Bonner Miller Cutting - Reasonable Doubt About Shakespeare? 

Ms. Cutting, I love your lectures and have viewed them many times. This is so fascinating and has opened up the entire Elizabethan era for me. Can’t get enough of the subject. Thank you and keep up the good fight!

As a longtime Oxfordian, I enjoyed this lecture very much. Here is one of my favorite evidence cases of reasonable doubt: although many Elizabethan English kept journals, and we have many that survived, in which they often noted they had spotted various famous authors and playwrights walking the streets of London on specific days (celeb sightings), not ONE ever noted seeing Shakspere on any day whatsoever.

Like Ms. Cutting, I too admire the Anderson and Roe books. Most astounding single piece of evidence that "Shakespeare" (not Shakspere) visited Italy: Roe's discovery that the playwright set A Midsummer Night's Dream in Athens because the ducal town of Sabionetta was known as a "little Athens" of the Renaissance--and even boasted a palace corridor known as "The Duke's Oak" (Il quercia di Duca) because it opened out onto an oak forest. This bit of information was given to Roe by a guide with no Shakespeare axe to grind, who was clearly passing on knowledge long preserved in local memory. Oh, and I highly recommend Cutting's book, Necessary Mischief, which continues the demolition of the Stratford pretender's case--and helps establish Oxford's case--in several chapters of new inroads into each man's life story.

From the UK! At last moving towards a legal involvement! I'm a member of the DeVere Society and live very close to De Vere's Birthplace Castle Hedingham Essex and probably look at the same views he looked at! Of course we all know who really wrote all the plays and sonnets Edward De Vere. I'm also a big follower of Alexandra Waugh, who has absolute proof that Shat-spear could not even write his name, he was alliterate, as were all his family. Please watch AW video's on here with the TOTAL proof!

This is all long before I learned of your declaration. I read English at Cambridge, and one of my first supervisions on Shakespeare required us to study and analyse legal language in his sonnets, not to mention T & Cressida, and the legal jargon and metaphors permeating his work. I found myself surprised to discover it is so abundant, and so specific in legal terminology. Almost, like, I saying to myself, this is a side of Shakespeare I have never seen before. Like a "new Shakespeare". After graduating, for years I speculated in private, with my spouse, that, Shakespeare must have been a lawyer. Because, having been creative writer myself, I profoundly understand the creative process, and a need, that no matter how genius your mind is, to create, one needs the "existing cognitive pieces" or vocabulary to draw on. If vocabulary is poor, genius may still emerge, but its poetic genius will not be based in a rich vocabulary (as Shakespeare's is), but on some other linguistic aspect. However, with Shakespeare, we have everything going: syntax, vocabulary, poetic innovations in multiple directions. So, one must have abided in legal profession to so freely and eloquently use a very specific legal language and embed it into most exquisite legal metaphors. And not only that, but then that legal metaphorical universe somehow elevate or juxtapose to God's realm of Justice. So, on this aspect alone, I believe Shakspeare of Stratford could not have written the works, unless there is a conclusive evidence he was educated and/or worked in legal profession. To me today, this is as clear as day. Of course, people are unfortunately very emotional about all this, but, one cannot have poetisized legal words, unless one had abided in legal universe, lived it, and was part of ones life experience. Something cannot come out of nothing. This is a creative process. It comes out of "life lived", or even "read books". Where could have Shakspeare read books in his day? There were no translations in English to classics he is making references to. And what kind of books would have been available to him? You cannot create a poetic universe on hearsay. It almost insults the intelligence.

Thank you for another great presentation. I have enjoyed, and continue to enjoy all of your SOF presentations.

Great, informative, and well-presented lecture. I also wonder how the published folios (from 1623) were assembled together-the editors affected the style and made any stylometry hardly usable. It is interesting how deep the roots of mystification can grow when passed from generation to generation.

Very good presentation. I had always understood that Richard Paul Roe was an orthodox scholar but looks like I’m wrong. I enjoyed your more detailed discussion of the will on the Shakespeareunderground website. A puzzle to me that he bequeathed a bed but no furniture associated with books e.g. a bookcase or a chest (or books either). Also a total mystery that any letters he wrote to others (by nature dispersed) are non-existent. I would have expected that a Renaissance polymath might have written letters but apparently not. The fact that his daughters were functionally illiterate does not make sense. I am a pronounced sceptic of the orthodox position with no particular allegiance but am increasingly intrigued by Alexander Waugh’s in depth research on RU-vid. His theory on the “vulgar scandal” especially compelling.

