From The Guardian:
Scholars often say that no one doubted Shakespeare’s authorship until the 19th century. The response is a rote way of brushing off persistent questions about the attribution of the world’s most famous plays and poems – but it may not be true.
New scholarship suggests that doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship first arose during his lifetime – in a book called Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, published in 1598 by the theologian Francis Meres.
Roger Stritmatter, a professor at Coppin State University who has spent years studying Meres’ book, argues that Meres asserted “Shakespeare” as the pseudonym of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Stritmatter’s research has been published in the academic journal Critical Survey. Shakespeare scholar Graham Holderness, who edited the journal, worries that shutting down debate about the authorship endangers academic freedom. “When you come across traditional Shakespeareans comparing Shakespeare authorship doubt to conspiracy theories – anti-vaxxers or climate change deniers – I mean, I think that’s wrong … for all sorts of reasons”, he said.
Palladis Tamia is a “commonplace book” of sayings and comparisons. It has long been known to scholars as an essential text in Shakespeare studies. In a chapter titled, A Comparative Discourse of Our English Poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets, Meres compares English writers with classical writers using an as-so equation. For example: “As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagorus, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.” Meres mentions Shakespeare nine times, praising him as a poet and playwright and listing 12 of his plays.
While some scholars have dismissed Meres as a “mere copyist” who compiled lists, others have suspected that his work was more important. Meres may be following some kind of “critical formula” or even expressing “a hidden critical judgment on Shakespeare,” wrote the scholar Don Cameron Allen in 1933. Until recently, that judgment has remained obscure.
Stritmatter’s article, Francis Meres Revisited: Wit, Design and Authorship in Palladis Tamia, observes that Meres, who had published a mathematical treatise called God’s Arithmeticke in 1597, is committed to symmetry in his comparisons – for example, setting eight Greek writers against eight Latin writers and eight English writers. Among the 59 lists, a handful appear asymmetric but conceal a hidden symmetry. Six ancient epigrammatists are compared to five modern ones – “Heywood, Drant, Kendal, Bastard, Davies” – which seems like a discrepancy until one realises that “Davies” can stand for two persons: John Davies of Hereford and Sir John Davies, both well-known writers of epigrams.
“Essentially it’s a book of logic puzzles,” said Stritmatter. “When the lists aren’t symmetrical, there’s a reason for it.” Another imbalance appears in a list of comedic dramatists, in which 16 ancient writers are set against 17 English writers, including the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare. The question arises: “If one name [Davies] can stand for two persons, can two names refer to the same person?”
Drawing on the history of commonplace book arrangement, Stritmatter notes that the order of names in Meres’ list aligns each classical writer with his English counterpart: Plautus and Anthony Munday wrote comedies about braggart soldiers; Archippus Atheniensis and Thomas Nashe wrote satires involving fish. Why is Aristonymus aligned with Shakespeare? Nothing is known of Aristonymus, except that his name means, “the aristocratic name”. The Earl of Oxford, who aligns with no one, is the only aristocratic name on the list. Stritmatter argues that the alignment of “Shakespeare” with “the aristocratic name” points to Oxford. “It may be concluded that Francis Meres, using ‘Aristonymus’ as the mediating signifier, said that ‘Shakespeare = Oxford.’”
“I was sceptical, but Stritmatter’s scholarship on this matter is sound,” said the scholar Ros Barber, who teaches Introduction to Who Wrote Shakespeare at the University of London. “Stritmatter’s article doesn’t prove that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, but it does argue quite strongly that Meres believed he did. Given the ubiquity of anonymous and pseudonymous publication in the 1590s and the dangers of publishing things that upset the authorities, it’s neither surprising that he might believe this nor that he chose to express it so covertly.”
Link to the rest at The Guardian
PG hasn’t read Professor Stritmatter’s work, but he’s skeptical.
One major point for Shakespeare’s reality is that Queen Elizabeth was Shakespeare’s patron for many years. As state papers attest, she liked his plays and watched a number of them. It was at her request that he wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is known that he was personally present in 1594.
