The Shakespeare Authorship Controversy

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Swammi posted a link somewhere upthread to some poems by Oxford which Swammi said we're penned when Oxford was "in his thirties." I have mentioned the link already, and will say again what I have already said:

No poet of the first rank was writing juvenilia into their thirties. Some of our best poets were dead and buried before they made thirty. Chatterton (dead at 17), Keats, Wilfred Owen, Shelley, Marlowe, Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Keith Douglass...

If Oxford was still mediocre (good but not exceptional) into his thirties, I submit that he could not have become the greatest poet of all time in English, in any number of years, by virtue of any number of tutors.

I submit that it is impossible, not just improbable, for Oxford to have written Shakespeare.

You will probably enjoy some of Ros Barber's presentations. She is a non-Stratfordian but not an Oxfordian.

There is obviously a lot of discussion in stylometrics concerning Shakespeare. It seems to be a cherry picking exercise actually, not unlike orthodox scholarship. Much of it attributes different parts of Shakespeare to different authors, Marlowe included. The results depend on the parameters one sets, namely if one decides a certain piece is exclusively "Shakespeare" and then proceeds to make comparisons. It's really not scientific. "Shakespeare" ends up not being "Shakespeare" depending on those initial parameters in cases. I guess that confirms the authorship question actually.

Bomber made some claims earlier about the actor being the author or along those lines and I really need to address that for my own edification. I don't quite understand the argument and need tp put it to rest. It's been rattling around too long. That's on my list when life stops calling.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The internal evidence of the plays themselves -- the statistical patterns in the word usage -- makes it pretty certain that whoever wrote the plays must have been one of the actors who performed them.

https://www.shakespeareauthorship.com/ox7.html

It's one thing to hypothesize that a nobleman such as Oxford secretly wrote the plays and slipped them to a shill; but it's quite another to hypothesize that Oxford was on stage in disguise, over and over, and was never recognized.

Of course we can't rule out the possibility that Shakespeare was fronting for a different actor; but the text statistics allow identification of which roles the author played, and it lines up with what little is known of Shakespeare's own roles -- the ghost in Hamlet for instance.

Here is Foster's premise, simply speaking:

Now, I'd like to discuss Don Foster's SHAXICON database, which is currently being prepared for publication, hopefully in 1996. Ward Elliot's study provides negative evidence; it indicates that none of the claimants tested wrote the works of Shakespeare. Foster's study, though, provides positive evidence of a new and ingenious kind; he has been able to show that the person who wrote the plays almost certainly acted in them, or at the very least, this person memorized one role (or several smaller roles) in each play. He has done this by cataloguing all the "rare words" in Shakespeare (those which occur 12 times or fewer in the canonical plays), indexed not only by the play they appear in, but by the character who speaks them. In each play there is one role (or in many cases two or more smaller roles) which disproportionately affects the vocabulary of all later plays, in that the words spoken by that character consistently occur in later plays more often than we would expect by chance; this is the role that Shakespeare memorized for performance.

Is there agreement here with this basic premise about Foster's following stylometry? I don't know a lot about stylometrics or Foster's reputation for making accurate predictions. I only want to know if the participants in this thread find this premise sound.

Thanks.

 

[Swammerdami]

Foster seems to be highly respected; the FBI have called on him to help with the investigations of Jon Benet Ramsay and of the Unabomber. Google may point you to the time he attributed "Funeral Elegy" to Shake-speare and later recanted, but we all make mistakes.

There are various stylometric measures developed by others; a very simple example would be counting adjacent word pairs: Shakespeare often wrote "... and with ..." — often enough that this can be used as a diagnostic! (On my own machine I see this pair occurs thrice in the Sonnets; five times in Venus, 214 times in the Plays.)

