Shakespeare digression

Actually, no. Shakespeare never existed. Those plays were written by a consortium.

Was it the Illuminati? Or do you actually have any proof of this that isn’t just a conspiracy theory?

Seeing how the illuminati didn’t come into existence until 2 centuries later, no.

Maybe you should stop pretending to be an idiot. Just a suggestion.

Do you have any proof that Shakespeare wrote the plays, for example are there any manuscripts of his plays, in his handwriting, from the time he was supposed to have written them?

That’s what they want you to believe since Adam left the Garden of Eden the Illuminati have been controlling your thoughts.

I don’t require any proof. You contended he didn’t it behoves you first to show why he didn’t then I can come back with proof he did.

You are kidding right, in the time they were written copyists copied the plays, his original manuscripts no longer existing are hardly evidence that he did not write them, any more than any book in the Bible is not hand written by some author, so hence we can dispute they wrote them. That’s a bad argument, you bad, bad man.

bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2 … -examined/

Interesting post… Worth a look.

That’s a nice insult. See he is not calling me an idiot directly, although he is implying I am. But has used the clever tactic of saying I am not. Like. :slight_smile:

I repeat: Maybe you should stop pretending to be an idiot. Just a suggestion.

I can’t positively prove a negative claim. Nonetheless, the total lack of evidence that there even was a William Shakespeare from Stratford who was a major playwright in London in that period is good enough for me.

The Bible was written around 1500 years earlier. Quite a lot changed in that stretch of time. We have contemporary records of Shakespeare’s marriage but not of any of his plays. That is to say, even the copies your correctly suggest would be the things to look for cannot be found. So perhaps I was overextending the argument, but it is basically a good argument. You can’t actually present any primary evidence that there was a William Shakespeare writing and putting on famous plays at that time.

And herein lies the problem with this sort of discussion, that people tend to leap in and try to fill the gap left by ‘there was no playwright named William Shakespeare’ with some simple alternative. Same with 9/11 or whatever other official myth you might pick.

I don’t think you are an idiot, if I did I would have banished you to my ignore list but you’re reasonably entertaining for a pseudo-fool so here we are.

An odd thing to say.
There is a huge body of evidence that WS was a real person that came from Stratford and who wrote many plays.
Your ignorance of those facts is not the same as “a total lack of evidence”.

Kindly present for me some of this evidence…

The Completely works of Shakespeare.
Various contemporary accounts, at the highest level of society, to the lowest.
The archeological evidence of The Globe Theatre.
A range of documentary evidence in his own and others hands which name him.
hiwaay.net/~paul/shakspere/evidence1.html
A number of textual analyses that earmark most plays as certain;y shakespearean, and others has possibly by another author.

There never has been any doubt that such a person lived, and that he came from Stratford.

Are you being serious? The evidence that he wrote the plays is that the plays exist?

Cite some of them for me.

I did not say that the Globe Theatre didn’t exist.

All this proves is that there was a man, William Shakspeare. It doesn’t prove he wrote those plays.

Wow, textual analyses.

What proof do you have that he wrote the plays? That is what I’m disputing. This Bill Shakspeare chap existed around that time, but I’ve never believed that he wrote these plays.

No you are not, you are disputing that such a person existed. You said there was a total lack of evidence that such a person existed.
It does not matter a damn if he wrote some, most or all of the plays attributed to him.
It would have taken a ridiculously intricate conspiracy to assert his existence were it not the case.
I’m not going to debate the authorship of his plays with you as you already claim ignorance of the evidence on his existence.
It would be a complete time waste chewing the fat with you.

So if I claim to have created the colour green and cite as my proof the fact that there is a recognised colour called ‘green’ then you’ll just accept it?

:smiley:

So if I just claim that there are contemporary accounts of me creating the colour green but refuse to provide any then you’ll just accept that?

That Royal theatre company that invented the Shakespeare persona. Even the official story is not that the company was ‘his own’, i.e. belonged to Shakespeare himself.

Tell me, where are these manuscripts in the same hand writing? In what archive or library are they held?

And what I could find a few textual analyses concluding that the plays had multiple authors? What if I provided my own? After all, I’ve read numerous Shakespeare plays, I’ve acted in several and directed productions of two.

‘Such a person’ referring not just to William Shakespeare being a man from Stratford but that he was a famous playwright in London at the time.

I’m saying he wrote none of them.

Kindly qualify this remark.

Feel free to back out of this at any point. I mean, so far you’ve convinced nobody. But for the record there are some very Marlowe-esque passages in some Shakespeare plays so I think he was probably involved.

Do you realise that you are just blowing this stuff out of you £$%£.
Hey I have no idea that you exist. I do not have any evidence except these silly posts, that seem like they could have been wrtiten by an automaton.
In fact I have far more information that The Bard was a real play writing person who existed, that I have that you are real.QED.
You don’t exist.

I don’t think the Library of Alexandria has any contemporary copies of Shakespeare plays. But I’ll email them and ask. When I asked all the obvious libraries in Britain they said no.

Besides which, in order to prove that any such manuscripts were written by this Bill Shakspeare from Stratford, one would have to have lengthy samples of that man’s handwriting. Can you point me to such samples?

Cite some of this abundance of evidence for me.

WRONG.

From the British Library website:
bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/companies.html

The Lord Chamberlain’s men were in effect the Royal theatre company - they even got renamed the King’s Men less than a decade later when they parachuted
King James onto the throne. They built the Globe.

Funny that you haven’t responded to this request…

Meet me face to face and I’ll gladly prove it to you a dozen ways.

