was only one author for all of the works. "...and ignoring the collaborative efforts proposed by modern Stratfordians, adds to the complexity." And no it doesn't. First, because there is no such thing as a "Stratfordian". The people you are talking about are Shakespeare scholars. It's an academic field. Second, it doesn't because acknowledging Shakespeare as a co-author is *STILL* an affirmation that he was *AN AUTHOR* . Only you pretend to have trouble with this concept. Finally, I'll just point out that you, in your conceptual muddle, are accusing John Heminges and Henry Condell in their capacity as compilers of the First Folio of "ignoring the collaborative efforts proposed by modern Stratfordians". So you think it's 'suspicious' that Heminges and Condell didn't have the power of precognition and couldn't foretell the future? "In light of these uncertainties, adopting an agnostic stance seems prudent. The true origins of Shakespeare's works remain enigmatic, and making definitive claims without concrete evidence ventures into speculative territory." But there is concrete evidence for Shakespeare's authorship. The concrete evidence is in everything you've had to *IGNORE* to arrive at your "agnostic stance". *EVERY* piece of documentary evidence bearing on the subject of the authorship of the canon shows that Shakespeare was an author and *EVERY* contemporary who bothered to speak on the subject said that Shakespeare was an author. He is identified as the author in title pages, in the Stationer's Regsiter, in the Revels Accounts, and he is identified by his contemporaries by name, by his rank of gentleman, by his profession of actor, and by his home town of Stratford. Until you can refute that extensive body of evidence, then your "agnostic stance" will be as dishonest as the rest of your approach has been.

​@@Nullifidian I'm reminded that getting into a good scrap may be fun, but watching a champ deliver a beat down is a thing of beauty.

And yet when he got a coat of arms from the College of Heralds, it was spelled Shakespeare. And when he was made a King's Man, and when he was deposed in Bellot v Mountjoy. And when he was mentioned in two cast lists by Ben Jonson, and when he got paid for performing a play at court. And when he was asked about a play by the Master of Revels. And when he bought the gatehouse in Blackfriars and...I would say you get the picture but that is unlikely. How anyone spelled his name in an era with no set spelling does not matter a damn.

@@Jeffhowardmeade It was John Shakspere that applied for and received the coat. William succeeded in not having it revoked. Re: the Bellot deposition, It is not clear at all how the clerk spelled the name, but it is not "Shakespeare", but like you said that doesn't matter. The spelling of the signature matters. The signature on the Bellot deposition does not say SHAKESPEARE. It says Shakspey. From the 1612 Mountjoy suit deposition: Willm Shackpey From the 1612 Blackfriars Gatehouse deed: (William) Shakspear From the 1612 Blackfriars mortgage: Wm Shakspea From the 1615 will, page 1: William Shackspere From the will, page 2: Wllm. Shakspere From the will, page 3: (by me William) Shakspear No two of the six signatures was written by the same person. The total available handwriting of Shakespeare doesn't amount two six unmatched signatures - it amounts to zero. But who knows...maybe the handwriting is all hidden in the same place that Edward de Vere's genealogies are to be found.

@@vetstadiumastroturf5756 The coat of arms was granted to John SHAKESPEARE. You're not certain how the clerk in Bellot v Mountjoy spelled Shakespeare's name, but you're sure how it's not spelled. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I PRESENT TO YOU OXFORDIAN SCHOLARSHIP AT ITS FINEST! There isn't a qualified paleographer in the world who agrees with you. Your imaginative deciphering of Shakespeare's handwriting is just one more lie you tell yourself so you don't have to ponder on your failing conspiracy theory.

Edward De Vere WAS the poet...of a bunch of bad to mediocre poems. What does that have to do with Shakespeare?

Undoubtedly? There wouldn't be an authorship issue if that was the case.

Thank you! Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare but Shakespeare was MISIDENTIFIED. He was not born and neither did he live or grow up in Stratford. His works were misattributed to Shakspere, a play broker.

Um. We are told hete that there is no evidence about the curriculum of the grammar school Shakespesre attended ..... wait! This is a red herring. There is plenty of evidence for the SORT of curriculum. What is lacking is evidence that Shakespesre ATTENDED THE SCHOOL. Judging by Shakespeare's very poor sgnatures, the ONLY samples of his writing, he was barely literate. but could write his name in copybook letters. In a manner thst was alresdy antiquated. His surviving daughtets were illiterate. Many women in Shakespesre's plays, includfing housemaids, read and write letters.

