Why so many Shakespeares?

because…being devil’s advocate is stimulating? The underlying message of the authorship question is that i am a fool for supporting the legacy of the Warwickshire man, Gulielmus Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.

Yesterday or the day before google tipped me off to Hank Whittemore’s blog, which he’s building in support of his MONUMENT.

Hank claims that the Earl of Southampton is the Earl of Oxford’s son and the Sonnets are that monumental proof. He also states that the Orthodox response to this revelation is fight or flight.

Once again I stand and  I’m only going to fight in the sense of drive-by highlighting what i think to be the nonsense in setting up his candidate versus mine . 

First we all have to agree as blatant Stratfordians the onus for proof is on them. I don’t care if you’ve signed the declaration of reasonable doubt, I’ll have the law!

History records my guy as receiving a coat of arms, as sharer in the Globe theatre, as a member of the newly formed King’s Men after Elizabeth’s death, and as an honest and witty person. This last speaks to me the most.

For if he is honest, then why should he lie. if he lies, then he is not honest.  Some 200 years after his death,  honorable men first doubted this honest man, this liar. Ergo it must be someone else and this man merely lies i’ the earth, deservedly denied, rebuked and spat upon.

O rheum-laden corpse, be like the Jew and take thy revenge! 

Once more our guy (bloke, chap, fellow) from Stratters is the dupe ,who as always was obviously, certainly, incapable of writing said verbiage along with the delectable quotable snippets and the ‘oh so educated and travelled and mondaine’ characters the wordsmith Shakes-spears created.

Behold a crest!

Lo a motto!

Hark an anagrammed name!

Poof! some air!

The main difference between our approaches is that for me the interfacing with the Sonnets themselves constitutes my Monument. One, or few, or any of these all. Not the identity of its characters, who are but a lyrical fiction, despite their supposed roman a clef suggestiveness. His mistress eye is my mistress eye. Fiction and reality intermixed in modern invention. 

My monument is a  fleeting vortex of phraseology, that seems to hide the truth in all its beauty and virtue. You probe it, and it probes you revealing an elision here, an ellipsis there, like Bach, inspired by the music of words. Only they claim the inspiration is reserved for an OxfloweBaconian alone. 

Although few care, I like to ascend and descend my monument’s scale of being and matter, fixed in time, defiant of time, wholly because it is. 

Fixing poetry to historical autobiographical fact seems to me futile, outside of devoted scholarly self-interest. It makes you feel good to know your truth. Your truth excites you and stirs your passions.

The proponents of other shakespeares gather under a banner of reasonable doubt and spout thousands of ‘not enough time in life to spend on refuting it’ heresies and unorthodoxies, in favour of one or more of some 60 odd candidates. The main ones are in descendance of historical incipiency Bacon, Oxford, and Marlowe. 

For argument’s sake suppose i do convert to this version of your candidate. How does this knowledge of the real author exactly influence my analysis, reading and performing of them again?

Is a sonnet read by an Oxfordian, Marlovian, Baconian etcetera, per se better than that read by an muddled, stodgy, slow-thinking Stratfordian? Because the OxfloweBaconian knows his reading holds a hint at a far greater mind, the mind of who really  was the real creator? 

And as always the man who is the dupe, is the land and property loving businessman, the perhaps shareholder of the Globe, the unschooled glovemaker’s son, who finds himself the mid-point of their argument.

They can’t argue without involving him some how, but just how he was involved, and why he did this, they never explicate. Instead reminding you with quote and allusion of just how bad a choice a candidate for Shakespeare, Shakespeare himself actually is.

The Stratfrodians argue in circles btw. As in He loved words that’s why he wrote. Sh. wrote in circles too.

To quote him:

Your monument shall be my gentle verse, 

which eyes not yet created shall oer’read,

and tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,

when all the breathers of this world are dead,

you still shall live ( such virtue hath my pen)

where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

Sonnet 81

Trace the path of thought to breath in this quote and you will find you are the beloved. He is writing to you in the guise of an arrogant young nobleman unaffected by his love.

It strikes me as I read yet another ‘true’ replication of the Sonnets, that in their version, the Stratford ignoramus is relegated to the sidelines, as their candidate’s hidden genius acts on the worldly stage, in positions of high power and influence, whilst quietly enriching English literature for us, the time to come. 

The time when we Stratfordians wake up and realise the Orthodox Hegemony is stifling true historical research!  By god you fiends at the Birthplace Trust, you satanic practioners at the RSC, you bardolatrous swine! You are wrong, so wrong! You smug bastards!

Memorising and performing those words that make up my monument time after time does not make me an authority, it makes me a familiar. Each newly spoken sonnet plants the seed for the next time I say it. His words, my mouth just as he predicted in this sonnet.

Their content is fast becoming second nature and that nature is my higher nature nurtured in the miscreancies of my lower nature, and fashioned by reason and grace into what you will. 

If any take offense, it is merely words, and thankfully you are not of such a majesty as could have my head, for the uttering of them.