Comment by catilina | Hacker News Reader

Comment by catilina | Hacker News Reader

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As an Oxfordian, this is a complete strawman. I'm not sure where anyone got the idea that Shakespeare from Stratford was not well attested as an actor ("Shakespeare the Player"). He is extremely well attested as an actor.

Here's a 400-page biography of Shakespeare from Stratford, by an Oxfordian:

https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeares-Unorthodox-Biography-Evi...

In Hollywood terms, a simple biography of this guy was that he was an actor who became a producer. The "authorship hoax" is that the screenwriter's work was published under the producer's name. In the Elizabethan world, which is second only to Twitter for dubious attestation and pseudonyms, this is about as unlikely as finding a goat on a goat farm.

The Elizabethans were not egalitarians. Social climbing in the Elizabethan world is not unheard of, but it's quite rare and very likely to be remarked on. A country bumpkin who becomes a noted poet on first-name terms with top aristos would be someone everyone talked about, and wrote about. Ben Jonson's ascent was less vertiginous, and he appears clearly in the written record as a human being. Shakespeare the social astronaut is not quite an anachronism, but Shakespeare the reclusive social astronaut is pretty much impossible.

Mainstream conspiracy theories and outsider conspiracy theories often have the same weird, bitchy, false-triumphant tone found in the OP. Like the people who analyze the walls of Auschwitz gas chambers for cyanide derivatives and thus "prove" that the Holocaust couldn't have happened. It takes a lot of work to evaluate the specific piece of evidence, but very little work to listen for this tone.

You can't seriously have gone from Stratford to Auschwitz in one go. Please don't troll here.

This would be a decent comment without that last paragraph.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13359360 and marked it off-topic.

Ben Jonson's ascent wasn't one. He was the son of a gentleman, had a trade, had access to money, trained under Camden, and fought under Francis Vere.

Shakespeare's lack of all that status is exactly why he is the 'upstart crow' and mocked for his (failed) attempts at social climbing instead of gaining any more purchase in society than as 'country bumpkin'-turned-writer. He was not somebody, and therefore not one the somebodies talked about.

Writers were not held in high esteem and were easily knocked off of their precarious perch in society (cf. Thomas Kyd).

There is a point beyond which most people just accept the fact of the matter as proof. The problem with the is he isn't he doubters is that if indeed they are the same man, there is no possible proof to be found. No one goes around leaving behind testaments that, yes, I'm-really-me. The lack of fact that show Shakepeare had a ghost-writer, at one point, must be taken as a proof by absence.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I have no doubt that Shakespeare from Stratford and Shakespeare the actor and playwright are the same. But your comment is nothing more than an appeal to authority. "I'm from Oxford and I say so." Please try to do better than that.

In this context, I suspect the word 'Oxfordian' might better be interpreted in this sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespear... (for what it's worth, people from Oxford or affiliated with the university would be unlikely to refer to themselves as 'Oxfordian'. If they want to be cute, they might go with 'Oxonian'.)

In that case it would seem to completely change the meaning of catilina's post - in my first reading, I was under the impression that they were attempting to debunk the it-wasn't-written-by-Shakespeare position. The confusing wording (goats and goat farms) is easy to overlook.

Yes it would have been better to clarify that in the comment.

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