@@beaulah_califa9867 yes, the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote the sonnets and plays attributed to Shake-Speare; in all probable fact, wrote Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece under that pseudonym

13:04 The timeline(s) for when each play was written is not grounded in hard evidence. We have evidence of when certain plays were performed but that only establishes a no-later-than date. The writing of The Tempest was commonly tied to incidents in the wreck of 'The Sea Venture' in Bermuda in 1609. That in turn was used to support the idea that play was composed between 1609 and Nov 1, 1611 when we see a documented performance. But we now know that the majority of the source material for The Tempest is a play performed in the winter of 1604/05 entitled The Spanish Maze. If the author of the Sonnets is "ever-living" in 1609 then they can't be writing, or rewriting, in 1610/1611. The Jaggard printing house attached the Shakespeare name to a range of works of varying quality; many of which contemporaneously declared apocrypha yet they continued. In 1619 Jaggard is printing the Javier quartos some of which are back-dated in what seems an attempt to escape claims by those who are the right holders as shown in the Stationers' Register. Four years later Jaggard is the printer of the First Folio and rights issues are resolved. Is it possible that Shakspere, who was then 7 years deceased, is used to claim the printing rights for the unpublished works that were included? His close-enough spelling and loose affiliation with London theater seems to have been enough to create the myth that lives to this day. For a deeper look at this issue I recommend this lecture by Thomas Regnier. He was a lawyer and presents his case very well. I believe that evidence shows that the plays and sonnets were written and rewritten by a variety of people. DeVere seems to have been one of them. Clearly Ben Jonson edits the works into the form we see in the First Folio but he is not one of the authors. Henslowe's Diary shows us that plays were written and rewritten by teams of writers, just as TV shows and movies are written today. The quality and quantity of the Shakespeare works is superior to those written by any individual writer because they were written, polished, rewritten and edited by many highly skilled writers. So on that part of the issue I disagree with "Oxfordians", "Marlovians" etc. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-OpFXD07_NYg.html

So many things wrong in such a... okay, it wasn't short at all. Anyway, in order: The way things are pronounced today have no bearing on how they were pronounced in the 16th century. You are assuming that the medial E modified the previous vowel sound as it does today. It did not. The myriad different way people spelled Shakespeare's name reflect how it sounded to them. Many referred to Shakespeare the actor and gentleman as "Shakespeare", though actor Edward Alleyn wrote Shaksper Sonets in his notes.

In 1595, William Covell referred to Queen Elizabeth as "ever-living". She was not dead. In 1598, Richard Barnfield wrote an epigram declaring four living poets to be "ever-living". They were Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and William Shakespeare. It meant immortal, not dead.

In two cast lists of his plays, Ben Jonson included the actor William Shakespeare. Once spelled Shakespeare and once Shake-Speare. Ben Jonson did spell his name consistently, but others spelled it differently. Which other poets can you name who did? De Vere certainly didn't, though he wasn't much of a poet.

Henslowe didn't start commissioning plays until after Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men, so using his accounts as some sort of evidence against Shakeapeare would be like checking the records of Johns-Hopkins and deciding that Jonas Salk was not a doctor. Shakespeare appeared along with Will Kemp and Richard Burbage to receive payment for a Christmas production by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It specifically said for "twoe seuerall Comedies or Enterludes shewed by them before her maiestie in Christmas tyme laste paste viz vpon St Stephens daye & Innocents daye." He was also listed second after King James's favorite actor brought with him from Scotland in the charter for The King's Men and first among them to receive scarlet cloth for the coronation. An Oxfordian found a reference in the margins of a description of Stratford where a Warwickshire vicar describes Shakespeare as "Roscius", after the Roman actor. Shakespeare was a performer, in addition to being a poet.

...raped boys, blew his fortune, called his daughter a bastard, killed a servant, abandoned his post during the Armada, and wrote mediocre poetry. It's not certain if he farted in front of the Queen. That one might just be a joke.

@@Jeffhowardmeade But it's not the only joke about de Vere. And like the fart story, the other joke gets less funny the more you hear it.

And none which has ever been refuted with evidence.

A fun and sensible story! Thank you! But that only works in English. Since German and Yiddish have similar phrases about breaking a leg, the source has to be more than the homonymic relationships of the word ‘cast.’

