This is interesting, but what specifically did she discover? The article is confusingly written and never makes it clear what the "smoking gun" actually is.
Yes, I read that paragraph. It's anything but clear: "It’s at this point in the story that Wolfe discovered “the smoking gun”. In the Brooke-Dethick feud, it becomes clear that “Shakespeare, Gent. from Stratford” and “Shakespeare the Player” are the same man."
What specifically did Wolfe discover? Certainly not the Brooke-Dethick feud itself: https://books.google.com/books?id=EAuvCFM2S34C&pg=PA183&lpg=.... Perhaps new information about it? Surely the Guardian's readers could handle a detail or two. It's after all customary for an article about a new discovery to say what the discovery is.
I think the core discovery is when Shakespeare from Stratford gets linked to Shakespeare the player, making her think that these two are the same person.
> "When “Shakespeare the Player” found himself on this list, his campaign for social advancement seemed in jeopardy. A bitter row broke out at court between two factions. Shakespeare himself became an object of ridicule. Another rival, Ben Jonson, in his satire Every Man out of his Humour, poked fun at him as a rustic buffoon who pays £30 for a ridiculous coat of arms with the humiliating motto “Not Without Mustard”."
"Not Without Mustard" being a reference to Shakespeare of Stratfords request that his family motto be "not without right."
To be even clearer: it sounds like there was never any clear documentation directly linking "William Shakespeare, the guy from Stratford-upon-Avon" and "William Shakespeare, actor and playwright," and this opened up a window for speculation (by well known people and others) that these were actually different people. Heather Wolfe found the needed documentation in an old court case, proving that Shakespeare is actually Shakespeare:
> It’s at this point in the story that Wolfe discovered “the smoking gun”. In the Brooke-Dethick feud, it becomes clear that “Shakespeare, Gent. from Stratford” and “Shakespeare the Player” are the same man. In other words, “the man from Stratford” is indeed the playwright. Crucially, in the long-running “authorship” debate, this has been a fiercely contested point. But Wolfe’s research nails any lingering ambiguity in which the Shakespeare deniers can take refuge.
The article describes all that, but it never says what is new. If you Google "brooke dethick" you'll find that the argument about coats of arms has appeared in lots of previous work about Shakespeare. The other details are even less obscure.
That's thirteen paragraphs down, by which time most of us would have moved on. This style of writing seems to have spread everywhere. Is it an attempt to portray the interviewee in a less formal and more interesting light. I see something similar on television 'science' documentaries. A picture of a scientist in her bath (a quantum physicist) or another standing on a mountain gazing rapturously into the firmament (a cosmologist). The shot being taken from a swooping drone. No doubt the scientists are having deep thoughts. The thing is, none of this is actually communicated to us in the body of the program. Back to the article, what it doesn't present is the evidence that Shakespeare the Gent. from Stratford is the same as Shakespeare the Player.
Every couple years somebody else comes out of the woodwork with a new theory about who Shakespeare was. We just don't know a lot about the guy and there's not we can do about it.
Reads article about the identity of Shakespeare, still doesn't know the identity of Shakespeare.
But seriously, if you need a tl;dr search for "It's at this point," read that paragraph, and note that what she found was that Shakespeare was a real man, not the pen name of someone else.
That's the discovery. Save yourself 20mins of reading a poorly-written article.
There's never been any serious question that Shakespeare was a real person. There's been a long-running and largely silly 'controversy' about the authorship of his works. This discovery just takes away another toehold the 'Shakespeare authorship controversy' people cling to.
As an Oxfordian, this is a complete strawman. I'm not sure where anyone got the idea that Shakespeare from Stratford was not well attested as an actor ("Shakespeare the Player"). He is extremely well attested as an actor.
Here's a 400-page biography of Shakespeare from Stratford, by an Oxfordian:
In Hollywood terms, a simple biography of this guy was that he was an actor who became a producer. The "authorship hoax" is that the screenwriter's work was published under the producer's name. In the Elizabethan world, which is second only to Twitter for dubious attestation and pseudonyms, this is about as unlikely as finding a goat on a goat farm.
The Elizabethans were not egalitarians. Social climbing in the Elizabethan world is not unheard of, but it's quite rare and very likely to be remarked on. A country bumpkin who becomes a noted poet on first-name terms with top aristos would be someone everyone talked about, and wrote about. Ben Jonson's ascent was less vertiginous, and he appears clearly in the written record as a human being. Shakespeare the social astronaut is not quite an anachronism, but Shakespeare the reclusive social astronaut is pretty much impossible.
Mainstream conspiracy theories and outsider conspiracy theories often have the same weird, bitchy, false-triumphant tone found in the OP. Like the people who analyze the walls of Auschwitz gas chambers for cyanide derivatives and thus "prove" that the Holocaust couldn't have happened. It takes a lot of work to evaluate the specific piece of evidence, but very little work to listen for this tone.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I have no doubt that Shakespeare from Stratford and Shakespeare the actor and playwright are the same. But your comment is nothing more than an appeal to authority. "I'm from Oxford and I say so." Please try to do better than that.
In this context, I suspect the word 'Oxfordian' might better be interpreted in this sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespear... (for what it's worth, people from Oxford or affiliated with the university would be unlikely to refer to themselves as 'Oxfordian'. If they want to be cute, they might go with 'Oxonian'.)
