Why there is a Shakespeare Authorship Question
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- Опубликовано: 6 авг 2021
- Official selection to the 2021 Montreal Independent Film Festival and 2021 Chicago Indie Film Awards, "Best Short Documentary." In addition, "Why there is a Shakespeare Authorship Question" was a finalist in the Dubai Independent Film Festival and Paris International Short Festival, a semi-finalist in the Dallas Movie Awards, Roma Shorts and Tokyo Shorts.
Most academic experts state, "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, period!" They claim there is no Shakespeare Authorship Question. Keir Cutler, PhD explains how looking at recent publications and statements by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Oxford University, and their current theories on collaboration, one can demonstrate there is a question as to who wrote the works of Shakespeare. The First Folio clearly states there is one writer, but modern experts are pushing a half dozen writers working with William of Stratford. This contradiction exposes a huge inconsistency and contradiction in the so-called expert thinking.
Keir Cutler has been writing and performing self-penned works that question the traditional biography of Shakespeare since 2002. He has performed at Shakespeare's Globe in London, England, Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Toronto Public Library, as well as at theatre and fringe festivals across Canada and the US. His adaptation of Mark Twain's "Is Shakespeare Dead?" and his monologue, "Shakespeare Crackpot" are available on RUclips.
In 2014, the Orlando Sentinel wrote the following in a review of Keir's work, "one must admit that his arguments are breathtakingly convincing and will leave you scrambling for your history books to verify what you’ve just heard. That Cutler’s show provokes us and challenges our cherished assumptions is a credit not just to the genius of the works of Shakespeare, regardless of who penned them, but to Cutler’s command of his topic and his audience."
More information on Keir is available at www.keircutler.com
The lack of a literary paper trail combined with the six scrawled signatures combined with the Droeshout engraving having two left arms, combined with the Stratford Moniment [sic] combined with the original bust not being a writer combined with "look not on his picture, but his book" combined with "Avon" being Hampton Court combined with "Stay passenger..." combined with Vere's Geneva Bible combined with "our English Terence" combined with ""our ever-living poet" combined with Golding's unlikely translation of Metamorphoses combined with hundreds of other items of evidence indicating that the Stratford businessman is not the author and pointing to Vere, I am inclined to believe that Da Vinci did not learn about painting Mona Lisa nor Michelangelo learn how to sculpt David by sitting around in a pub yucking it up with the guys as Stratfordian entrepreneurs would have us believe.
There is an excellent paper trail.
1 A court case identifies Shakespeare of Stratford as Shakespeare of London,.
2 Two documents prove London Shakespeare was an actor.
i he is listed as such in Ben Jonson's published works'
ii He is referred to in the College of Arms as 'Shakespeare the player''.
3 The English Terence reference was in an epigram that makes it crystal clear that the poet knew that Shakespeare was both actor and writer.
4 Forget Hampton Court. Jonson wrote a prose memoir that made it quite clear that he knew Shakespeare wrote the plays:
"I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. “Sufflaminandus erat,”[2] as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said in the person of Cæsar, one speaking to him: “Cæsar, thou dost me wrong.” He replied: “Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause;[3] and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned."
5 There are several elegies that make it quite clear that they are talking about Shakespeare of Stratford, including one which mentions the date and place of his death. One mentions his 'Stratford Monument'. Another, by William Davenant, identifies the writer with Stratford upon Avon.
6 The Court Revels list 1604-5 lists several canonical works, and attributes them to Shakespeare.
It is truly hilarious that you cite da Vinci. He certainly DIDN'T sit around in a pub. He became an apprentice to an established artist, Andrea del Verrocchio. Just as Shakespeare did, joining the Globe as actor and learning his dramaturgy stage-craft first as actor, then as writer, with on the job training.
I don't know what the F you mean by 'the original bust not being the writer'. Maybe you could try writing in English. If you read Jonson's poem, it is a simple and unambiguous message: this is a good likeness. But the engraver could never capture his WIT therefore 'look not on his picture but his book'. Suggest you READ the bleeding thing, rather than cherry-picking a couple of lines. The monument identifies Shakespeare as writer, quite unambiguously.
If the Geneva bible shows a preponderance of quotes appearing in the Works you still have to prove that this isn't simply a bias towards the most popular and apposite verses of the time. Golding's translation was widely available, and had been through two editions. Anyone in London could have accessed it with no problem. Moreover Shakespeare's publisher (Stratford man Richard Field) had a copy of it in Latiln in his print-shop, along with several other source works of which he owned the copyright.
