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.

A Mystery Writer Ponders: Whodunnit?

Mystery novelist Ellis Goodman wrote a brief blog posting yesterday that summarizes his reasons for suspecting that Edward de Vere was the Bard.

Goodman homes in on Will Shakspere's last will and testament as reason aplenty to suspect something is very wrong with our traditional picture of "Shakespeare":

In addition, it is recognized his Will was poorly drawn, badly written and ungrammatical. Could this really be William Shakespeare? I decided there was a much better case to prove that De Vere was the true author of much of Shakespeare’s work; but, because of the fact that he was an aristocrat at the Court of Queen Elizabeth and a homosexual, he used Shakespeare as his “front man” at a time when anything to do with the theatre was considered low-class, rough, and tough. The theatre was banned from operating within the city limits, and no person of “class” would be seen at these entertainments.

So my conclusion is that William Shakespeare probably did not write these plays. What do you think?

I, for one, think the Stratford will tells a lot more than even many Oxfordians recognize. Bonner Miller Cutting, host of this year's North American Oxfordian conference in Houston (Nov. 5-8), has done some of the best work on this subject that I've seen -- revealing, for one, that Will Shakspere used a Protestant boilerplate template. (So much for the "secret Catholic" theory.) So much more, I suspect, remains to be uncovered as skeptical eyes re-examine that legal document that for centuries has been thought to be the Bard's.

[Creative Commons image by rpongsaj]

Overbury Overdrive, pt. 3: The (modern day) back-story

Here is a fascinating interview Channel 4 (UK) did with the family owner of the Cobbe portrait of "Shakespeare," the art restorer Alec Cobbe. An affable chap. After the 35 minute mark, the interviewer asks a few questions about the possible Thomas Overbury identification. And Cobbe says, essentially, that facial features can't be used to identify a sitter in a portrait.

But rewind the tape by about ten minutes, and there's Cobbe arguing for his portrait being a "Shakespeare" portrait by appealing to the similarities between his painting and the Droeshaut engraving of Shakespeare.

So there you have it. It can when you want it to, but it can't when you don't.

Overbury Overdrive, pt. 2: The Face

Before getting into the new Cobbe (misattributed "Shakespeare") portrait in detail, I wanted to make sure that it is abundantly clear just how precise the match is between the Cobbe's face and undisputed images of the face of Sir Thomas Overbury.

Here is why it matters: The "new Shakespeare portrait" is no such thing. It is a big snafu-in-the-waiting that could also have significant implications beyond this little embarrassment for Stratfordian scholarship. For the nonce, I'm just going to lay that claim out there, with the promise that I'll be following up on these bigger issues in subsequent posts.

Below I've attached a Photoshop exercise that I'll explain after the jump. (Click on the image to enlarge.)




The image here is a gradual fade-in of the Cobbe "Shakespeare" over an engraving of the Jacobean poet Sir Thomas Overbury. As noted in the previous post, it should be as plain as can be that each of these two images is portraying the same face.

Incidentally, I reversed the engraving of Overbury. Note that that would have been the way the image appeared when being struck by the engraver, one Renold Elstrake. The dating of the Overbury engraving is c. 1616, which would put it after Overbury's scandalous death. So presumably Elstrake had to use another Overbury portrait as his source. As the above portrait overlay makes plain, the resemblance between the two faces is close -- so close that I think a good case can be made that the "Cobbe" portrait may have even served as the original for the Overbury engraving.


And, to bring in a third witness here, to the right is another image of Overbury -- revealing the same face as the Overbury engraving and as the face in the Cobbe portrait.

Now just to be clear: I'm not talking about the authorship theory in these postings about the Cobbe portrait. The story, the theory, the whole enchilada of "Shakespeare" By Another Name -- Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare" -- remains.

I just think this "Cobbe portrait" business is a mixed-up jumble of Stratfordian wishful thinking foisted upon an undeniable portrait of Thomas Overbury.

There may well, on the other hand, still be a different kind of "Shakespeare" connection to the Cobbe portrait.

And that's a mouse-trap for another day.