That's absurd. The so-called "Anti-Stratfordians" didn't exist in 1634. That's when _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ was published as being by "those memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher, gent. and Mr. William Shakspeare, gent." In 1653, Humphrey Mosley entered _The History of Cardenio_ as being by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Nor did the "anti-Stratfordians" have any input into Nicholas Rowe's proposal in 1709 that _Pericles_ was co-authored. And though this has been resolved in Shakespeare's favor, there was a concerted effort to eject _Titus Andronicus_ from the canon, which meant that a significant number of 17th, 18th, and 19th century authors and scholars thought that another man's play was falsely attributed to Shakespeare in the First Folio. It's now accepted that George Peele's hand is in the play, though his hand doesn't exclude Shakespeare's. And even though the "Anti-Stratfordian" position was just beginning to exist c. the mid-19th century, none of the historical "anti-Stratfordians" had anything useful to add to the identification of George Wilkins as the co-author of _Pericles_ or John Fletcher as the co-author of _Henry VIII_ . In fact, not having anything useful to add to Shakespeare scholarship has been the common "anti-Stratfordian' condition. The only one of you who has made any sort of genuine discovery related to Shakespeare is Paul H. Altriocchi, who discovered the marginal note in Latin in Camden's _Britannia_ from the Rev. Richard Hunt praising Shakespeare as "truly our Roscius". And the "anti-Stratfordians" are anti-Stratfordian because they reject William Shakespeare's authorship wholesale. To them, he had no part in any of the plays that are in the First Folio or the canonical plays and poems not included in the Folio. So to credit them with "winning the day" because scholars accept that William Shakespeare collaborated on a minority of his plays, primarily early and late in his career, is patently ridiculous. And we do know who wrote the works. William Shakespeare wrote them. We know this on the same basis that we know anyone wrote anything in the early modern period: because the documentary evidence shows it and every contemporary who bothered to make any comment on the subject said he was an author. That he is not the exclusive author does not mean he is not _an_ author of all of the canonical works. That would be absurd. Furthermore, the same stylometry that shows that Shakespeare did collaborate also shows that he wrote his own works and excludes any other alternative "authorship candidate" who left published writings that can be tested. The only exception to that generalization is Christopher Marlowe, but that's hardly good news for the Marlovians because Marlowe's hand has only been detected in the _Henry VI_ plays, all of which were on the stage by 1592, a year before he died, and _nothing_ else, which means by inversion that he is no more the "real Shakespeare" than any of the others. Finally, there isn't actually _any_ "single-author claim made in the First Folio". A single-author claim would be like Ben Jonson's claim in the prologue to _Volpone_ that "'Tis known, five weeks fully penn'd it, | From his own hand, without a co-adjutor, | Novice, journey-man, or tutor." By contrast, nowhere in the First Folio is the existence of any other authors _specifically_ disavowed. The plays are attributed to Shakespeare because they are his just as much as the co-authored works-a minority of the total number, and still less since the co-authored _Pericles_ , _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ , _Edward III_ , and _Sir Thomas More_ were *NOT* printed in the First Folio-also belong to their co-authors. If it's legitimate to say that _Titus Andronicus_ is George Peele's play, _Timon of Athens_ is Thomas Middleton's, and _Henry VIII_ is John Fletcher's, then it's also just as legitimate to say that these three and the other 33 in the First Folio are William Shakespeare's on the same basis that partial authorship entitles one to have the play considered one's own. P. S., If you don't agree with "making the same mistake with some other writer", then I can only assume that you have an evil alter-ego or the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship has published your writings without your consent, because the association certainly does make it appear that you're an Oxfordian.

​@@NullifidianThank you for that very succinct version of Brian Vickers' Shakespeare, Co-author (2003, OUP). You just saved me $131 plus shipping.

@@Nullifidian It is indeed disheartening to observe the rapid descent of this discourse into the realm of unsubstantiated claims and, regrettably, blatant falsehoods. Firstly, allow me to clarify that I have never had the privilege of having my work published by those adhering to the Oxfordian perspective, unless one were to consider content hosted on ubiquitous platforms such as RU-vid, which, it should be noted, is open to universal utilization. Furthermore, I have appeared at Oxfordian conferences as a paid performer, yet it is imperative to underscore that being hired as entertainment does not, by any logical extension, imbue me with the identity of an Oxfordian. I am not an Oxfordian. I disbelieve the mythical story of the man from Stratford. Addressing the matter of falsehoods, it is paramount to direct our attention to the First Folio, a seminal literary artifact that unambiguously proclaims a single author as the progenitor of these enduring literary masterpieces. The very nomenclature of the First Folio, "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies," leaves no room for equivocation. The omission of any reference to collaboration is conspicuously deliberate, reinforcing the singular authorship. The litany of dedicatory verses and commendatory poems celebrate Shakespeare's unique talent, attributing the works solely to his authorship. There is a conspicuous absence of any insinuation of shared authorship or collaborative effort in these tributes. Moreover, the First Folio itself contains passages that underscore the uniformity of authorship, with expressions like "perfect and as he conceived them" underscoring the notion that these plays were conceived solely within the confines of one man's imagination and creative vision. With regard to your assertion concerning stylometry, it is imperative to highlight its inability to definitively affirm Shakespeare's participation in collaborative efforts. Notably, we lack any authenticated examples of Shakespeare's personal writings, and, thus, your assertion that any unattributed authorship can be unilaterally assigned to the individual from Stratford is, at best, an exercise in wishful thinking. It is worth noting that the gentleman from Stratford left behind no written documents or compositions. I recognize that for some, the assertion that "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare" may indeed resemble an article of faith. Yet, as the argument evolves, it appears to transform into "Shakespeare wrote the majority of Shakespeare," and subsequently into "Shakespeare surely composed some portion of Shakespeare," all of which, it must be acknowledged, remain speculative in nature. The only tenable standpoint is one of agnosticism, acknowledging that our knowledge is ultimately incomplete. To bring this discourse to a conclusion, I would like to present a decisive statement from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, as elucidated in their publication, "Shakespeare Beyond Doubt." In contemplating the future, they concede, "We may find that some passages, even some widely beloved sections of plays or favourite lines were not Shakespeare's work." Whether this is palatable or not, it underscores the prevailing uncertainty surrounding the compositions attributed to the man from Stratford. I extend my apologies if this position does not align with your convictions.

