How noble in reason, infinite in faculties; Or, what a good Shakespeare heretic makes*

No worries ‒ the earlier post today was just a hoax. This is what I've been planning to post for a while now. The upside about having to wait a week to post anything is that I'll have something in my secret reserves for the whole coming year, if things go as planned. They never do, which is exactly why plans are needed, as a partial remedy.

Even though I may not be reaching my target readership with these kind of posts, I'm going to keep up with this silly Shakespeare-related babble. I find everything about this literary icon endlessly amusing, ever since I learned about the authorship question. Oh, it's almost too juicy sometimes.

Of course, many will be bored to death with this. I realize that my posts look rather long, but why is it that text is somehow less accessible in large amounts on a computer screen, on a website (sorry, blog)? I might shrink the font size in the future, to make my rantings look nice and concise.

But it's my blog, my power, my kingdom and my horse that I'll kiddy up any way I wish to go. In the name of myself, this blog and the holy ghost of Shakespeare, whoever s/he was. Amen.

So the other day it occurred to me to search for videos related to the Shakespeare Authorship question (wholly deserving of the capital letters right) on Youtube. Nothing too original came up, except for this fine piece of someone playing Edward de Vere.

There's also the taping of the mock trial in Washington. The audience will apparently laugh at anything. Some people just listen and wait for anything to laugh at, so as not to give an impression of having no sense of humour. Silly if you ask me.

Then I ran into John Hudson's theory of Emilia Lanier as Shakespeare. Or rather, his "discovery". Finally a candidate I'd love to believe in. What if Shakespeare was a woman? Wouldn't that be so cool?

Seriously speaking, I still know too little of the issue to vouch for any certain candidate. I'm still not sure I have to. The agnostic camp may not be a whole lot of fun, but at least I know I don't have any ulterior motives behind every statement I might make.

("Edward de Vere" from aforementioned Youtube video)

Earlier this week I read a book pertaining to methods in historical study. There were many points that struck a chord in me, thinking back to writing research papers of any kind. There was something about being able to relate to the people in the past, in order to draw the right conclusions about anything they did, to do justice to them when writing about them.

When I was writing on the authorship question, this aspect puzzled me. Who exactly should I try to relate to? Shakespeare, whoever s/he was, and his/her contemporaries, or the authorship question enthusiasts? If the latter, it looks like I failed miserably. It put me off how so many of these researchers were trumpeting their respective candidate without seeming to have much of self-criticism. Once they had made up their mind about their choice of candidate, they turned on the defensive and overly assertive gear.

Now that I think about it, the strong rhetoric is probably partly due to the publicity that the question has received. In addition to multitudes of books by professionals and amateurs (here meaning simply someone without a scholarly background), there are also websites galore that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, any time. In public, you obviously have to make your statement without hesitation if you want to get it through to people. They'll have none of this hedging that is so natural and even imperative in the scientific way of writing.

Another interesting point in the book was something about certainty with your research results. It reminded me of what was said in a book on the history of childhood. Something along the lines that childhood historians often wake up in cold sweat in the dark of the night when realizing how thin a line separates their work from fiction.

(What came up with "hysteria + rhetoric" on Google Image search)

I wonder if there isn't something of this kind of hysteria present in the rhetoric of the authorship scholars and researchers. If you're going to spend years on studying an author's work, you don't want to be held in an eternal state of suspense as to who it is you're studying, even if it doesn't always matter in literary analysis.

It could also be the case that these brits and americans simply write differently from what I'm used to reading. It's strange, though, since I rarely read anything in any other language than English. You'd think I was used to it by now. It must be related to the genre of writing, i.e. books aimed at a popular audience, as well as internet websites.

So don't be fooled by Hudson's less than convincing case on that video. Calling the Stratford Shakespeare "Shaksper" would make anyone sound a little cuckoo. His website is more impressive (takes a while to load, be warned).

