Christie Waldman

I read Shapiro's Shakespeare and the Jews recently. It was reissued from 1997 in 2016. He is a true scholar. Compared to journalist Winkler's book, his Contested Will is far better. Unlike Winkler, he gives equal time to the Baconian and Oxfordian histories. And he makes reference to SirBacon.org as well as to Brian McClinton's book, The Shakespeare Conspiracy: 400 Years of Myth and Deceit. In contrast, Winkler somehow manages to allude to Barry Clarke's 2019 book, Francis Bacon's Contribution to Shakespeare, without mentioning his name. Shapiro says interesting things like, just about the only kind of writing Bacon did not try his hand at was playwriting. He plainly states he believes the Stratford man wrote Shakespeare, but he is entitled to his opinion. He gives the full story on Delia in Contested Will. It is tragic how Putnam's backed out on their contract to publish her manuscript in four installments, after only publishing the first installment. Her manuscript was entrusted to Emerson's care and it disappeared. There was no copy. She had to rewrite the whole book. I thought Shapiro's portrayal of Delia was sensitive and fair. I know he does not address our evidence in the depth we would like. I have found his book, Contested Will, to be useful, though, I would have to say.

That's probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. Thank you, Eric.

Thank you so much, A. Phoenix, for going to the trouble of providing all these good resources.

Yann, we thank you for reading everything here in English. If I had to read everything in French, I could not be here.

I like that. And this is poetry: Circumstantial evidence is that "not based on actual personal knowledge or observation of the facts in controversy, but of other facts from which deductions are drawn, showing indirectly the facts sought to be proved. The proof of certain facts and circumstances in a given case from jury may infer other connected facts which usually and reasonable follow according to the common experience of mankind. Evidence of facts or circumstances from which the existence or nonexistence of fact in issue may be inferred. Inferences drawn from facts proved." Black's Law Dictionary. In other words, we don't have anyone with personal knowledge we can put on the witness stand and question. Do we have a smoking gun? We have the Shakespeare play fragment manuscript which Maureen Ward-Gandy gave her professional forensic opinion that it was in Bacon's own handwriting. Well, I could go on and on, ad infinitum, with what we have. We have acrostics. Historically, It was not uncommon to prove authorship of a literary work by acrostic. I gave an example in my book of a French work, Le Pelerinage de l'ame (The Book of the Pylgremage of the Sowle, by Guilliame de DeGuileville, established only by acrostic (p. 66). (translated 1413, first published by William Caxton in 1483. Check out this book, it has gorgeous illustrations from Egerton MS 615. Edited by Kathleen Cust (London, 1859). Hathitrust, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015053684802. The section in my book on the "Four Daughters of God" and the tapestry that was once on display at Hampton Court depicting them: Mercy, Truth, Justice, and Peace." (my book, p. 62, fn 8, citing Hope Traver, The Four Daughters of God, a Study (Bryn Mawr, 1907), p. 163, n. 15. (Her 1925 work is The Four Daughters of God, a Mirror.) In one of her papers, I remember Sophie Weeks talking about Bacon's method of working, how he doesn't express his whole thought on a topic in one place in his writings, but scatters it around among his various works. My take on this (without looking up and re-reading Weeks' article) was that he seems to lead us around from one work to another to get the whole thought, with clues. He is leading us on a treasure hunt. Bacon named one writing Filum labyrinthum, an allusion to Ariadne's thread that helped Theseus escape from the labyrinth after he killed the minotaur. Bacon includes the story in his Wisdom of the Ancients (as you know). Tapestry, tapster. The play fragment that was found in binder's waste has been called the "tapster play" because it is an analogue to the tapster scene in Shakespeare's play, The First Part of Henry the Fourth. We can argue the "totality of the circumstances." One fact alone might not be enough to shift the balance on the scales for an open-minded person, but take all the facts together and see what you have. Two quotations I like: Many literary critics seem to think that an hypothesis about obscure and remote questions of history can be refuted by a simple demand for the production of more evidence than in fact exists.—But the true test of an hypothesis, if it cannot be shewn to conflict with known truths, is the number of facts that it correlates, and explains. —Francis MacDonald Cornford, The Origins of Attic Comedy (London: E. Arnold, 1914), 220. (quoted from my paper, "If Bacon is Shakespeare, What Questions Does That Answer?" this website, 11/27/2020. And: "The implication of a material fact is tantamount to a conclusion of law." --J. H. Baker, ch 12, "Law Making," An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th ed. 202 (London: Butterworths, 1990), quoted in my book, Francis Bacon's Hidden Hand, 32). (J. H. Baker, a British legal historian, is, however, on record, elsewhere, as a Stratfordian.) A material fact is one essential to the case, necessary to determine the issue, without which it cannot be supported. Its proof would establish or refute one of essential elements of the case (Black's Law Dictionary). "Tantamount" means "just as good as, equivalent to, to amount to as much as." Whether the statements of Heminge, Condell, and Jonson made in the First Folio can be taken at face value is a question of material fact. And so we try to show the evidence is not credible, that there are reasons for not taking it at face value. I saw this on the internet: the truth welcomes questions. A lie does not like to be challenged (stated by Janice Dean, Instagram. I do not know anything more.). Bacon: "A prudent question is, as it were, one half of wisdom." De Augmentis, Spedding 1:635.

