The Shakespeare Authorship Controversy

[WAB]

Swammi, we are on a skeptics board.

Skeptical about this; skeptical about that; skeptical about this and that. Skeptical about whether 1st-century documents were really written in the 1st century. BUT NOT at all skeptical about Stratford's authorship, despite the huge evidence against it. OK.

Have you taken the time to notice that no one, no one, except Moogly, have taken interest in this theory? No one. No one. At the other sceptics board there is literally no one, no one, who takes the oxford theory seriously. At a poetry board I was involved with for seven years,, no one, no one, no one, was remotely interested.

"No one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one." I hope you saved time by doing the copy/paste trick.
Roger Penrose, Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, many Professors of Literature, three SCOTUS justices, geniuses like Georg Cantor, etc. are all "no one, no one, no one, no one, no one, no one" to you. Got it.

So stop badgering me, and asking me if I have answers to this or that. No one, no one, no one has answers to your questions. There is plenty of information on the web to sort yourself and get a clearer picture of things.

Are you unaware that you can decline to click on a thread which is uninteresting to you?
Better yet, the message-board offers an Ignore option which IIUC would have various benefits to you, such as NOT being notified if I quote one of your posts.

I bumped the thread primarily to put my own thoughts and summary in a place where I can find them easily. (My favorite laptop died,, and my bookmarks etc. are too disorganized to be usable.)

The many MANY people who despise "anti-Stratfordian" ideas and despise me personally are welcome to address the items in my recent post from a pro-Stratfordian perspective. Nobody can do it? No surprise.

You name a handful of well known people who favor the Oxfordian theory. Yes I know very well of those people. When I said no one no one no one, etc, I was referring only to the people who joined the threads mentioned, not to the whole world. Plus, who cares that certain intellectuals buy into Oxford? The very same is true for any crackpot theory.

I started a thread at another board about this, but after about 100 posts, not a single soul has any use for Oxford.

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?

I wholeheartedly say that the Earl of Oxford could in no way have written the works of William Shakespeare. He was a mediocre poet and his known prose was absolutely nothing one would call Shakespearean. It makes me sick, and boils my bottom, that people cotton to this silly view. What dost thou...

internationalskeptics.com

** Not that that means much, but it's interesting as to your claims about how obvious it is that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, or that a sub-par writer like Oxford did.

 

[Swammerdami]

You name a handful of well known people who favor the Oxfordian theory. Yes I know very well of those people. When I said no one no one no one, etc, I was referring only to the people who joined the threads mentioned, not to the whole world. Plus, who cares that certain intellectuals buy into Oxford? The very same is true for any crackpot theory.

That's one reason to emphasize that THREE Supreme Court Justices are Oxfordian (and another two are very skeptical of Stratford). Not only do these Justices have experience evaluating evidence and have reason to avoid crackpottery but SCOTUS Justices are a very SMALL set. The claim that "20 Professors of English Literature are Oxfordian" could be met with the derisive "So what? How many thousands of Lit Professors are there?" That complaint won't work with SCOTUS judges.

I started a thread at another board about this, but after about 100 posts, not a single soul has any use for Oxford.

I started a thread about a decade ago on another board, and not a single soul supported me in that thread either. I did get two DM's expressing agreement: But the DM'er was too smart to join me in getting attacked publicly!. What was notable about the objections was how many showed TOTAL lack of familiarity with the evidence and reasoning. As one of MANY examples of such, after I mentioned the taboo about noblemen writing plays for public performance, the response was "The same taboo would have applied to Shaksper." No, Shaksper wasn't a nobleman. Another guy, PhD student and instructor in physics, thought he was contributing to the mystery's solution by pointing out that a book was titled Shakespeare's Sonnets, not just Sonnets.

** Not that that means much, but it's interesting as to your claims about how obvious it is that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare,

I've said repeatedly that the Authorship mystery becomes less interesting than the fact that people will get almost enraged about the suggestion of a hoax, and yet REFUSE to address, or even consider, the oodles of evidence. Recently in this thread I've listed specific facts that are impossible for traditionalists to explain. Have YOU addressed any of them? Did anyone in your other thread do so?

I see the same thing on other topics. Many Infidels here insist that Jesus of Nazareth (a normal human) never existed at all. Yet NONE has ever addressed any specific argumentation.

I DO want to thank specific Infidels, including Bomb#20 and Dr. Zoidberg, who have contributed particular pro-Stratfordian arguments to this thread. And kudos to you, WAB, by repeatedly emphasizing a key point:

or that a sub-par writer like Oxford did.

Even I can see that the sonnets written when Oxford was middle-aged are hugely superior to the poems written by the teen-aged Oxford. I find an even bigger gap between the mature works of Robert Frost and his teen-aged poems. We've discussed this already; here I'll just point out that excessive alliteration -- an obvious "flaw" in the teen-age Oxford's poems -- is easily avoided with maturity.

 

[Swammerdami]

Occasionally I even take time off from my busy schedule to review the SAQ.

I AVOID meandering into alleged cryptograms in poems and dedications: The NON-cryptic evidence is so overwhelming, any cryptic clues are just "gravy." But this page by John Rollett seems interesting:
https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/secrets-dedication-shakespeares-sonnets/
(Save time by skipping the first quarter of the page.)

The Dedication to Shakespeare's Sonnets has a layout depicting the series 6-2-4. That leads immediately to a simple transposition cipher of "These sonnets all by E.Ver." Rollett shows that the format was unusual (and rightfully complains that the format is often mangled when quoted.)

The page also shows an acrostic poem by Anthony Munday; I Googled its first line. Google (Gemini?) hallucinated TWO wrong attributions, showing the line first in Othello then in Hamlet!! Bing and Duck-blah-blah are useless for searches. Finally I asked ChatGPT for help; it claims the line is from Julius Caesar, a claim that by that time I was too frustrated to confirm/refute. It did find Munday's acrostic poem but claimed that the Munday attribution was unproven.

Anyway, what appeared to be utter hallucinations by Google in response to looking for a simple quote was a severe disappointment. Is there a way to ask Google to turn OFF its "AI"?