Unfortunately, I don't have many poems or plays on my machine besides Shakespeare's. Oxford used "and with" in his "The Lively Lark stretched forth her wing (Desire)", but nowhere else in "Twenty Poems." Kyd used "and with" in Spanish Tragedy. (Counting occurrences of "and with" may seem absurdly trivial, but at least it's easy to understand. Note that, since there are hundreds of stanzas in Venus and Sonnets, the 8 occurrences of "and with" there are proportionately about the same as Oxford's single instance in "Twenty Poems.")

As for Moogly's specific question about the actor correlation mentioned by Bomb#20: It would be nice to look at actual data and guess how significant the correlation is. Even if not already on-line, a polite e-mail to Foster or his son might get the necessary data, but I'm pre-occupied with personal matters right now.

Since I have the machine-readable plays I could repeat the study myself, but this would be a lot of work. For example, in Henry IV Part 2, speaker changes are easily found: the Speaker name is shown in all-caps. But they are not all-caps in Henry IV Part 1. Foster doubtless had unpaid grad students helping him with such trivia.

 

[DrZoidberg]

... It's perfectly believable that a guy like Shakespeare did it.

I don't understand the great motivation you have to question it? As far as I know it's only crackpots who question the established narrative. Isn't that so?

Again, since you obviously haven't read the thread: The idea is NOT that "a guy like Shakespeare" — whatever that means — could not write the plays and poems. The idea is that THIS PARTICULAR GUY did NOT write them. Review the thread.

And the idea that only "crackpots" question the Authorship is a delusion fostered by dogmatic "traditionalists." One of my most recent posts mentions Professor James Norwood who teaches a class on the subject. How many Professors do I need to cite? Or will no number suffice, since all of them will be branded as "crackpots"? At least six U.S. Supreme Court Justices did not believe Stratford wrote the works — are they all crackpots? Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, the famous mathematician Georg Cantor. Are they all crackpots?

Read the thread. Specific challenges are posed. For example, if you think Stratford wrote the Sonnets, how do you explain the peculiar dedication of that book? (For that matter, why weren't the Sonnets reprinted in the First Folio? — This question will confuse you until you're more familiar with the cases.)

As for my "motivation", I don't really "have a dog in the debate" in the sense many detractors would like to imagine. I just like good mysteries, good detective stories.

Authors ghostwrite for each other as well. More established writers will use less established writers and have them do the boring bits, or great authors if they are pressed for time. From analyzing Salieri's style of composition we know that Salieri wrote some of Mozart's work. This is uncontroversial. Composers help each other out when they are pressed for time. Rembrandt had a whole factory of painters churning out Rembrandt style paintings, which he then put his name on. All artists help each other. The idea of the solitary genius bashing away in solitude is just a myth. Few great artists have ever worked like that. We like the myth because it elevates artists and makes them special. Rather than being actual humans doing research and scratching out a living like normal people.

Somebody in Shakespeare's position would likely more have a role of an editor than the guy actually writing. Salaries were lower back then and art was, as it is now, was relatively badly paid.

I suspect you have a warped idea of what it means to write a play. Especially in Elizabethan England.

Just like the guy on the scientific paper isn't the only person who did work. They all had teams grinding away and a network of friends and collogues helping them out along the way.

Another possibility is that Shakespeare is like Banksy. A front for a artists collective. A bunch of authors working together. Play writes often do work together. This isn't a likely theory since most scholars reject the idea. And I'm easily fooled by fine shiny academic credentials.

I'm not writing completely out of my ass. I love Shakespeare and had a long period when I read all this plays and read as much about him as I could. But we do have very little information about his life. So any theory will be questionable. We're short on hard facts. That's why I will side with the academics rather than speculating on my own.

I remember that the main arguments against him being an author was his humble origins. It was just assumed that in the 18th century only those of noble blood had artistic sensibilities. That he wouldn't have had the education to come up with all of that on his own. So argument from snobbery. I find that argument unconvincing. But we know where he got the ideas. He took, at that point, newly discovered ancient Greek plays and rewrote them in a modern context. Because these were at the time unknown he blew everybody's mind with his creative genius.