I ADORE the fact that you cite da Vinci, who began his career as an apprentice to another artist. Much as a playwright working with a theatre company could learn his trade on the job.
Never mind. Ignorance IS curable.
😂
@@vincentsmith5429 You left out the word "literary." And again, more juvenile insults from Stratfordian apologists. How unsurprising.
I really enjoy these videos by Keir Cutler. I come back and visit the "Shakespeare Authorship" videos periodically to see what is new. Keir Cutler's are my favorites. My mother introduced me to Shakespeare when I was 10 in 1959. One Christmas, she gave me the latest biography of Shakespeare. I was surprised that nearly all the biography was about the life and times of Shakespeare, not the man. Later, after reading “Alias Shakespeare", I became convinced that there was something up concerning authorship of the plays and poetry. Afterward, I spent many an hour arguing with my mother about the authorship. I never got her to budge. I gradually have concluded that the Duke of Oxford was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth to outline, and oversea the construction and writing of most if not all the plays. The sonnets and other poetry were likely his. This hypothesis provides a layer of protection they needed, and for the many Elizabethan writers involved.
Thank you for your kind words!
Minor correction; Edward DeVere was the 17th Earl of Oxford. He was not a duke. This title did not exist during Elizabethan times.
Reupload? Worth watching again!
Brendan Ward : Agreed.👍
Powerful video. A must see for anyone interested in Shakespeare
There was a team of writers
One key but too-rarely mentioned reason to believe a woman or women wrote some/all of the plays is that women had to hide behind a (male) pseudonym given that women were not permitted to write plays and have them publicly performed except as "closet" playwrights. The only truly balanced non-chauvinist conclusion is that a male and female "Shakespeare Salon" including de Vere, Mary Sidney, Amelia Bassano had some great fun covertly writing but probably not co-writing all of the plays. Actors, theatre owners and play commissioners would have attended those semi-clandestine Shakespeare salon sessions for initial read-throughs and as with movie screenplays minor or major changes would inevitably have been proposed by all involved.
Paul G
Also, if everyone knew this Stratford chap was actually Shakespeare, how could he write for example Richard II, where the King literally gives away his crown and not get arrested? It's honestly laughable.
Great to see a new upload on this topic apart from unending codes and other mind boggling themes…. Lord have mercy (minus the seat)
Codes are such a counter productive argument.
I believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. But who was Shakespeare?
Thank you. You’ve helped reawaken my involvement with this issue. I gave it up when I had to move to Pittsburgh.
Not a lot of interest here. I’m hoping to escape…and wake.
Your presentations are an excellent review for me, I hope an intriguing introduction for others.
Thanks, Tina. As the world death spirals towards various Armageddons, the Shakespeare Authorship Question is a welcome respite. Lol
Of course, it is much more convenient to suggest that many plays were not by Shakespeare in order to sanitise the glaring question of authorship, i.e that they were not written by the Stratford man in the first place, because that nulls the centuries of works written about Stratford man. When I did my undergrad at Cambridge, there was one thing that we were never to say out loud, and that is:
"I don't know", the shaming would follow on a most embarrassing scale. So, fabrication was more acceptable, but not knowing was not. So, imagine that suddenly Cambridge University has to concede that the whole institution was "in not knowing" for centuries, by promoting Stratford man as Shakespeare?
I think orthodox academia will have to transform radically or die, and become a museum, and it is their choice. I hope they read this comment.
When did you do your undergrad, if you don't mind me asking.
Thank you for this great and compelling content. I’ve only very recently become obsessed with the Shakespeare Authorship Question. Your arguments, while often very humorous, don’t stray from logic and bare facts. My introduction came through Alexander Waugh, who, though a staunch supporter of the question and ardent Oxfordian, seems to have sacrificed a lot of his own logical deduction in chasing out very strange information from the First Folio. The idea of Shakespeare being something of an anonymized brand and catch all for gentlemen poets and playwrights of the day makes a lot of sense when considering the broad scope of Shakespeare’s breadth of knowledge and reading. I’m inferring here as much as any existing Stratfordian, but it makes more sense for that knowledge to have come from a collective than a singular-and singularly unlikely-Warwickshire bumpkin. No offense to Warwickshire bumpkins of this or any other age.
