#42897: Kristine Harley — 10/06  at  10:55 AM
All right--I wanted to be a scientist, but I ended up majoring in English, and this is my turf.

"Neville spoke French, unlike Shakespeare, and some scenes of Henry V are written in French." Well, that's convincing, I must say! A real genius came up with that one.

“Neville was familiar with details of court life in a way Shakespeare was not.” Another argument, made at another website, asserts that Neville traveled in Europe, whereas Shakespeare did not.

I guess that’s why our author Neville made so many basic geographical errors as appear in the Shakespeare canon!

I could go on and on, but right now I need to eat a cheeseburger and read a book by Eric Hoffer (author and longshoreman) to wash away the officious snobbery of asserting that someone who wasn’t at court and wasn’t highly educated and well-traveled could not have written plays! (After all, Kafka wrote Amerika without seeing our fair country--or DID HE? [Sarcasm alert.])

I love Rubenstein’s photo, by the way, that accompanies the "Dept of History and Welsh History" website. It looks like someone's soon-to-be ex-husband who has just stopped complaining to his mother. I would dust off the digital camera and try again, if I were he.

#42898: — 10/06  at  11:05 AM
Aha, _that_ Rubinstein. Thanks PZ, I did not make the connection. Now I can go on believing that Shakespeares work is the work of Shakespeare, in true ockhamian spirit.

#42916: Sean D. Hurley — 10/06  at  11:57 AM
Let me guess: Shakespeare was the work of intelligent design!

Which, in this case, is true...

#42919: — 10/06  at  12:07 PM
Well, at least they're not still claiming that Christopher Marlowe inexplicably wrote under both his name and Shakespeare's and continued to write as Shakespeare after Marlowe's murder.

I do love the implication of all of these "theories" that the people of London wouldn't be intimately aware of the details of every court scandal. Hello? Ballads sung in the streets? Scurrilous broadsheets? You know, all the stuff that was so widely available that today's scholars use it to write about Tudor England? And yet the people at the time would have been oblivious to, say, the guy on the streetcorner singing the details?

#42929: — 10/06  at  12:52 PM
This is from the Timesarticle: They say that Neville, a rotund man nicknamed “Falstaff” by close friends, had the virtue — unlike Shakespeare, who lacked an appropriate background — of being an educated man of culture, a courtier and a well-travelled linguist.

So Shakespeare didn't have an appropriate background? Oh, my. I wonder why he didn't get his MFA. I find this line of 'argument' terribly depressing and completely specious. Shakespeare went to a grammar school at Stratford where his education would have been entirely in the Latin classics, and we see the signs of this education everywhere in his works. And, besides, there's no evidence of any particular familiarity with court life, especially foreign court life. And, besides, have the Rubensteins heard of something called "reading," a way of getting information about matters that you haven't directly experienced? It was quite common, even in the 16th century.

But there's no real point in getting into specifics, since this sort of "argument" is indeed exactly like the anti-evolutionist argument: find some minor (and probably specious flaw) in the theory you're attacking and counter it with suppositions infinitely less probable (i.e. a massive conspiracy to cover up for some aristocratic playwright).

#42939: — 10/06  at  01:39 PM
It hasn't been updated for a couple of years, but I still like the website http://www.shakespeareauthorship.com/ for a detailed discussion of the stereotypical "Shaksper couldn't have written Shakespeare's plays because..." arguments.

#42962: — 10/06  at  03:58 PM
I think that the funniest argument is that Shakespeare couln't have written his plays because he didn't have a university education. Frank Lloyd Write dropped out of university after a few months. Harry S Truman never attended university. Edison had such a difficult time in school, that almost all his education was from his mother at home. John Stuart Mill did not attend school at all. I'm sure I could find many more similar stories. Rubenstein seems to major in flogging dead horses.

#42964: — 10/06  at  04:00 PM
Wright, not write! (Smacks forehead with hand)

#42970: ACW — 10/06  at  04:55 PM
I incline to the theory that the plays of Shakespeare were written, not by Shakespeare, but by another writer of the same name.

