Sadly, it must be admitted, violets are a beautiful, sweet smelling flower. Traditionally violets represented faithfulness, as seen in the purple promise of FedEx, but for Shakespeare they were also symbolic of sorrow and death. Yikes! lol
This should be pretty simple. Sometimes, yes, it's worth saying "What if...?" but then we need to think about what would have to happen to make that speculation true. In this case, we have to suppose that two people and their family and friends contrived to convince the world that one of them wrote the works that the other had actually written, and the pretence continued even after they were both dead. Firstly, depending on which candidate you choose as the "real" Shakespeare, you've got to figure out how that person could possibly have fitted in being a prolific dramatist with a radically different writing style on top of being a philosopher, statesman, scientist, Attorney General and Lord Chancellor (Francis Bacon) or dead (like Christopher Marlowe from 1593, or Edward de Vere from 1604). Then, once you've resurrected Marlowe, or done whatever you have to do to make your theory work, you have to figure out a motive - not just a motive for the two participants to do all this, but one sufficiently strong to keep everyone else who knew about it from saying anything about it. Anyone who believes that's possible has clearly never tried to keep a secret! Keeping one to yourself is hard enough, but when family and friends must inevitably be in on it something's going to give, if only an actor from the Globe blurting out more than he should when he's out on the piss one night. The reason academia doesn't encourage what you are calling "critical thinking" is because real critical thinking is evidence-based. It doesn't assume a conclusion and then work backwards. Speculation is all very well, but unless you can come up with a smoking gun you have to accept that the academic world is just going to shrug. For comparison, the once-unthinkable idea that Shakespeare may have secretly been a Catholic has gained traction because people who have critical thinking faculties have managed to advance some powerful arguments. I'm still not convinced, myself, but I can at least see that there is a case to be made. When it comes to Shakespeare authorship, though, it's the stuff of movies (Anonymous) and novels (The Marlow Papers). Regarding the latter, Ros Barber, who takes the premise of the novel seriously, was funded by the AHRC and is currently a lecturer at Goldsmith's, so there is some acceptance of her views in the academic world, though personally I don't buy any of it!
You're making a lot of assumptions about me, and you clearly are very limited in what the Shakespeare Authorship Question is and isn't. First off, I like Diana Price and many other doubters, do not support a single author theory. If one believes in Oxford, or Marlowe or Bacon, then that person is an Oxfordian, Marlovian or Baconian. My beef is with the flimsy case for the man from Stratford. Secondly, there is no consistent writing style in Shakespeare. No other writer was a master of all forms like Shakespeare. Playwrights in particular, write comedies or tragedies. Marlowe didn't write comedies, Jonson didn't write tragedies. Only Shakespeare was a master at everything, and left no sample of his plays or poems to verify this skill. Thirdly, you speak of motive, which suggests you are unaware of the situation in Elizabethan England. It was very dangerous to be a writer. Writers were considered threats to order, especially playwrights who could communicate with the illiterate masses. Playwrights were routinely arrested and in some cases tortured. Hence, plenty of motivation to keep ones writing secret. In addition, people of noble birth could not lower themselves to create for the public theatres. That was unacceptable, and was not done, or if it was done, it was done anonymously. Finally, you defeat your entire argument by admitting that it was up until recently unacceptable to say Shakespeare might have been Roman Catholic. Things are developing. The single author theory has been abandoned by most scholars. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust states that there were at least six collaborators with Shakespeare and it is unknown exactly what writings were done by the bard. So, by any standard, we simply do not know who wrote the works, how many people were involved, and what part if any the man from Stratford had in creating the works.
@@keircutler Thank you for the response. I'm sorry if I'm making assumptions about you. You're making quite a few about me, too, and it's probably inevitable that we both do so, given the nature of this interaction. But my remarks were directed more at the field than at you personally. Yes, "authorship" was a very different animal in Shakespeare's day, and we are getting more insights into how interactive and collaborative the process could be all the time, the latest major find being the apparent Marlowe / Shakespeare collaboration in the Henry VI plays. But Shakespeare collaboration and Shakespeare authorship are two very different questions. You appear to conflate the two, which I think is misleading. There's plenty of work, as I'm sure you know, on collaboration and shared authorship in Shakespeare. There's a fairly good open-access summary of the state of play here: www.cambridge.org/core/books/shakespeare-survey/why-did-shakespeare-collaborate/1C5846EF6CB0FB556C760DA213241591. This is all within the parameters of academic orthodoxy. It doesn't, as far as I can see, bring Shakespeare authorship, in the Mark Twain, John Thomas Looney sense, any closer to the mainstream. I do understand what you're saying about how fields change. Cambridge turned down my work on translations during the early modern period twice in the 1980s, but (after a gap of some years) I continued working in the field, and eventually - after quite a few transformations and re-evaluations of the field and a lot of tightening up of my own position - they gave me the degree on the basis of my publications in 2015 - forty years after initially registering as a PhD student! So, yes, I definitely understand that fields do change. I also understand that researchers have to figure out ways to engage with the establishment if they want to be considered anything other than "loony fringe". And the whole "how to think not what to think" thing is pretty central to my approach as a teacher, so I get that too. You say that I destroy my entire argument by acknowledging the growing acceptability of the idea that Shakespeare may have been Catholic, but I don't think so. All I'm saying is that academia can and does develop. You say the same thing ("Things are developing"), and I could just as well say that with those three words you have destroyed your entire argument, since you admit that academia is not the stubborn, immovable dinosaur you characterize it as! > The single author theory has been abandoned by most scholars. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust states that there were at least six collaborators with Shakespeare and it is unknown exactly what writings were done by the bard. That's pushing it a bit. The current orthodoxy is that Shakespeare collaborated on 13 of the 43 plays he worked on. That's a far cry from saying Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare. On the contrary, from where I - and I think "most scholars" - are sitting it defines more clearly than ever where exactly Shakespeare's hand begins and ends within his works. Thank you for engaging in discussion. "Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument About it and about; but evermore Came out by that same Door as in I went."
@@anosensei The reason there is an authorship debate is because academia insisted up until recently that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare period with very few exceptions. Now as you say whole plays are being re-attributed with the admission that the process is ongoing. Pretending that isn't an admission that they're is a question. Is like saying the US under Trump remains the land of the free. You can't simply change everything and say nothing has changed! Congrats on your success!
> Congrats on your success! Thanks! I still feel you are conflating the highly significant work going on in the field of attribution studies with the red herring of the authorship question. Time may prove me wrong, of course, but for now I guess we're just going to have to agree to differ.