Given all the gossips in the Elizabethan Court, it stretches credibility that everyone kept his true identity secret. Some people put forth Christopher Marlowe as the actual Shakespeare. However, Marlowe died in 1593, before Shakespeare’s greatest plays were performed – Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth.
Shakespeare was also an actor, a playwright, and a shareholder in an acting company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which became the King’s Men when James I became king in 1603. There are also many references to Shakespeare’s work by contemporary authors – see Shakespeare Documented for many of such references.
Shakespeare’s burial is recorded in Stratford’s parish register on 25 April 1616. He made a will on 25 March, almost a month before he died. It would have taken a lot of effort by someone in Shakespeare’s time to have convinced the keeper of the parish register to make a burial record for someone who did not exist.
Gladwell does have a small point about hockey players – it’s not that there is something magical about their birthdate, but the fact is the date serves as a sorting mechanism.
Now, John and Paul were, from the beginning, talented, but what helped propel them to the top level was the apprentice of their German period.
They had the time to focus on their craft, feedback from the audience, and isolation from distractions. A perfect environment for their development. John had the ambition and drive, and Paul had a more easy-going temperament that kept the group together.
As for Shakespeare, yes, it was class snobbery – same as that which discounts the work of many achievers today.
The linked piece begs to differ on the Beatles and they explicitly distinguish between focused practice to improve technical proficiency and performance. In the sports world, it is the difference between a pitcher in spring training getting lit up because he’s throwing a new pitch over an over versus opening day when he uses his full toolkit when thr games count. Practice and perfrmance are not the same thing. As the authors point out, when did Lennon/MacCartney practice songwriting?
And me, I doubt MISTER Gretzky would’ve been a lesser player if he’d been born in June than in January. Any sorting effect might manifest among equally talented athletes but Mr Gretzky had no peers to sort against. It took a decade for the league to up its game enough to bring up challengers and he still stands above the norm a generation later. Practice alone doesn’t do that.
Gladwell mistakes correlation with causation: talented individuals looking to hone their craft to make the most of their natural gift *will* practice with an eye to refine their *skill* but skill isn’t talent. Without the underlying talent no amount of practice will achieve anything.
In the past few weeks I ran into a 19 year old young lady with a unique voice via a youtube music analysis channel, Tori Holub. Her voice is…unusual…in that she can sing in a tone closely matching an “outlier” singer, Karen Carpenter.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HWB96ZLWUUw&pp=ygUad2luZ3Mgb2YgcGVnYXN1eCBjYXJwZW50ZXI%3D
Carpenter is an interesting story herself in that her ambition was to be a drummer and it was *that* that she practiced to the point she was rated a top 5 performer by Rolling Stone. But what made her legendary was her voice: at 16, while playing drums for her brother’s band they were short a singer and they discovered that her singing voice was special. By 19 she and her brother (who played and practiced piano but turned out to have gift for arrangement) had a studio deal and by their third album (~21) had evolved an overdubbing technique that made them world famous. (Her sad fate is movie worthy, alas.) What made her special, aside from the ability to play world class drums and amazing vocal control (as the link demonstrates) was the rare ability to do both at the same time.
Karen Carpenter was the product of natural talent, not practice, not connections, not dumb luck.
Just (random?) genetics.
The same can be said of her similarly gifted contemporary, Linda Ronstadt. No amount of training will ever produce a voice (and lungs! 😉 ) like hers.
True “outliers” like Gretzky, Nolan Ryan, Carpenter, Ronstadt, Mozart, Gates, Musk, and yes Shskespeard, are born, not made. Education and practice might factor in *after the fact* but their achievements come from internal genius (which ethymology comes from the romans who lijewise pondered where talent comes from).
Gladwell can’t tell the difference between talent and skill and that in addition to the fallacies he relies on makes his thesis populist dreck. (“You didn’t build that!” Yeah, tell that to Rowling. Or King. Or…)
Speaking of Ronstadt, consider this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1cFkmxfoHg&pp=ygUgd2luZ3Mgb2YgcGVnYXN1cyBsaW5kYSByb25zdGFkdCA%3D
That is *some* voice.
A true “outlier”.