Besides, "there are just too many coincidences here"! Wow, I was instantly won over by that particular statement! She was a known feminist, a Jew, used De Pisan as a source as did Shakespeare and ‒ gasp ‒ was mistress to Henry Carey, who was the patron of the acting company Lord Chamberlain's Men, which performed Shakespeare's plays among others. It boggles the mind!

As sugar at the bottom, she even included the names of important people in her life in the plays, in the form of clever puns. To show to the posterity that it was her who wrote them. It can't get any more obvious than that.


It's the cumulative argument all over again. A large number of coincidences sharing one common denominator must by laws of nature entail truthfulness of the original premise! It's like horoscopes: the parameters are so loosely defined that they'll fit any person to a tempting degree.

(Was Emilia Lanier Shakespeare - the most brilliant hermafroditic literary genius in the world?)

Emilia Lanier was not a complete stranger to me. Earlier, she's been identified as the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets. For instance, Michael Wood (2003, In Search of Shakespeare) reckoned that Shakespeare might have had an affair with this woman when living in London, away from his wife and children in Stratford.

Maybe she's the one who gave Shakespeare syphilis (again proposed by mr. Wood), so as a result the 40-something Shakespeare described himself as old and decrepit in the sonnets. Wouldn't that explain everything so neatly? In your face, Oxfordian heretics!

Hudson connects Lanier with Shakespeare because of her background in music, among other things. Her family performed in court. And what d'you know: Shakespeare's plays are "the most musical" in England! Witness "nearly 2000 musical references" and "300 different musical terms" - clearly proof that Shakespeare the author must have been a professional musician, or connected to such people.

Obviously I don't dare to argue on this with Hudson, who holds a certificate in a Shakespeare Institute, who reviews for a Shakespeare journal, and who is writing a thesis on a Shakespeare play. He must know the plays far better than I ever could.

Yet I can't help wondering, how come is it that I keep bumping into these fabulous figures and almost incredible assessments of the nature and vocabulary of Shakespeare's plays. It all makes the (wo)man sound completely inhuman in his boundless abilities and knowledge of everything there is to know in the world.

Taking a wild guess, if I had a look at the list of the references and terms, I would probably find perhaps 50 quotes of the word "music", or some musical instrument. Surely, if you refer to music and musical instruments a lot, it means you must be musically talented. Right?

Music, lute, piano, violin, string, chord, note, minor, major, melody. What if I added a string of musical terms at the end of each of my posts? Or better, sprinkled them here and there to spice up my language? If some day some future historian for some reason created a corpus of my posts and started searching for musical terms, they could conclude that I was a very musical person. There could simply be no other explanation.

*Ever wonder why 19th century novels nearly always seem to have subtitles starting with "or, [yada yada yada]"? I have. Did the authors have trouble making up their minds about the title, or were they just trying to be as informative as possible?

(The first picture shamelessly ripped from the Youtube video; the second picture from John Hudson's website.)

Auld lang syne, Mr. von Schlegel's turn of phrase!

I know it's been only three days since my last post, but I'll soon revert back to my one-post-per-week policy anyway. Take this as a warning that in the future it may not be worth the trouble checking back here more than twice a week, at the most. Unless you want to explore the archives and discover the less than glorious past of this blog. Actually you should, if you only like the paintings. There's much less of these boring ramblings of mine over last winter.

Down to business it is. As I mentioned in my previous post, in Munich I bought an old German translation of Shakespeare's King Henry IV Part 1 AND 2 (I noticed later that both were included). I was annoyed to find no mention of when the book was printed.

I could guess that it must be old, at least -ish, judging by the yellowish paper and the ribbon bookmark (those ribbons you only find in Bibles these days), let alone the very-old-and-Gothic-looking font of the German text. Strangely, the English text is in a more modern font.