In that case it would seem to completely change the meaning of catilina's post - in my first reading, I was under the impression that they were attempting to debunk the it-wasn't-written-by-Shakespeare position. The confusing wording (goats and goat farms) is easy to overlook.
There is a point beyond which most people just accept the fact of the matter as proof. The problem with the is he isn't he doubters is that if indeed they are the same man, there is no possible proof to be found. No one goes around leaving behind testaments that, yes, I'm-really-me. The lack of fact that show Shakepeare had a ghost-writer, at one point, must be taken as a proof by absence.
Would 9/11 have been better? If you read the comment, I'm not saying, "jet fuel can't melt steel beams." I'm saying, "people who talk this way have the same tone as the people who say, 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams'." Hard for this to start a conversation about whether or not jet fuel can melt steel beams. (I believe it can actually soften them.)
Ben Jonson's ascent wasn't one. He was the son of a gentleman, had a trade, had access to money, trained under Camden, and fought under Francis Vere.
Shakespeare's lack of all that status is exactly why he is the 'upstart crow' and mocked for his (failed) attempts at social climbing instead of gaining any more purchase in society than as 'country bumpkin'-turned-writer. He was not somebody, and therefore not one the somebodies talked about.
Writers were not held in high esteem and were easily knocked off of their precarious perch in society (cf. Thomas Kyd).
26 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 70.7 ms ] threadWhat specifically did Wolfe discover? Certainly not the Brooke-Dethick feud itself: https://books.google.com/books?id=EAuvCFM2S34C&pg=PA183&lpg=.... Perhaps new information about it? Surely the Guardian's readers could handle a detail or two. It's after all customary for an article about a new discovery to say what the discovery is.
> "When “Shakespeare the Player” found himself on this list, his campaign for social advancement seemed in jeopardy. A bitter row broke out at court between two factions. Shakespeare himself became an object of ridicule. Another rival, Ben Jonson, in his satire Every Man out of his Humour, poked fun at him as a rustic buffoon who pays £30 for a ridiculous coat of arms with the humiliating motto “Not Without Mustard”."
"Not Without Mustard" being a reference to Shakespeare of Stratfords request that his family motto be "not without right."
> It’s at this point in the story that Wolfe discovered “the smoking gun”. In the Brooke-Dethick feud, it becomes clear that “Shakespeare, Gent. from Stratford” and “Shakespeare the Player” are the same man. In other words, “the man from Stratford” is indeed the playwright. Crucially, in the long-running “authorship” debate, this has been a fiercely contested point. But Wolfe’s research nails any lingering ambiguity in which the Shakespeare deniers can take refuge.
This is what I sorta inferred from the article. The author says there was a smoking gun but I didn't see where it went off.
What did Wolfe's research uncover? A previously overlooked court document hidden in the archives of the Folger Library in Washington DC?
So no need, for her, to verify if Shakespeare was real or a ghost-writer.
But seriously, if you need a tl;dr search for "It's at this point," read that paragraph, and note that what she found was that Shakespeare was a real man, not the pen name of someone else.
That's the discovery. Save yourself 20mins of reading a poorly-written article.
[EDIT: spelling.]
Here's a 400-page biography of Shakespeare from Stratford, by an Oxfordian:
https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeares-Unorthodox-Biography-Evi...
In Hollywood terms, a simple biography of this guy was that he was an actor who became a producer. The "authorship hoax" is that the screenwriter's work was published under the producer's name. In the Elizabethan world, which is second only to Twitter for dubious attestation and pseudonyms, this is about as unlikely as finding a goat on a goat farm.
The Elizabethans were not egalitarians. Social climbing in the Elizabethan world is not unheard of, but it's quite rare and very likely to be remarked on. A country bumpkin who becomes a noted poet on first-name terms with top aristos would be someone everyone talked about, and wrote about. Ben Jonson's ascent was less vertiginous, and he appears clearly in the written record as a human being. Shakespeare the social astronaut is not quite an anachronism, but Shakespeare the reclusive social astronaut is pretty much impossible.
Mainstream conspiracy theories and outsider conspiracy theories often have the same weird, bitchy, false-triumphant tone found in the OP. Like the people who analyze the walls of Auschwitz gas chambers for cyanide derivatives and thus "prove" that the Holocaust couldn't have happened. It takes a lot of work to evaluate the specific piece of evidence, but very little work to listen for this tone.
This would be a decent comment without that last paragraph.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13359360 and marked it off-topic.
Would 9/11 have been better? If you read the comment, I'm not saying, "jet fuel can't melt steel beams." I'm saying, "people who talk this way have the same tone as the people who say, 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams'." Hard for this to start a conversation about whether or not jet fuel can melt steel beams. (I believe it can actually soften them.)
We've banned this account for trolling. If you want to convince us that you're not, you'll need to take a different approach.
Shakespeare's lack of all that status is exactly why he is the 'upstart crow' and mocked for his (failed) attempts at social climbing instead of gaining any more purchase in society than as 'country bumpkin'-turned-writer. He was not somebody, and therefore not one the somebodies talked about.
Writers were not held in high esteem and were easily knocked off of their precarious perch in society (cf. Thomas Kyd).