Hollywood Dishonors the Bard - NYTimes.com

Hollywood Dishonors the Bard

Whether "Anonymous" is credible has nothing to do with whether it is entertaining, but for the sake of accuracy:

Edward de Vere died in 1604. Several of Shakespeare's plays refer to events that happened after that date.

The structure of Shakespeare's plays changed in 1609 to accommodate the company's move to an indoor theater that year. (They needed predictable breaks in order to replace and relight candles.) De Vere could not have made that adaptation, given that he was, well, pushing up the daisies. The plays produced after 1608 were, therefore, actually written after 1608, when de Vere was taking a dirt nap.

The arguments often made in favor of The Earl of Oxford (de Vere) actually work against him. His genius, rather than making him rather more qualified to have written the plays than humble Will Shakespeare, actually makes him an unlikely candidate. What most of us do not understand is that the person who wrote the plays, while unquestionably a brilliant wordsmith and an astute observer of humanity, was not an erudite or highly educated man. The author we know as Shakespeare made many errors in his understanding of history and the pronunciation of ancient Greek and Latin names. (We know that because of how he tried to cobble the names into his iambic pentameter.) These errors are perfectly consistent with the poorly educated son of a merchant, but utterly inconsistent with de Vere. (For example, would the supposed great genius de Vere have shown ancient Greeks quoting Plato a thousand years before his birth?)

Those points, however, do not make for the most damning evidence.

Science has replaced the meaningless babble of speculation on this issue. The science of stylometrics has found that we all have distinctive styles of writing and speaking that evolve very slowly (if at all ) during our lifetimes. How often do we use certain words? How often do we modify adjectives with adverbs? How often do we use hyphens or subordinate clauses? How often do we begin words with un- or conclude them with -ment? How many commas do we insert per sentence?

The results of stylistic matching are not to be interpreted like DNA evidence, but rather like blood type matching, in that they could easily produce false positives, but not false negatives. In other words, if your profile or your blood type matches Shakespeare's, that does not prove you are he, but if your profile or blood type does not match his, it most certainly proves you are not said Bard.

Such studies cannot demonstrate that a wool-merchant's son named William Shakespeare wrote the plays (there's nothing meaningful to compare them to), but they can clearly establish who did NOT. The computer nerds have compared Shakespeare's style to the known writing styles of 30+ claimants, and have also analyzed some works of Shakespearean apocrypha. They were able to determine that none of the claimants could be the author of the plays, and that none of the apocrypha could have been written by the same person who authored (most of) the known plays.

They did arrive at some conclusions that may depart from the view you learned in school. A small number of Shakespeare's plays (although none of the great ones) appear to have had either a different author or a co-author. These facts may surprise you, but would not represent revelations to any scholar in these matters.

However, the key points germane to today's topic are summed up below:

"The claims of the Earl of Oxford and the other claimants we tested are astronomically improbable. Shakespeare and Oxford belong in different galaxies; the odds that either could have written the other’s work are far lower than the odds of their having been struck and killed by lightning."

Here is their complete report, if you're really into studying the numbers.

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Reader comment:

Hey Scoop, when last we talked I pointed out the oddity of Paris Hilton's Great-Grandpa trying to disinherit his kids in favor of the Catholic Church. This time I want to write a quick rebuttal to your quick case against de Vere. I'm working up a website stating the case for de Vere right now, but it still has a long way to go and needs major improvements in layout and presentation. You can find it at oxfordshakespeare.wordpress.com but don't post it as a link
because it's not really ready for primetime.

So here's the argument:

Hiho hiho! I'm one of the crazy people who thinks de Vere wrote Shakespeare and I wanted to set the record straight on your takedown of the theory.

First off let me state that "Anonymous" is rife with factual inaccuracies, screws up chronology tremendously, and that's even IF you accept the insane premise that Elizabeth was the mother of Essex, Southampton and de Vere himself. I belong to conservative, scholarly wing of "Oxfordianism", as de Vere advocates are generally called, and one of our main tenets is ejecting what are called the "Prince Tudor" and "Mother Elizabeth" theories. To put it bluntly we think that having so many Oxfordians believe that crap makes the rest of us look stupid.

So to your case against de Vere on Other Crap.

It is true that de Vere died in 1604, but none of the plays conventionally dated after 1604 contain any hard and fast references to events taking place after 1604. The typical cornerstone of this is that "The Tempest" refers to an essay by a man named Strachey describing his shipwreck on the island of Bermuda, leading to the contention that Prospero's magical island is Bermuda. This is with all due respect bunk. Firstly the events and language used in the Strachey narrative and their supposed commonality with events in the Tempest are tenuous at best. They match the descriptions of several shipwrecks in Endlish and elsewhere going back to the shipwreck of St. Paul in the "Acts of the Apostles". Secondly the text of the Tempest is pretty explicit that the play does not take place on Bermuda. Ariel is sent to get dew from the "still-vexed bermoothes" and states that he will "put a girdle round the Earth in twenty minutes". This means that even by magic it will take him 20 minutes to go around the world and get to Bermuda. (That is assuming the play refers to Bermuda and not a district in London called "the Bermudas") The play is obviously supposed to be set on the Aeolian Isles North of Sicily, either Vulcano or Stromboli, where one would logically be blown off course by a storm while sailing from Tunis to
Naples. These islands also contain features consonant with the island of the play, berries that can be distilled into a mild alcoholic beverage, volcanic brine pits and so on. They were classically the home of Aeolus the God of the Winds, who would be the man to see if you wanted to magically conjure up a Mediterranean storm.

