"Shakespeare" with an E - The new 2011 ebook edition of "Shakespeare" By Another Name

As noted previously on this blog, on the ShakesVere Facebook boards and elsewhere, "Shakespeare" by Another Name has been updated and revised for an ebook edition. 

Today, I'm pleased to announce, the ebook of SBAN is now online and available for sale at ebook retailers across the Internet and around the world. The new ebook copy is also now being converted into a print-on-demand paperback that will be available for sale later this year. More announcements on that front forthcoming. 

Anyone with an ebook reader, smartphone, tablet or even just plain old PC or laptop can buy the ebook and read it on their device(s). The ebook is available in formats for all the major portable reader devices today (Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android tablets & smartphones, Google Books devices, etc.). Formats for reading the ebook on your PC/laptop reader (PDF) are also available or will soon be available, depending on the outlet. (Some sites take longer than others.) 

The central clearinghouse for all of this is the publisher's page for SBAN. As of this writing, SBAN's ebook publisher, Untreed Reads, is offering a 30% off sale -- just $5.59 for "Shakespeare" by Another Name in its new e-formats. 

Comment-upon-comment: The scholars consider

On the Facebook ShakesVere boards, Geoffrey Green points to a recent blog post by a Stratfordian  scholar who sighs and says, OK, Anonymous now means we have to take on the Oxfordians. 

My comment on this literary scholar's blog after the jump. 

News from Germany (Drei)

From our own Mr. H.W. in Germany today comes this news: Kurt Kreiller's book (Der Mann, der Shakespeare erfand: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford) will be published in paperback on April 18. This hard-hitting Oxfordian tome, our correspondent notes, has proved since its 2009 release to be "quite a success." Kudos to gentle master Kreiller! 

Moreover, the peerless Oxfordian researcher Robert Detobel (a helpful and careful early proof-reader of "Shakespeare" By Another Name) has a new book coming out in response to James Shaprio's recent anti-Oxfordian diatribe Contested Will. The book cover is pictured here. 

Detobel's Will - Wunsch und Wirklichkeit - James Shapiros Contested Will ("Will -- Wishes and Reality -- James Shapiro's Contested Will") is slated for publication in October. 

According to its press release, the new Will will be challenging Shapiro's "almost unbelievable range of errors... and deliberate distortions."Hear hear! 

Both books are in German only as of this writing. 

More Contested Cant

In recent days, you've probably seen a few reviews of James Shapiro's Contested Will. The man's a best-selling author and clearly doesn't need our help generating clicks.

But thanks go to reader SJW who pointed out the LA Times blog's recent post offering up some new old trout by reviewer Ward Elliott -- the author of a series of computer studies involving Edward de Vere's letters and the youthful poetry (mostly song lyrics) published under de Vere's name.

This may come as a surprise to those not familiar with academia, but Elliott published well-funded studies in the 1980s and '90s using computers to prove, among other things, that letters and song lyrics are very different from Shakespeare plays.

It never ceases to amaze this blogger (and part-time tech journalist) how often computers are enlisted to re-tell us things that are in fact already quite obvious. But Elliott points toward his CT scan of an apple and his CT scan of a glorious orange and says with the assurance of a good professor of number-crunching that never mind those trifling quibbles over the input data: The point is the computer says the apple couldn't ever no never have been an orange! So de Vere weren't Shakespeare, see?


I'm not a professor of number-crunching. But I think I have a fair nose for picking out hornswoggle just from the whiff of it.

I'm also a writer working on a second book and haven't the patience or time right now to deal with taking on Elliott's nonsense point-by-point. Fortunately, that's already been done.

Here [PDF] is a fine study of Elliott -- which it should be fairly noted Elliott replied to which was in turn replied to as well.

So, to those seeking deeper truths than "an apple ain't an orange," please seek above and you shall find!

Meantime, it's also worth noting one Canadian critic who's had enough of Shapiro's "anemic" scholarship.

That plus the skeptical review of Shapiro blogged about earlier has been picked up by the National Book Critics Circle.

Seems cant doesn't go down easily everywhere.

Contested Wont

James Shapiro (1599) has a new book out. Called Contested Will, it's about the Shakespeare authorship question. Reviews have appeared in a number of (predominantly British) publications you've heard about.

However, the best newspaper or magazine review yet published on this book comes from The Brooklyn Rail, penned by William Niederkorn (a former editor at the New York Times, who in the interest of full disclosure I've known for five or so years). Niederkorn's an independent thinker who remains agnostic on the authorship issue -- a fact that, since Niederkorn wrote a number of Shakespeare authorship-related articles for the Times, Shapiro takes pains to single Niederkorn out for attack in his book.

Well, the riposte is in.

A few excerpts after the jump.


Everything went wrong, Shapiro writes, when scholars started trying to read topical allusions into Shakespeare’s works, and he blames Edmond Malone (1741-1812), the lawyer whose work is generally acknowledged as the cornerstone of modern Shakespeare scholarship. The only way out for Shapiro, it seems, is to ban all topical interpretation: Shakespeare never alluded to anything, or if he did we don’t know enough to be able to say what he was alluding to.

...