@@keircutler Part 1 of 2: "It is indeed disheartening to observe the rapid descent of this discourse into the realm of unsubstantiated claims and, regrettably, blatant falsehoods." Yes, it is, isn't it? But since you've chosen to lie to me straight off the bat, we'll just both have to deal with it on that basis, won't we? "Firstly, allow me to clarify that I have never had the privilege of having my work published by those adhering to the Oxfordian perspective, unless one were to consider content hosted on ubiquitous platforms such as RU-vid, which, it should be noted, is open to universal utilization." And that is your first lie. Your article "The Top Ten Reasons Shakespeare Did Not Write Shakespeare" is hosted on the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship website, and you certainly strike a more definite tone than mere "agnosticism" regarding Shakespeare's authorship in that. "Addressing the matter of falsehoods, it is paramount to direct our attention to the First Folio, a seminal literary artifact that unambiguously proclaims a single author as the progenitor of these enduring literary masterpieces. The very nomenclature of the First Folio, "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies," leaves no room for equivocation." So does _Comedies and Tragedies_ written by FRANCIS BEAVMONT and JOHN FLETCHER, gentlemen, thus also constitute a claim that _every_ single play in this edition is written by those two in collaboration and those two _alone_ ? Because if so, then it's just as 'dishonest' as you're attempting to paint the First Folio, since Beaumont was dead by 1616 and Fletcher lived for another decade writing plays for the King's Men. The first and second Folios don't explicitly attribute any plays to the collaboration of Philip Massinger, one of Fletcher's most frequent collaborators after Beaumont, nor to John Ford, John Webster, Nathan Field, William Rowley, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, James Shirley, or William Shakespeare. Indeed, three plays in the First B&F Folio and one (additional) play in the Second are not even by _either_ Francis Beaumont nor John Fletcher. They are _The Nice Valour_ by Middleton, _Wit at Several Weapons_ by Middleton and Rowley, _The Laws of Candy_ by John Ford, and (in the Second) _The Coronation_ by James Shirley. You're viewing this from the perspective of a time when there is authorial copyright and intellectual property is a recognized thing, but this was a different era and it can't be judged from your ahistorical and anachronistic perspective. They put Shakespeare's name on the Folio because that is who they wanted to honor with a Folio publication of his works. They didn't muddy the waters by naming any co-authors because that wasn't the point of the Folio, but neither did they specifically _disclaim_ the possibility of co-authorship as Ben Jonson did regarding the composition of _Volpone_ . "There is a conspicuous absence of any insinuation of shared authorship or collaborative effort in these tributes." You say that as if you expected the authors of the commendatory verses to _know_ that a minority of the plays were co-authored. What reason do you have for making that assumption? Let's look at the four authors of the commendatory verses. We have Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges, and James Mabbe (the proposal that "I.M." was John Marston is generally rejected because he was way off in Hampshire still pursuing his second career as an Anglican vicar). Three of these men weren't playwrights, though at least two of them and perhaps all were personally known to Shakespeare. Shakespeare had acted in two of Ben Jonson's plays and Leonard Digges was the stepson of Thomas Russell, whom Shakespeare named as one of the two overseers of his will, a role one would only give to a trusted family member or friend. Meanwhile, James Mabbe was a friend of Digges' and could have met Shakespeare through him, and Hugh Holland likely at least saw Shakespeare act in _Sejanus_ since he contributed commendatory verses to the publication of that play. But still, knowing Shakespeare personally would be no guarantee that they'd follow his career closely enough to know who his collaborators were. Even Ben Jonson likely wouldn't have cared. He was aware that collaboration was a fact of early modern life-he collaborated on many now mostly lost plays early in his career-so what need to make a big deal of discussing it? For all that Jonson wrote that Shakespeare was "not of an age, but for all time", they were still writing for their contemporaries according to what their background knowledge would have likely been and they weren't writing for _you_ . Even in modern times, we have works that were originally co-authored only going by one of the author's names. For example, _The Log from the Sea of Cortez_ is reprinted and condensed from _Sea of Cortez_ and published with only John Steinbeck's name on it, even though much of Ed Ricketts' portions still are contained within the _Log_ . "Moreover, the First Folio itself contains passages that underscore the uniformity of authorship, with expressions like "perfect and as he conceived them" underscoring the notion that these plays were conceived solely within the confines of one man's imagination and creative vision." No, that's just another expression of Shakespeare's authorship that you're trying to bootstrap into a denial of co-authorship while at the same time wanting to wrest credit from Shakespeare for having written anything. "With regard to your assertion concerning stylometry, it is imperative to highlight its inability to definitively affirm Shakespeare's participation in collaborative efforts. Notably, we lack any authenticated examples of Shakespeare's personal writings...." We don't _need_ examples of his personal writings. In fact, his personal writings might not be any help at all, at least for many of the stylometric tests that are based on aspects of verse writing, because I doubt he was writing in blank verse to his friends and family. We have his single-authored plays and we have his poems that constitute a unified stylometric signature. And to anticipate your objection, if these plays were co-authored, the data points wouldn't cluster around each other but rather the data points would be pulled this way and that by their various co-authors and there would be no consistency in the results. The idea that a sequence of co-authors could possibly write so uniformly in each other's stylistic markers-writerly tics that no author would pay conscious attention to-as to fool a stylometric analysis into concluding they were the same author would be to expect miracles. "It is worth noting that the gentleman from Stratford left behind no written documents or compositions." So then you have solid evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did _not_ write the solo-authored plays attributed to him in the First Folio (and all of the solo-authored plays are contained in the First Folio), as well as _Venus and Adonis_ , _The Rape of Lucrece_ , "Let the Bird of Loudest Lay", and the sonnets? Where might I find it? Because it certainly wasn't contained in that article on the SOF's website. "I recognize that for some, the assertion that "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare" may indeed resemble an article of faith." It might be to you. To me and to anyone else who knows the facts, it's the only position backed up by any documentary evidence or contemporary testimony. Shakespeare was identified as the author by name, by his rank of gentleman (when the only William Shakespeare who was an armigerous gentleman was the one from Stratford-upon-Avon), by his profession of actor, and by his home town of Stratford. In fact, all of these references exist within the First Folio itself. As you so clearly pointed out, it is _Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies_ when "Master" or "Mr." is the proper honorific for a gentleman. All of the commendatory verses also address Shakespeare this way, and we also have Ben Jonson's reference to "gentle Shakespeare". We also have him identified by profession. Not only is his name first in the list of Principal Actors-I wonder what he could have possibly done to merit being placed above even the leading man, Richard Burbage-but he is identified as the "Friend,& Fellow" of John Heminges and Henry Condell, he's identified by Ben Jonson with a typically classical allusion ("when thy socks were on", referring to the socks and buskins of Athenian actors), and indeed all of the commendatory verses play on the imagery of the theatre. Hugh Holland works in a name-drop of the Globe, Leonard Digges explicitly refers to _Romeo and Juliet_ and indirectly to _Julius Caesar_ , and "I.M." speaks of leaving "the world's stage" for "death's tyring-room", an image also echoed by Holland's "death's publique tyring-house", and the fact that the image occurred to both suggests they both knew they were honoring an actor-playwright. Finally, Ben Jonson refers to him as the "Swan of Avon", and Leonard Digges, the local Warwickshire man, is even more direct in referring to "thy Stratford monument". You know as well as I do what that monument is and what it says and that it is located in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. He was identified as the author by people who would have known him personally and/or professionally (John Heminges, Henry Condell, Ben Jonson, John Webster, etc.) or by people who clearly knew a great deal about him as an author or about his antecedents (William Camden, Francis Meres, etc.). Unless you have specific evidence to undermine this mass of documentary evidence and contemporary testimony, then I think I'm perfectly at liberty to consider that William Shakespeare's authorship of the works that bear his name has been established. That in a _minority_ of cases it is part-authorship is neither here nor there.