But the burden of proof is with you, not me. You are the one trying to say that S never wrote a play. That makes you the outsider, not me.

So the burden of proof lies with people who reject mythical orthodoxies? I’m looking forward to you trying to sell that one to me.

Who is Marlowe, what makes you think he existed? You have no proof whatever.
SHow me the evidence!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlovian_theory
You can start here.

Do you realise that you are just blowing this stuff out of you £$%£.
Hey I have no idea that you exist. I do not have any evidence except these silly posts, that seem like they could have been wrtiten by an automaton.
In fact I have far more information that The Bard was a real play writing person who existed, that I have that you are real.QED.
You don’t exist.

And yet, you continue to talk to me as though I do exist, and refuse to present any evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship of those plays. You hide behind fallacious appeals to authority and keep claiming the burden of proof is on the person questioning the orthodoxy rather than the one paying lip service to it. I ask of you: Do you realise that this debate has been going on for two centuries?

I tend to favour the interpretation that Shakespeare’s works were in part predictive programming for the transition from the house of Tudor to the house of Stuart, and it is no surprise that the Royal theatre company mentioned above, once it was renamed after James Stuart, had a monopoly on the performing of the Shakespeare plays. Is this the sort of intricate conspiracy you had in mind?

And you talk about Shakespeare as if he did. I talk to you because I know I can get completely predictable results from your processor. It give me a sense of security. And yet you claim to be human, and yet present no evidence that you are anything but a machine. You hide behind an avatar of another human, with an emotional expression as I that gave you any credibility.
But there is obviously something wrong with you processing capacity or logic circuits. First you claim there is no such person as Shakespeare, then you claim this non existent person did not write any plays then you claim he might not have written some of those plays.
When I challenge you about his existence you prove yourself to be completely ignorant of evidence that is freely available to anyone on the Internet and in the British Library. So why should I take your word that you have looked into this question more than I have??

You’ll be telling me aliens have landed, next.

Now you are saying that the plays were 'predictive programming", have you ever even SEEN a Shakespearean play before? I doubt it.
Whoever wrote those plays must have has a time machine to see into the future, then?

PS. I am surprised that you mentioned the ‘controversy’ has only been around for 200 years. In fact doubts were only raised a good deal less that 200 years ago. The main reason for that happening is a classist one, assuming a man of humble origins could not possibly have been so brilliant.
A pretty poor start to a conspiracy theory that took over 200 years to come to light, since his death.

I will be splitting the topic digression off shortly, so you may continue your digression there…

I think they were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

They were actually written by DEERGGLPMINGAR, the POLINMOP from planet Sertion IN Alpha Centauri.

You never heard of the Oxfordian theory, I take it?

Okay here’s the thing.
There are plenty of conspiracy theories very few of which are remotely true, and few of which are based on sound evidence. Nonsense abounds about secret societies the Illuminati, - so secret that everyone knows about them.
Secrets are hard to keep. Shakespeare was a public figure that appeared on stage, and was a celebrity. It’s not as if he were a reclusive writer.
There are some serious difficulties with this one.

  1. Numerous alternative schemes.
  2. There was no doubt about the authorship of the plays for over 200 years.
  3. Does not take account of the level of evidence that actually exists.

1 The claims against the authorship do not stem from a solid alternative. First they damn Shakespeare then they scuttle around for an alternative. There are a range of poorly constructed alternatives none of which are as strong as the orthodox account. So even if it were the basic claim were true, there would be no agreement for an alternative account. I think it would be more convincing had it started with a contemporary claim; an individual who someone had suggested.
2 It seems rather odd that no one, not a single hint that Shakey was not the author for over 200 years after his death. Not a whisper during his life, not a scrap of paper during or after his life for all that time. This alone takes some doing. When the President of the US can’t hide a couple of tapes that a handful of people knew existed. I suppose we might never know what secrets have actually lasted 200 years. But this is on the scale of Elvis Presley not singing any songs.
3 The fact is that there is a remarkably large amount of evidence for Shakey and the authorship of his plays. Far more than for any other writer of his time, or before. In fact far more than most writer, and certainly far more evidence of his life than any of the other prospective writers. Were we to take this seriously then we would have to thrown doubt on the authorship of most of the British cannon of literature.
So what is all this about?
It does not seem a co-incidence that none of this speculation happened until the mid-19thC. Shakespeare had always been a thorn in the side of the aristocracy and educated elites, and an inspiration for the emerging middle classes.
It is no surprise to me that the Victorians who felt the upward pressure from below of the emerging lower classes thought to attack this hero of the underdogs by trying to impose a more intellectual, educated and aristocratic personage.
Yet there is not the slightest reason why any of them might want to hide their own identity, and push the credit onto a grammar school boy.

The fact remains that it is quite possible that one man did not personally write every single word. But this is not unusual in the art world.
I love the sculpture of Rodin, you may know his “Thinker”, or his various versions of Victor Hugo and “The Kiss”. Copies of these sculptures (originals) exist all over the world. But even though they are correctly attributed to August Rodin he probably never even touched them himself. The fact is that he conceived them all; he supplied the materials and the workshop and he closely directed the work of his small army of trainees. Any piece of work that emerged from his studios and was signed Rodin was his responsibility and was done under his aegis.
Thus I have no trouble with the idea that some input from some of the actors happened. But a mysterious and silent partner that no one noticed for over 200 years – that is just absurd.

You take it wrong.
This is a mutli-tentacled conspiracy theory designed to discredit the lower orders, by suggestion only an aristocrat can be a genius.

Shakespeare was to the Elizabethan theatre what Richard Feynman was to 20thC science.