Talk:Shakespeare authorship question/sandbox2

Please make sandbox edits to this page: Talk:Shakespeare authorship question/sandbox draft2

Rough outline (repost from SB1 talk)
Here's my idea of how the article should be structured. As it is now, it meanders all over the place and the material in many cases has nothing to do with the section headings.

I. Lead, which should contain these points:

1. Definition
 * 2. Origin and main candidates that have been put forth
 * 3. Scholarly opinion
 * 4. Description of present-day status

II. Extended treatment of topic (overview)
 * 1. What disqualifies Shakespeare, with the most common arguments discussed
 * a. Scholarly view of these
 * 2. Conspiracies
 * a. Scholarly view of these
 * 3. Methodology of anti-Stratfordian theories
 * a. Scholarly view of these

III. History of anti-Stratfordianism
 * 1. Rise of Bardolatry—2 grafs
 * 2. Pre-cursors to open doubt—2 grafs
 * 3. 19th century
 * a. Hart, Bacon and rise of Baconism


 * b. Rise of cryptograms and decline of Baconism.
 * 4. 20th century
 * a. William Stanley
 * b. Earl of Oxford
 * c. Christopher Marlowe
 * 5. Group theories and other candidates

IV. State of the movement today
 * 1. Rise of Internet groups
 * 2. Academic attention

Every topic, especially each candidate, should be as comprehensive as possible without becoming tediously long and complex, which is what the old article was. Once we get everything written, then we can determine what, if any, topics need their own articles. Tom Reedy (talk) 19:06, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

'For the most part'
Nishidani, you say "'For the most part'. No. Even those mainstreamers who look at it, do so rarely, in the odd, article or book, and then get back to serious work on S."

Isn't that exactly what "for the most part pay little attention" means? Both references support the statement, one saying "little interest" and the other "little attention". And the NYTimes survey says that only 2 percent of the respondents said they never mention the SAQ in their classes. But that is not all we have to consider; we also have books written by Wells, Schoenbaum, Bate, Shapiro, Duncan-Jones, et al, who have given it a great deal of attention. Although they do not make up a significant percentage of all academic Shakespeareans, their status should weight any statement we make about how much attention academe gives the topic. Tom Reedy (talk) 19:59, 27 April 2010 (UTC)


 * "'The hypothesis . . remains essentially without support among Shakespeare scholars and literary historians, who for the most part pay little attention to it. Nearly all academic scholars accept that William Shakespeare was the primary author of the canon, and the great majority of those who have investigated the various alternative authorship theories deny their validity.'"


 * Sorry, my dumb, like most edits I do 5 minutes before dinner. I meant to say 'there is a problem with the second sentence.


 * "Nearly all academic scholars accept that William Shakespeare was the primary author of the canon, and the great majority of those who have investigated the various alternative authorship theories deny their validity."
 * 'Near' should be 'virtually' (2)who are the 'great majority'? If academic scholars, (a) most think it is illiterate junk and just ignore it (b) but of the exiguous few who condescend to waste their time to analyse the phenomenon, we have several, the 'great majority' . . but (c)a great majority of an exiguous few?
 * What I intended to say is that 'the great majority' can refer either to all students of the subject, or to academics. If all students of the subject, independently of their qualifications, is to be understood, then 'the great majority' would refer to the hyperinflated fringists who debate this topic, since it is something academia ignores, but marginals entertain in their speculative books, and they do not deny the validity, but promote the scam. If academics, 'the great majority' is wrong, because, as the sentence reads, it suggests that a small minority of qualified Shakespearian scholars looking at the SAQ, on examining the unorthodox literature, don't deny its validity. Has any distinguished Shakespearean ever looked into this stuff and affirmed its validity, as the sentence would imply if the subject is 'academics'?


 * This may not be clear, but I am watching Tommy Lee Jones in The Missing, at the brujo's spell has just worked on Cate Blanchett, and am distracted by questions as to whether or not the scriptwriter was sucked in by Carlos Castaneda's colourful inventions about the Yaqui brujo Don Juan Matus or not. So I'm wired to a different set of mental circuits not conducive to Shakespeareana or lucidity.Nishidani (talk) 21:12, 27 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, Daniel Wright and Roger Stritmatter would certainly qualify as academic scholars. No matter what anyone might think of the quality of their scholarship, they have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Disqualifying them from being "qualified" because of their authorship beliefs would be circular, to say the least, hence my "great majority" [of academic scholars who have investigated the subject].
 * (Movies about ghosts are written by people who don't believe in them, so it might be an exercise in futility to try to determine a scriptwriter's beliefs by the plot of a movie, much like trying to guess Shakespeare's biography from reading his works. I did know people who swallowed Castenada whole, though, power objects and all.) Tom Reedy (talk) 21:58, 27 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Stritmatter and Wright, two of 10,000, neither with any significant research. Okay, I won't niggle.
 * "' no positive evidence that he possessed the education, the life experience, or the aristocratic outlook they claim is evident in Shakespeare’s works'"
 * For lead concision I suggest you rewrite:
 * "no positive evidence that he possessed the cultured background they claim is evident in Shakespeare’s works."Nishidani (talk) 09:28, 28 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Nishidani, you say (I think!) "Nearly all academic scholars accept that William Shakespeare was the primary author of the canon, and the great majority of those who have investigated the various alternative authorship theories deny their validity."
 * This is intended to be helpful although I'm not sure that it will be perceived as such. There are several respected scholars who have specifically denied the validity of the Marlovian claim (Wells, Schoenbaum, Bate, Shapiro, etc.), but as far as I know none of the scholars who have denied it has actually shown any sign of having investigated it too. Peter Farey. 81.100.123.3 (talk) 16:54, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Principles of Composition: Some suggestions
The slowness of this section, as I at least work on it, is due to peculiar issues that make it difficult. The other page is careless of the best criteria set down in WP:RS, and tends to treat what is, for this editor at least, a fringe topic as that is expounded by fringe sources, as though we were dealing (and this is false) is a minority position within within mainstream discourse, rather than a WP:fringe theory that lacks any credibility within mainstream academic scholarship.
 * The major problem is that the fringe literature runs into thousands of volumes and articles, stretching over 160 years. None of these are, strictly speaking RS or reliable secondary sources. On the other hand, the mainstream literature devoted to this tsunami of amateurish speculation, 99% of it by people who have no academic background, amounts to only a handful of books, which hardly cover the topic in detail. Thirdly, almost everything said in the recent fringe literature is recycled from debates, speculations, voluminous tracts printed over a century ago. If one cites Whalen, Farina, Ogburn, Price, Anderson, etc. what is actually occurring is that one is referring to their recent books ideas poached and recycled from books written, and confuted, a century ago. A tendency in the early wiki essay was to source to these recent polemicists, as their view, or research, numerous ideas they merely copied from old dusty tracts, as any googling per theme or idea can readily show. Any topic we touch throws up hundreds of citations from long-forgotten trivia from the controversies of the 19th century.

(1) On this page, we should endeavour to follow scrupulously the ideal in WP:RS, i.e., sourcing all statements, as far as possible, to mainstream sources, esp. books with a university imprint, written by acknowledged scholars, in contradistinction to the method of sourcing on the other page, which uses fringe sourcing, for what is a fringe set of theories, with almost zero academic recognition.

(2)An exception might be made for material which is widely circulated, but which has not yet received a critical examination by mainstream scholarship.

(3) Since we are dealing with over 63 theories (63 candidates), the text must not give undue prominence (WP:Undue) to elements of conjecture that are associated only with one specific theory in the field.

(4) However, it is clear that three or four theories have won more attention than the rest. One needs to discriminate nicely so that while (3) is the rule, (4) means a certain edge in coverage must be conceded for the three or four major alternative theories.