Part 2 of 2: "The only tenable standpoint is one of agnosticism, acknowledging that our knowledge is ultimately incomplete." Or one could just base one's views on the evidence, rather than ignoring it all. "To bring this discourse to a conclusion, I would like to present a decisive statement from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, as elucidated in their publication, "Shakespeare Beyond Doubt. 'In contemplating the future, they concede, "We [ _sic_ - you should have closed the first part of the quote before inserting your editorialization, and used a lowercase w, since it's just continuing the sentence] may find that some passages, even some widely beloved sections of plays or favourite lines were not Shakespeare's work." So what? Even if this were actually the "decisive" statement you wish it were, I'm fully entitled to take my own view regardless of what is ostensibly a "statement from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust". Waving around a supposed 'authority' in my face and expecting me to dutifully submit is the way creationists argue. However, it _isn't_ even that. It's merely a quote from the essay "Theorizing Shakespeare's authorship" written by Andrew Hadfield, a professor from the University of Sussex, so unless the University of Sussex is unexpectedly an arm of the SBT.... Attempting to lie to me on this point was unwise because I've got a copy of _Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy_ and have read it in full. Also, you call this a "decisive statement", but doesn't say we _have_ found that, merely that we "may". Do you know what the word "decisive" means? "Whether this is palatable or not, it underscores the prevailing uncertainty surrounding the compositions attributed to the man from Stratford." No, it doesn't. It reflects that research is continuing into the subject of possible co-authorship, but also reflects the fact that further investigations of the canon may well not find any significant degree of co-authorship than has already been found. Personally, I think that's the most probable outcome, because as a profit-sharer Shakespeare was advantageously positioned for sole authorship. He didn't have to commit to eight or ten plays a year just to make ends meet like many freelance playwrights did (e.g., Thomas Dekker). "I extend my apologies if this position does not align with your convictions." To whom are you going to apologize for your position not aligning with reality?

