Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Stupid Mail - You're Behind The Time

I never actually said that I was certain that Francis Bacon wrote the plays and poems attributed to the Stratford man,  I said it made more sense that someone who was considered the about the greatest of English scholars and one of the most illustrious experts on the law of his time would have written them than a man whose entire credible writing product are six signatures in which he didn't even spell his own name the same way twice, even in the same document and it was clear he seldom if ever picked up a pen to put it to paper.

I have come to be more skeptical of Bacon, most of all because I've finally gotten round to reading Richard Roe's brilliant study, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy, which proves, conclusively that whoever wrote the plays and poems knew Italy at first hand, something which Bacon doesn't appear to have experienced and which there is absolutely no evidence the Stratford man ever had.  I think Roe's book is right up there with Diana Price's brilliant study,  Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography which is one of the most significant books on the question of who wrote, or rather who didn't write the works in their history.  I always check to see if Diana Price has a new paper or book out because her scholarship is always first rate, always briskly and refreshingly honest and always fascinating.  I have more respect for her than the entire cannon of Stratfordians, all of whom I know are addicted to either inventing or peddling fictions and lies as fact.

I am also becoming more skeptical that Bacon's philosophical stands and his writing style matches the corpus in question though writers can have more than one style.  I wouldn't be surprised if he or those near him had some hand in revisions made to the originals, such questions I've discussed in comments here about the circulatory system which he probably understood and had access to as the other candidates almost certainly didn't.  But I do know one thing, there is entirely more evidence that he could have written the works than the Stratford man for whom there is absolutely no contemporaneous evidence that he ever wrote anything but his name.

I have been listening to Alexander Waugh's extremely entertaining Oxfordian arguments on Youtube, I'm not ready to become an Oxfordian and the quality of his arguments is somewhat varied from powerfully convincing to less so but it is always fun.  I also love to listen to Ros Barber, who doesn't seem to be a totally sold Marlovian and who has the virtue of integrity that the Stratfordians lack, her book putting forth a Marlovian theory is something she completely admits is fiction, a novel.  She is also always interesting and entertaining.

Now, I know that you've never read a single thing about this and I'm sure you won't read any of the things I mentioned above, though you might listen to a video.  I doubt you've read any of the works since you were forced to in your last English class in high school when you probably borrowed the Cliff Notes from your best friend, was he nicknamed something vulgar and puerile?   I will not post on this topic again this year.

Update:  Well, that shows how little you've studied this because exactly at the time that Ben Jonson was involved in publishing the First Folio, including writing most if not all of the front material, including the things allegedly by other authors and others, he was working for Francis Bacon one of those doing exactly the same thing with Bacon's own literary production.  As well, Jonson was one of the most sarcastic and tricky writers who ever wrote in English, he was quite up to and quite willing to be part of a hoax that he indicated in all of the Elizabethan obscurity that was a feature of late Renaissance literature.   Since part of the literary practice with plays was for anyone to add lines and insert even speeches in them - I seem to recall something like that mentioned in the Corpus of the plays - Jonson would have not hesitated to do so nor, I would guess, would Bacon who was certainly up to at least that much of an effort.  He was the only one of the candidates who would have had direct access to the most recent knowledge of the discoveries of the circulatory system as mentioned in Coriolanus but which wasn't discovered until after the deaths of all of the other candidates, including the Stratford man. 

Bacon, however, to my knowledge, was never in Italy and if there's one thing that Richard Roe proved, whoever wrote the plays and poems had to have traveled extensively in Italy and been familiar with some rather obscure geographical and cultural information - that's obvious as Roe proved.   As with the total absence of evidence of an education and a total lack of any contemporaneous record of him having been acknowledged as the actual writer of the works - something Diana Price proved even the most obscure rival playwrights of the time had in at least three categories of such contemporaneous evidence, the Stratford man had not one in ten different categories of evidentiary material - the Stratford man is not known to have ever left the South of England in his lifetime, he certainly had no access to that information in English, there was no Elizabethan or Jacobian Rick Steeves to provide it to anyone who had not been there. 

I won't comment on the Marlovian claims because I haven't read much of them and they'd have to find convincing evidence his death had been faked as some have speculated - something that isn't that far fetched considering the facts as we have them but which hasn't been demonstrated sufficiently and the fact that Christopher Marlowe was a professional spy.   Ros Barber makes some good points about the stylistic and thematic similarities between the last known Marlowe and the earliest plays in the corpus in question, her other research is very interesting and much of what she says is extremely level-headed and practical, apparently she was the first one who got the idea of putting all of the documentary evidence of the Stratford man in one place so people could see how unliterary it was and how some of it obliterates much of the Stratfordian lore that even those who teach at universities still push.  I've made use of her compilation to argue that here on a claim by Gary Wills which the documentary facts obliterate. 

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