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To: Paisan
The weakest defense of the Stratfordians is accusing the Oxfordians of snobbery - that a uneducated person could not have possibly written poems/plays that required an initimate knowledge of the classics, Latin/Greek, science, politics, etc.

No one has a problem attributing the works of Van Gogh, Clemens, London, the Beatles, etc. to the respective working-class artists for one simple reason: their works where known and their genius widely acclaimed (with the exception of Van Gogh) during their lifetimes.

The usual reason stated by Stratfordians why this isn't the case with their man is that these incredible poems/plays, obviously written for the ages (and recognized as such by the author himself), where *not* art; rather, they were merely the equivalent of TV fare for its day. To wit, who knows who wrote a series of scripts for a cancelled TV show?

If you reject that theory, you reject Stratford. If you read Shakespeare with the knowledge that the author knew exactly what he was doing at the time they were written, and that his genius *was* recognized furing his lifetime by those that had the ability to read & understand the many, many veiled references (ie members of the nobility & court), then you know that the name "Shakespeare" was merely a nom de plume.

29 posted on 06/01/2005 4:28:02 AM PDT by lemura
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To: lemura
...If you read Shakespeare with the knowledge that the author knew exactly what he was doing at the time they were written, and that his genius *was* recognized furing his lifetime by those that had the ability to read & understand the many, many veiled references (ie members of the nobility & court), then you know that the name "Shakespeare" was merely a nom de plume.

And yet the difficulty remains: there is not a single piece of contemporaneous evidence direclty imputing the authorship of the plays of "Shakespeare" to Bacon or Oxford or anyone else. All such theories are built on conjecture. They all also assume (as they must) a conspiracy of silence among those in the know - which would have to have been more than a few in the London literary scene - who all seem to have taken the secret to their graves.

Whatever the merits of such theories, they don't hold up well to Ockham's Razor.

33 posted on 06/01/2005 5:00:57 AM PDT by The Iguana
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To: lemura
No one has a problem attributing the works of Van Gogh, Clemens, London, the Beatles, etc. to the respective working-class artists for one simple reason: their works where known and their genius widely acclaimed (with the exception of Van Gogh) during their lifetimes.

If you imply that Shakespeare was not widely acclaimed during his lifetime then you are simply speaking false. He's praised by name in the anonymous "Parnassus Plays" (c. 1600), in Richard Barnfield's "Poems" (1598), in John Weever's "Epigrams" (1599), in Gabriel Harvey's marginalia (c. 1600), in Anthony Scoloker's "Epistle to Daiphantus" (1604), in John Webster's preface to "The White Devil" (1612) and several times by his friend Ben Jonson.

61 posted on 06/01/2005 12:05:06 PM PDT by SpringheelJack
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