(5) Where possible, a view should be attributed to the person who first developed it historically, and not to the most recent proponent or recycler. Thus, with the playbroker theory, hitherto associated in drafts with Diana Price, the concept was elaborated by Alden Brooks in 1943. Perhaps he in turn took it from an earlier speculator. Most of the stuff we read in books over the last decade can, apparently, be found in books published a century ago, and best practice is to give priority to chronologically organized innovations.Nishidani (talk) 08:02, 1 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Agree on the upholding the quality of sources, but I'm not sure what you mean with (2).
 * I think that while (3) should be the rule in the main text, we have to include more comprehensive coverage of Bacon, Oxford, Marlowe and Stanley, either in a section as it now stands or in the history section. The directive is, after all, to merge the SAQ article with the Oxford article.
 * Yes, the recycling of anti-Stratfordian arguments has long been noted; Matus and Kathman both comment on it. The same thing is done in academe, where periodically a new angle that was first proposed by Malone or Steevens will be "discovered" by someone who has not read out the literature.
 * Price's book is nothing more than an extended argumentum ex silentio based on her arbitrary definition of acceptable biographical sources, with any persuasiveness deriving entirely from rhetoric. Shapiro talks about this on 243-44 (276-77 in your edition, although for some reason it is uncorrected from the proof version; it should read "CPLE", contemporary personal literary evidence).
 * I disagree on (5). I think we should refer to the most current forms of the arguments, otherwise we'll be accused of ignoring modern anti-Strat "scholarship" the way Shapiro is, although I think it would be a nice scholastic touch to note the first use of the argument, perhaps in the ref itself. When we're done I expect this will be the first FA article on a fringe subject. Tom Reedy (talk) 17:48, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * On 2 I was thinking of Altrocchi, who has published together with Alan Nelson, a mainstream scholar. His original paper 'Sleuthing' is cited by Nelson, so I rephrased that poorly, thinking of 'mainstream' as books. There's very little Oxfordian stuff that comes close to the effort he put into that paper, which was thorough, and only spoiled by the blind ideological conclusion I have quoted in the text. It
 * Re 5 earlier and Price, Her theory picks up a lot of old stuff, from Grenwood and Alden Brook, for example. What annoyed me about the other draft was that she was showcased, esp. when what she was saying had been more or less 'plagiarised' in the fashion Greene is cited on as attributing to Shakespeare, from earlier books. I think one should make some effort to historicize this subject more precisely. Modern anti-Strat scholarship of course is more accessible, but where possible, one should at less reference in the footnotes the provenance of these recycled clichés. Oxfordians are like the Truk islanders of anthropological notoriety, constantly regurgitating otherwise forgotten incidents from the past as if they occurred yesterday, and that is an important element. I don't know about FA status. We should over the next month think of that as the high bar we are trying to prepare ourselves to leap over, but I expect that the usual numbers racket will manoeuvre to make a mishmash of the best of whatever we produce, and the  other article. Nishidani (talk) 18:47, 1 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I have nothing against substantial parts of the page being sourced to Diana Price who is, after all, one of the rare anti-Stratfordian RS for the article. But repeating her name, and using her exclusively does give the impression that the case is that of DP, and the article's Oxfordian sections more or less reflect what she wrote. For that reason I find myself adding notes to show most of her arguments come from theses proposed a century ago. To state Miss Price's version, while for reasons of space, ignoring the fact that virtually everything she revives has a long history of development and rebuttal, creates a loose impression this is the cutting-edge, and that there is so far no answer to the clichés she recycles. Hence some sketchy background, referring the reader to earlier sources for the same arguments she trots out. For example, the Poet-Ape epigram may refer, for example, to Shakespeare: how you date it makes a large difference to how you take it. If it was composed in early 160os, it may reflect the poet's war, and be a crack at Shakespeare. If you date it late, then Heywood or someone else becomes the more probable candidate. All these nuances are lost on the naive first-time reader, who is given lists of ideas, and little context. Spatial concerns militate against neutrality and comprehensiveness. Nishidani (talk) 09:42, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Justifying a large excision
From the date of death section I excised this blob:
 * "Fosters claim, and the Bate translation, however, do not represent the more traditional mainstream belief, espoused by noted Shakespearean scholar Sydney Lee, that 'In Elizabethan English there was no irregularity in the use of 'begetter' in its primary sense of 'getter' or 'procurer''. Lee compiled numerous examples of the word used in this way and asserts that any doubt about the definition is 'barely justifiable'.(Shakespeares Venus and Adonis: being a reproduction in facsimile of the first edition, 1593, from the unique copy in the Malone collection in the Bodleian library, pgs 38). Some modern Shakespearen specialists, such as Katherine Duncan-Jones, believe the sonnets were published with Shakespeare’s full authorization,(Duncan-Jones, “Was the 1609 Shakes-Speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?”) this assertion, however, stands in contrast to the more general believe noted by Lee, that 'The corrupt state of the text Thorpe's edition of 1609 fully confirms that the enterprise lacked authority,...the character of the numerous misreadings leaves little doubt that Thorpe had no means of access to the authors MS.'(Lee, pg 40.)"

This is a prime example of what was wrong with the original draft. It is pleading, and execrably done. You cannot jam in notes citing Sidney Lee, writing in 1908, then Duncan-Jones, writing a century later, as if there weren't an intricate nuanced history of debate on this question. Secondly, the heading deals with the date of death. This stuff wanders off into a skimpy yarn about scholarly contentions over the meaning of words, that in themselves have nothing to do strictly with the heading. I've adjusted by simply adding that 'begetter' is usually understood as 'procurer', interleaving Foster's comment.Nishidani (talk) 17:12, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Hyphenation
Just for the record Tom, I didn't imply that Field hyphenated the name. I meant to note simply that the Shaksper/Shakespear(e) variation itself, part of the history of sceptic arguments that different spellings connote different identities, has been accounted for, in this regard, by technical explanations about setting up fount. That Field, who was from Stratford, innovated in the spelling of his fellow Stratfordian contemporary's name, is significant. He certainly knew who the man was, and made no distinction between Shakspe and the Shakespeare/Shake-speare of quarto titles. Thanks for the correction about Thomas, but there is an every so slight problem with our text on this. At List of Lord Mayors of London you find a Sir Thomas Cambell (1609), not 'Campbell'. Of course, 'Cambell' is variously printed 'Campbell'. Nishidani (talk) 17:17, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
 * It was hard to tell exactly what that part was about, and it seems the significance of the Field-Shakespeare connection is lost without mentioning it, but including it would constitute OR. I don't find the typeface argument convincing, especially since all but one of the hyphenations are Shake-speare. Now if there were some examples of such broken typefaces I think it would strengthen the argument, but I don't think the "k" type projected beyond the body as stated except for italic fonts, and Field used roman type. I think it is sufficient that hyphenation was common enough for names that lent themselves to it, and I think Honan and Shapiro violate Occam on this. If you can get past the tone, see Stritmatter's essay (in two parts). Even a blind hog finds an acorn sometimes.
 * Thomas "Cambell" was the father of James Campbell on the same list. Once again, it only shows the variable spelling of the time (unless that's a typo on the part of the editor; see this). In any case, the name is printed as Camp-bell in the 1609 1/4to, which is all that is important to us. Tom Reedy (talk) 19:31, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Not OR to cite Honan on Field's printing Shakespeare. I don't mind leaving it out, since in any case, the more one cuts back, the more space left free for proper surveys. Will read Stritmatter tomorrow, thanks.Nishidani (talk) 20:22, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
 * In the meantime you might like to read this by Randall McLeod 'Un editing Shak-fpere' in Stephen Orgel, Sean Keilen, (eds.) Shakespeare and the editorial tradition, (1999) Taylor & Taylor, pp.50-90, pp.79-80 Nishidani (talk) 20:40, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Ben Jonson's degree
I eliminated the ref to his honorary degree from Cambridge. That he got one from Oxford (1619) is well know. Will restore if someone can come up with details. It's not in Ian Donaldson's chronology of nsignificant events in his edition of Jonson's poems.Nishidani (talk) 09:33, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Further substantial excision
"'For a comparable analysis of personal literary paper trails for two candidates for the authorship of The Arte of English Poesie, see Gladys D. Willcock & Alice Walker, eds. The Arte of English Poesie (Cambridge Univ. Press 1936) xvii-xviii, xxiii. For a discussion of criteria, see Robert C. Williams, The Historian’s Toolbox: A Student’s Guide to the Theory and Craft of History, (M.E. Sharpe 2003), who defines a “primary source [as] a document, image, or artifact that provides evidence about the past. It is an original document created contemporaneously with the event under discussion” [emphasis added], 58. See also Paul M. Kendall, The Art of Biography (1965. Reprint, W.W. Norton 1985), xiii.)'"