Worth noting is that is still, pretty much, how any writing is done today, either for stage or fiction writing. No matter what story you read, it will in form, comply to an ancient Greek template. James Joyce and some 20'th century modernists tried to break the mould and come up with something wholly unique. But there's a reason we find the modernist books hard to read. The Greeks perfected the art form and we're still doing it. An author who first came upon these ancient Greek works is like paddling down a river of gold. He had everything he needed to make absolute gold, regardless of his humble origins.

Today these templates are ingrained into the backbone of every living human. They define how we think about story structure and what to expect when we read. In Shakespeare's day it was the Bible that formed this template.

BTW, I first read the Bible because I wanted to better understand Shakespeare. If you don't know the Bible forwards and backwards you'll miss half of his jokes. He just assumes the reader knows the Bible. So he references it heavily.

At least six U.S. Supreme Court Justices did not believe Stratford wrote the works — are they all crackpots? Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, the famous mathematician Georg Cantor.

It doesn't matter how smart somebody is when they're talking about something outside their field of expertise. You know... like you and me... in this thread.

 

[DrZoidberg]

It's the other way around. Non-academics questioning academia would have led to us still believing that disease is caused by evil spirits and that germ theory is bogus. QAnon isn't the smart guys who have figured it all out. I respect the opinion of experts.

It's one thing if you and me were Shakespearian scholars. But we're not. The only reason I entered into this discussion is because I saw an exhibition about Hamlet that went into great detail on how it came to be. They certainly convinced me. But then again, I'm not an academic. I rarely think I'm smarter than the experts. Never, in fact. So that's my stance in this discussion .

Then "scholars" should never disagree. But they do. And further there should never be anything new to learn because the "academics" already have all the answers. Interesting perspective I must say. Certainly not mine. Sounds like just another fallacious argument from authority.

So I assume that you don't respect your doctors opinions either? What could they possibly know that google doesn't? Have you performed operations at home many times? I mean... how hard can it be? Do you tell the pilot of a plane to move over so you can take over? I mean... how hard can it be?

 

[Swammerdami]

... That's why I will side with the academics rather than speculating on my own.

... I remember that the main arguments against him being an author was his humble origins.

Many of your posts are completely unresponsive — they seem like non sequiturs. You "side with the academics." Did you notice that most of the Oxfordians linked to in this thread have PhD's in relevant fields? If you mean that you side with a 51%-sized group of academics over the 49% group, then say that.

And, repeating myself — Do I need to write this in a larger font? — your "I remember that the main arguments against him being an author was his humble origins" guarantees that you have NOT read the thread NOR have you actually read any other Oxfordian arguments. This view that Oxfordians are "elitist" is what you get if you Google "Talk to me about how stupid Oxfordians are" rather than "Present objective intelligent Oxfordian arguments."

Remember: Google Searches are only as good as their operator.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

It's the other way around. Non-academics questioning academia would have led to us still believing that disease is caused by evil spirits and that germ theory is bogus. QAnon isn't the smart guys who have figured it all out. I respect the opinion of experts.

It's one thing if you and me were Shakespearian scholars. But we're not. The only reason I entered into this discussion is because I saw an exhibition about Hamlet that went into great detail on how it came to be. They certainly convinced me. But then again, I'm not an academic. I rarely think I'm smarter than the experts. Never, in fact. So that's my stance in this discussion .

Then "scholars" should never disagree. But they do. And further there should never be anything new to learn because the "academics" already have all the answers. Interesting perspective I must say. Certainly not mine. Sounds like just another fallacious argument from authority.

So I assume that you don't respect your doctors opinions either? What could they possibly know that google doesn't? Have you performed operations at home many times? I mean... how hard can it be? Do you tell the pilot of a plane to move over so you can take over? I mean... how hard can it be?

