User:BenJonson

Greetings
and welcome to my page.

I'm a lifelong learner who teaches English and Humanities at an Urban University in the Eastern United States. I have a Masters Degree with honors in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where I studied, among others, with Marc Shell. While obtaining the PhD, I survived for eight years by working as a Housepainter. I've published over 16 articles in peer reviewed journals, including Review of English Studies, The Shakespeare Yearbook,  Notes and Queries, Critical Survey, Cahiers Élisabéthains, and The Rocky Mountain Review of Languages and Literature, University of Tennessee Law Review, and The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review. I debated Stanley Wells on the authorship question in the Washington Post. He has since seemed reluctant to cross swords again.

My heroes include J. Thomas Looney, Leslie Howard, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir George Greenwood, T.S. Elliot, George Orwell and John Stuart Mill.

Wise Words of T.S. Eliot

 * But on giving the matter a little attention, we perceive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences. Here, one would suppose, was a place for quiet co-operative labour. The critic, one would suppose, if he is to justify his existence, should endeavour to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks—tares to which we are all subject— and compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible, in the common pursuit of true judgment. When we find that quite the contrary prevails, we begin to suspect that the critic owes his livelihood to the violence and extremity of his opposition to other critics, or else to some trifling oddities of his own with which he contrives to season the opinions which men already hold, and which out of vanity or sloth they prefer to maintain. We are tempted to expel the lot. -- TS Eliot

These wise words were sent to me today -- what day, you ask? - today -- by Dr. Heward Wilkinson. Read them and weep at how little in our world has changed. Or else pretend not to understand them.

Current Projects 11-11
You may view my participation in this project here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Guild_of_Copy_Editors/Backlog_elimination_drives/November_2011

And Now a Quote from one of our Sponsors
Let it work,

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer

Hoist with his own petard. And ’t shall go hard,

But we will delve one yard below their mines,

And blow them at the moon. Oh, ’tis most sweet

When in one line two crafts directly meet.

My Work on the Web
I am primarily responsible for two websites,Shakespeare's Bible, and Shakespeares Tempest

I am the General Editor of Brief Chronicles, an interdisciplinary journal of early modern authorship studies.

Past Editing Projects
I seeded these pages:


 * George Greenwood
 * The Shakespeare Fellowship
 * Pasquill Cavaliero
 * Hershel Parker
 * Andrew Cairncross
 * Cahiers Élisabéthains
 * Charlton Ogburn
 * Angel Day
 * True Reportory
 * Decades of the New World
 * Hamlet Q1
 * Brief Chronicles
 * The Shakespeare Yearbook
 * Carole Chaski
 * Critical Survey (added 3-5-10, in fulfillment of promise past due to myself)
 * Famous Victories of Henry V
 * Lynne Kositsky
 * Biographical criticism
 * Charlton Greenwood Ogburn

And contributed actively, among others, to


 * Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare Authorship
 * Oxfordian theory - Parallels with Shakespeare's Plays
 * Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
 * William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby
 * Shakespeare Authorship
 * Oxfordian theory
 * The Tempest
 * Ur-Hamlet
 * William Jaggard
 * William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
 * George Gascoigne
 * Francis Meres
 * Palladis Tamia
 * Polonius
 * Thomas Underdowne
 * Queen Elizabeth's Men
 * Ida B. Wells
 * Delia Bacon
 * Thomas of Woodstock
 * John Dover Wilson
 * Thomas of Woodstock (play)
 * sources of Hamlet
 * Pimpernel Smith (film)
 * Leslie Howard (actor)
 * Anne Cecil
 * biographical fallacy
 * Bruce Edward Ivins