Sunday, March 20, 2016

Hate Mail - I Guess You'd Say Mark Twain Was A Class Snob Too

Oh, no.  You're making the wrong assertion.  I didn't assert that it's impossible,  that someone who grows up in modest conditions in a small town couldn't have written plays and poems.

I didn't even assert that someone of that description couldn't have written good or even great plays and poems*.

I merely said there is not adequate evidence to make even a convincing case that William Shaksper(e) living the life we have evidence of could have written those specific plays and poems.

Your mistake is addressing a specific instance of a man who has left substantial, personal evidence of his life as a broker, a money-lender, a petty hoarder of grain who sold it for a massive profit during a time of food shortages, someone who left a record as being willing to sue people over money owed, etc. was unique among those known to be writers because he left not a single piece of direct, unambiguous evidence that he a. ever wrote anything but a few signatures on legal document related to his business and his will, b. ever read a book, c. ever wrote a letter, d. ever had the legal right to any kind of payment for the production of plays he might have written, e. was ever paid for writing anything, f. who was anything but a man who, in fact, doesn't seem to have left a single, personal document that he ever was a writer.

As Diana Price has established, after centuries of what might be the greatest paper chase in literary history, searching high and low, William Shaksper(e) of Stratford is unique among those asserted to have been authors in the contemporary  history of his time to have left not a single personal document that mentions him having had a literary career.

Furthermore, no one in his family or in his town who knew William Shaksper(e) mentioned him as a writer of poem and plays which became famous in the decade after his death.  No, not even Dr. John Hall, the Stratford man's son-in-law, about the only person associated with William Shaksper(e) of Stratford who left extensive or, indeed, any writing, mentions the man of Stratford in association with the plays and poems, even in the period after the First Folio began to make "William Shakespeare" the most famous writer in the language.

All of the mentions of "William Shakespeare" of Stratford as being the author are posthumous and all of them are either stated with puzzling ambiguity or are  written by people who only knew about the Stratford man as a result of those ambiguous hints in the First Folio.   Ben Jonson, who may well be the author of most of the prefatory material in the Folio, where, in fact, there is first mention of Stratford in association with the poems and plays appears, was clearly implying that the William Shakespeare being sold as the author was not the author.  And there are contemporary commentators, some of them writing, not seven years after the death of the Stratford man but during his life, even during his residence in London, who cast doubt on his association with the plays and poems.

Personally, I think that William Shaksper of Stratford on Avon was written up by Jonson as the crooked "Poet-Ape" who passed off the work of other people as his own.  That was something known to be done in the period and it would explain why the Stratford man left no claims or rights to plays or poems in any document written up for him, he didn't think he could get away with passing that off.  If he were acting as a play broker, an activity which would be more consistent with the career that is documented in actual, primary evidence, he could well have done that.  He may have even been paid off as a false front for someone who wanted their authorship to be concealed, due to the curious similarity of his name with the "Shake-Speare" psudonym under which many things known to not have been by the author of the plays and poems in question were published during his lifetime.

The question isn't a general one about the superiority of one social and economic class over another. That thinking is entirely foreign to me.  As a liberal Irish-American such repulsive, typically British thinking is entirely uncharacteristic among my people.    

The question is if this specific case supports the traditional Stratford based "Shakespeare" industry and the massive money machine that it has founded, not on supporting evidence, but lore and myth made up out of the whimsy of scholars wanting to create a figure who the historical record doesn't document and the equivalent of Chamber of Commerce promotion.  You can't argue this case from general principles because it has to be based in specifics, specifics which, in the case of your Stratford man, don't support your firmly held faith, learned dutifully and dearly held to.

*  It being the class ridden, moral cesspool of England, I'd imagine such a genius from the lower classes would have a life more like that of the tragic Thomas Chatterton than the Stratford businessman.  Or one like that of Ben Jonson which has left extensive direct evidence of his literary activity.

Chatterton's eccentric, imagined past is something that a relatively uneducated, unconnected genius might have dreamed up but it's a far cry from the  imagined worlds of the "historical" plays or the historical accuracy often found in those.  Chatterton is, actually, a perfect example of what someone without an education up to their genius or anything like a decent life might have written and what his likely fate would have been in "enlightenment" England.