It is interesting that you would ask about my doctor. He really is a super chap, loves to see me, keeps himself in super shape, does a lot of volunteering, raises a great family, is very involved with his kids, and has a great following, so we have a lot in common. But he never had a parent with my condition so wasn't able to observe that parent - or patient - over many years. Without having done that I would never have been able to solve my particular condition. He certainly tried to apply all the medical knowledge he possessed but it didn't work. I solved it by being a good sleuth. But even that may not have been enough had I not lived closely with another person with the same condition for a lifetime.

So I give him tips about managing my condition and he listens intently, just information I've gathered over a lifetime, always out of necessity, sometimes desperation. His methods didn't work, just like they didn't work for my parent. But my methods work exquisitely, and they're not woo.

Yes, I certainly respect his opinions.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I remember that the main arguments against him being an author was his humble origins. It was just assumed that in the 18th century only those of noble blood had artistic sensibilities. That he wouldn't have had the education to come up with all of that on his own. So argument from snobbery. I find that argument unconvincing. But we know where he got the ideas. He took, at that point, newly discovered ancient Greek plays and rewrote them in a modern context. Because these were at the time unknown he blew everybody's mind with his creative genius.

That's a myth. Many persons of great acclaim and accomplishment have had humble beginnings. What makes the Stratford man so different is that there is no evidence that he ever wrote anything. He has no literary trail. Scholars have spent their careers looking and have come up empty. I cannot recall the scholar's name who spent her career looking for a connection between the Stratford Man and Southampton, finally admitting there is none, saying she had failed. That the Stratford man is the author is orthodoxy without evidence, it's just that simple.

As for works not being the singular act of one person we are on the same page. Also, works are constantly being revised and improved. Da Vinci worked on his Mona Lisa regularly, only stopping at his death.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Foster seems to be highly respected; the FBI have called on him to help with the investigations of Jon Benet Ramsay and of the Unabomber. Google may point you to the time he attributed "Funeral Elegy" to Shake-speare and later recanted, but we all make mistakes.

There are various stylometric measures developed by others; a very simple example would be counting adjacent word pairs: Shakespeare often wrote "... and with ..." — often enough that this can be used as a diagnostic! (On my own machine I see this pair occurs thrice in the Sonnets; five times in Venus, 214 times in the Plays.)

Unfortunately, I don't have many poems or plays on my machine besides Shakespeare's. Oxford used "and with" in his "The Lively Lark stretched forth her wing (Desire)", but nowhere else in "Twenty Poems." Kyd used "and with" in Spanish Tragedy. (Counting occurrences of "and with" may seem absurdly trivial, but at least it's easy to understand. Note that, since there are hundreds of stanzas in Venus and Sonnets, the 8 occurrences of "and with" there are proportionately about the same as Oxford's single instance in "Twenty Poems.")

As for Moogly's specific question about the actor correlation mentioned by Bomb#20: It would be nice to look at actual data and guess how significant the correlation is. Even if not already on-line, a polite e-mail to Foster or his son might get the necessary data, but I'm pre-occupied with personal matters right now.

Since I have the machine-readable plays I could repeat the study myself, but this would be a lot of work. For example, in Henry IV Part 2, speaker changes are easily found: the Speaker name is shown in all-caps. But they are not all-caps in Henry IV Part 1. Foster doubtless had unpaid grad students helping him with such trivia.

Swammerdami, thanks for the response. I should have been more focused in my question about Foster's premise. The article says:

Foster's study, though, provides positive evidence of a new and ingenious kind; he has been able to show that the person who wrote the plays almost certainly acted in them, or at the very least, this person memorized one role (or several smaller roles) in each play.

Perhaps I'm just being thick as usual but I want to understand this. Is this scientific or is it just "sciency?" Is Foster (and the article) saying he can apply this metric to any play with actors and that therefore we can apply it to Hamlet and other works attributed to the same author. Is this some kind of new foundational scientific theory about plays and playwrights?

 

[DrZoidberg]

... That's why I will side with the academics rather than speculating on my own.

... I remember that the main arguments against him being an author was his humble origins.

