Declaration of reasonable doubt…

I doubt it.

Here’s a contemporary of Shakespeare whose opinion is never heard because his comments were printed some 27 years after Shakespeare’s death. His name is Sir Richard Baker.

Cut to a First Folio Facsimile ix pages into the introduction:

‘In his Chronicle of the Kings of England, Baker treats in turn the reign of successive sovereigns and at the end he discusses the famous men of the time. For Elizabeth’s reign he notes statesmen such as Burleigh and Walsingham, famous seamen and soldiers -Raleigh, Drake, and the Earl of Essex- and the literary figures who are mostly theologians with the exception of Sir Phillip Sidney. In conclusion Baker observes:

After such men, it might be thought ridiculous to speak of Stage-players; but seeing excellency in the meanest things deserve remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in History with such commendation, it may be allowed us to do the like with some of our Nation. Richard Bourbidge [Burbage] and Edward Allen, two such actors as no age must ever look to see the like: and, to make their Comedies compleat, Richard Tarleton, who for the part called the Clowns Part, never had his match, never will have. For Writers of Playes, and such as had been Players themselves, William Shakespeare and Benjamin Johnson, have specially left their Names recommended to posterity.

This being the attitude of the times, as a large number of other writers testify, it is small wonder that most playwrights did not bother to see that their works were printed.’
(My FF Facs, with an introduction by Charles Tyler Prouty).

Jump Cut back to the blog:

I love the way Baker misspells everyone else’s name except Shakespeare and Tarleton. And his life-story is a corker. He was 4 years younger than Shakespeare, but lived an extra 30 years. His last 10 years were spent in debtor’s prison; where he wrote his Chronicles. I love the last sentence of the wiki-link on Baker above, where the writer crushes any semblance of defence for an Orthodox victory in naming him as a source. But the fact remains he lived the time, breathed the same air, was a play-goer and a player at Court, before he fell on hard times.

Here is a knee-jerk reaction to the ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’ doing the rounds on the internet as we speak, which can be downloaded here. The mere idea of this doubt makes me doubt the world and all that it inhabits. Man is designed to equivocate and so to broad sweeping argument. Let them be the Galleon, I’ll be a nimble English Man of War.