The translator, August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), a poet himself, is still considered one of the best German translators of Shakespeare, according to Wikipedia. Someone else apparently thinks that Schlegel's translation is remarkably different from the original, for example as regards the verse style. Shakespeare often wrote in blank verse, which in his case means he wrote with an unrhymed iambic pentametre. This writer says that Schlegel transformed the blank verse into "the iambic pentametre with either male or female cadence", i.e. 10 or 11 syllables on each line.

Now I'm not very well-versed in these technicalities of poetic composition, but is the iambic pentametre with male or female cadence really so strikingly different from the regular one, which has ten syllables on a line? Anyone care to explain this to me? But be that as it may, I can appreciate the various problems Schlegel must have had, considering how different English and German are when it comes to word order and syllabic structure.

(August Wilhelm von Schlegel)

As for my problem of dating the volume. Schlegel's Shakespeare translations span the years 1797-1810. König Heinrich der Vierte was published in 1800. Obviously there have been reprints, through the 19th century until around the time of WWII. The later reprints, however, all seem to be collections including several plays. But I'm not sure whether that means that they were still printed as individual volumes or as a single book.

Next I tried to find information on the publisher, Der Tempel Verlag. It was founded in 1909, so my book can't be more than almost a hundred years old – not much, eh? Apart from these tiny parsels of information, google really isn't almighty when it comes to finding bibliographical information. I don't mean just old books, but even more recent ones are surprisingly non-existent in the virtual world of search engines. Yet things, or even people, aren't supposed to be important if you can't google them. Fiddlesticks,* I say!

My final resort was the university library's online search engine(s). It's a real drag to go through all sorts of collections on god knows how many different portals, because for each search it takes so long to process. The end result still zilch. I'm slightly disheartened now with my less than resourceful detective skills.

Something good came out of all this though: I stumbled upon a website which has pictures and transcriptions of American diaries from late 19th to early 20th century: www.writtenbyhand.com. Perhaps not eligible for including in a corpus, but interesting nevertheless.

(Picture from Written by Hand Manuscript Americana)

Speaking of corpora, it occurred to me that there might be a possibility of compiling an Edward de Verean corpus for the purposes of comparing his language with Shakespeare's. I definitely need to look into it, since it would make for such an exhilarating research project. I know some websites with transcriptions of his personal letters, draft interrogatories (whatever those are) and memoranda, so all I need to do is find out if they're up for grabs or not.

I do know of one linguistic comparison between these authors, aided by a computer, using statistical methods: Was Oxford Shakespeare? A Computer-aided Analysis. Needless to say, these guys with all their knowledge of statistics still err somewhat in other methodological issues. They assume too much, take so much for granted, and any complexities that don't quite fit are pummeled flat. All in a day's work for anti- or pro-Shakespeareans alike!

*Another Shakespearean term, from no other than 1 Henry IV! Says Falstaff, "Heigh, heigh, the Deuill rides vpon a Fiddlesticke: what's the matter?" Of course, not quite in the same sense as in present-day use.

Things you should know

I've run into all kinds of interesting tidbits of information when reading that book on 19th century Finnish families.

The author quoted some source that defined the ideal qualities in a wife. Among other things, a wife should have "good, big nipples".

I wonder what it is that makes nipples "good". And as if the size of them mattered in breastfeeding, or in other kinds of activities for that matter. Well, maybe it does. I'm not an expert on nipples and their various functions.

But what's truly puzzling about that quote is, how on earth did men know about the goodness and the size of women's nipples before marrying them?

I mean, did men ask women to flash them? Did women wear see-through clothing? Wet t-shirts, perhaps?

Hmmmmmmm.

Enough of it already

I've been thinking about something a certain nice Serbian girl asked me at the Helsinki conference.

She asked what linguistics mailing lists I'm on.

Erm, listS?!

I'm only subscribing Linguist List so far and I already feel bogged down by all the mail that I get.

It's mostly redundant. I find myself clicking delete delete delete oh that sounds interesting delete delete deletism to my heart's content* and then even more deletage!