I'm not sure who this is trying to impress. The assumption behind this OR is that somehow these basic materials illustrate what methodological principles historians should use in analysing Shakespeare's biography, but which no one but Diana Price uses. Are they taken from Prince's bio.? Everyone with an undergraduate degree in literature should know that biographies require careful sifting of primary sources. All historians practice this. So?Nishidani (talk) 13:33, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Broken Diana price link
No.154 ^ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmske/is_3_11/ai_n29167504/pg_7/?tag=content;col1

We'd better try and find a proper link to that content.Nishidani (talk) 17:17, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Linking to a search result is not permitted. What did this ref to? From what I can tell it's the hypenation ref stating that Tom Tell-truth, etc. are "often cited". Leaving aside the fact that I doubt that's what the ref says but instead is an example of such citing, Martin Mar-Prelate, although "often cited", was not often hyphenated, the occurrence of such hyphenation totaling one. Tom Reedy (talk) 13:06, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Doubters. Checking needed
Most of the list comes from the usual suspects, who are as reliable on this as they are on Shakespeare. I can't recall from my reading that Dickens was a doubter. Ackroyd, who I have, says nothing of it, nor does Valerie L. Gager, in her Shakespeare and Dickens: the dynamics of influence, as far as I can see. I know Leslie Howard in the Pimpernel film expresses a doubt, but does any bio of him back that up etc.? Nishidani (talk) 18:49, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Neither Dickens nor Emerson nor Welles nor Howard were "doubters". Tom Reedy (talk) 08:24, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

I'll put the list of claimants here, for reference. Notable anti-Stratfordians Over the past 150 years Mark Twain, Henry James, Walt Whitman, John Galsworthy, Clifton Fadiman, William Y. Elliott, Mortimer J. Adler, William James, Sigmund Freud, Tyrone Guthrie, Charlie Chaplin, Sir John Gielgud, Lord Palmerston, Paul H. Nitze, Harry A. Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell, Jr.. Otto Bismarck, Helen Keller, Charlie Chaplin, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Conner, Malcolm X, Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance have expressed their scepticism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Orson Welles,Leslie Howard though listed, were not doubters. William Y. Elliott is a funny guy to cite there. He was a true believer, and his son Ward was raised in an Oxfordian milieu, became an academic, and, with Valenza then went on to prove by computer analysis the whole 'theory' was off-the-planet (his words).Nishidani (talk) 08:45, 5 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Check out these old posts:

Welles

Howard (I'm sure you'll note the "excretable" goof)

Emerson

Dickens Tom Reedy (talk) 14:42, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Tom. Nothing wrong with the intelligent malapropism 'excretable'. I think WS would have loved the word.Nishidani (talk) 15:13, 6 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I defended it on the ground that his scholarship is for shit. Tom Reedy (talk) 17:33, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Marlowe
This, like a few other sections, is underworked, and is in trouble given this draft's attempt to write the SAQ using sources that qualify as the best RS. I think Peter made an excellent outline for the points that distinguish Marlovians from Oxfordians, which he has summed up with this synthetic edit:
 * 'Marlovians use very few of the standard anti-Stratfordian arguments—as given in the main article below—to support their theory, believing many of them to be misguided, misleading or unnecessary.'

The problem is however that, though true, it can only so far be sourced to Peter's personal authority. Is there any paper by a Marlovian that sets out these distinctions, and that might qualify as a source?Nishidani (talk) 15:08, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I must say that I find it difficult to imagine why any Marlovian would want to write such a paper! On the other hand, my essay Hoffman and the Authorship (which makes the case for Marlowe and for which Park Honan awarded me a share of the prestigious Hoffman Prize in 2007) is a good example of those arguments NOT being used. So is the paper Playing Dead: An Updated Review of the Case for Christopher Marlowe I wrote at Prof. Michael Egan's request for last year's Oxfordian, which was also the basis of the three-hour session I was asked to present at Brunel University a couple of months ago. Other good examples of a failure to make use of those arguments (at least in any significant way) would be the main Marlovian books by Calvin Hoffman, A. D. Wraight and Louis Ule, and Daryl Pinksen's more recent prize-winning one.
 * Just as a matter of interest, whose opinion (whether Stratfordian or Marlovian) would be considered superior to mine on this particular subject? Is the fact that I have never had any great desire to see my opinions in print really that damaging to their credibility? Also, please remember that I included that synthetic edit as an economical way of avoiding the need for a special sub-paragraph disassociating Marlovians from each of the items I mentioned in the list you asked for. Peter Farey 81.100.116.3 (talk) 12:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The problem is that, lacking a RS as defined by WP:RS, which technically can be read with WP:fringe to deny all citations from non-mainstream sources on this argument, one could (I won't of course, but reviewing experts might) wipe out much of the entry on Marlowe because it is a synthetic paragraph, written by an insider/outsider that fails to meet the strict tests of wikipedia. It's a technical problem. Tom and I, at least, are trying to ensure this version of the page fits to a tee those criteria, in order to satisfy future reviewers who will grade the article.Nishidani (talk) 13:01, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, I do realise that. I have done the very best I can, both here and in the main article, to provide the interested reader with the most accurate and reliable information about the Marlovian theory that can be given. If the strict Wikipedian rules are unable to cope with this, so be it. Peter Farey. 81.100.116.3 (talk) 14:11, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I've gone for the strict wikipedia approach, Peter. I'd like to thank you for the edits you did today, finessing my revision, and the comprehension you've shown throughout, in a very collaborative spirit, for the technical difficulties rigourists like Tom and myself have with sourcing to websites, however fascinating, set up by non-academic researchers. I might say that I have profited from several pages on your site, and regret that a link, so far, cannot be conserved, except in the backpages, directing the curious to it, esp. the one on the contradictions in orthodox accounts.
 * That's OK, you're only editing a Wikipedia entry, not the World Wide Web! I like the Rowse quote you found, by the way. One point, though. How does a link to a list of highly reputable sources figure in your approach? The one I am thinking of is on the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society page at http://marloweshakespeare.org/MarloweScholarship.html, and might even help you in finding something relevant? Peter Farey 213.81.122.207 (talk) 11:57, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
 * P.S. What are "backpages"? Peter Farey 213.81.122.207 (talk) 13:19, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
 * By backpages I meant 'earlier versions' of the wikipage, accessible in the 'view history' column, as the page was before I had to edit out the ref to the International Marlowe-Shakespeare page.
 * I think scholars have examined the Marlovian lit., they just don't talk much about it explicitly, much as they don't talk about the far more irrational deVerean/Baconian theories. Nicholl, Riggs and Honan all write of the Deptford business with a wariness about the incongruencies in the official reports (as I note in my edit on molasses from Honan) that probably reflects in part their familiarity with the Marlovian position.
 * Whilst Honan, bless him, is certainly aware of the Marlovian position on this, as is reflected in the small amendment I have just made to the Marlowe section, "a wariness about the incongruencies in the official reports", as you suggest, shows not the slightest evidence of any awareness of how Marlovians would explain them. That both Nicholl and Bate have certainly been made very much aware of the Marlovian argument is completely unknowable from whatever either of them has written about it. As for Shapiro, he certainly hasn't a clue about just what our argument is!
 * It's just that, as with the other hypotheses, there is no evidence external to literary texts for the theory after 1593. The conventions of scholarship are that historical inferences, especially a chain of them that are drawn from works published over 2 decades, cannot substitute for the independent archival proof required to document what must remain otherwise a counterfactual hypothesis.
 * The technical problem was, if this goes up for review, all sorts of arguments could break out over whether webpages are reliable sources or not. Tom and I agreed to go only for sources with academic or mainstream press imprints on this subject to avoid the forseeable bunfights precisely on this issue.
 * Well good for you and Tom. It just seems to me that unless you have a reason to believe that the collection of quotations presented on that site are in any way less worthy than any you have managed to find, you must leave yourselves (and those all-powerful reviewers lurking in the background) open to accusations of bias.
 * I think, Peter, that you ignore the constraints we are labouring under. Tom I suppose, and certainly myself, disagree on quite a few things, as I expect you will have occasion to see when he does his own re-editing of the version I have just completed. But we share a commitment to work within the highest criteria for quality pages set forth in wikipedia's guidelines. It is not a matter of bias, though we all have that. Most of the SAQ history is riddled with pure fantasy of the most bizarre kind, as I think you yourself will allow, and while I personally think the Marlovian case as you set it forth suffers least from the methodological problems that rack Baconism and Oxfordianism, these latter versions dominate historical discourse, and we have had to work to get predominantly that into perspective. What I personally like about Marlovians is that they are motivated by appreciation of an outstanding genius, like Shakespeare, of humble origins, focus of the aesthetic similarities, and do not rave on about those coxcombs born with a silver spoon in their gobs while putting down the capabilities of blokes from the sticks or backblocks. There is no snobbism there. Personally I think that of all of these 65 wild hypotheses, the Marlovian is by far the least objectionable (apart from C Hoffmann's treatment). Webster's note is not at all a bad conjecture. It's just that there is no historical evidence for your theory, whereas there is for Shakespeare. You have conjectures, but history can't rest on conjectural inferences.Nishidani (talk) 13:26, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay I rechecked through all the quotes. The majority come long before Eliot's time. The only one that says more or less what your original edit says is from the first literary work of the poet Charles Norton, whom I only know of through his biography of Ezra Pound. The quotations from Greenblatt, Bloom, Honan and other modern scholars are wholly unembarrassing and unobjectionable, because, as I'm sure you'll know through Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, all great poets struggle to find their own voice by first mastering, imitation and then breaking out from the poet-predecesor they most admire. To say that Shakespeare was deeply influenced by Marlowe is a truism, as it is a truism to remark that Sophocles was deeply influenced by Aeschylus, Virgil by Apollonius and Lucretius, Horace by Callimachus, Marlowe by Ovid, Keats and Hopkins by Shakespeare etc.etc. Influence is not identity. Marlowe did not write comedy. Shakespeare was an exquisite master of the genre.Nishidani (talk) 14:00, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I vaguely remembered some possible help from Eliot's essay on Marlowe in the Sacred Wood last night and reread it after decades. It had the Rowsian conditional clause I suspected, but takes a different lines:
 * "'as often with the Elizabethan dramatists, there are lines in Marlowe, besides the many lines that Shakespeare adapted, that might have been written by either . . .But the direction in which Marlowe's verse might have moved, had he not 'dyed swearing,' is quite un-Shakespearean, is toward this intense and serious and indubitably great poetry.."
 * this, and many other examples could be adduced,
 * "Many other"? I challenged Tom on that one recently, and am still waiting. I'm sorry, but until some more examples are forthcoming T.S.Eliot does seem to me to have been pretty much on his own concerning the relationship of Marlowe's works to those of Shakespeare.
 * No not all all. Honan in his Marlowe bio, for example, thinks the influence reciprocal. Nishidani (talk) 13:26, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
 * makes the section generalizations difficult, though on the Marlowe website you give a lot of authoritative quotes to substantiate the point made there. The way round the impasse is simply to edit in here the scholarly references listed there.
 * Sounds good to me. Do you have any in mind?
 * Technically, the prose of wiki should paraphrase a reliable academic source. All that is needed is to compare the points made, or the points you as an editor would wish to make here, with similar points cited from the academic literature on that page, and shift the citation source here in a note. Easy as a poop in bed, chum!Nishidani (talk) 13:26, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
 * It sounds, I know, censorious to exclude websites, but I think no one is going to trouble their use on the proper Marlovian theory wiki page, where I think they can be justified.
 * Music to my ears. As long as that survives, and readers can find out there as much as they want to know about what we nutcases believe, I'm really only too happy to cooperate with you on creating this acceptably Wikipedian entry.
 * (An afterthought. That second part of Eliot's comment (The Sacred Wood (1920) Methuen 1983 p.94) is ungrammatical.'Might have moved' is conditional, and therefore 'is' is wrong, and should therefore be 'would probably have turned out to be quite un-Shakespearean'. Also, earlier (p.88) he wrote: 'It is pertinent, at least to remark that Marlowe's "rhetoric"is not, or not characteristically, Shakespeare's rhetoric; that Marlowe's rhetoric consists in a pretty simple huffe-snuffe bombast, while Shakespeare's is more exactly a vice of style, a tortured perverse ingenuity of images which dissipates instead of concentrating the imagination, and which may be due in part to influences by which Marlowe was untouched'. He thought Surrey a bigger influence on Shakespeare than Marlowe. Actually, Eliot on Shakespeare is just working out his own neurotic relation to tradition and not too coherent.
 * As I said, T.S.Eliot does seem to have been pretty much on his own. Peter Farey 213.81.122.207 (talk) 13:02, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I've done my piece of the overhaul, and when Tom gets round to editing, he will probably revise it radically. So nothing here is stabilized.Nishidani (talk) 14:00, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I might add that I was wondering, today, while updating the candidate list at the bottom of the page, why no one seems to have taken into consideration the candidacy of the mysterious John Eliot, author of that remarkable minor masterpiece, Ortho-epia Gallica, which Shakespeare uses in Henry V. After all he disappears from history in 1593, almost contemporaneously with Marlowe? Nishidani (talk) 12:56, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Review
There is a lot of repetition. I will occasionally intervene over the next week to try to put thematic order in and patch back the dispersed passages that deal with the same themes, or repeat the same arguments, so they can be précised into just one statement for each point.