If I had any talent for it I might try to imagine what his life would have been like in a less stratified society.   He might have been more like Hamlin Garland.  Though books were far more available to those of modest means at that time in the United States so he'd likely have had access to more accurate background material.  He would have, though, found it impossible to produce factual accuracy without access to such books as the young Garland read at the Boston Public library.   Even a genius can't construct accurate technical knowledge out of their imagination.   He'd likely not have been led to suicide in a stinking class ridden society.

If he were a rural genius, he would have been more like Mark Twain, the great every-man, the "Lincoln of our literature" the great anti-snob who did a bit of creative historical writing of his own.  He was one of the first major doubters of the phonied up Stratford man myth.   It was reading Mark Twain's "Is Shakespeare Dead?" when I was trying to read all of Twain that first led me into doubting that he was the guy who really wrote the plays and poems.   About the only thing I've pointed out that he didn't was the work of Diana Price and that's because no one had had the common sense to do the research that she did.   Oh, or the silly assertion about Shaksper having written the "hand D" section of Thomas More, an assertion by members of the Shakespeare industry in a desperate attempt to give their guy what he so conspicuously didn't have, a literary paper trail.

19 comments:

  1. "The question is if this specific case supports the traditional Stratford based "Shakespeare" industry and the massive money machine"

    You're so right. All the English lit professors I knew at my dipshit college got absolutely stinking rich teaching us that Shakespeare wrote his own stuff. The unprincipled swine!!!

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    1. Breakfast Cereal U isn't part of the Birthplace Trust or associated with the Folger is it?

      You don't know how much fun I get out of seeing you floundering around trying to make up an argument out of bluster and your total ignorance and inability to focus. And even more so when I see how your good buddies are OK with your making such a putz of yourself.

      So, you and JR WOULD say that Mark Twain was a Brit style class snot, would you?

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  2. Incidentally, there is no filmed record of Lennon and McCartney actually writing the Beatles songs. And given their total lack of formal musical training, it is therefore obvious that somebody else wrote the greatest pop music of the second half of the 20th century. Candidates include Sonny Bono and Petula Clark (the theory floated by Glenn Gould) but in my opinion it was Skitch Henderson.

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    1. You, of course, make about the stupidest of all arguments not understanding that the total and massive direct, primary paper trail proving the authorship of that commercial crap only sets out the contrast of the total, complete lack of a paper trail of Shakspere of Stratford having one for having produced the single, greatest body of work in the English language. It also shows how that complete lack of evidence is what the case of the Shakespeare Industry has replaced with a massive and fictitious persona which guys like you believe is the Stratford guy's missing literary record.

      The whole thing is, as Henry James said he feared, the most massive fraud in the history of scholarship.

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  3. There is no conclusive evidence other than oral accounts by people with obvious agendas that the Beatles wrote their own music.

    Which, BTW, was not commercial crap, but rather the best stuff out of England since Purcell.

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    1. There are manuscripts, correspondence discussing their work, there are contracts with their notarized signatures establishing that Lennon and McCartney wrote the work their names are attached to, there is direct contemporary evidence of other people who knew and know them testifying that they wrote what is attributed to them, there is massive evidence of them being paid royalties and other fees as a result of them having written those works, there is the interesting case of "Come Together" and the allegation that, in that case, Lennon plagarized Chuck Berry because Lennon's song used material Berry originally produced .....

      You know, Simps, what you're doing here isn't that much different from what the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and other Stratfordians do, making absurd arguments based on lies, only they do it to make believe the, at best, semi-literate Shaksper of Stratford had the most significant literary career in the history of English and you're doing it to pretend that the massive primary, contemporary, personal record of John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote songs and other material attributed to them, did, beyond any rational doubt, write it, minus a bit of creative plagiarism isn't a complete contrast to the total absence of such records in the case of William Shaksper(e) when such records do exist for virtually every other author, some of them of very modest achievement, but there is none for your boy. I will note the borrowing in the case of the Beatles but I'd never claim that record isn't there.

      Purcell. Oh, blow it out your ear, Simps. The Beatles are the most overrated musical entity in history. I'd rather listen to just about anything else. It's like Monty Python or Hitch hiker's Guide, enough is enough. It isn't durable and doesn't stand up to decades of listening.

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    2. There are manuscripts, correspondence discussing their work, there are contracts with their notarized signatures establishing that Lennon and McCartney wrote the work their names are attached to, there is direct contemporary evidence of other people who knew and know them testifying that they wrote what is attributed to them, there is massive evidence of them being paid royalties and other fees as a result of them having written those works, there is the interesting case of "Come Together" and the allegation that, in that case, Lennon plagarized Chuck Berry because Lennon's song used material Berry originally produced .....