Hard to do with those who have no living descendants, like Shakespeare.

Honestly, I find it frustrating too. I’m a one-person show when it comes to making these videos and in the moment I make mental notes to re-shoot but, in my rush to finish filming, forgot to go back and get another take. And since I don’t edit right away, fixing it would require setting up for re-shooting by trying to match the original shot. I made a decision to just keep it in because it’s not crucial to the arguments I want to make. But yeah, I get what you’re saying.

De Vere spoke in an East Anglian dialect. Shakespeare was West Midlands. Neither De Vere nor Avon were pronounced then as we do today.

"These may suffice for some Poeticall descriptions of our ancient Poets, if I would come to our time, what a world could I present to you out of Sir Philipp Sidney, Ed. Spencer, Samuel Daniel, Hugh Holland, Ben: Iohnson, Th. Campion, Mich. Drayton, George Chapman, Iohn Marston, William Shakespeare, & other most pregnant witts of these our times, whom succeeding ages may iustly admire." -- William Camden, Remaines Concerning Britain, 1605. This was the same Camden who defended Shakespeare's right to his family coat of arms a few years earlier.

Was Jonson weak-minded? Is he likely to have forgotten who Shakespeare was by the advanced age of 50?

So Jonson's comments to William Drummond of Hawthornden about Shakespeare that he made in January 1619 were... what? Perhaps I've been ensorceled by the Orthodoxy, but I always thought that April 1616 to January 1619 was less than three years. "That Shakspear wanted Arte." "Sheakspear, in a play, brought in a number of men--saying they had suffered Shipwrack in Bohemia, wher ther is no sea neer by some 100 miles." He may have criticized Shakespeare's geography and want of art, but Jonson was very clear that it was _Shakespeare's_ inaccuracy and artlessness and not anyone else's.

@@Nullifidian First of all, thank you for adding to my vocabulary by your use of the word ensorceled. Once you look a word up, you never forget its meaning. But your reading comprehension impresses me less than your vocabulary. 1619 was NOT during the life of your candidate, and Jonson's remarks did not associate the name "Shakespeare" or "Shake-Speare (the names on the title pages of the plays) with "Shaksper" or "Shagspere," i.e. the Stratford businessman. So you fail to respond to my point. But keep trying.

@@Jeffhowardmeade Exactly! Thank you for supporting my position. Since Camden knew the Stratford family, why did he not, in his description of Stratford in his classic Remaines Concerning Britain, note that England's greatest author hailed from that town. As you note, he was aware that "William Shakespeare" was how the great poet/playwright was known. What a glaring omission!

Why don't you present some of this "hard historical evidence to the contrary." I've been studying this matter for decades and I have yet to see even a single bit of it.

No, it's not getting clearer. The plays were performed Shakespeare's theater company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later The King's Men. The Lord Chamberlain was the very Protestant Henry Carey, the Baron Hunsdon. He was Elizabeth's cousin and closest advisor. The King was a guy who feared witches and Catholics, both of whom (at least in his mind) had tried to kill him. Shakespeare's plays were performed frequently at court. Are you suggesting that nobody in an era when the authorities were hunting for Jesuits in order to kill them, that a Catholic was writing propaganda-laced plays, which were performed by an officially-sanctioned theater troupe, and nobody noticed?