The first paragraph, 'Arguments against Shakespeare's authorship' should summarise the general points that are then dealt with in some detail under specific headings. I have rewritten it to conform to this order.Nishidani (talk) 10:27, 15 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, a lot of the arguments ostensibly against Shakespeare are actually arguments for a candidate. All that needs to be in the candidate section. Also I noticed, Nishidani, that you are counter arguing in the 'Arguments against Shakespeare's authorship' section. To avoid repetition, I think we should limit the text to the topic. The counter arguments belong in the section that follows. We're also going to have to avoid such terms as "supposed", etc. A simple bald recitation of the anti-Strat theories is all that is called for (and is often a devastatingly effective rebuttal). Otherwise, we run into POV problems.Tom Reedy (talk) 14:12, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually I hadn't finished - barely started - to rearrange. Family bothers and emergencies took me away from continuing, and will stop me from working consistently on this reordering for a day or two forseeably.Nishidani (talk) 15:00, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Notes section for future reviewers, if any are willing to help. Some thoughts
Okay. I've done my review. Some points.

(1) Given the immense difficulties encountered in co-editing the one Shakespeare Authorship Question, and the lamentable state in which it languished Science Apologist asked the two parties to work on a version that would merge two pages. This was set up Talk:Shakespeare authorship question/sandbox draft, but the same problems recurred. Smatprt, in a conflict restored the version he prefers and on the same day, April 26, set up a Talk:Shakespeare authorship question/sandbox draft2 for Tom Reedy and myself to work elsewhere on the same proposal. Since then he has simply tweaked with 47 minor edits his preferred version, which is a slight adjustment to the older version, mainly consisting in excisions of half of the original material. I have done about 750 edits, and Tom will review the result from his perspective.

(2) The key problems arise from a clash of perspectives between User:Smatprt and ourselves. He subscribes to Oxfordianism, the belief that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare, and edits to push or defend that perspectives. Tom Reedy and myself subscribe to the orthodox perspective of tradition and scholarship, which affirms what Elizabethan contemporaries of Shakespeare said: Shakespeare wrote almost all the plays ascribed to him.

(3)For mainstream scholarship, the authorship theories are a form of popular delusion, branded as slightly lunatic, having nothing to do with scholarship. From a mainstream perspective they come under conspiracy theories, pseudohistory and negationism, and fall under WP:fringe in that they refuse to accept the verdict of three centuries of scholarship, and the documentary record itself. For Oxfordians and others, their theories are legitimate queries into an issue they regard as unresolved, and therefore constitute a 'minority' (WP:Minority view).

(4) In terms of Wikipedia policy, it can't be a minority view, since there are no academic works with as University imprint, written by recognized authorities on Shakespeare, which recognize, formally and substantially, the theories propounded.

(5) Tom Reedy and myself have agreed to write our version according to the principles required by Wikipedia guidelines in their strongest form, which means excluding, except where necessity, once or twice, might require it, any recourse to websites, blogs and primary sources written by fringe theorists. We have also tried to exclude newspapers, which are partisan, and frequently too superficial to cover the field. This is quite a challenge, because scholarship, until recently, never wasted much ink in examining these theories, since they were considered too bizarre to be taken seriously. Some attention has been given, however, desultorily to the issue because promotional work through new media, is perceived to inflect popular opinion in a deleterious way, and scholars have therefore written books for the general public to clarify why they think these ideas are non-starters.

