Shilling Shakspere

The Shakespeare Establishment, the Birthplace Trust, the Folger Library, etc. is going all out this year to fight the growing phenomenon of  informed Stratfordian skepticism, the growing number of people who look at the actual evidence that backs up the required, established common wisdom that the money-lender, sharp businessman, fractional owner of interests in theaters, etc. wrote THE PLAYS AND POEMS that are published as being by William Shakespeare.  And who are doing so without the constant reliance on supposition, the creation of fiction and the reliance on previous generations of supposers and inventors to make their arguments.  The Shakespeare industry is presently sending around a touring exhibit of a copy of the First Folio, a volume which contains a good deal of the ambiguity on which the skepticism draws and, more absurdly, assertions about the "hand D" section of a play not even considered to be in the cannon, Thomas More, with the baseless assertion that it is, actually, in the hand of Wm. Shakspere of Stratford on Avon.

There is, actually, no evidence that the hand that wrote those lines is the same as scrawled or, rather, drew, the six signatures generally held to be the sum total of authenticated writing by the Stratford man.  There are, actually, conventional Stratfordians who have admitted that there is nothing, at all, to tie their guy with the manuscript of Thomas More and who have expressed their own skepticism that he had anything to do with Thomas More.   There isn't even any thing to verify that the person who wrote those lines into the manuscript, along with many others, is the person who wrote the lines.   Some have noted such things as cross-outs and eyeskips in the manuscript that would indicate it could be someone copying from another source.  The alleged verification in spellings as found in the First Folio or other printed copies are not conclusively reliable as even indirect evidence because it is unknowable if those spelling variations are copied from an original manuscript or introduced by any number of copyists or the typesetters as they set the type for the Folio edition.

I'm tempted to go on with reasons that the assertion that "hand D" was that of the Stratford man but I'll let you see for yourselves.  Here is one of the pages being peddled by the Stratfordian establishment.



And here are the six famous signatures, which, by the way, are not all universally held to be authentically from the pen of William Shaksper(e).   Some question if some of them might be written by a scribe or witness.


You see any similarity?  I don't even see reliable similarities among the signatures, never mind to the Thomas More hand.  I doubt there is any rational case to be made that they were written by the same hand that isn't based on the wishful thinking of the Stratfordian Shakespeare industry.   I heard one of those shilling the Thomas More as his, when asked about the discrepancy between the fluid, fluent writing of the manuscript and the tortured, inexpert nature of the signatures ask now many of us made a consistent signature.   Well, I've got terrible handwriting and I pretty much type out anything that I know anyone else has to read and mine isn't anywhere near as bad as that, and I'm going on two-decades older than the Stratford broker and hoarder of grain was when he died.  And my eyesight is just awful.   I have examples of my father's signature made decades after he was entirely blind and those are more recognizably his characteristic, Catholic school learned handwriting than the signatures are consistent with each other.

Update:  Why am I writing this?  a. Because I know it drives some of my trolls nuts with anger, b. as that great American author, Dr. Suess said,