The issue with Shakespeare’s “identity,” one should note, is very class-based: So far as I know, all of the major proponents of “it was someone other than the Will. Shakespeare whose death is recorded on 25 Apr 1616 in Stratford” were/are nobility or otherwise upper class, selectively-educated back before the unwashed were admitted to selective institutions (either side of the Pond), hangers-on of either/both, or — there’s no polite way to put this — bonkers.
Part of the problem is that those groups are just unable to believe (and it was worse half a century ago) that an “uneducated boor” like Shakespeare could possibly work all of those classical-culture and other historical elements into his plays. Apparently, only the Right Sort of Persons knew or cared about that material, notwithstanding the sixteenth-century version of “nerds” who would seek out stuff wherever they could — perhaps by hanging around in pubs in Deptford listening to the “learn’d banter” among the ex-University crowd there, and doing perhaps slightly better at surviving than did Walsingham’s man.
In short, it’s credentialism — but poor Tom’s a-cold.
Oh, class might be key. Yes, that makes sense, especially if, as Felix suggests, the upper crust player-hater is a colossal mediocrity. I’m reminded of a line in “From Hell,”*** where two upper crust men are speaking of Inspector Abberline. And one says something like, “he [Abberline] has a cheap intelligence common to the lower classes.”
But someone with Shakespeare’s talents cannot be dismissed so readily, disparaged so plausibly. So I guess these conspiracy theories are the next best thing. Something to be said for Shakespeare’s talent, I guess: his detractors have to work for it.
***The Johnny Depp / Robbie Coltrane version of the Jack the Ripper story.
What is this obsession with saying Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare? What is the point of claiming he was someone else? Or that someone else was writing under his name for some reason? Why is it necessary to claim Marlowe was using Shakespeare’s name? I get why, say, a Kristine Kathryn Rusch uses pen names: she writes in a lot of genres that don’t necessarily cross over. But “genre” clearly wasn’t an issue for the guy who wrote Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream under the one name.
I distinctly remember the Queen Elizabeth 1 angle from high school, where we discussed the concept of playwrights and artists having patrons. Do any of these would-be Scooby-Doos and their mystery-van chums ever account for *why* QE1 and KJ1 would give patronage to a man who either doesn’t exist ,or is someone other than who he says he is? If he didn’t exist, then who was the masked man who gave Anne Hathaway the “second-best bed” in his will? And who did she have a crossbow-wedding*** with?
There are too many plot holes with these conspiracy theories, but in the end there’s still the question of why they’re so intent on denying the existence of Shakespeare, or denying he wrote his own works.
***Shotgun wedding, but they didn’t have shotguns back then. So crossbows.
“There are too many plot holes with these conspiracy theories, but in the end there’s still the question of why they’re so intent on denying the existence of Shakespeare, or denying he wrote his own works.”
That’s easy: mediocrity can’t tolerate the existence of excellence.
The very idea that a human can do great things they can’t even dream of is intolerable sothey must be “cut down to size”, procrustean-style. An attitude tbat has been with longer than that myth.
Marxism and its modern mutation, “equity” is but another expression of that same human vice.
As to the OP, given Shakespeare’s background I would not be shocked by the existence of a tome denigrating him, from an earlier age’s Malcom Gladwell:
https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell-ebook/dp/B001ANYDAO/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1K3DTHHZMETBI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.FhkpvadOUxYuO90852wWbFp9QX9lFRCyF7_8V5oxZSnUCTiOVUezB1KSsAp6EhYOgYXJGZiMUeJGKumvEfgh2OSoDHbrwK2mxXxG0OcHeliRlO1ljEa4T8s0XYjSzxXX8Qr0KQ70gAx8HKldoE680k_o8J8KfQvSTbeaSyqsXBnZhcCWC79TRI2oYMuyX2WZPVNYfK9phiOZ_mgU7SQvHf-pqlA9F4t8CT7_5PG4qCU.flPO_NjXnOSi9mrmGYMfOFO2EJi-RXLowkf_w-6z8sQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=outliers+by+malcolm+gladwell&qid=1713803794&sprefix=outliers%2Caps%2C243&sr=8-1
It is no different than tbe luddite-in-chief’s claim that “you didn’t build that”.