Check out our channel to see Alexander's talk for the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable.
as a village idiot from warwickshire id be ever so proud to be called a bumpkin. it would be a real compliment, that it it would
I hope you get the point I'm making but before Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane in 1941 the person who got the credit for a film was the producer. For example, in 1939 Victor Fleming directed two humongous projects in the shape of Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz, but who has even heard of Fleming today?
Yes. It is possible Shakspere was the producer of the plays. Not the writer.
The title pages of many plays say they were "written by" William Shakespeare. In the dedications to Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare claims authorship. In the First Folio his fellow actors describe his writing process.
Regardless of what conclusions or opinions one has on this debate, it's faintly depressing that it's STILL such hard work to convince certain quarters that questions have every right to even be asked in the first place.
Keep up the good work, Keir :).
Thank you.
@@AHCouillard William Shakespeare was a pen name, and not a 'front man'. The coincidence of a living man with that name means nothing. I could be called Boris Johnson but it doesn't make me a prime minister.
It's always a good thing to ask questions and challenge the status quo. Now it's time to move on from suggesting that Shakespeare couldn't or didn't write the plays, and try to provide some actual evidence that someone else did. And by that I mean actual evidence that a particular person is a reasonable candidate. So far I have seen no such evidence, at all, for anyone. But if I'm wrong about that please let me know.
As Mark Twain said, "no amount of evidence will convince an idiot".
@@Grogster2007He doesn't even have the same name 😂
I have penned a poem or two
though most of them are dogs
hounding paths to love that's new
in mysts and rain and fogs
Me thinks I did speak poorly though
both time and time again
if I did not speak sweet to you
my long lost holy friend
while Shakespeare waits in fashion's tomb
and Marlow speaks behind
Just beyond the curtain
Le nome de Plume sublime
I would stoop to ape the bard
If it would bring her back
That girl that was my Isabel
In this twelfth Night of my lack
Thanks for this. You are one of the best to explain this issue in the popular vein. Another issue to popularize is the requirement of evidence and what constitutes evidence. The Strafordians always like to lurk in the vague shadows of maybe and suppose and could have.
Thank you and great point about Stratfordians. Because they are mainly literature buffs and not historians, they often relie on hearsay to prove their case.
@@keircutler One of the greatest art historians alive, Simon Schama, describes the Authorship Question as "a catastrophic failure of the imagination on the subject of imagination". We're snapshotting this discussion by the way, just to prove who prefers lurking in the dark
.
@ethelburga Shakespeare's work is far more than imagination. Any person anywhere might be born with Shakespeare’s imagination. But knowledge of multiple languages has nothing to do with imagination. And neither does the vast knowledge of multiple domains. Knowledge is learned, not imagined! There is no evidence the man from Stratford has any of this knowledge.
francis bacon shake spear has occult connotations
Have you ever tried to do a debate with people who thinks on the contrary? If yes what was the result?
The subject is too emotional for people to have a civil debate. Once someone decides on a position, they lose all reason and it becomes a religious conviction.
Does national pride has anything to do with this sour kind of reaction? Because, I don't understand.
As for me - if I was English - it would make no difference at all if the true author had been de Vere: he and Shakespeare were both English! So what difference does it make?
@@keircutler That's a "no" then.
@@triumphbobberbikerPeople want a writer who's not an aristocrat - it doesn't fit with the hero they want. Plus let's not forget the legacy of bardolatory. Shakespeare (at least who's often thought as such) was once literally painted as Jesus.
All this rationalism and actual historic research combined with critical thinking is starting to get on the high priests' nerves. This is made even more apparent by their shrill tone and snarkiness. They are standing on quicksand and they know it!
Edward De Vere was “William Shakespeare.”
I know, I know. How disconcerting it must be to those whose high and lofty perch lay threatened. Upon that molehill hill of university degrees it sits. A rage to those whom an affront is must so clearly be. That so little talent is bestowed compared to thee. A simple chap, a pleb of the most humble earth to whom so much light of providence has shone.
I have a question: Why some people get very angry when you ask them about Shakespeare Authorship Question? Several times I was chatting on social media with a few people about this subject and they got so offended and angry and called me stupid and imbecile and told me I shouldn't say such nonsense and I am not an expert so I have no right to comment on this subject! I don't understand why they insult a person who just asks a question?
Great question. I guess people get upset because deep down they know how weak the case for Shakspere from Stratford is. So if they browbeat you into submission, maybe you will never mention it again. It is very hypocritical, for everything else they will say it's important to question, but not for Shakespeare!
