60 Minutes with Shakespeare

Loyalty oaths and testaments gain little of value.  They can not substitute for the courage required of Shakespearean scholars to honor logical analysis and empirical evidence, regardless of unwelcome adjustments in the present biographical catechism. If Shakspere was “formed by a grammar school education,” then how came it that, in glaring contradiction to contemporaneous custom even among Elizabethans of modest means, his will bequeathed nothing to the local school, to which, putatively, he had owed his entire formal learning? It indicates either callous lack of loyalty or, more likely, no educational involvement. Shakspere was not a cultivated man. His actions and preoccupations were not those of an artist. There is no valid external ‘evidence’ he was. A similarly spelled pseudonym on a title page in an era of anonymous and pseudonymous publication fails as proof Shakspere of Stratford wrote anything. Primary evidence, e.g., the illiterate scrawl of his signature, beckons us to be realistic, meaning in the end a revised vista on English history and literature.  Either the Shakespeare establishment meet the challenge presented by the Oxfordian initiative, by critical self-examination and renewed study, or its priesthood is going to look pretty tattered very soon.

Thankfully someone is sane.  I’d be worried if we didn’t have all those samples of the million words Shakespeare wrote…  All the original manuscripts, all the letters we have of Shakespeare’s where he discusses his work…

O wait….  there doesn’t exist a single piece of paper ever written by Shakespeare… not a single letter… 

Curious, isn’t it?  

Where did all the thousands of pages go?

How is it we have original documents by Donne, Jonson, Dante, Cervantes, Kyd, Nashe, etc, etc…

But not a single piece of paper from William Shakespeare…

One wonders why….

I’ve been arguing for months about this topic on the IMDB discussion board for “Anonymous.”  Of course William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays.  I think the biggest problem for the Anti-Stratfordians is the fact that Shakespeare was an actor in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.  This demolishes the Anti-Stratfordian arguments that WIlliam Shakespeare was an illiterate (or semi-illiterate boob), that no one would have thought all the references to William Shakespeare the playwright referred to him, or that there would have had to have been a MASSIVE conspiracy to hide the truth if Shakespeare of Stratford was not the author.  When you ask anti-Stratfordians about Shakespeare’s career as an actor, they usually respond with something like, “Well, that’s a mystery, isn’t it?  We’ll probably never know the exact degree to which William Shakespeare was an actor, or maybe a propmaster, so it’s really best to ignore the whole thing, so let’s turn to important stuff, like how every time the author used the word EVER in his work, he was giving us clues as to the identity of the REAL author.”