fight back!

The Authorship Question is rearing its ugly beautiful head in 2007. (yes even uglier more beautiful than the Droeshout portrait). The Washington Post ran an article questioning yet again a belief system that is absolutely unfalsifiable. It is an article of faith.

If, and there is muuuch mileage in your if, you start down this path of dalliance, you are doomed to ever more smug slotting of the final final piece into place on this historically perpetuated conundrum. Sh was a liar and x is the true author because of a similarity to one or more of his greatest characters.

‘Kind is my love to day, tomorrow kind,
still constant in a wondrous excellence,
therefore my verse to one thing confined
one thing expressing, leaves out difference.

Fair, kind, and true is all my argument,…’ Q105.

My shakespeare has a provenance in the theatre as an actor and author, also as a commercial poet. he is known to his peers in theatre, patronage and printing. His patron is distantly related to his mother’s family, the Ardens, ardent Catholics.

The preposterous claims of the authorship grave-diggers are eating away at the base of the Stratty-boy with few Orthodoxers rushing to his rickety defense. I’m making a stand here.

The cacophony of the Oxfordians and now Sir Henry Neville exclaiming: it’s obvious, swallow these fantasies, believe this preposterousness, galls me through seven shades of humours and biles. The reductionism of viewing the Elizabethan age solely through the one true prism: Bacon, Oxford, Derby, Eliza, poor soul.

‘When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced,
the rich proud cost of outworn buried age.
and sometime lofty towers down-rased,
and brass eternal, slave to mortal rage.’

The author, as stated in the historical record, is William Sh. BTW the historical record is generally agreed upon by everyone and not owned exclusively by orthodox scholars, subverting any open expression of alternative views on the identity of SHhhhhhh.

he didn’t want to be found, imho.

A lifelong friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton is there throughout sh’s career. both working the aristocracy for a buck. or perhaps rather, poaching the buck after getting paid from the nobleman’s accounts guy.

The behaviour of the aristocracy at Elizabeth’s Court and outside of it, must have been a source of much humour for the players, writers and other associated gossips. The reality is they lived in different worlds.

Their worlds intersected only on formal occasions with a gulf dividing them in intimacy. They were after all his lord’s servants. This world, exemplified so mellifluously in his plays with words in the mouths of kings and queens and noble families’ traditions.

Oxford for example could never have maintained the day to day hustle and flow of the working theatre world. Besides he had his own group of players and he let them play others works, depriving them of his genius, in favour of giving a rival company the profits and fame which his plays produced, a company to which his shill belonged.

Where on earth is the motive in this? What did Oxford or Bacon or whomever, get out of this? This happened too with the two narrative poems that went through 11 editions in Shaxberd’s lifetime. Who profits from this? Why do it for anonymous posthumous fame? Especially when that fame is due to arrive, finally if ever, when someone figures out the wittily placed cryptographic clue obvious to several individuals some 225 years later. Oxenforde lived out his last years in penury. Why?

‘Lean penury within that pen doth dwell,
that to his subject lends not some small glory,
but he that writes of you if he can tell,
that you are you, so dignifies his story.’