Hi, Light-of-Truth, Our best evidence so far, I think, is the Shakespeare play fragment manuscript fragment that the late Maureen Ward-Gandy, a highly respected British forensic expert analyzed and compared to the writing of other Elizabethans and determined that it was written in Francis Bacon's own handwriting. That has not been refuted. Only ignored. No one else has a manuscript. Everyone says, oh, someday, maybe we will find a manuscript in Shakespeare's own handwriting. Well, we have it. The Strats want to claim that Shaxpere wrote Hand D in the "Play of Sir Thomas More." The Shaxpere handwriting examples are too small of a sampling, making them worthless for proving authorship. But based on other factors, there is some agreement that it was likely Shakespeare's (I mean the real Shakespeare's). Didn't A Phoenix write about Bacon and Hand D? I apologize for having to ask. People who have never read the beautiful language of Francis Bacon have no business saying that his style was different from Shakespeare's. Read Francis Bacon because he will enrich your life, whether he was Shakespeare or not, I say! (Well, okay, being honest, I never read Bacon JUST to read Bacon. But he was such a good person and such a good writer, and he overcame so much. He's really inspirational.) And then, there are those who do not want the truth to come out., those whose minds are made up, those who just don't care, those who don't care enough to do the work. It isn't for everyone. And of course, the law in Shakespeare is huge. This is also about the voice of the minority not being lost in the crowd. That is an important democratic principle. We may never change the consensus opinion if the consensus cannot be woke up enough to care enough to make a change. I don't think this is a thing that should ever be decided by any fallible human beings in any kind of tribunal. But we keep trying, don't we, to put it all together so that other people can see it as clearly as we do. Because it is important to us. And I think we are making progress with our mountains of evidence, slowly but surely. A lot of that is due to A. Phoenix.

Maybe when Meres said Oxford was the "best for comedy" this is what he meant.

I just discovered this fun and enlightening read on the SirBacon website, Jerome Harner's "Why I am not an Oxfordian" from April 2001. It puts everything in a different perspective for me. https://sirbacon.org/harneroxford.htm.

"Sheik" is Arabic for king. Pronounced "Shayk or Sheek." A female would be "Shaykah." according to vocabulary dot com. Shaykah sphere would be Queen of the World, or Queen of the Universe, names for the Virgin Queen Mary. I have read that Bacon was one of the few people most responsible for promoting the idea that his mother Queen Elizabeth was a Virgin Queen. (Is that an idea that was alluded to in the Shakespeare works? I have never looked. There is also the concept Astraea (Francis Yates' book. I have it, have not read it all. A. Phoenix, you have written about Astraea, haven't you?) What do you all think? No one things "queen" when they see "Shayk." They think "king." No one expects the pseudonym to have to do with his mother. But one of his goals, I think, was to bring glory to her reign, which he surely did, with the Shakespeare works. There are so many ways that "Shakespeare" as a pseudonym would work. We may not have thought of all of them yet. An extremely personal meaning, you would expect it to be well hidden. Certainly he could always point to the "cover" explanation, Pallas Athena shaking her spear at ignorance. What do you all think?