If Shapiro has a bible on the Earl of Oxford it is Alan Nelson’s Monstrous Adversary, a life of de Vere that is one of the most bilious biographies ever written. Riddled with errors, which Oxfordians have pointed out since its publication in 2003, Nelson’s book is an embarrassment to scholarship. Contested Will, whose title is cast in the same syntactical form as Nelson’s and which revels in the same spirit, is almost as bad.

Though both books assemble a great deal of interesting information, they are patently biased and need to be read skeptically. While it is hard to find one page of Nelson’s book that is free of unfair statement, though, Shapiro can occasionally sound seductively considerate. He characterizes Nelson’s book as “harsh,” but also “authoritative,” and recycles Nelson’s opinions.

...


Perhaps he even contributed to the hatchet job that appeared on the front page of the New York Observer a month later, aimed at silencing my coverage of the authorship issue in the Times. In his bibliographical essay, he recommends it “for a helpful analysis of Niederkorn on Shakespeare.” And he repeats the same derisive remark used in the Observer article, another trademark Stratfordian analogy, saying that my “rhetoric smacked of that employed by Creationists eager to see intelligent design taught in the schools alongside evolution.”

That was for my suggesting that authorship studies be made part of the standard Shakespeare curriculum. If another reason for open-minded discussion of the authorship issue in Shakespeare studies were needed, Contested Will provides it, because it shows just what students are now having to swallow.

Contested Will's first review

Columbia University English professor and best-selling author James Shapiro (1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare) will be drawing much attention to the Shakespeare authorship controversy in the coming months -- with the publication of his new book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? in January in the UK and in April in North America.

Reviewer Linda Theil of the Shakespeare Oxford Society has gotten her hands on an advance copy of Contested Will and today published her review of the book on the Society's blog.

Much to this Oxfordian's surprise, she says that it's an enjoyable (if at times frustrating) book and an entertaining read that could make a "stride toward armistice in the 'trench warfare' of authorship inquiry."

According to Theil, Shapiro makes two basic arguments:

First, Shapiro claims, it would have been impossible in the Elizabethan age for anyone to conceal any hidden identity of a prominent author such as Shakespeare.

And second, Shapiro claims, it's an anachronism to suppose there are any autobiographical qualities to the Shakespeare canon at all.

Much can be said about both points, of course. But before I do, I'd like to read Shapiro's words first. Give the man a chance to say his piece.

In the meantime, as Theil says in her review,

I fail to see how a lack of interest in a personal story translates to not having one. Call it what you will, an English writer will not produce Sufi poetry unless he has been taught Arabic, trained in the methods of Sufi literature and imbued with the life and understanding of a Muslim. An artist can only express what his life has given him, and as Shapiro admits throughout this book, the work of Shakespeare was not the life expression of the Stratfordian.

That's plenty for now.

Will meets Queen! (Correction at 11)

If sunsets have seemed particularly red lately, this may be for good reason. Clouds of housedust, blown from countless old anthologies the world over, have recently been lofted into the atmosphere over the announcement of the latest (ahem) Shakespeare "discovery." It was certainly true in this office, where, upon learning of a new Shakespeare poem, I (quite literally) turned to a cobwebby stack of dusty books that I've long been meaning to sell—so I could look this "new" poem up.

The verse is a choppy old thing. It's an anonymous 18-line Elizabethan ditty that comes down to posterity as item 228 in an anthology of 400-year-old ditties and riddles and other miscellany, recorded by one Henry Stanford. It's titled "to ye Q. by ye players 1598." It's hardly lustrous—though it does have some spear-shaking overtones. Here: Read the old thing for yourself.

Point is that these 18 lines of anonymous verse, transcribed as part of their larger anthology in 1968, argued to (possibly) be by Shakespeare in 1972 and then published in book form in 1988, are just the latest dredgings that pass for bold new scholarship in the boneyard of conventional Shakespeare scholarship today.

Media reports of this "new" poem, however, have embellished the story almost beyond recognition.

Shakespeare, we are told, was "a resident playwright at Richmond Palace" at the time of this verse's royal recitation—which "may well have been spoken by Shakespeare himself." Plus Will was, says an editor of the new edition of the collected works that reprints the old thing, "probably in the habit of dashing some lines down on the back of an envelope and then chucking them away."

Yuh-huh. Did you know that there's just as much evidence that Shakespeare invented spaghetti? That he whistled while he worked? That he liked to wear red on Tuesdays?

Most intriguing observation about the old thing, though, must go to James Shapiro, who in his recent book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare writes:

"Shakespeare imagines Elizabeth as a timeless and rejuvenating force, likening her to a clock hand perpetually circling, resistant to the ravages of time, outliving generations. There's a slight undertow to the conceit... the uncomfortable thought that Elizabeth will be around in a half century." [74-5]

Elizabeth was 65 years old at the time of this poem's known public reading. Wishing that this senior citizen stick around for another couple generations is more than just a "slight undertow." It's downright bizarre.

However, written to a much younger queen and then pulled out for old times' sake some two or three decades later is another story. One of the tenets of both "Shakespeare" By Another Name and the larger Oxfordian movement is that proto-"Shakespearean" works first written for a courtly audience in the 1560s, '70s and '80s were later revised or just re-performed for Elizabeth in the waning years of her reign.

It's an open question. Could this "new" poem, if indeed it is by the Bard, be like much of the rest of the Shakespeare canon: Bearing earmarks of a historical moment that was far too early to have been written by Will Shakspere of Stratford?