As to the other post 1604 references, name 'em and I'll debunk 'em. The conventional chronology of the plays is more or less built on a house of cards. It was constructed by E.K. Chambers at the beginning of the 20th century, when he used the first recorded performances of the plays by the Lord Chamberlain's Men or the earliest publication of a version of them and internal evidence from the types of Blank Verse used to construct a rough sequence. To my knowledge the only incontrovertible topical allusion was in "Henry V", at the end of which the Chorus makes references to the short and disasterous campaign of Essex in Ireland. This marks not the FIRST
performance of Henry V, but only the date after which no further revisions were made. There is no empirical proof that "Shakespeare" wrote plays after 1609 that were more appropriate to the new stage of the King's Men, scholars have just assumed that he must have and read into the works that assumption, and quite naturally found what they were expecting.

Furthermore one can interpret the late publications in a way favorable to de Vere. The rate publication and assumed composition slowed from a blistering 4-5 plays a year in the 1590s to a snails pace of one play every 3-4 years afterwards. Many of the late plays published after 1604 were collaborations, something to be expected if the collaborator was finishing an unfinished play by the deceased master and rather odd for a comparatively young playwright who has retired at the height of his powers. Also, the 1609 publication of the Sonnets was dedicated to our "ever-living poet", a turn of phrase not normally ascribed to living writers.

The response to the suggestion that "Shakespeare" was not erudite can best be summarized with the phrase "What you talkin' about Willis?" "Shakespeare" had erudition out the wazoo. For one thing he was so familiar with Ovid that he made allusions to it naturally. (de Vere's uncle Arthur Golding was translating Ovid into English at the same time he was tutoring de Vere in Latin.) He wrote one scene in Henry V in perfectly idiomatic French and another partially in it. (The scene where Pistol captures a Frenchman is almost never performed.) As to cobbling Greek and Latin name pronunciation for Blank Verse he did the same thing for English words on some occasions. if I recall correctly. (Can't pull to mind an example just now.) Constantly used "ed" as a syllable and as a non-syllable at the end of a line as it suited him, that much is for
sure. He knew you could travel from Pisa to Padua by boat without rounding the Italian Penninsula. (You use the freakin' CANALS people!) He used complex legal metaphors. He also constantly used metaphors about the very aristocratic passtimes of hawking and hunting. The idea that "Shakespeare" was an uneducated rube is so ridiculous it doesn't even bear consideration.

As to Elliott and Valenza's old stylometric work... Well to put it frankly stylometrics is nowhere near the precise science it represents itself as. Look carefully at the procedures they used to match authors based on stylistic analysis. You see what they never bothered to do? A control! They never used their methods to divide a known author's work in half and prove that it could match the early work to the later work on stylistic analytical grounds. As an experiment back when I was in College an older Oxfordian colleague of mine tried to construct a stylometric program and fed into it the works of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. The program could not
correctly associate Jefferson's political writings with one of his recorded political speeches, and failed completely in identifying a strong pattern on Paine's works. This evidence is of course anecdotal and I cannot produce the source code of the stylometric program, but this should give you an idea of the potential unreliability of the technique.

Lastly I'll give you strongest piece of evidence that I know of that de Vere was the true author. Three words "Shakespeare" is credited with coining in the OED, and one that is not so listed in the OED but Shakespeare's usage does predate the first otherwise recorded usage in the OED, appeared in de Vere's letters or poems before they appeared in Shakespeare. These words are "bifold", "despairing", "disgraced", and "restoration". I have no idea why this isn't the lead off to every discussion on the de Vere-Shakespeare theory because it's the most solid piece of evidence we've got, insofar as I can tell.

For references on the word coinages and some other funny coincidences that provide the more circumstantial case, see this website for an opposing viewpoint (except inasmuch as it uses a picture supposedly of de Vere at the end that is actually one of his father John...):

I hope that this little essay and link will allow your readers to see the other side of the argument.

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Scoop's notes:

Some of those arguments seem extremely misleading to me, especially the etymology, which is based on an old edition of the OED which has since been upgraded radically. For example:

1. We now realize that "restoration" is actually an ancient word. The latest edition of OED includes two quotes from the 14th century, while Chaucer was still alive! "1390 Gower Conf. III. 23 Yit phisique of his conserve Makth many a restauracioun Unto his recreacioun. ...   1398 Trevisa Barth. De P.R. vi. xxi. (Tollem. MS.), Þerto nedeþ continuel restauration to restore what is wastid and spende."   