Many of your posts are completely unresponsive — they seem like non sequiturs. You "side with the academics." Did you notice that most of the Oxfordians linked to in this thread have PhD's in relevant fields? If you mean that you side with a 51%-sized group of academics over the 49% group, then say that.

And, repeating myself — Do I need to write this in a larger font? — your "I remember that the main arguments against him being an author was his humble origins" guarantees that you have NOT read the thread NOR have you actually read any other Oxfordian arguments. This view that Oxfordians are "elitist" is what you get if you Google "Talk to me about how stupid Oxfordians are" rather than "Present objective intelligent Oxfordian arguments."

Remember: Google Searches are only as good as their operator.

I have not read the whole thread. Nor will I. I just saw one piece of information that was incorrect and had relevant knowledge to share on that one detail. So I did. I'm not arguing any case, other than that it's silly for an amateur to question something the majority of the experts agree on.

People who challenge whether Shakespeare actually wrote them is a bit like conspiracy theorists. They care more about whether the clues fit together, rather than whether or not the basic question makes sense. It doesn't. There's no reason not to think he wrote them, or was the main author.

What's also interesting is that it doesn't actually matter much. It's his work that people ultimately care about. And that stands on it's own. It's a bit bizarre having any strong opinions about the man himself, unless you are a Shakespeare scholar specialized on the man's life. I am a huge fan of his work, no matter who wrote them. So I am not going to argue for it. I let the Shakespeare scholars do that. They do an excellent job. We can just read what they have to say.

But what I've learned from reading about Shakespeare skeptics is that their motivations for challenging his authorship is rarely based on any genuine interest. It's always, of what I can see, some ideological crusade or another. As if everybody wants his authorship to prove some pet theory on humanity that they're harbouring.

A vast majority of the people who have dedicated their lives to studying Shakespeare for academic curiosity on it's own merits have come to the conclusion that Shakespeare was a real person and did write them. They're academics who are specialised in this. I am not. I'm not going to challenge them. I'd make a fool of myself. Like you are doing now.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I remember that the main arguments against him being an author was his humble origins. It was just assumed that in the 18th century only those of noble blood had artistic sensibilities. That he wouldn't have had the education to come up with all of that on his own. So argument from snobbery. I find that argument unconvincing. But we know where he got the ideas. He took, at that point, newly discovered ancient Greek plays and rewrote them in a modern context. Because these were at the time unknown he blew everybody's mind with his creative genius.

That's a myth. Many persons of great acclaim and accomplishment have had humble beginnings. What makes the Stratford man so different is that there is no evidence that he ever wrote anything. He has no literary trail. Scholars have spent their careers looking and have come up empty. I cannot recall the scholar's name who spent her career looking for a connection between the Stratford Man and Southampton, finally admitting there is none, saying she had failed. That the Stratford man is the author is orthodoxy without evidence, it's just that simple.

As for works not being the singular act of one person we are on the same page. Also, works are constantly being revised and improved. Da Vinci worked on his Mona Lisa regularly, only stopping at his death.

The guy lived almost 500 years ago. He was a commoner. We barely have any paper trails on non-royal noblemen from that time.

For example, John Knox, a contemporary of Shakespeare. He wrote a bunch of books, he had Mary Queen of Scots deposed and managed to make himself into a dictator of Scotland. He reformed Scotland and made it Calvinist. Apart from the books that carry his name, we have no surviving physical evidence that the man ever existed. We only have mentions by others. John Knox was a hell of a lot more famous than Shakespeare in his day.

I think you have absurd demands on the degree of evidence to expect.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I remember that the main arguments against him being an author was his humble origins. It was just assumed that in the 18th century only those of noble blood had artistic sensibilities. That he wouldn't have had the education to come up with all of that on his own. So argument from snobbery. I find that argument unconvincing. But we know where he got the ideas. He took, at that point, newly discovered ancient Greek plays and rewrote them in a modern context. Because these were at the time unknown he blew everybody's mind with his creative genius.