It's annoying too, all these calls for papers to conferences I probably won't be able to visit. I need to figure out my financing before I start running all around the world. I need to dig too much out of my own pocket for the upcoming trip, even with my professor's kind assistance with getting a grant. Thankfully I know how to live hand to mouth.

Besides, the travelling aspect makes me uneasy. I hate it. Please someone develop a teleport right now!

In any case, I think I could aim for ICAME 29 next year. I found about it too late to send a paper this year. Of course they'll accept my draft next time, it's a given. Based on my hefty experience with conferences, they'll take anything they can get. (Hint: sarcasm in the air.)

By the way, ICAME 28 in 2007 took place in Stratford-upon-Avon! That would've been wonderful. The home town of the lowly actor who dared (or durst, since we're talking about ancient people here) to claim the works of the mighty Shakespeare as his own. Some nerve, huh!

Anyhow. I started looking for more interesting mailing lists. There's one about corpora that should be useful. Lately I've been thinking a lot about all these methodological issues related to them and it's very unnerving.

There seems to be no rhyme nor reason** to any of it among more experienced linguists, so I'm not too worried about it. You can always make up some ad hoc arguments for your choice of corpora if it comes to that. If your ethics so allow. But I don't mean to sound disillusioned or anything.

One list focuses on medieval texts. I'd like to find one specified in historical linguistics, but not that historical. Early modern English is as far as I'm willing to go.

* Originally used in Henry VI and The Merchant of Venice.

** As you like it.

My bookshelf to me a kingdom is

Since I have a crappy camera in my cell phone, I thought I could take pictures of all of the books that I own, to be used as decoration when I discuss each of them in turn. Bar any embarrassing ones, but there are very few of those anyway.

So let this be an introduction into a series of posts where I bring to the public eye the contents of my bookshelf (and the floor next to my desk, where I keep my favourite ones). Because what could be more interesting than seeing tiny pictures of books in bad quality and reading about my take on them? Absolutely nothing, you guessed right.

But before I get down to business, I must bring to every reader's attention an interesting point that I found out about only recently.

The title for this post was derived from the poem My mind to me a kindgom is, published in 1588, traditionally attributed to Sir Edward Dyer (1543(?)-1607). I always try to come up with titles that have some pretentious, quasi-artistic literary allusions in them.

Dyer was a contemporary of Shakespeare's, a courtier poet whom inter alia George Puttenham praised in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), an account of notable English writers at the time. Which by the way I absolutely had to have on my laptop at home in its original spelling, so I can read it over and over so my heart with pleasure fills.



Wordsworth is quite alright you know. And I like linking every other word to a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is a good source for trivia that you don't want to memorize, especially if it doesn't matter whether the information is in the end accurate or not.

Now here comes the funny part. More recently (in 1975 in The Review of English Studies Vol. 26, to be accurate), the poem has been attributed by Stephen W. May to the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (1550-1604).

(Young Edward de Vere)

Before that, Alden Brooks had proposed in his 1943 book Will Shakspere and the Dyer's hand that the above-mentioned sir Edward Dyer was the true William Shakespeare. In other words, Brooks claimed that Dyer wrote the works of Shakespeare, not the man who went by that name at the time.

You may wonder what's so funny about that, because surely it makes sense that authorship questions often arise with several hundred years old texts? Well, in this case the question is of considerably more interest than in general.

I wrote a paper on the Shakespeare authorship question, and one of my sources was a dissertation by one Dr. Roger Stritmatter. He is a proponent of the Oxfordian theory which claims that it was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who wrote the works that are generally attributed to a man called William Shakespeare.

Dr. Stritmatter had included in his appendices the aforementioned poem, with the intention of demonstrating how similar Edward de Vere's and Shakespeare's writing styles were.

(On the cover of the dissertation is a photo of Edward de Vere's Geneva bible!)

At the time of writing the paper, I didn't realize that the poem wasn't even originally attributed to de Vere!