      You know, Simps, what you're doing here isn't that much different from what the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and other Stratfordians do, making absurd arguments based on lies, only they do it to make believe the, at best, semi-literate Shaksper of Stratford had the most significant literary career in the history of English and you're doing it to pretend that the massive primary, contemporary, personal record of John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote songs and other material attributed to them, did, beyond any rational doubt, write it, minus a bit of creative plagiarism isn't a complete contrast to the total absence of such records in the case of William Shaksper(e) when such records do exist for virtually every other author, some of them of very modest achievement, but there is none for your boy. I will note the borrowing in the case of the Beatles but I'd never claim that record isn't there.

      Purcell. Oh, blow it out your ear, Simps. The Beatles are the most overrated musical entity in history. I'd rather listen to just about anything else. It's like Monty Python or Hitch hiker's Guide, enough is enough. It isn't durable and doesn't stand up to decades of listening.

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  4. I should add that we know for a fact that none of the sheet music versions of Beatles songs -- most of which are in different keys than the records, BTW, which is obviously suspicious -- were written by Lennon and McCartney because neither of them could read or write music.

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    1. That doesn't stop there from being manuscripts of lyrics and the is nothing to keep someone who doesn't read or write music from being a composer. Francesco Landini was blind and it didn't keep him from being the acknowledged composer of complex music and lyrics that was a far greater artistic achievement to that of the mopheads. There have been a number of blind composers in history whose written music is a result of dictation, the greatest figure in popular music of all times, Louis Armstrong, didn't read or write music, Ella Fitzgerald didn't and she was probably one of those closest in creative ability to Armstrong.

      Being blind is not evidence that someone didn't have a creative career, it is certainly not evidence that someone didn't have a literary career. Homer is said to have been blind. There are blind epic poets and musicians in any number of cultures around the world. You really are one of the more ignorant remnants of that kind of 19th century jerk, aren't you.

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  5. "It isn't durable and doesn't stand up to decades of listening."

    That's silly even by your standards.

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    1. Yeah, I should have specified listening by people who are intelligent enough to get bored.

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  6. "That doesn't stop there from being manuscripts of lyrics"

    None of which prove Lennon and McCartney wrote the songs. Hell, I've got tons of of manuscripts of Dylan lyrics in my handwriting in my guitar case -- doesn't mean I wrote his stuff.

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    1. You try publishing them as yours and see how fast you get slapped with a cease and desist notice or perform or record them for money without paying the legal owner royalties.

      That's one thing that the notably greedy William Shaksper would have done if he had any legal right to the plays, he sued people for piddling sums of money yet he is never recorded as being paid for the use of the plays or the publication of any of the works. And he didn't mention leaving those rights to anyone in his will in which he divides up the most piddling household items he owned. None of which, by the way were books. It would be odd for a relatively rich man who had the devotion to learning which the author of the plays and poems demonstrates so lavishly, yet there is not a single book which can be said to have ever been owned by him. It's as if he lost all interest in that massive life of the mind as soon as he bought the house at New Place, Stratford and started suing people and trying to steal the commons from the people of Stratford.

      You're twisting in the wind of your own generation and you're too stupid to understand that, Simps. But, then, why should you try, your fellow "Brain Trusters" aren't interested in the truth or if their good buddy is a lying phony.

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    2. Oh -- so it all comes down to lawyers? Well, you know what "Francis Bacon" said about THAT!
      :-)

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    3. You are really stupid, that's nothing like what I said. Though, of course, any determination of authorship rights or rights to payment of royalties are, actually, evidence of authorship.

      I wonder, who owns the rights to that crap you wrote for various publications? How was the right of them to print your garbage assigned? Or was all that left to someone else as you were too much in need of custodianship to manage your own.... uh.... "literary career"?

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  7. "Homer is said to have been blind"

    So? Do you believe Homer wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey, or perhaps it was some either blind Greek with the same name?

    Answer me THAT!!!!

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    1. I wasn't arguing that he did write it, which is why I used the passive voice. Or is that too complex a device for you to navigate?

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  8. "Armstrong, didn't read or write music"

    And the relevance of that to whether Lennon and McCartney WROTE THE MUSIC THEY'RE CREDITED WITH is exactly what, pray tell?

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    1. Are you so mentally defective that you don't remember the argument YOU made, which I answered? Which is a rhetorical question because it's obvious that you are so mentally defective.

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