@@keircutler Let's cut to the chase here cos life is too short - 1. John Heminges,Henry condell and William Shakespeare are all mentioned in the same list as 'players' who receive red cloth for James 1st coronation.
2. These three guys are again linked in shakespeare's will where he bequeaths money to them 'and to my fellows John Heminge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell 26s 8d a piece'.
3. And guess what - they are once again all linked up in the Shakespeare first folio - they name him in the dedication as the writer of these plays "onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare, by humble offer of his playes."
Thus we conclude - the Stratford man IS William Shakespeare the playwright.
Link to the 'red cloth' shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/account-master-great-wardrobe-recording-issue-red-cloth-shakespeare-and-his
Link to the 'will' shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/william-shakespeares-last-will-and-testament-original-copy-including-three
Link to the 'dedication in the first folio' firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/book.html (image 8)
@@30piecesofsilver64 So no manuscripts, no journals, no letters, no handwriting at all except for six signatures that spell the name SHAKSPER. But somehow red cloth is proof that William Shaksper of Stratford spent 20 years in London writing under the name Shake-speare...
@@stevenhershkowitz2265None of any of that for your boy, either. Just a bunch of mediocre poems that nobody would have bothered publishing if their author weren't an earl.
And you keep forgetting Sir Thomas More. Or maybe you're just blind to it. When you see a sentence with the name of that play in it, do you just wonder why there's a big blank gap in the middle of it?
@@jeffmeade8643 Sir Thomas More? What is that?
👍 Thumbs up !
Old Will was the Front for a whole bunch of writers who were happy to remain anonymous. I doubt he ever wrote one word of any play. I will admit I am wrong when his manuscript is discovered.
No, you'll just deny that the manuscript is actually his. Three pages of the manuscript of the play Sir Thomas More are in Shakespeare's handwriting. What I don't get is that most of you claim Shakespeare was a front man. Having him copy plays into his own handwriting to maintain the ruse would seem like the thing to do. Yet you reject the preponderance of scholarship which says it's his handwriting. Why?
Oh, right! You don't want to admit that a well-off gentleman, groom extraordinary of the chamber to King James, as well as being an actor, living at the height of the Protestant Reformation and English Renaissance, could read and write.
@@jeffmeade8643 You forget to mention that when Will died no one cared, but seven years later he rose from the dead and ascended to the celestial pantheon of writers. I will admit he must have been a creative genius because he made up all that stuff and never owned a single book or taught his daughters to read what he had written. What a guy!
@@stephenjablonsky1941 They cared so little that they erected a monument to him within a couple of years which describes him as a great poet. Where is Ben Jonson's monument? Where is Christopher Marlowe's? Please direct me to the funerary monument for Thomas Middleton. Where is Edmund Spenser's monument? Nowhere until two decades after he died.
But Shakespeare got one right away.
@@stephenjablonsky1941 And how do you know he never owner a book? Does your will mention everything you own? How do you know he never taught his daughters to read? Is there some evidence of this?
@@jeffmeade8643 You will greatly benefit from some quality research, and, yes, my will mentions my books and scores, and everything else in my possession.
Odd isn't it that the fact that women had one major additional reason to hide their identities often strangely goes unmentioned: women were still not permitted to write plays in ostensibly enlightened and liberal Elizabethan England. By contrast the fact that women were not permitted to *act* in plays in English theatres is widely known and freely discussed.
Paul G
"Either one believes Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or there were an unknown number of collaborators" that's the pivotal canard here. Shakespeare authorship study is revealing hitherto unsuspected contributions by other Bankside playwrights as more sophisticated stylometric analysis is able to tackle smaller and smaller fragments. But the identical process has completely deflated the claims of alternative authors of the entire canon which have now moved along the authorship spectrum from the familiar territory of "preposterous" to their new home in the realms of "impossibility".
Yes there are parts of the early and late plays, and even Macbeth, which contain additions by other playwrights but it is both absurd and disingenuous to suggest that this has created new space for followers of The Earl of Oxford or Bacon to explore. The opposite has happened. Better stylometric analysis has reduced the probability of candidates to effective elimination.
The Shakespeare Authorship Question, where that implies the existence of potential alternative candidates for the whole canon (minus a couple of percent in collaborative additions), no longer exists. It is a parlour game for contrarians.
i don't quite understand, are you saying it's impossible that a single author wrote the entire shakespeare canon and that it had to have been a conglomerate?
