Comments on: Malim reports on Globe conference

By: SAT trustee Julia Cleave reports on Shakespeare bio conference at The Globe « Shakespeare Oxford Society

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:02:22 +0000

[…] initially in Nina Green’s email list, Phaeton on December 3. Her report supplements an earlier report by De Vere Society Secretary Richard Malim. A selective report by Julia Cleave on an event held at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London on […]

By: Richard Malim

Richard Malim — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:47:45 +0000

Perhaps the next q for Shapiro is ‘What do you now rely on to establish the connection between WS and the works ? – now that you discard the autobiographical element in the works, because you agree you cannot identify any particular one, AND the Malone-Dowden-Chambers chronology leaks like a sieve, thanks to Coleridge and Brian Cummings pointing to a surer way of arriving at more reliable method ( – read the plays). And if the answer is ‘my imagination’: How is your imagination superior to anyone else’s , bearing in mind Schoenbaum’s Rule 7
(‘Intuitions, convictions and subjective judgments generally carry no weight as evidence. This is no matter how learned, respected or confident the authority’ – Internal Evidence & Elizn Dramati Authorship 1966 p.178) ?

You bet your sweet life our account of the conference was accurate !

By: Thomas Hunter

Thomas Hunter — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:38:57 +0000

Thank you for this, Richard and Kevin. You seem to be reporting a subtle sea change within the Stratfordian paradigm, a growing up, a facing of facts, much of it via James Shapiro himself. Is this too much to hope for? Do they realize what they are doing? Yet the key, Shapiro’s ultimate fall back position, is still “imagination.” Not Greenblatt’s imagination by which we find the truth about Shakespeare by suspending our own disbelief and surrendering ourselves entirely to the imagination of the learned professor. No, this is the imagination of Shakespeare himself, Emerson’s ultimate fall back position when all else failed to explain how Shakspere could be Shakespeare and create the works we know under that name. This took Emerson to the ultimate conclusion of Shakespeare-as-transcendental-being who could be explained in no other way. Is that where Shapiro really wants to go with this?

Yes, Shapiro’s answer is to blame Malone for trying to match the life with the works, a feat which Emerson despaired of ever being able to accomplish. Shapiro appears to be saying that Malone’s failing is this: “It diminishes the power of Shakespeare’s imagination: all his characters are within that imagination.” In other words, Shapiro has brought Stratfordians to another dead end, an equivalent of the genius defense, and a betrayal of their misunderstanding of how literature is created.

All of this will therefore, if your report and this interpretation are at all close to what happened at the Globe conference, guide us to our best answer to them, the demonstration of the works of Shakespeare as a product of the life experience (as opposed to autobiography) of Edward de Vere, cognizant that that experience includes “biographical connections” and “topicalities” to which you refer and also the writer’s “own reality” as cited by Dr. Wilkinson from Nietzsche.

Perhaps the dating project has been Providentially timed to, in your words, “draw these strands together.” It is a huge undertaking. I am grateful to hear that it is in progress. We ultimately need to see if his new book does take the direction which Shapiro apparently took at the Globe. I am thinking that his presentation there is probably a good indication that it does and that those of us who will be attending Shapiro events, such as at the Folger in April, should be working on concise ways to challenge him on those terms.

By: Heward Wilkinson

Heward Wilkinson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:36:44 +0000

The fundamental argument is about what Nietzsche named when he said the great writer only creates from his own reality (Ecce Homo). Because of the ‘invisible man’ problem vis a vis writing with the Stratfordian, Anglo-Saxon aesthetics has been saddled with a ‘significant form’ type theory for many years – eg Wimsatt and Beardsley ‘Verbal Icon’ (see the Muse as Therapist) – and THIS is what has to be deconstructed if the Oxfordian case is to be heard.
All best Heward