I am a dedicated Oxfordian. I live in Louisville, KY and would love to get together with fellow Oxfordians. I would also like to make a trip to Europe and Italy to see what Roe saw.

Bonner's online presentations and lecture are always a treat. They are well-researched, informative, and lively, traits which I wish more presenters would have. I believe that of the extant alleged signatures of Shakspere, only the most shaky ones are actually his. I think he memorized how to spell his name, but forgot from time to time, which explains why there are so many variations on it. I also think that he would recite his name to clerks, who had a difficult time hearing the letters through is Warwickshire accent, so they spelled the name how they heard it. That they were not corrected by Shakspere is evidence that this theory is true. He was illiterate and did not know to correct the name when it was incorrectly spelled. The signatures also look more like they were copied using a model because there are indications in them that the pen hesitated and changed direction for even simple letters which no experienced writer would hesitate on. Would the quartos and the First Folio have the name spelled in so many different ways if he could read? I doubt it. He would have insisted on corrreting them. Some title pages spell the name with a hyphen between the syllables, while others do not. All but one, however, share one distinguishing feature: they have the letter 'e' between the 'k' and the 's' in the middle of the name. None of the extant documents dealing conclusively with the Stratford man have that 'e'. Only the title page of the 1608 quarto of King Lear lacks the letter in the name, but that is for good reason: without it there are 17 letters, therefore the page alludes to the real author's title. At 35:32, Bonner mentions that Stratfordians claim Shakspere learned specific and accurate details about Italy merely through hearing conversations in taverns. I guess that made him telepathic, which is a super-power they would never admit their argument implies. So much for their standards of scholarship: they are practically non-existent. One last thing about Bonner's presentation. At 39:58 she shows some of the subjects which are found in the poems and plays by "Shakespeare". I believe it is evidence that de Vere had an eidetic memory and never forgot anything he read, heard, or experienced. This is what Bonner would call a plausible 'unifying explanation' about how such vast amounts of material found its way into his works.

Ms. Cutting, I saw your print you said you got from your mom of the Stratford monument effigy. It was said to be a drawing by George Virtue from his notebook. I saw this in a RU-vid by "David Shakespear" titled "Is this the Face of Shakespeare?".

What is the provenance of the portrait fist shown at 28.45 please?

How did the Stratford man gain the extensive knowledge displayed in the works? Obviously from chatting with his cousin De Vere😂😂😂

As Looney points out in his book, there are legal documents pointing to activities that would necessitate Shakspere’s presence in Stratford during a time when he is still popularly reputed and inferred to be living in London. The purchase of New Place in the late 1590s coupled with lawsuits over unpaid goods and/or services rendered, etc. It gets me thinking about identity theft, and, anecdotally, I’ll explain: When I was a teenager, my next door neighbors were visited in the night by police officers who had come to deliver a very unfortunate next of kin announcement. Now, the presumed deceased was asleep upstairs, and his wife was not just a little confused to be told the man she had left snoring away in bed was in fact, a corpse. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. Another man in the same state had assumed my neighbor’s name for purposes unknown and gotten himself mysteriously, and rather conveniently killed in an accidental explosion and fire. The forensic evidence of his identity was duly torched, but the paper trail was sufficient to lead police to my neighbor’s door. They determined that it wasn’t just a coincidence of two men with the same, or similar name (although the actual deceased had created a discrepancy by not using the correct middle initial) but the rest pointed to my neighbors. It follows-and this is a glaring inference, but bear with me-that a person writing plays is going to have some intersection with the theater. If it was known to someone wishing to disguise their authorship that an individual was likely to be four days travel away in Stratford, and thus none the wiser to any activity perpetrated under a version of his name, would that not be deemed a suitable cover? I’m not saying that that’s what happened, but given the secretive nature of the time period, the “schizophrenic police state” as I’ve heard Elizabethan England described, can we still assume that identity theft is exclusive province of our own day and age? I tend to think not.

Question about the Shaksper signatures - Were they all signed at the same point in time , or were they signed over a more extensive time period such as ten years or more?

So who got Shakespeare's five houses according to the will?

whoever william shalespeare was or were. or WERE!

Anyone look at.edwards will?