I have always believed Twain on this because he always sounded so sincere. Maybe not about his borrowing from Greenwood, though. Because Twain did not have the knowledge of law. And he pretty much admitted he "borrowed" from Greenwood. But he did give him some credit initially with his footnote. It was in the year before Twain died. I'd be willing to cut him a little slack.

Chantel Tottoli, 8/5/2020. Mark Twain's Mind Waves is pretty good reading. I see there are other articles. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/08/25/mark-twains-mind-waves/

Robert Dudley died in 1588. History magazine has a 1580's timeline. Aug. 1 1589 Henri III of France was stabbed and died the next day. https://www.history-magazine.com/1580stimeline.html.

Maybe it really was telepathy!

I am the wrong person to ask about Rosicrucian or Freemason hints, for I would not know what to look for. I had not heard of that book, "Shakespeare's America, America's America." But, this morning, I was looking at Contested Will (2010) by James Shapiro (p. 138), trying to find a particular reference, and he gave details Bristol left out. Bristol (in 198) said Greenwood had just let the matter go, but Shapiro said the newspapers reported the matter of his plagiarism of Greenwood and it became a minor scandal. Ultimately, Twain was required to insert an extra page in his book with a copyright notice stating "Chapter VIII, Shakespeare as a Lawyer, is taken from The Shakespeare Problem Restated by George G. Greenwood." Bristol did not mention this. He only mentioned crediting the chapter and book, without the author's name, in the footnote in the original publication. Shapiro reports that Twain wrote in a private letter to John Macy (who married Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher) who had given him Greenwood's book that he had "stolen meat enough from it to stuff yards and yards of sausage-gut in my vast autobiography and make it look like my own .... really the gut is mine." How could he even say such a thing? But he said it in a private letter. His copy of Greenwood's book even shows Twain's margin notations to start lifting text on p. 371 and stop 16 pages later (Shapiro, 138). But, he never said it was his own work. He did have the footnote with the chapter and book reference, even though it left off Greenwood's name. I have read before, though, about other incidences where he was accused of plagiarism and protested that he had not done so intentionally, that he couldn't explain how it happened; it must have been by telepathy! I think Oliver Wendell Holmes was another victim of his "plagiarism." I love Mark Twain, but he was only human, and this was in 1909, with him dying in April 1910. These are the only sources I have read on this. In past reading, I have disagreed with Shapiro on various points he makes in Contested Will, but he does have a 3-page biographical essay on sources he consulted on Twain, and a lot of those sources are related to Is Shakespeare Dead? (pp. 300-302).

For those interested, I have now read this article on JSTOR, "Sir George Greenwood's Marginalia in the Folger Copy of Mark Twain's Is Shakespeare Dead?" by Michael D. Bristol in the Shakespeare Quarterly vol 49, no 4 (Winter, 1998), 411-416. An independent reader (like me) could read it once without subscription or payment. After that, the little arrow would not go in reverse so I could not read the story again that way, but I was able to create a folder and save it, and read it again from the folder. I did not try to print or download. Sometimes you can do those things there. Chapter 8 of Twain's Is Shakespeare Dead? book ("Shakespeare as a Lawyer") is actually ("borrowed") Greenwood's chapter 13 from his The Shakespeare Problem Restated. (same chapter heading I assume). In his book, Twain included a footnote that said "From chapter 13 of The Shakespeare Problem Restated, but he did not give Greenwood's name or publication info. It wasn't "from" it, though; it was it. And he had not asked Greenwood for permission, according to Greenwood's marginal note in his own copy of Twain's book (now in the Folger). This was in 1909 and Twain died the next year, April 21, 1910, with Halley's comet (April 9 to April 20). Greenwood let it go. He was busy responding to Beeching and Wallace in their ongoing battle about Shakespeare authorship. Twain and Greenwood were on the same side. I thought Bristol was hard on Twain. In Twain's defense, perhaps the publisher is to blame. Twain was older and may have been failing health-wise. No, he did not do it as he should have, but he did credit the chapter and book. I don't think he was trying to fool anyone and take credit for something he did not write. Anyway, that's what the article was about. It's an interesting "footnote," not much more, in my opinion.