After all, if high achievement comes from individual genius, what dors it say about those that don’t achieve?
Were you the one who explained that in that book, Gladwell argues that talent is not a thing, but rather it’s just how much practice you put into an endeavor? Because I remember losing interest in reading that book when I found out that was the actual premise.
Envy of superior talent makes sense as a motive, especially if one is ideologically committed to believe they are superior to the talented one (which may be the case, as CE Petit notes a lot of purveyors of the conspiracy believe Shakespeare was too low-class to be so talented).
Maybe me, maybe someone else.
Me, I take issue with pretty much every thesis he invokes to support his view that “outliers” (high achievers) owed their success to dumb luck (what part of the year they were born), family connections and/or wealth, and amount of time spent practicing:
https://www.salon.com/2016/04/10/malcolm_gladwell_got_us_wrong_our_research_was_key_to_the_10000_hour_rule_but_heres_what_got_oversimplified/
The problem with the latter is he mistakes muscle memory with talent, athletic ability with skill, education with creativity, and with each other. Classic muddy thinking.
The problem with the rest of his arguments come from assuming correlation equals causation. In his view, Bill Gates was no smarter than the other PC era founders and his success isn’t due to the culture he built into his company but of his luck in being born to an upper middle class family (banking executive father, socially connected bother). The Beattles success? Practice, practice, practice, not the songwriting skill of Lennon and MacCartney, Ringo’s drummer chops or their combined skills. Wayne Gretzky? Born in January so he was more physically developed than his competitive cohort as he grew up and learned hockey. If he were writing it today he’d likely be arguing there is nothing special about Ohtani, Jonathan Nolan, or Elon Musk.
That said, the book still sells quite well:
#26 in Business Decision-Making
#29 in Social Psychology & Interactions
#51 in Personal Success in Business
It’s a populist message that resonates with the masses:
“…Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the “self-made man,” he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don’t arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: “they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, “some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.”
That’s from Amazon’s “review” of the book.
Yeah, high achievers are just lucky. Riiigghhhtt…
(It was recommended to me as “insightful”. Biggest waste of time reading it. Almost as big a waste as THE SPACE PRODIGAL.)
As to the class-based dissing of the bard, of course no country bumpkin could have possibly managed to acquire the education needed to be a succesful playright!!!
Not even if his father was a successful businessman and politician.
From wikipedia:
“John Shakespeare (c. 1531 – 7 September 1601) was an English businessman and politician who was the father of William Shakespeare. Active in Stratford-upon-Avon, he was a glover and whittawer (leather worker) by trade. Shakespeare was elected to several municipal offices, serving as an alderman and culminating in a term as bailiff, the chief magistrate of the town council, and mayor of Stratford in 1568, before he fell on hard times for reasons unknown.[1] His fortunes later revived and he was granted a coat of arms five years before his death, probably at the instigation and expense of his son, the actor and playwright.”
Class warfare is eternal.
So are sour grapes.
In the famous words of someone, we can fact-check your ass on the Internet.
I looked up Palladis Tamia and found this version:
https://sourcetext.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/1598_mere_palladis_tamia.pdf
In the second paragraph, we find:
“These and many other epigrammatists the Latin tongue hath, Q. Catullus, Portius Licinius,
Quintus Cornificius, Martial, Cn. Getulicus, and witty Sir Thomas More; so in English we have
these, Heywood, Drant, Kendal, Bastard, Davies.”
Six classic writers compared to five English writers.
There is also a comparison with “noble Mecaenas” with James VI of Scotland in poetry, followed by the late Queen Elizabeth for her poetry and patronage of poets without any classic comparison.
One “political adviser” (per Wiki) compared to a King and a Queen.
Oh, and Shakespeare is praised several times without the presence of the Earl of Oxford, and in the paragraph below he is compared to Plautus and Seneca among the Latins:
“As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so
Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy,
witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his
Midsummer’s Night Dream, & his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard the 2, Richard
the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.”
So unless the esteemed Roger Stritmatter, “who has spent years studying Meres’ book,” wants to imply that King James and Queen Elizabeth are one and the same, and that Plautus and Seneca are one man, I’ll press D for Doubt on his theory.