(6) Of the 65 candidates, only several have had a significant following historically. In the last few decades, Oxfordians have prevailed, though, again, no scholar of standing sees any merit in their case. This fact has created a major difficulty for editors, since Oxfordians, as is their right, edit the page. The problem is, the page is inescapably biased towards showcasing the elements of the theory they espouse, while ignoring the historically rich theories of Baconism, and other competing fringe perspectives. Oxfordians, though borrowing heavily from Baconism, are dismissive of it. Editors who see no merits, because they embrace the mainstream viewpoint of scholarship, in any of these theories, have troubole because they must negotiate virtually with only representatives of one school of speculation, who seem disinterested in the historical background of all other theories. Oxfordians are well-organized and have heavily invested in promoting their theory throughout the media, of which wikipedia is one.

(7) In citing the few books, like Diana Price's, which have a good imprint, and show signs of observing the barely minimal conditions of methodical presentation, the impression is given that the views are those of Diana Price. However 95% of the views she, and most other recent authors (Farina, Whalen, Ogburn, Bethell, Sobran etc.etc.) provide us with, are taken from, or rewritten, or reworked from a body of ideas already quite thoroughly worked out by the end of the 19th. and beginning of the 20th centuries. So attribution of a cliché to any of these authors is highly misleading and is a major blemish on the original page, and Smatprt's minor variation on it. Since no evidence at all has been forthcoming in 160 years of intensive archival research to give the slightest comfort to those embracing these speculations (and they admit this: it is all a matter of assumptions about what history should tell us, and inferences about what we should tell history when it falls short of our expectations), the arguments of 1880 are recycled endlessly from book to book, with almost no control on the primary sources. Technically, though it is invisible here, 99% of the arguments adduced could be cited from books written ca.1856-1910. Scholarship has moved on, massively. The fringe is anchored in the past. The variant page we have written, though not being able because of a lack of scholarly interest in the subject, to clarify this, has tried by careful use of language to de-authorize the elements of the theory. Best practice consists in not ascribing to a recent journalistic rehash an idea cropping up there which predates by a century the author responsible for recycling it. Most of Diana Price's work rehashes Georre Greenwood (1910) and Alden Brooks (1943) for example.

(8) There is a vast body of speculation running into several thousands books and articles, expounding the fringe view since 1856. The number of scholarly books on the phenomenon can be counted on the fingertips of two hands, and most of them ignore issues and talking points raised by the fringe. They do so because scholars think them either inconsequential or so evidently amateurish they do not require rebuttal. This puts editors in a difficult position. A straightforward exposition of the ideas, presented to the naive googling reader, would almost certainly mislead him or her into believing these ideas has some textual legitimacy in Elizabethan studies. They don't. But if one appends a brief notice on what scholarship has said on each point, the temptation of the fringe editor is then to come back with a reply to the mainstream criticism, and we end up with a spiral that is unreadable.

(9)For that reason I have given an exposition of the main points, at least in Oxfordian theory, followed by an indented paragraph or two with the substance of what mainstream scholars think.

(10) It looks long at 120k. Much of that is due to the templating effect. The text comes in, I think, at half of that(?). Yet some regard should be held for the fact that wikipedia in this, as in many other controversies little understood by the public, is the default source for the curious public, and a detailed page on all major issues seems to be justified, esp. given the high profile in the modern mass media the Oxfordian movement especially have selected as the best means of winning its case, since neither the law courts, nor scholarship, give them the recognition as serious scholars which they think their rightful due.

(11)The best way to see what is going on is to open three windows on the original, and two competing pages, once this version has been conclusively edited by Tom. Over to you, Tom, or whoever else cares to get this page into an order of comprehensive quality.Nishidani (talk) 15:04, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Template and problems
Check that for Bates in Garber, Kathman in Wells, and Nevalainen in the Cambridge History of the English Language. I think it is not clear that the blue-ink is the article, whereas the book, with the links and isbn are not linked.Nishidani (talk) 12:12, 27 May 2010 (UTC)


 * The authorlink for J. Dover Wilson in the references, does not work.?Nishidani (talk) 10:14, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Johnston is given as writing that the Jesuits wrote Shakespeare 1916. Wadsworth and Churchill cite this date. Schoenbaum and Emma Smith cite 1910. 6 can be misread as 1910, and I presume Schoenbaum's date is a misprint, but I can't manage to google Johnson's original on this. Nishidani (talk) 12:36, 3 June 2010 (UTC)


 * 1916 is the correct date. And Johnson is the author/petitioner. "First impression, April, 1916. An intervening petition made to the Circuit Court of Cook County, Ill., on March 9, 1916, for the right to be made a party in the trial of William Selig, complainant, vs. George Fabyan and others, in an effort to protect the petitioner's projected publication by proving that, instead of by Shakespeare or Bacon, the plays were written by the collaboration of certain Jesuits." Tom Reedy (talk) 23:55, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

I've been reading your and Nableezy's comments about the citation apparatus. Instead of a row of 3 or 4 ref numbers, I think one number for multiple refs looks better. IOW, like ref #2 instead of like #s 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9. What say you? Tom Reedy (talk) 23:41, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
 * However you want it to be is fine, there is one advantage to separating refs. If you use a reference multiple times we can used named references and not have to define it each time. But if you would rather have a single reference number go to multiple citations within that ref that is fine.  nableezy  - 00:08, 8 June 2010 (UTC)


 * While we surely will be using the same source throughout the article, I doubt that we'll use the same ref more than a few times. I think one superscripted number looks better than having that cigarette-ash goldfish turd trailing behind statements that are sourced multiply. To me, that appearance reeks of a wobbly statement, but I don't want to lose any of our references, either. Tom Reedy (talk) 01:26, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Fish turd? That sounds weird. I've handled a lot of fish, and snakes, in my day, while a fag dangled from my lips, but never seen anything solid enough there to warrant the image of a 'turd'. But I'm a piker on these technical things, get bogged down if I do struggle like a jerk to understand it all, and can't get hooked up by them, and so will leave the angles of sorting out the drag of the line for others to debait. Nishidani (talk) 07:31, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I knew I was straining the line, but I didn't foresee that you'd be reeling from the image. Have you never seen a fish swimming around in an aquarium with a segmented extrusion of shit dangling from his rear? Tom Reedy (talk) 12:47, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
 * A 'segmented extrusion', Tom? for pisces' poop? You're jumping out of the crap and into the feces, son. My impression is that, like some varieties of fish excrement, you'll end up on skid-roe (i.e. 'skidmarks'). Let's say stringy filaments of piscine poop. Readers of Joyce, not to speak of those who peep into the poop-hole afterwards, will remember that turds and merdes are characteristically solid, and it is my geometrical sense of a di-stink-ion between the solid and the acqueous which engendered, without any intention to offend either sex, the query over your idiom!Nishidani (talk) 13:28, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Now you're merely taking the piss! Or worse: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3600/3412058890_00fcd80cf7.jpg Tom Reedy (talk) 14:20, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I can outgoogle that! you will note the distinct difference between fishshit and a solid baby guppy, which however does not seem to worry the cannibal-coprophagous guppy mum here
 * As for taking the piss, it is a strict convention in Nableezy's streetsmart Chicagoan presence to avoid blandishments, like pissing in people's pockets.Nishidani (talk) 14:59, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Quotation marks &c
Need to be double. Also a semi-colon should lead into the next cite in the case of multiple cites within a ref. Tom Reedy (talk) 23:16, 8 June 2010 (UTC)


 * The Dobson refs need to be disambiguated to 2001a and 2001b. Tom Reedy (talk) 03:38, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Rethinking the arrangement of the article
Looking at the topic box, I think we might need to rearrange the first part closer to the original layout, like so:

I. Intro

II. Overview
 * A. Antistratfordian view (which is pretty much done--the first two grafs after the italicised note.
 * B. Stratfordian view (just 2-3 grafs)

III. Arguments and counter-arguments
 * A. Anti-strat arguments and rebuttals
 * 1. Education and literacy
 * 2. Monument, etc.
 * 3. Etc, etc.
 * B. Conspiracies
 * C. Methodologies

The rest of it the same as proposed at top of the page. But I'm not going to do any major rearranging before I edit the copy; I'll rearrange as I go along because I'm sure my mind will change some more. Tom Reedy (talk) 06:06, 13 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Nishidani, I saw where you experimentally moved the Strat graf from the Overview down to the beginning of the Strat argument. Do you think we should even have an overview section? If not, we could just jump right into the anti-Strat argument, using the overview antiStrat intro graf to lead it off with. The problem I see with that is the standards of evidence graf, which I think should be contiguous to a statement outling both positions in order to make the distinctions between the two views clearer, but I don't think it should be in the article lede. Tom Reedy (talk) 13:05, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Ascription /Theory
The various Baconian theory/Marlovian theory/Oxfordian theory pages are misnamed. I believe we should try to observe a distinction maintained in science, i.e. that in contradistinction to a hypothesis, which is an untested idea put forward to explain facts, theories are tested ideas that are generally considered to be true (Tim Flannery). Even hypothesis is a concession, for strictly speaking, these alternative ideas are not testable, since to test them, evidence is required. There is no evidence, only conjectures about the absence of evidence, and the falseness of documents that are normally the basis for theories.