#42989: — 10/06  at  07:35 PM
This is my turf, too: I'm a Renaissance Drama professor. Yes, really.

Frankly, this doesn't surprise me: the 'arguments' that Oxfordians/Baconians and other assorted wingnuts put forward to 'prove' that "Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays" are just badly thought out, weakly supported and poorly argued as the creationist wibble you spend your time dismantling. Like creationist wibble, the arguments are often convincing to people who only know a little about the area, and like creationist wibble, they distract people from the area of real interest, which is the plays themselves. And both are rooted in a contempt for scholarly practice; both fling accusations of closed-minded bigotry at the academic establishment in order to win points from people who don't know how scholarship works.

So it doesn't surprise me that this guy is fostering both forms of wibble on the world. All he heeds is a book explaining that the pyramids of Egypt were built by aliens, and he'll have a full hand.

#43015: — 10/07  at  09:54 AM
So, are there going to be stickers on textbooks of English too ?

Teach the controversy, I say !

#43062: — 10/07  at  03:39 PM
Oh, I imagine they'll get around to us too, eventually.

After all, 'controversy' is so much more fun and entertaining than, you know, doing experiments or research or (god forbid) actually *learning* anything about the subject.

#43109: — 10/07  at  10:30 PM
jrochest:
This is my turf, too: I'm a Renaissance Drama professor. Yes, really.

Wow... I had to fantasize about that for a minute.

"I'm an Engineering Manager" (ho hum)
or
"I'm a Renaissance Drama Professor". (her head turns and her eyes sparkle.)

#43232: — 10/09  at  01:19 PM
Valid theory or not, I think this new book of James and Rubinstein might be a good subject for a thesis. Does anyone have any interesting links to websites/books/articles on this matter? I'd like to gather as many of the pro's and con's I can before I start comparing
thanks!

#43252: — 10/09  at  04:55 PM
Prof. Rubinstein presents his argument for why Neville wrote Shakespeare's plays in truncated form - and let's face it, you would not want to read them in any more than truncated form - on the website of the Social Affairs Unit, ie where he presented hs arguments on evolution. Worth a read, to see how this Prof. Rubinstein manages to make a daft argument in quite divergent fields. On top of this Prof. Rubinstein seems all too willing to go off on subjects which are outside his area - he is an expert on UK wealth holding and UK and Australian Jewish history, but not Shakespeare,and as we all know, and as he admits, evolution. At least he has not written a book on Shakespeare. What surprises me is that Longman, a reputable academic publishers, is willing to put out crap like this about Shakespear/Neville.
Link to Rubinstein/Social Affairs Unit Shakespeare article:
Is Sir Henry Neville the true author of Shakespeare's plays? William D. Rubinstein discusses the Shakespeare "authorship question" and explains why he believes that Shakespeare's plays were really written by Sir Henry Neville

#43672: — 10/12  at  05:11 PM

"I'm a Renaissance Drama Professor". (her head turns and her eyes sparkle.)

Ah, but then you have to mark student papers.

#44070: — 10/15  at  04:15 PM
There's an article in Skeptic which puts forward several arguments for doubting Shakespeare's authorship. It's "More on Shakespeare's Authorship" by Diana Price. Can anybody comment on it?

#48500: — 11/12  at  04:04 PM
Before you get carried away on this thread, please note that the idea that Sir Henry Neville wrote Shakespeare was originated by an ex-English Lecturer named Brenda James. She researched her hypothesis for 7 years and had produced a draft of her book and shown it to colleagues before even getting involved with Rubinstein. As he is a 'specialist' in Modern History and appears to have written exhaustively on Jews and the Holocaust, a find James's choice of associate, curious. I think she would obviously have produced a better book if she had involved a proper medieval specialist and someone without a reputation as a self-appointed polymath. But then again, legitimate historians might have been too cautious; books on 'Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare' are normally produced by cranks. Actually, there appears to be some interesting circumstantial evidence for Neville, especially since there is no evidence of a contemporary(s) called William Shakespeare who wrote anything at all.