That's a myth. Many persons of great acclaim and accomplishment have had humble beginnings. What makes the Stratford man so different is that there is no evidence that he ever wrote anything. He has no literary trail. Scholars have spent their careers looking and have come up empty. I cannot recall the scholar's name who spent her career looking for a connection between the Stratford Man and Southampton, finally admitting there is none, saying she had failed. That the Stratford man is the author is orthodoxy without evidence, it's just that simple.

As for works not being the singular act of one person we are on the same page. Also, works are constantly being revised and improved. Da Vinci worked on his Mona Lisa regularly, only stopping at his death.

The guy lived almost 500 years ago. He was a commoner. We barely have any paper trails on non-royal noblemen from that time.

For example, John Knox, a contemporary of Shakespeare. He wrote a bunch of books, he had Mary Queen of Scots deposed and managed to make himself into a dictator of Scotland. He reformed Scotland and made it Calvinist. Apart from the books that carry his name, we have no surviving physical evidence that the man ever existed. We only have mentions by others. John Knox was a hell of a lot more famous than Shakespeare in his day.

I think you have absurd demands on the degree of evidence to expect.

Elizabethan writers leave paper trails. They write letters, get paid for writing, are recognized by others as writers, etc. There is none of this for the Stratford man, even though more time has been spent by scholars and academics looking for his particular literary paper trail than for all other writers combined. This is just one bit of evidence. You'd know this if you'd read the thread.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

... That's why I will side with the academics rather than speculating on my own.

... I remember that the main arguments against him being an author was his humble origins.

Many of your posts are completely unresponsive — they seem like non sequiturs. You "side with the academics." Did you notice that most of the Oxfordians linked to in this thread have PhD's in relevant fields? If you mean that you side with a 51%-sized group of academics over the 49% group, then say that.

And, repeating myself — Do I need to write this in a larger font? — your "I remember that the main arguments against him being an author was his humble origins" guarantees that you have NOT read the thread NOR have you actually read any other Oxfordian arguments. This view that Oxfordians are "elitist" is what you get if you Google "Talk to me about how stupid Oxfordians are" rather than "Present objective intelligent Oxfordian arguments."

Remember: Google Searches are only as good as their operator.

I have not read the whole thread. Nor will I. I just saw one piece of information that was incorrect and had relevant knowledge to share on that one detail. So I did. I'm not arguing any case, other than that it's silly for an amateur to question something the majority of the experts agree on.

People who challenge whether Shakespeare actually wrote them is a bit like conspiracy theorists. They care more about whether the clues fit together, rather than whether or not the basic question makes sense. It doesn't. There's no reason not to think he wrote them, or was the main author.

What's also interesting is that it doesn't actually matter much. It's his work that people ultimately care about. And that stands on it's own. It's a bit bizarre having any strong opinions about the man himself, unless you are a Shakespeare scholar specialized on the man's life. I am a huge fan of his work, no matter who wrote them. So I am not going to argue for it. I let the Shakespeare scholars do that. They do an excellent job. We can just read what they have to say.

But what I've learned from reading about Shakespeare skeptics is that their motivations for challenging his authorship is rarely based on any genuine interest. It's always, of what I can see, some ideological crusade or another. As if everybody wants his authorship to prove some pet theory on humanity that they're harbouring.

A vast majority of the people who have dedicated their lives to studying Shakespeare for academic curiosity on it's own merits have come to the conclusion that Shakespeare was a real person and did write them. They're academics who are specialised in this. I am not. I'm not going to challenge them. I'd make a fool of myself. Like you are doing now.

You would do well to say which "Shakespeare." If you mean the Stratford man you should say that. We have no evidence that he was a writer, only a tradition of orthodoxy and a mythography of his literary life.

We do have six of the Stratford man's signatures, all spelled differently and in at least five different hands, barely legible. Scholars have said he was sick. We have no evidence that he was sick so more mythography is invented.

It's common in Shakespeare circles to say, "Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?" These kinds of silly utterances do nothing to advance scholarly research.