A second point is 'ascribed to' 'ascription'/'attributed to' 'attribution. Like the word 'Stratfordian' this is a loaded word in all contexts where attribution does not specifically refer to works whose authorship status is anonymous or contested by scholarship. Scholarship does not attribute Hamlet to Shakespeare, or Lear to Shakespeare, or the Folio to Shakespeare. Write this anywhere in a work of scholarship and you would be laughed out of court, or the quad. Scholars practice attribution studies, when discussing whether a work not ascribed to Shakespeare, was then claimed to be his (Edward 111), or when a work published under his name appears not to have been written by him (Locrine, etc.) Perhaps a curt note to this effect is required. Our used of 'traditionally ascribed/attributed to' Shakespeare is, as with 'Stratfordian' a concession to terminology privileged by the fringe. It does not reflect academic usage.Nishidani (talk) 13:55, 20 June 2010 (UTC)


 * All this may be and probably is true, but this topic is generally described as such and conforms to the fringe theory definition (which BTW includes a disclaimer to your point). Let's get the article in shape and argue about fine distinctions later. Since this is an encyclopedia article aimed at the general reader, insisting upon what could be seen as hair-splitting technicalities—especially with the loaded language—would be construed as POV. Tom Reedy (talk) 14:44, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
 * So the works of Shakespeare in all wiki articles are the works ascribed/attributed to Shakespeare? Don't worry about wasting time answering. But it is not POV. As with Stratfordian, 'ascription'/attribution' is the fringe term. In the good old days of Karl Kraus or Orwell one didn't let the markeplace get away with this kind of infiltrative abuse of language. In any case, there are more serious things to do. Like watching Italy vs NZealand on the boob tube.Nishidani (talk) 14:58, 20 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I understand your point. Nobody says "I can hardly wait to read the new Bernie Gunther novel, attributed to Philip Kerr", but this article concerns attribution and so should be granted licence to use the term. The difference in this article and the Emmerich article is that this is all about attribution; the other is not. Tom Reedy (talk) 05:49, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Fair enough. I only hope it's clear that 'attribution' in these contexts is a mainstream concession to fringe theorist jargon, much like 'Stratfordian'. Nishidani (talk) 10:41, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Note:
Instead of deleting the text I'm cannibalising, I'm just pushing it down the page to be used as ore and will delete it later. Tom Reedy (talk) 03:04, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Suggestions for shortening the second part of the lead. 244 versus 272
Though at times attracting a good deal of public attention, the hypothesis remains essentially without support among Shakespeare scholars, who mostly disregard it as a fringe theory, and accept that William Shakespeare was the primary author of the canon. All but a few of those who have investigated the various alternative authorship theories deny their validity.

Promoters of the various authorship theories mainly assert that their candidates are more suited in terms of the education that comes from a blue blood background,, and that William Shakespeare lacked the education, aristocratic sensibility, and familiarity with court-life they detect in the works from which they construct their respective profiles of the ‘true’ Shakespeare.

Mainstream Shakespeare scholars say that biographical interpretations of literature are invalid for attributing authorship, and that the evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship — title pages, the testimony of his contemporaries and official records — is the same as for any other author of the time. No such supporting evidence exists for any other candidate, and no one questioned Shakespeare’s authorship during his lifetime or for centuries after his death.

Despite the absence of evidence acceptable to mainstream scholars, a relatively small but highly visible and diverse assortment of supporters, including some prominent public figures, are confident that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote the works. They campaign assiduously to gain public acceptance of the authorship question as a legitimate field of academic inquiry and to promote various candidates through publications, organizations, online discussion groups and conferences.


 * Aw shit, Nishidani. Let's plug on to the end and take a look at making changes afterward. I don't have time to compare the two right now and 30 words more or less is not going to make that much difference. Tom Reedy (talk) 14:29, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I just like to make life hard for other editors. Several unnecessary words exchanged in Harbin in 1905 turned out to be responsible for the Russian defeat at Tannenberg in 1914, and Karl Kraus blamed careless journalism for the bombing of Shanghai in 1934! Nishidani (talk) 15:15, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Not to mention all the trouble caused by the majestic touch of fountain being misprinted for mountain. Tom Reedy (talk) 21:28, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Aw shit! Now I'm going to have to cope all morning with dislocated associations running through my mind of the type, Der Brunnenberg/The Magic Fountain and O mons Bandusiae. I hope no one tells me the Essaies of Étienne de La Boétie's pal were written by the versifying fablist Jean de la Montaigne. Another problem of misattribution. . .Nishidani (talk) 07:25, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Hope and Holston ref
We need to purge Hope, Warren; Holston, Kim (2009), The Shakespeare controversy: an analysis of the authorship theories, McFarland, ISBN 978-0-786-43917-1; They are Oxfordians and as such are not RS. here is a review of it. Tom Reedy (talk) 01:50, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
 * By all means. It's a laughing stock.Nishidani (talk) 08:59, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Portrait
To my mind, a slightly larger Shakespeare, and smaller candidates, with the number of candidate portraits increased to 8 Mary Herbert, Henry Neville, Emilia Lanier, and Queen Elizabeth (two women in to avoid the fascist-chauvinist phallocentric bias here: there's no portrait of Dyer, who should be one of the male candidates), encircling the Droeshout, would be better.Nishidani (talk) 09:13, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, I've been thinking along the same lines, and I've been experimenting. Tom Reedy (talk) 14:56, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Obiter dictum transferred here from draft page
This article is biased

I have the same view of this article as I have of the sandbox1 draft (see my Comments at end of it). Are these two authors competing twins separated at birth, destined to fight for the Shakespeare Authorship crown? To be specific, the author of this article seems not to be in command of the up-to-date arguments for each candidate, has taken no trouble to find out, and even if he had seems disinclined to discuss them. RewlandUmmer (talk) 20:28, 19 August 2010 (UTC)


 * The section about the candidates has yet to be re-drafted. At the moment the history section is being evaluated and rewritten, and there are a few loose ends further up the page, which may or may not be included.
 * Any constructive editing is certainly welcome; this was not supposed to be a two-man project, although it has ended up that way. The ultimate charge is to replace the current SAQ article as well as the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship. Whether the other articles will be replaced and whether one article will be comprehensive enough remains to be determined. Tom Reedy (talk) 12:32, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

1958-62
Tom, There seems to be a sudden peak, if you graph publications, in technical or academic surveys and dismissals of the movement, coinciding with a radical drop in the output of the anti-Shakespearean school (which did nothing of note publication-wise from the time of these works down to Ogburn Junior in the 1980s, which, as Shapiro notes, revived the game, lost academically, by exploiting TV. I.e. appealing over the heads of academe to the uninformed public.) One could add to the list two important articles
 * Louis B.Wright, ‘The Anti-Shakespeare Industry and the Growth of Cults,’ in Virginia Quarterly Review, XXV (1959) 289-303
 * Giles E. Dawson, ‘The Anti-Shakespearean Theories’ Encyclopedia Britannica, XX (1960-),457-458

I can't recall offhand if a secondary source like Shapiro, or anyone else, makes the connection, or observation. But if one exists, it could be used to make the point.