@@FistfulOfGabagool no I'm saying that the improved techniques to identify contributions by dramatist other than Shakespeare mean that we can be more certain about their source. Where I take issue with Keir is where he implies that everything is up for grabs simply because we now recognise the presence of other author's work. It most certainly is not. In fact improved discrimination has ended the idea that there is a an alternative candidate waiting to assume his rightful ownership. Oxford's work is completely incompatible, for a example.
Yes, I am largely in agreement with you. I have never proposed an alternative author as the sole writer. My interest in the Authorship Question has always been against the Stratford man as sole or principal author. I think he was likely a front for the real authors.
@@keircutler You're free to redefine terms; but that's all you've done. The term "Shakespeare Authorship Question" as used by most people in the debate, such as it is, refers to the claim by a fantasist few that most or all of Shakespeare was written of one of several candidates who were not Shakespeare. This is the meaning of the term as used by the experts you claim to critique. Yours is a fallacy of equivocation.
@Mitchell Coffey Nonsense. The Shakespeare Authorship Question is exactly that.
Is there a question whether Shakespeare wrote the works. Period!
5:45 it doesn't say WRITTEN BY. david o. selznick's gone with the wind.
That's a valid point. It doesn't say written by. And the theory is that they were William's plays that he purchased for the Globe, so in that sense they were Williams Shakespeare's, but not written by.
I have no problem with any of this situation as the group centering around William Stanley who exclusively introduced Shakespeare’s plays and, as such, was the only person whom has been said ever came in contact with Shakespeare. The rest being silence.
Nobody ever visited Shakespeare in the massive off-limits Gatehouse, which was also the forbidden French embassy while he was advanced through three courts the Prince of Wales, the Queen and, finally, the King.
They all did it through WS , William Stanley.
If one objectively examines the available evidence, you have to conclude that William Shaksper (Shakespeare) did not write the works attributed the William Shakespeare.
What's your definition of "evidence"?
@@jeffmeade8643 "the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid." Also, the lack of evidence can be informative.
@@georgegrubbs2966 If that's the case, I've never seen any "evidence" that anyone besides Shakespeare of Stratford was the author of the works attributed to him. The loss of some evidence after 400 years seems reasonable, and doesn't detract from all the rest that remains.
@@jeffmeade8643 Evidently, you haven't been tracking the Shakespeare authorship question. Evidence abounds, both what's present and what's not present. This upcoming book (May 9) may clear up your doubts: Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies" by Elizabeth Winkler.
@@georgegrubbs2966 I've been following the SAQ for decades, and I have never seen a single piece of evidence -- as the world understands the term -- which declares that anyone besides Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the body of works attributed to him. Nor have I seen any gaps in the record which are inexplicable after four centuries. I have seen anti-shakespeareans try to intuit illiteracy from penmanship, mistranslate Latin, scramble text to "reveal" hidden codes, unscramble anagrams, and basically mangle history in an effort to make an argument for this candidate or that.
Winkler is just another in a long line of such people. Emilia Bassano Lanier was a published poet whose works were nothing at all like Shakespeare's. They were scrupulously pious, which is something that could never be said about Shakespeare's works. Maybe she was the Dark Lady, maybe not. She wasn't Shakespeare.
A clever way to demolish Bacon or De Vere as the writer.
No actually its a conformation of de Vere as the center of the Shakespeare phenomena---he was on a yearly retainer from the Queen to generate Historical plays ----for which he maintained a coterie of writers which ---at various times---- included most of the candidates mentioned.as possible co-authors of one or more of the Plays.
Almost totally agree. A clever way to demolish Bacon as the writer. Thank you.
Bacon...first illegitimate son of Elizabeth 1st.
The First Folio Is full of lies and its objective was to create a myth because the real author of the 36 plays preferred to go underground. It's difficult to believe that there were so many collaborators because most probably someone would have said something in this respect.
And Shakespeare's style Is One. There is one personality of the time who has not yet been considered and this is John Florio. He had an enourmous culture and knowledge and his influence is huge on WS plays, plots, settings, language and Italy. To have an objective analysis of Shakespeare's mystery, John Florio should be attentively studied and considered in the authorship debate. Thank you for your attention.
Actually, there is a whole book dedicated to the premise that John Florio was Shakespeare. "John Florio alias Shakespeare" by Lamberto Tassinari.