 

[DrZoidberg]

The guy lived almost 500 years ago. He was a commoner. We barely have any paper trails on non-royal noblemen from that time.

For example, John Knox, a contemporary of Shakespeare. He wrote a bunch of books, he had Mary Queen of Scots deposed and managed to make himself into a dictator of Scotland. He reformed Scotland and made it Calvinist. Apart from the books that carry his name, we have no surviving physical evidence that the man ever existed. We only have mentions by others. John Knox was a hell of a lot more famous than Shakespeare in his day.

I think you have absurd demands on the degree of evidence to expect.

Elizabethan writers leave paper trails. They write letters, get paid for writing, are recognized by others as writers, etc. There is none of this for the Stratford man, even though more time has been spent by scholars and academics looking for his particular literary paper trail than for all other writers combined. This is just one bit of evidence. You'd know this if you'd read the thread.

Assuming that the information presented in this thread is accurate. When random people on the Internet present controversial evidence that go against established scholarly views, I'm not going to look at the evidence presented.

 

[DrZoidberg]

You would do well to say which "Shakespeare." If you mean the Stratford man you should say that. We have no evidence that he was a writer, only a tradition of orthodoxy and a mythography of his literary life.

The guy whose name on the plays I love. That guy. Yes, I am aware he is mostly a mythic figure. Much like most famous people from that time.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The guy lived almost 500 years ago. He was a commoner. We barely have any paper trails on non-royal noblemen from that time.

For example, John Knox, a contemporary of Shakespeare. He wrote a bunch of books, he had Mary Queen of Scots deposed and managed to make himself into a dictator of Scotland. He reformed Scotland and made it Calvinist. Apart from the books that carry his name, we have no surviving physical evidence that the man ever existed. We only have mentions by others. John Knox was a hell of a lot more famous than Shakespeare in his day.

I think you have absurd demands on the degree of evidence to expect.

Elizabethan writers leave paper trails. They write letters, get paid for writing, are recognized by others as writers, etc. There is none of this for the Stratford man, even though more time has been spent by scholars and academics looking for his particular literary paper trail than for all other writers combined. This is just one bit of evidence. You'd know this if you'd read the thread.

Assuming that the information presented in this thread is accurate. When random people on the Internet present controversial evidence that go against established scholarly views, I'm not going to look at the evidence presented.

How would you know they are random people on the internet if you're not looking at the thread? How would you know if any of the information is accurate if you're not looking at the thread? You're not making any sense.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

You would do well to say which "Shakespeare." If you mean the Stratford man you should say that. We have no evidence that he was a writer, only a tradition of orthodoxy and a mythography of his literary life.

The guy whose name on the plays I love. That guy. Yes, I am aware he is mostly a mythic figure. Much like most famous people from that time.

I am not aware that most famous people from that time are mythic figures. Do you have information to share?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

For those interested in the Stylometrics question I found this video by Ros Barber. I've watched a minute or two and she's already talking about Marlowe/Shakespeare. I also like that she's looking at the methodology and asking if it's pseudoscience or hard evidence. I have not watched the video but intend to go watch it directly. Just wanted to drop it here.

SAT Conference 2017 - 3 – Ros Barber - Stylometry: Hard Evidence or Pseudo-Science?


Spoiler alert: After having watched the video Barber hammers stylometry as done by the authors she mentions. She is a scientist so understands the scientific method. It's a good video to watch.

 

[DrZoidberg]

You would do well to say which "Shakespeare." If you mean the Stratford man you should say that. We have no evidence that he was a writer, only a tradition of orthodoxy and a mythography of his literary life.

The guy whose name on the plays I love. That guy. Yes, I am aware he is mostly a mythic figure. Much like most famous people from that time.

I am not aware that most famous people from that time are mythic figures. Do you have information to share?

If we'd only accept the existence of the people we have hard incontrovertible evidence for existing, Europe in the 1500's would consist of perhaps 50 to 100 people.

But even those we have hard evidence on we can't say much about their personalities or how they did the things, they did.

