Hi,
I think it is important to keep in mind that Herman Melvile was aware that Edward De Vere was Shakespeare more than 20 years before Looney!
The story is found in “Billy Bud”.
Oxfordians should do more to tell this story.

Indeed, in her one specific example regarding Looney, she states that Shapiro ties Looney’s adherence to Comte’s Positivist philosophy to Hitler’s belief in the same philosophy–this smear is more vicious than anything thrown at Oxfordians in the past, such as ridiculing Looney’s name, calling us snobs, being amateurs, and so on.

Since Linda hasn’t detailed anything else from Shapiro’s Oxfordian chapter, I wonder what really lurks there. I’m sure he doesn’t just “mention” a lot of Oxfordians. As he does with Looney, he is probably undermining them, personally or professionally.

Finally, I don’t think a book that’s being published and marketed as a definitive response to anti-Stratfordianism has been written in the spirit of gaining an armistice.

Gary Goldstein

I wonder if we draw sufficiently from the paradoxical partial admissions of the great critics. For instance, in the Muse as Therapist I adduced Wilson Knight’s recognition of the central importance of Il Cortegiano for Hamlet, with all it implies for Oxford, and Harold Bloom’s recognition of Shakespeare as ‘the inventor of the human’ – which (though Bloom does not grasp the implication) undercuts the anti-biographical argument, since Hamlet himself is emphatic about the link – e.g., ‘holds, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’ and ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the times’, and much else of course, whilst Macbeth (unlike his doctor!) even anticipates psychoanalysis, which also implies recognition of the life-connection of the works as healing vehicles in Shakespeare:
‘How does your patient, doctor?
Doctor
Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick coming fancies,
That keep her from her rest.
MACBETH
Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.’

Clearly the FH Bradley ‘straight biographical’ approach went too far in one direction, but the ‘verbal icon’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley), and ‘significant form’ (Clive Bell) and even the ‘poetic drama’ emphasis of Scrutiny (‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ LC Knights) clearly go too far the other way. I think we have clearly come too far to buy the Eliotic separation of author and work! Clearly we know in Tolstoy, Wagner, Dickens, Conrad, and DH Lawrence, for instance, which of their characters is closest to their authors! and so we do with Hamlet.

Although in Nietzsche’s time the Oxfordian possibility was not available, I think his comments in Ecce Homo contain the heart of the matter (with apologies for his anti-Americanisms!) – and of course also some relevant implications about the need for disguise with which the plays are so utterly rife:
‘Seeking for my highest formula for Shakespeare, I invariably find only this: he conceived the type of Caesar. Such things a man cannot guess – he either is the thing, or he is not. The great poet draws only from his own experience – to such an extent that later he can no longer endure his own work. After glancing at my Zarathustra, I pace to and fro in my room for a half hour, unable to control an unbearable fit of sobbing. I know of no more, heart-rending reading than Shakespeare: what he must have suffered to be so much in need of playing the clown! Is Hamlet understood? Not doubt but certainty drives one mad. But to feel this,. one must be profound, abysmal, a philosopher. We all fear the truth. And, to make a confession: I feel instinctively certain that Lord Bacon is the originator, the self-torturer, of this most appalling literature: what do I care about the wretched gabble of American fools and half-wits? But the power for the greatest realism in vision is not only compatible with the greatest realism in deeds, with the monstrous, with crime – it actually presupposes the latter. . . . We hardly know enough about Lord Bacon-the first realist in the, highest sense of the word-to be sure of everything he did, everything he willed, and everything he experienced in himself. To the devil with the critics! Suppose I had christened my Zarathustra with a name not my own – with Richard Wagner’s, for instance – the insight of two thousand years would not have sufficed to guess that the author of Human, all-too-Human was the visionary of Zarathustra.’
http://hewardwilkinson.co.uk

For example, it is good to see that apparently Shapiro doesn’t make personal attack the main thrust of the book as it appeared from early indications, although you do indicate that he does appear to treat interest in authorship as aberrant behavior when discussing its early history. It will be interesting to see if even hints at the same for recent authorship inquiry. At least he apparently isn’t making it the whole story. I would say that if Shapiro treats Looney with “great respect,” that is hopeful, but perhaps not if he then links Looney to Hitler via Comte.

It is also good to see that he apparently pays attention to actual work done by Oxfordians. However that there are not citations in the book is worrisome, especially with regard to the “long, long list of all that has been accomplished in the past 20 years” by Oxfordians. I am very curious to see what that list includes.

And good for Shapiro that he has recognized the academy’s unscholarly behavior when it comes to authorship, however ironic it may be that this discovery came to him in front of a fourth grade class

However, he apparently does continue to hang his hat on imagination and the genius process without understanding how they work. Linda, I like your statement of how they do work in reality and in particular for Shakespeare.

Also, I don’t understand how Shapiro can insist on the impossibility of concealing a writer’s identity during the Elizabethan period when it was done all the time and has been amply documented

Someone is going to have to sit Shapiro down to explain that insisting on refuting the autobiographical nature of the plays is a waste of everybody’s time, that it is the reddest of herrings, that experience is what tells, not autobiography, that putting an autobiographical spin on the works (Hamnet inspired Hamlet) is not the same as finding connections between them and real life. Has Shapiro ever read Mark Twain? But for Shapiro to admit throughout the book that (in your words) “the work of Shakespeare was not the life expression of the Stratfordian” is perhaps victory enough for us now and certainly something to build on.

Thank you for an excellent review.

Tom Hunter, Ph.D.

Shapiro’s book allows another opening for prime time coverage of the earl of Oxford – some of it hopefully spotlighting that long list of all that’s been accomplished in the last 20 years.

“…a stride toward armistice in the “trench warfare” of authorship inquiry.”

Great blurb for the book jacket!