I was aware that the traditional author of the poem, Sir Dyer, was an alternative Shakespeare candidate himself. But I never realized just how eager the so-called Oxfordians were in appropriating all the works in English literature to Edward de Vere.

Even without knowing about this, there were several problems with the analysis of the poem, and I simply dismissed it as one more of Dr. Stritmatter's farfetched, uninterrelated and badly argued points. In all fairness, though, he was relying on Stephen May's analysis.

As if there weren't enough reasons to doubt anything that Shakespeare authorship heretics write, I was confronted by yet another. The more I learn about the issue, the more ridiculous it becomes in my eyes.

I wish it didn't have to be like that, as in the beginning I was very sympathetic to their cause. But the fact that I like to call it a cause is itself telling. It aggravates me how political the issue is and has always been. Many people probably see no evil in mixing scientific research and politics, but personally I find it disturbing. I'm too much of an idealist, and politics really isn't for idealistic people.

So what I'm trying to say is, stay tuned for more discussion on the Shakespeare authorship question. I've got files and folders full of goodies related to the issue, just waiting to be ridiculed.

(My "souvenir" from Edinburgh. It has served me well.)

I'm not going to make fun of anything on purpose even when it's begging for it, since I'm fighting teeth and nails against becoming partial to any particular candidate.

I don't think I mind it either way, whether it was the earl de Vere or Shakespeare from Stratford, or anybody else for that matter, who wrote those famous plays and sonnets. No reason to mix 'n' match the author and the works, right?

I'm learning, me of all people

I never expected a test book to be so interesting as one dissertation on 19th century Finnish family life.

When I read history books, I'm constantly surprised by how different things were even in the recent past. I suppose that shows how little I know about history. Even hearing from my mum about her childhood simply blows my mind.

Her aunt ruined her teeth because she thought that a lump of sugar will heal a toothache! I'm so glad that most people these days are much more health conscious. Even though not that many are willing to live accordingly.

Anyways. So far I've learned, among many other things, that until late 19th century marriages were arranged (EDIT: only among upper class families I should add) so that the husband was at least 10 years older than the wife. If the age difference was any smaller, it was actually frowned upon.

By the end of the century, general attitudes were already changing more towards the present-day atmosphere. Now it's the complete opposite, for most people.

But it's interesting how different opinions people have on this. My mum for instance almost had a heart attack when she heard that my cousin married a man 10 years her senior.

To be fair, it was partly due to the fact that the guy had become bald very young, and in the photo that my mum saw he was on crutches, having had broken his leg recently. But still, it definitely has made me wonder if my mum would ever approve a similar situation in my case.

But it's not all bad. I discussed this with an old friend of mine and she thought 10 years is perfectly acceptable - because it's worked for her parents so well! So it seems that everything is relative.

Another friend prefers younger men, as does her sister. I can see the temptation. Being in the position to corrupt an innocent young man. But seriously speaking, all these differing opinions just go on to show how there can be no consensus on age differences today.

The bottom line seems to be that whatever floats your boat, you should go for it. In this age of relativism, I guess it makes sense.

Generally, I don't really care about it that much myself. If it works, why worry about age. I've noticed that if I'm interested in someone, I just don't care. The only reason why I'd be worried is if I became a widow for 20 years.

But honestly I don't believe that a huge age gap can work that often. And could the older person really be interested in someone much younger?

It amuses me how calculating I am sometimes. I just want to be in for the long haul.

A Million dead poets would gladly attest - or would they?

In my view, the Shakespeare Authorship question is a tangled web that would probably take a lifetime to unravel in its entirety.

I was rather disheartened when I tried to find accounts of the matter which actually would have tried to remain objective. I'm still on a hunt for an author who's genuinely trying to find the truth, rather than trying to defend his or her respective candidate as the true Shakespeare.

But maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Maybe you're not supposed to be objective. Maybe the only reason why anyone would be interested in the matter is that they actually care about who the author is.