Texts written about people were in most cases hagiographies. Ie, on purpose highly exaggerated. Shakespeare included.

Everyone we know from that age are mostly mythic figures.

We have very little information about what went on in people's minds from that age.

 

[Bomb#20]

The internal evidence of the plays themselves -- the statistical patterns in the word usage -- makes it pretty certain that whoever wrote the plays must have been one of the actors who performed them.
...

Here is Foster's premise, simply speaking:

Now, I'd like to discuss Don Foster's SHAXICON database, which is currently being prepared for publication, hopefully in 1996. Ward Elliot's study provides negative evidence; it indicates that none of the claimants tested wrote the works of Shakespeare. Foster's study, though, provides positive evidence of a new and ingenious kind; he has been able to show that the person who wrote the plays almost certainly acted in them, or at the very least, this person memorized one role (or several smaller roles) in each play. He has done this by cataloguing all the "rare words" in Shakespeare (those which occur 12 times or fewer in the canonical plays), indexed not only by the play they appear in, but by the character who speaks them. In each play there is one role (or in many cases two or more smaller roles) which disproportionately affects the vocabulary of all later plays, in that the words spoken by that character consistently occur in later plays more often than we would expect by chance; this is the role that Shakespeare memorized for performance.

Is there agreement here with this basic premise

I'm not sure I see a premise there. I agree with Kathman's description of what Foster measured; it matches my recollection of the original description of Foster's work I read twenty-odd years ago. If you mean do we agree that Foster didn't fake his data, I do -- somebody would have called him on it by now if he had. If you mean is there agreement that his results aren't an artifact of a buggy computer program, I have no information on that. If that's the source of doubt, there may be nothing for it but for Swammi to code it up himself and try to reproduce Foster's results. If you mean is there agreement with his proposed explanation for the correlations he observed, that's a conclusion, not a premise.

about Foster's following stylometry? I don't know a lot about stylometrics

What Foster is doing here is not stylometry in any normal sense of the word. Stylometry measures stylistic similarity between a passage and a known body of work. Foster didn't measure style and/or similarity; he measured correlations between which character used words before those words became more frequent.

Swammerdami, thanks for the response. I should have been more focused in my question about Foster's premise. The article says:

Foster's study, though, provides positive evidence of a new and ingenious kind; he has been able to show that the person who wrote the plays almost certainly acted in them, or at the very least, this person memorized one role (or several smaller roles) in each play.

Perhaps I'm just being thick as usual but I want to understand this. Is this scientific or is it just "sciency?" Is Foster (and the article) saying he can apply this metric to any play with actors and that therefore we can apply it to Hamlet and other works attributed to the same author.

No. It's not a measurement of any one play; it's a measurement of correlations across multiple plays by the same author. You couldn't apply it to Hamlet unless you had other plays the author wrote before and after Hamlet. And having actors isn't enough; the metric detects the appearance of a special statistical relationship between the author and some character in a play, a relationship that the author is observed not to have with the other characters in the same play.

So given that the statistical relationship exists, what causes it? To be the actor who personally played that character on stage in performances of the play, or not to be the actor who personally played that character on stage in performances of the play, that is the question.

Is this some kind of new foundational scientific theory about plays and playwrights?

Foundational? Hardly. But for our culture's arbitrary obsession with all things Shakespearean, it appears to be a minor contribution to what we know of human memory, worthy only of a scholarly article in some obscure peer-reviewed journal, just like a thousand other psychology discoveries. But is this scientific or is it just "sciency?" You tell us. The point of science is to discover explanations for the correlations in our observations. Foster has exhibited a plausible explanation for what caused some observed correlations. To me, that looks on its face like vanilla grunt-level legwork of science. If you think his explanation is just sciency but not scientific, propose an alternative explanation for the correlations, one that makes more sense than Foster's explanation.

You can see a list of the roles Foster deduced that the author played here. One hypothesis explains an awful lot of correlations.