Your scenario is ridiculous. It requires a completely unevidenced Catholic conversion for a man who died while under suspicion of being an atheist, and rather than just leaving for the Continent in a straightforward way-as numerous Catholics had done-he instead fakes his death for _what_ reason? They didn't have extradition treaties and Interpol at this time. Furthermore, torture and execution were *NOT* particularly likely for a lay Catholic commoner. The Act of Supremacy was a mere 60 years old when Marlowe died and there were still thousands of practicing Catholics in the country. The people who primarily were at risk of execution were the _priests_ , not the laity. In fact, we can fact-check this scenario by observing that there was another trouble-prone playwright who converted to Catholicism, and his name was Ben Jonson. The only thing that happened to Jonson was that he was fined 13 shillings by the Consistory Court in 1606 for refusing to take communion. He wasn't tortured and he certainly wasn't executed. Instead, he was consistently _hired_ by King James-even during his Catholic period-to write masques for the court, and eventually he would be given a 100-mark annuity, thus making him in many people's eyes the first British Poet Laureate. Admittedly, the annuity came after Jonson abandoned Catholicism in disgust following the assassination of King Henri IV of France by a fanatical Catholic zealot, but prior to his 1610 re-conversion Jonson's Catholicism had not interfered with his being routinely hired to write court entertainments at all. Furthermore, the problem with all Marlowe-in-exile-writing-plays scenarios, whether they propose the author was Catholic or not, is that it makes absolutely no sense for Marlowe to be penning plays for a theatre company he _hadn't even seen_ back in London. The Lord Chamberlain's Men was founded a year after his death. It's not like today when an e-mail can carry a text halfway around the world in seconds. Marlowe would have been having to write for a company he didn't know, couldn't see, and had to predict their specific needs despite being in another country entirely. Moreover, if any rewrites were needed, how could they have maintained the illusion that William Shakespeare was the author? How was that front mans scheme even worked out, since it would have to be negotiated from the Continent? It's a mass of inexplicable decisions and unanswered questions. And furthermore, you're anachronistically treating Shakespeare as if he were _acknowledged_ as the "National Poet" in his lifetime. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was regarded by many as a talented playwright and the author of a very popular Ovidian poem, but the opinions of him were decidedly mixed. Some people admired him, some were more critical. None of them, however, even his admirers, saw him as anything other than just another public theatre playwright. Shakespeare as "the God of our idolatry" - as David Garrick wrote, imitating a line from _Romeo and Juliet_ - wouldn't be a thing until the latter half of the 18th century. Therefore, his alleged "Catholicism" would have been neither here nor there, since there was no Shakespeare worship at the time. And if, as you seem to be suggesting, the Shakespeare worship is culturally determined by the need to prop up Anglicanism, then why wouldn't they just pick a more devoutly Anglican writer to champion? It's not liked they were particularly hard to find. Take John Marston, for example. He left playwriting to become an Anglican vicar. Why aren't we celebrating _The Malcontent_ , _Antonio and Mellida_ , _Antonio's Revenge_ , _The Insatiate Countess_ , _The Dutch Courtesan_ , and so on? Why are we reading Shakespeare with his "Catholic sympathies and Protestant ridicules" that you can't point to specifically but are sure are there?

"I'll leave his name for anyone interested to discover." Sorry, but not falling into that Trap.

Nice one, son.@@Jeffhowardmeade

The 1609 printing of the Shakespeare sonnets refers to the author as "ever-living" -- IOW deceased. That rules out Shakspere of Stratford. There was no Shakespeare of Stratford. The spellings may be similar but the phonetics are not. Ask anyone if they remember the Los Angeles Lakers player named Shake -- they will correct you. Yet we have become quite used to Stratfordians changing the spelling and phonetics of the Stratford man's name. Shakspere is related to the 1623 printing via the odd interlineation in his rambling, unpunctuated Will adding Heminges and Condell but there is no evidence that he is the author of even one line of the works. No one in his lifetime ever refers to him as a writer. His death in 1616 goes unnoticed in the London theater scene. His parents were illiterate and his daughter was illiterate and there is no evidence that Shakspere attended any school. His Will and his monument ("cursed be he that moves my bones") certainly don't rise to the level of Shakespeare. His signatures look like those of someone who rarely held a pen.

@@apollocobain8363 From the top, Maestro. In 1595, William Covell referred to Queen Elizabeth as ever living. She died in 1603. In 1598, Richard Barnfield referred to four living poets as ever-living: Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and William Shakespeare. Ever living meant immortal, not dead. When the College of Heralds granted Shakespeare a coat of arms, making him a gentleman, they spelled his name Shakespeare. When Queen E's accountant paid The Lord Chamberlain's Men for a Christmas performance, they spelled his name Shakespeare. When Ben Jonson listed the actor in two cast lists, he spelled the name Shakespeare and Shake-Speare. More than a dozen times William Shakespeare of Stratford's name was spelled Shakespeare. Not that it matters, because you're trying to apply phonetic rules which didn't exist in the 16th Century. Shakespeare is related to the 1623 Folio in so many ways I'd get carpel tunnel trying to lay them all out. I'll be happy to, though, if you can manage to back up even a single claim you've made here with evidence. More than a dozen contemporaries referred to Shakespeare as a poet during his lifetime, all by his name and many in ways which can only refer to the gentleman and actor from Stratford. There were no newspapers in England in 1616. Where do you suppose his death was supposed to have been "noticed"? By that standard, nobody's death was "noticed" in the theater scene. There is no evidence that anyone in his family was illiterate, and his older daughter was demonstrably literate. There is no evidence that anyone attended the free school during Shakespeare's lifetime, yet it existed and Shakespeare's father, as an alderman and one-time mayor (that guy you just called an illiterate), was responsible for selecting and paying the schoolmaster. You are referring to his grave stone. The epitaph on his monument, which was attested as being in place by about 1618, is very poetic and even compares Shakespeare to the Roman poet Virgil. And his signatures look just fine to anyone who knows how to read 16th Century handwriting. I'm guessing that's not you. Anything else you would like up get wrong?