A last point. I thought that 1957-62 would be better to allow William F Friedman and Mrs Friedman's devastating The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined, Cambridge 1957, to be registered as part of the turn in the Zeitgeist.Nishidani (talk) 10:43, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

William Jaggard
Tom, Re Allardyce Nicoll in the TLS. The note has it that a reply by William Jaggard followed. I've been worried at this since the first edit, but now in review, wonder if it can be checked in the TLS to see if it is a pseudonym for someone. After all 'William Jaggard' was an Elizabethan printer of Shakespeare and this looks too coincidental.Nishidani (talk) 14:47, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
 * No, this Jaggard was a bibliographer active during the late 19th-early 20th century. He compiled the volume, Shakespeare Bibliography: A Dictionary of Every Known Issue of the Writings of Our National Poet and of Recorded Opinion Thereon in the English Language, Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Press (1911). The name was a coincidence but IIRC he tried to prove he was a descendant of the FF publisher. It's a bit like Julius Caesar, the English jurist. It was Jaggard who pointed out that the geography was wrong in the Wilmot materiel. You can read the article here. I've got the subsequent commentary around here someplace. Tom Reedy (talk) 02:06, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Down to the wire
Nishidani, I had to lay off most of the day, but I think we can get the history section in summary style in a day or two. I'm also think that Marlowe needs some work, but the trouble with him is that the argument gets pretty vague once you get past the fake death, because in effect the entire thing is based on "what Marlowe would have been if he not been killed, so let's play like he wasn't killed, and look! Sure enough, his development is exactly how we thought it would go!" Not much to go on, and it shows in the vagueness of their theory.

I agree all the digging can be done in one subsection. Schoenbaum talks about how anti-Strats seem fascinated with conspiracies, digging up graves, and seances, and that might make a good lede-in. It's on p. 440 when he talks about recurring commonalities of anti-Strats (which he calls psychopathology, but then he wrote before the Age of Psychopathology in which we now live): "The heretic's revulsion against the provincial and lowly; his exaltation of his hero (and, through identification, himself) by furnishing him with an aristocratic, even royal, pedigree; his paranoid structures of thought, embracing the classic paraphernalia of persecution: secrets, curses, conspiracies; the compulsion to dig in churches, castles, river beds and tombs; the auto-hypnosis, spirit visitations, and other hallucinatory phenoma...." Tom Reedy (talk) 05:12, 28 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Layabout!! Okay, I gather you'd prefer the 'Trials of Shakespeare' in the history section and not as a separate unit. So I'll start reintegrating that today. (b) There's blessed little on Marlowe for a natural reason. It's all in the fake death, as you say. Weìre agred that the digging section should remain a separate unit. I'll put in Schoenbaum, checking it against my copy. I'd like Dobson's note also on the history section, re the fact that this is very much an American preoccupation, historically. It is not only fringe, but rooted in the peculiarities of American popular culture and advocacy, and this after all is a global encyclopedia. To woik, then.Nishidani (talk) 09:42, 28 October 2010 (UTC)


 * The idea that it is rooted in American culture is a myth promulgated by the Brits, mainly, who see it as another vulgar appropriation of Brit culture by the colonists. Coleridge and Carlisle were the first to prise Shakespeare's tombstone, and although Hart was the first to openly sneer at the drunken poacher from Stratford, earlier Brits suggested it and Jameson was the first to publish in a respectable journal. In fact, the first Baconian was William Henry Smith, who beat Bacon into print by a few months and was accused of plagiarising her ideas, to which he replied that he had for decades been mulling it over. Yes, the Americans brought new ideas and energy to the heresy, but the Brits and the continentals were certainly with them, and the first Bacon society was British. Greenwood was a Brit; Looney was a Brit. So IMO the idea that it was an American phenomenon at heart is mistaken and really a minor point, since it sheds no light at all on it and could be construed as POV.
 * To me the important part to chronicle is the transition from the anti-Strat simulacrum of scholarly method to the use of public relations strategy beginning in the 1980s. After the onslaught of academic refutations in the 1950s and 60s, anti-Stratfordism was declining until they started using mock trials and its attendant publicity and the new media of TV and the Internet. Academics, who had prematurely congratulated themselves on their earlier job well done, stopped paying attention and never caught up, as Shapiro makes clear. The great attraction to anti-Stratfordism is its romanticism: secret identities, great conspiracies, digging up graves--it's a great comic-book entertainment custom-made for today's culture. The only thing missing is Shakespeare as a vampire, but I feel sure we'll soon be seeing that at the cineplex. Nobody ever went broke feeding corn-fed bullshit fantasy to the world; we're hungry for distraction and meaning and Shakespeare as a blind is a very attractive story. The fact that's it's all fantasy is really its most attractive feature. Tom Reedy (talk) 14:27, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh boy, I might take you down the wire to arbitration on this! A humongous thread is the least I can lash you with. On these articles the American side includes (1)Ignatius Donnelly (2)Orville Ward Owen (3) Wilbur Gleason Zeigler (4) Hart (5)Elizabeth Wells Gallup (6) Delia Bacon (7)(Ralph E. Emerson) (8) (Nathaniel Hawthorn) (9) Mark Twain (10) Richard Tuthill (11) Colonel George Fabyan (12) Archie Webster (13) Walter Conrad Arensberg (14)Mrs Maria Bauer (15)Charles Wisner Barrell (16) Alden Brooks (17) Dorothy Charlton (18) Charlton Ogburn Sr (19)Charlton Ogburn Jr.(20) Charlie Chaplin (21) Calvin Hoffman (22)William Plumer Fowler (23) PBS Frontline (24) Atlantic Monthly (25) Marty Hyatt (26) Bill Boyle (27) Nina Green (28) Mark Alexander (29) Lynne Kositsky (30) Tom Bethell (31) William Niederkorn (32) Brief Chronicles (33) New York Times (34) Diana Price (35) Roger Stritmatter (36) Paul Streitz (37) John Michell (38) Mike Rubbo (39) Mark Anderson (40)Joseph Sobran (41) Richard Whalen (42) Michael Delahoyde (43) Kim Holston (44) Warren Hope (45) Richard Malim, as sources or vehicles through which this argument has been developed.


 * You must have missed the word "rooted". And who the hell is Ralph E. Emerson? Is he the kind on The Simpson?And Nathanial Hawthorn was no anti-Strat. I tell you who was, though: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.. And Charles Chaplain was a Brit. Tom Reedy (talk) 21:00, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I do miss rooted . It means f***ed in a dialect I have some passing familiarity in. I mentioned Waldo Em and Nath Hawth as figures who helped Delia Bacon get her research underway, just as PBS and the Atlantic and the NYTs helped Oxfordians. Okay you got me clean on Chaplin, I'd forgotten he'd never taken out naturalization. The figures still prove my point, and I might report you to administration if you persist in not taking everything I say as law. Nishidani (talk) 22:06, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Contrariwise, in terms of the Pommie contingent (1)Jameson (2)W.H. Smith (3)George Greenwood (4) Thomas J. Looney (5) B M Ward (6) Percy Allen (7)Roderick Eagle (8) A.D.Wraight (9) William Leahy (10)Charles Beauclerk are mentioned. Your own historical timeline undermines your argument, and, one might add, the advocacy effect has only alarmed American scholars, since the major historians and academic critics of the movement are almost all 'septics', Wadsworth, the Friedmans, Matus, Shapiro, Kathman, Nelson, Elliott and Valenza, Crinkley. There is, I admit, a snobby tone of complacent anglocentric hauteur ('hands off, chaps. This is our lad, and our emerald isle' in Dobson's point, but I think Wadsworth noted several hundred articles and books had been published by the late 1880s, most of them in the US, and the general thrust of Dobson's observation, minus its tone, strikes me as correct.Nishidani (talk) 16:36, 28 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I might add that I was introduced to the SAQ in 1980 at the London National Gallery whilst standing in front of a painting of a castle connected in some way with the Earl of Derby. A tall fellow with bony wrist bones extruding from his sleeves and a manic gleam in his eye informed me that Stanley was the true author of the works of Shakespeare, and as I tried to slowly back away he continued to regale me with what I considered to be the most nonsense I'd listened to since Ronald Reagan's acceptance speech. After that it was almost two decades before I heard of it again. Tom Reedy (talk) 15:06, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The Ancient Mariner reborn as Uriah Heep redivivus, two literary incarnations in one spectral encounter. My mother's aunt back in the 1920s taught her, on such occasions, to gently humour the person, inveigle their convictions with an empathetic smile and generous ear, perhaps offer them a cup of tea, or a snorter of the real stuff, until, the stranger's poetic afflatus is exhausted, and you pop the one twee question which explodes the whole balloon. Many of her anecdotes illustrated the technique. I've yet to master it, but you might take note. You're better a quicker study than I.Nishidani (talk) 16:45, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
 * For the record, I first began to really study this question in 1998, when a chance comment before a Nina Green protegé got me into a debate as extenuating as these threads, with both.Nishidani (talk) 16:49, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Down to the wire 2
You can see where I'm going. I've got some spaces between sections that need blending or deleting, but I gotta hit the sack. Hopefully we'll get most of it done tomorrow. Tom Reedy (talk) 05:03, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm tempted to revert everything and make you wake up from your nightmares to a new day full of a real nightmare! No, that's fine by me. I'll go over the whole page as time allows.Nishidani (talk) 06:02, 29 October 2010 (UTC)