Be that as it may, personally I still believe that you don't have to have a "favourite" candidate in order to be interested in the question. All this "bitter trench warfare", as it's been called, is entertaining and amusing in its own right.

I admit that my notion of "entertaining and amusing" may differ from the more generic meaning of those words. For instance, I couldn't resist a chuckle when I read the description of the Oxfordian Richard Whalen's 1994 book, Shakespeare - Who was he?. (There's an imaginative title for a book if I ever saw one.)

Let me quote whoever wrote the description:

Most intriguing are the many direct parallels between Oxford's life and Shakespeare's works, especially in Hamlet, the most autobiographical of the plays.

To elucidate the terminology for everyone: Oxfordians believe that Edward de Vere (1550-1604), the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare. Their candidate is usually called Oxford, though the man himself preferred to sign his letters as Oxenford. At least we know he had a sense of humour, or it's just another manifestation of the flexibility of Elizabethan spelling. Which is also one issue I must touch upon in the future.

So Hamlet, "the most autobiographical" of Shakespeare's plays. The "direct" parallels between the play and the earl's life are used as an argument on his behalf, because – here comes the gist of it – the play is the most autobiographical of them all.

Of course, whether a work is autobiographical or not can only be determined if you know who the author is. Please, please correct me if I'm wrong on this one! If I'm not, I've just found another ridiculous circular argument from the Oxfordian camp. (Not that the "orthodox" Shakespearians haven't excelled in that area for their part.)

To drive home the point of this post: even with a quick 5-minute search on the authorship question, you're bound to run into irrational, silly or just plain stupid arguments.

In countering the inevitably ensuing frustration from all that, my weapon is to make light of it. But even my sense of humour has its limits.

I was going to present a rough draft of all the issues that I'm going to cover in my forthcoming series on the authorship question. Turns out that instead, I was once again amused slash annoyed by an Oxfordian statement, and consequently thrown off course. This is going to be an interesting journey, I can tell.

Capricious

All the negativity of my previous post on Italy aside, I liked Capri a lot. It was really beautiful there, and CLEAN. I loved the bougainvillea that were growing on almost every wall.

(Click to enlarge)

I liked the villa of Axel Munthe (1857-1949) in particular, Villa San Michele, which is actually located in the town of Anacapri, higher up the island. The towns of Capri and Anacapri harbour some sort of enmity towards each other for some reason.

Munthe was a Swedish writer and a doctor. He designed his villa himself, and wanted it to be the embodiment of his visions that he had over the years.



When they started working on the site of the house, they discovered old Roman remains of columns and statues, and plaques with writing on them.

The locals thought it was all a bunch of rubbish, but Munthe used them to decorate his villa. He was farsighted, as now everyone can of course appreciate their aesthetic, let alone historical value.



He claimed to have found many of the sculptures through the visions he had.

He'd one day been sitting down by the sea, and got an overwhelming feeling that someone was watching him. He told his employees to go search the sea in a particular spot, and what d'you know, they found the head of Medusa.



Another time he wanted to find a sphinx to add to his furniture. He sailed to a random island, told his people to wait for 24 hours and if he hadn't come back by then they should leave. He did come back in time, with him a small statue of a sphinx.

He placed it on a terrace of a kind, and there it was laying on a balustrade and facing the rising sun. Nobody can see its face, unless they're willing to plummet to their death.

(Click to enlarge)

They're nice stories, but I strongly suspect that our Mr. Axel was a bit of a cuckoo.

I realize I haven't been posting any new paintings in a while. Anyone who discovers this site now must wonder how come it's supposed to be about painting and art. Yet I think all these photos look really good against this new layout, so I hope others can enjoy them from an aesthetic point of view like I do.

I got a little carried away with my recent encroachments on my other hobbies, and I haven't even posted about all of my new ideas yet. I think it's positive that I don't always have to blather about my paintings. Sometimes they really aren't that interesting, even to me.

(Pictures 4 and 5: http://www.capri.com)