2. "Despairing" dates to Chaucer's youth!! From OED: "1375 Barbour Bruce iii. 194 Throw mekill disconforting Men fallis off in-to disparyng."

3. It means nothing that the word "disgraced" appears in de Vere's letters before Shakespeare's plays. It was a common word in the mid 16th century, not actually a Shakespearean neologism. The OED reports multiple uses in the 1550 and 60s, before Shakespeare was born, and when de Vere was in infancy and adolescence. De Vere was 14 years older than Shakespeare, so I assume de Vere was probably writing it when Shakespeare was only 5 years old and had not yet learned to write - and that every other literate adult in England (all seven of them) was as well.

4. You may be right on "bifold." That may have been coined by de Vere, but if he was Shakespeare, he later decided to employ a completely different spelling in the play (by-fould or bi-fold) than he used in his letter (byfolde), and he decided that he needed to add a hyphen. That doesn't mean much, of course, because there was no standardized spelling then, but it sure presents no compelling case that they were the same guy.

Moving on ...

No other argument really matters because the statistical evidence in the most current version of the stylistic report is unquestionable, as I see it. Debunking the general concept of stylistics, or various previous studies, doesn't debunk the most recent version of the cited study, which stands publicly for all to inspect. As I read the tables, I conclude that there is absolutely no possibility that the words authored by de Vere could have been written by the same person who wrote Shakespeare's plays. The authors have actually understated the summary in the report because one of the professors is a math professor who is bound to express reservations, because statisticians are never really allowed to have 100% confidence about anything. But the realistic possibility is, in fact, about the same as attributing Sir Isaac Newton's career output to Adam Sandler. "The odds that Shakespeare could have produced Oxford’s test patterns by chance are between 400,000 to 1.5 quadrillion times worse than the odds for Shakespeare’s own most discrepant block" of text. In fact, de Vere's authorship is probably less likely that the theory that I authored Shakespeare's plays in 1970 and used my powers of mind control to make everyone think they existed before then.

Also, I always need to point out to people that Shakespeare actually was a poorly-educated man in many ways, and that is not something which can be dismissed with his knowledge of Latin. As the Wikipedia article notes, "His classical allusions rely on the Elizabethan grammar school curriculum. The curriculum began with William Lily's Latin grammar Rudimenta Grammatices and progressed to Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, all of whom are quoted and echoed in the Shakespearean canon. Almost unique among his peers, Shakespeare's plays are full of phrases from grammar school texts and pedagogy, together with caricatures of schoolmasters. Lily's Grammar is referred to in a number of plays, including Titus Andronicus (4.10), The Taming of the Shrew (1.1), Love's Labour's Lost (5.1), Twelfth Night (2.3), and The Merry Wives of Windsor (4.1)."

Shakespeare, whoever he was, was a man with a great gift. He was possibly the greatest wordsmith mankind has ever known, and an astute observer of the human condition. Because he was such a genius in some regards, we tend to think of him as a scholar as well. He was not. Creative genius and scholarship often have nothing to do with one another. Shakespeare was especially clueless about antiquity. I'll leave Titus Andronicus off the table for several reasons, but otherwise note that whoever wrote those plays thought that characters in the Trojan War could refer to Aristotle, and that the ancient Romans had clocks. And we know how he thought some ancient names were pronounced because he used them multiple times and always tried to fit them into his meter the same way - the wrong way. Who could have made such mistakes? What kind of man are we looking for? Well, I'm no expert on the school systems of Elizabethan England, but I'd guess those are the sorts of things that could come from a merchant's son with a grammar school education, but probably not from a learned man who knew how to pronounce Latin and Greek names.

That is probably still true today. The man on the street would probably not know whether Aristotle came before or after the Trojan War, and would not know when clocks first appeared, or how to pronounce "Leonidas," for example, but a scholar would.

(Hey, I don't know that last one either.)

By the way, I don't know if the guy who wrote the plays was Will of Stratford, the wool-merchant's kid. I see some evidence for that in the records of that time, but I also understand that we know almost nothing about that man.

But I haven't seen a credible alternative.

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SIDEBAR:

By the way, the earl of Oxford wrote this:

Helpe gods, helpe, saintes, helpe sprites and powers, that in the heaven doo dwell,

Helpe ye that are to waile aye woent, ye howling hounds of hell;

Helpe man, helpe beastes, helpe birds and wormes, that on the earth doth toile,

Helpe fishe, helpe foule, that flockes and feedes upon the salte sea soil;

Helpe eccho that in ayre dooth flee, shrill voices to resound,

To waile this losse of my good name, as of these greefes the ground.

What follows is just my opinion of course, but that is some seriously bad writing! (Ignore the spelling. There were no spelling rules back then.)

More to the point, it's also ungrammatical in the subject/verb agreement. Are there cases where Shakespeare's work includes similar solecisms? That would certainly strengthen Oxford's case, would it not?