 * 'a Pylian': Nestor was from Pulos of course, hence 'one of Pylos'. It's pretty 'clumsy', and evidently the epithet was chosen purely on metrical grounds. It would be worth checking, just out of pure curiosity's sake, the use of 'Pulius' in late Latin, or Elizabethan Latin, to designate Nestor. Has anyone done that? In any case, a classicist like Peter Levy (p.343) just put 'Nestor for wisdom' and I think that the way to go, with 'Pylian' in brackets. It's hair-splitting but pilus means 'hair' in classical Latin.Nishidani (talk) 11:23, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Tense?
OK, I was halfway down when I realised you had changed the tense from the past to the historical present. Which is it? What does Wikipedia policy prefer? I'm gonna work on the section further down and we can agree on tense later. Tom Reedy (talk) 21:12, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I saw you had introduced the historic present in your comprehensive review. I had used the simple past. Seeing that you'd left parts in the past tense (understandable gven the work load in here), I went and made the usage consistent, following your lead. I'm indifferent to the issue, and just seek coherence ('The splendor of it. It all coheres!', was I think how EP put it).
 * In short, IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!!!, and I'm just a janitor, cleanen up round'ere (nice lilt to that line, by the way).
 * That's been intense hectic work, Tom, seriously. Thanks
 * Yours lazily Nishidani (talk) 10:18, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Well I think we probably need to use past tense in order not to throw the reviewers off, although I like present myself because of the immediacy it lends to liven up the narrative. Tom Reedy (talk) 11:30, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay, Hillary, I'd do the Tensing, and then we can let this E-ver-rest.Nishidani (talk) 14:13, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Problems
I see you reverted me on this: as academics attacked their methodology as unscholarly and their conclusions as ridiculous.'

As my edit summary put it, 3 'as's' in one sentence looks asinine, or asinthree. Worth reconsidering.Nishidani (talk) 14:21, 30 October 2010 (UTC)


 * What happened is that I was editing off-page to avoid edit conflicts and didn't see your edits--just cut and pasted in my edit from the external page. I'll change it back, but it'll have to be tomorrow. A bit too tuckered out at the moment. Tom Reedy (talk) 03:51, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
 * No sweat. We got all the time in the world, and I'm a true believer in the Mayan calender!Nishidani (talk) 08:37, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Done
I'm essentially done. We need to go through and delete from the bib all the sources we're not using. I'll comb through the Shapiro quotes to insert the US page numbers. It also wants copyediting, but I think we need fresher eyes than ours on the material. If it gets moved to the mainspace I'll campaign for a GA project and review, which should help immeasurably. Other editors need to chime in and improve the article, and we'll have to walk a fine line between watching for POV issues while avoiding WP:OWN problems. Maybe just step back completely? But I'm getting ahead of myself. Tom Reedy (talk) 18:06, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
 * You've 'broken the back of it' with that long haul. I suppose as resident janitor I should do the bibliograèhy checking.
 * You're done, we're both done in, and like John Donne and his wife, might be 'undone'. I reckon it's in shape enough to get the thorough review promised once we'd filled our remit, which I think we have. Thanks Tom-thumbs up! Nishidani (talk) 18:22, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

It'll take a while
to finish the bibliographical control. Some notes here

Dobson 2001 in the template, but two items Dobson 2001 in the biblography, we have to distinguish them in the template and refs.Nishidani (talk) 21:22, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

(b)Altrocchi 2003 p.19 no ref in bibliography

(c)Ogburn and Ogburn are I think templated in text but not in bibliography. Not needed in either since we have Wadsworth. Check

(d)^ Potts 2002, p. 154 in text note but not in bibliography

(e)note 197 ^ Ross (refers to Kathman and Ross in bib but not clear.

(f) I've gone through the whole page checking refs to bibliography, once. Must certainly have missed a few things of course, or fucked up somewhere. I've cut quite a few books from the biblio. The above represents the remaining problems but I can't type anymore as drooping eyeballs are playing tinckly on the keyboard.Nishidani (talk) 23:13, 31 October 2010 (UTC)


 * We've got it down, last word, 15,000 bytes in the last few days, so at least that's an improvement.Nishidani (talk) 23:16, 31 October 2010 (UTC)


 * OOkay I was sleeping when I did that. Fine way to spend one's birthday.

I've removed tons of refs no longer useful. I am reluctant to remove Pressly, because it should refer to Ashbourne and Wisner Barrell. I'm sure that's an oversight or slip, Tom. The Ashbourne controversy was significant for the history-Nishidani (talk) 11:50, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

I removed because the note on him has been elided to compress to max. I think that note was quite important, but I'll leave it to your general judgement, as you're the expert.Nishidani (talk) 18:07, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

I've checked the text, searching it for name+date while comparing results with a download of the bibliography and trimmed out anything I couldn't find a textual correspondence for. That's done. All I need do now is doublecheck, by clicking on every ref link in the text from top to bottom, to make sure the ref and the bibliography item come up regularly. Will do this by tonight, I hope.Nishidani (talk) 08:32, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I've rewritten and reinstated the Schmucker material, but after restoring it to the bib took it back out again since it's not cited. I swapped it for the American origin material to keep the length (and reader boredom) minimised. I don't see how it's all that important, for the reasons I rehearsed aboue.
 * I don't know why the Ashbourne portrait is important to the SAQ history, except to demonstrate that the whole thing revolves around irrelevancies. Say it was an overpainted portrait of Oxford; how would that be evidence of his authorship? It's no evidence for Hammersley's authorship, which it should be if the Oxfordian logic is applied. Such is the vapidity of their reasoning demonstrated, an abyss that I fear is unbridgeable. Tom Reedy (talk) 21:40, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Schmucker's in Shapiro, who makes the argument, doesn't he, that the great irony of the whole subsequent history of doubts about Shakespeare is basically contained in what Schmucker wrote, though he was inventing these doubts only to show the absurdity of them?
 * I thought that a pretty acute point. But it can go into the History of the SAQ dispute article if that's still around. Ashbourne portrait got great publicity at the time, and was hosted by Scientific American. Still on both points, I've no objections on the removal. We have to consider succinctness and various criteria, esp. that of not boring folks, (any where near the degree we've been bored by actually reading the background on this subject!). Nishidani (talk) 22:14, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
 * No, I meant I took his book out of the bib. I left the material in the article. I think it's a nice touch. The Ashbourne can go in the Oxfordian article when we get around to that. It's not SAQ generic enough for this article. Tom Reedy (talk) 23:31, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

For reviewing editors
We might, if a request to this effect comes through, provide reviewing editors and admins with a shortlist of the precise protocols from wiki policy which we agreed to use in rewriting the old page, in order to clarify preemptively any doubts. Some things like the weighting and sequencing of sections, for example, are as they are because of our reading of WP:fringe, and WP:Undue. Given the huge confusion and mass of fringe theory sources, most of them not qualifying as RS for anything but their own positions, we have tried to describe the phenomena comprehensively as it has been described in the, by now, extensive scholarly literature on the authorship question. That was particularly difficult, but one effect has been to ensure a precise synopsis of the leading ideas and issues, without readability being compromised by endless to-and-froing on marginal data that are considered so improbable they never get any attention. Unless this approach had been adopted, one would inevitably have ended up with a 300 kb page, like the SAQ3 version that was compiled by User:Smatprt, full of bizarre obscurities. My expectation is that whatever details are omitted can be surveyed, and reported, on the linked or subpages, like Oxfordian theory, or if it is decided, on a subpage in which all the major theories are covered. But that's not our call.Nishidani (talk) 08:42, 2 November 2010 (UTC)