@@Jeffhowardmeade You are conflating the Stratford man with the pen name. Stratford left six signatures -- none of them are "Shakespeare" or the more obvious pseudonym "Shake-speare." We have "William Shakspe" and "Wm Shakspe" on the conveyance deed. "Willm Shakp" on the deposition; "William Shakspere" on page 1 of the Will. "Willm Shakspere" on page 2 and "William Shakspeare" on page 3. >a dozen contemporaries referred to Shakespeare as a poet < just as people praised "Mark Twain" as a great writer even though Huckleberry Finn is not written by a person with the legal name Mark Twain. None of those contemporaries is referring to having met or done business with a writer named Shakespeare but rather only to the works. 'where would his death be noticed?' -- with eulogies, memorials, etc. like the deaths of Spencer, Camden and others were. Illiterates tend to sign documents with an "X" and that is the way John Shakspere signed. You have failed to cite any evidence that Stratford was the author of any of the works. Despite epic searches for such evidence none has ever been found and the vacuum has periodically allowed forgeries like those of WH Ireland to be temporarily celebrated by those who claimed to be experts.

Both. Lack of knowledge of the early modern era made him a sucker for the claims of the Baconians because he wasn't informed enough to fact-check them.

Nor could be have. The first collection of documentary evidence relating to Shakespeare wasn't published until 1941. Before then it was all tucked away in half a dozen different goverment archives on the other side of the world from Twain. Now all the evidence can be had at the click of a mouse, but STILL some people don't bother to just look at it. I wonder if Twain would have been one of them.

​@@Jeffhowardmeade He might not have had the documentary evidence available with respect to Shakespeare, but there were many points in which he _could_ have fact-checked his sources if he wanted to. For example, the claims Baconians made that the number of legal allusions in the plays showed that their author was a legal expert could have been exploded, or at least significantly undermined, if he'd bothered to read plays by Shakespeare's early modern contemporaries and seen how many times they used legal language in their works. Instead, he just swallowed the claims of George Greenwood without demur. If he had bothered to fact-check more easily settled claims like that, he probably would have been cautious about the rest.

@@Nullifidian Or he could have just read The Merchant of Venice. That should be enough to convince any reasonable person that no actual lawyers were consulted in the making of Shakespeare.

@@Jeffhowardmeade Indeed! My favorite part is where Portia reminds Shylock that he's incurred the penalty of execution by seeking the death of a Christian, even though the attempt didn't come off, but somehow nobody else in Venice knew this occult law., not even the Duke who was trying to convince Shylock to relent before the trial started. You'd think that if this penalty existed, it would have made a strong debating point for the Duke. Of course the dramatic reason for it is obvious: you want to keep the tension going and you want Portia to be the one who triumphs, not some secondary character. But in doing so, Shakespeare inadvertently created a legal absurdity out of Kafka. If lawyers can summarily declare a man guilty of a capital crime, even though nobody else knows about it, then suddenly we're in the world of Josef K. It reminded me of the "Corporal Punishment" episode of _Blackadder_ where Gen. Melchett is presiding over the court martial and begins by saying, "Before we get to the formality of sentencing the deceased - I mean the defendant, heh heh heh." Or perhaps the ending of _The Atheist's Tragedy_ by Cyril Tourneur where the scaffold for Charlemont and Castabella is erected before the court's ruling. Truly one of the most insane plays in all of early modern literature.

Marlowe, in common with Bacon, has the great consolation that neither needed to be Shakespeare in order to be memorable and great. If Oxford wasn't Shakespeare, he should be justly forgotten, or at least remembered as a cautionary tale. Of the Anti-Stratfordian Trinity, Marlowe in the Holy Ghost primarily because he was the first to become a ghost. Despite his being just The notion that he had somehow faked his death was easier to accept when the details were scanty. The discovery of his coroner's inquest in 1923 should have ended the matter. And I'm aware of the arguments. He was under indictment but he was at liberty. You don't allow that for people in danger of being strung up. His required daily appearance before the Privy Council would make the involvement of the Queen's coroner completely reasonable. And dying in a tavern brawl was completely in keeping with the violent and dissolute way Marlowe lived his life.

No evidence exists that most people of the era attended the scores of grammar schools spread across England at the time. Does that mean none did? And his name, as declared in the records of the College of Heralds and the Royal Court was "Shakespeare". Why don't you explain how you came up with the name "Shaksper".