I now vent in the specific direction of “Oxfordians” who believe that William Shakespeare did not write his own poetry and plays: REALLY? Have you read Edward DeVere’s poetry? Have you studied anything about his personal narcissism? Have you asked yourself why such a vain man would put his own name to poetry that a sixth-grader might be ashamed to own – but Shakespeare’s name to the greatest English verse ever conceived? Have you wondered how a subpar writer who died in 1604 could’ve written plays credited to William Shakespeare that were written after that? Some dated as late as 1613????!?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This led to a lengthy and, to my mind, extremely pleasant exchange, other than the friend of my friend who referred to me as a “garrulous douchebag.” In this exchange, I pointed out that I fully believe that William Shakespeare wrote his own poetry and plays, but I believe William Shakespeare was a pseudonym, and not William Shaksper of Stratford, who usually gets the credit. I also addressed the dating of the plays, but the subject of DeVere’s supposedly low-quality poetry called to mind an excerpt from Charlton Ogburn’s “The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality,”<\/a> which is a tome that many Oxfordians consider to be the gold standard of Oxfordianism. I had thought that the test he mentions on page 393 of that book would be somewhere online, but, alas, it is not.<\/p>\n So, being the garrulous douchebag that I am, I thought I ought to remedy that.<\/p>\n I now quote Ogburn at length from pages 393-393 of his book. His words are in blue. In this excerpt,\u00a0Ogburn\u00a0quotes a Dartmouth professor named Louis P.\u00a0B\u00e9n\u00e9zet, whose words are in green.<\/p>\n _________________<\/p>\n The reader who does not see signs of a common origin in the two sets of verses might test his ability to discriminate between the styles of Oxford and “Shake-speare” on a pot-pourri made up by Louis P.\u00a0B\u00e9n\u00e9zet of Dartmouth… Professor\u00a0B\u00e9n\u00e9zet writes:<\/span><\/p>\n This mixture contains seventy lines; there are six passages from the works of one author, seven from the other; no passage is longer than eight lines; none shorter than four.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It has been most interesting to see the Shakespeare scholars tackle this problem. I handed the book to a former college instructor in Elizabethan literature, now an editor for a well known publishing firm. He picked it up with an air which said: “This is going to be easy. Just watch me detect the true Shakespeare lines.” I had given him the number of lines in each selection, so it should have been doubly easy. He not only failed to pick the Shakespeare passages among the first forty lines; he exactly reversed them<\/em>, attributing de Vere’s stanzas to Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s to de Vere…<\/span><\/p>\n An old friend of mine, who has been teaching English for forty years, took my booklet home and made an honest attempt, after careful reading and study, to pick out the Shakespeare passages. I met him afterwards, and he confessed that he had missed three of the first eight and was not sure enough to go on to the end.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But the most surprising test was an interview which I had, four years ago, with a famous professor of literature from one of the nation’s oldest and greatest universities, a man whose name is synonymous with literary knowledge and who is quoted from coast to coast [William Lyon Phelps of Yale].<\/span><\/p>\n I read him the pot-pourri. “What do you think of it?” I asked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “It is beautiful,” he replied.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “Where do you place it?” I asked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “Oh, it is Elizabethan,” was his answer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “Did one man write all of it?” I persisted.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “Oh, unquestionably,” said he…<\/span><\/p>\n A prominent literary figure, a committed Stratfordian, to whom I submitted the test, would have nothing to do with it, calling it “dirty pool” and “a cheap lawyer’s trick.” Here it is:<\/span><\/p>\n [Stallion editorial note: I will now show you the trick in question, but I’ll do it in black text to make it easier to read, as well as numbering each line. See if you can tell which is which. Unfortunately, Ogburn never provided an “answer key,” so I had to Google all of them to find out for myself.\u00a0All of DeVere’s poetry comes from his youth, so one would expect it to be less accomplished than what he later wrote as Shakespeare. At the same time, I think this amply illustrates the fact that DeVere’s supposedly shoddy poetry is only shoddy by reputation, not by empirical examination.]<\/span><\/p>\n The answers are in\u00a0white text below. Highlight to read.<\/span><\/p>\n So? How did you do? Let me know in the comments. Don’t cheat; that’s no fun.<\/p>\n Shakespeare wrote lines 7-12, 19-22, 27-34, 43-46, and 65-71<\/span><\/p>\n Edward de Vere, using his own name, wrote lines 1-6, 13-18, 23-26, 35-42, and 47-64.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So,on Facebook, an old friend threw down the gauntlet on a subject that is near and dear to my heart and rather boring to most folks.I quote his\u00a0original post in full:![\"Edward-de-Vere_1528470c\"](\"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/Edward-de-Vere_1528470c.jpg\")
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I now vent in the specific direction of \"Oxfordians\" who believe that William Shakespeare did not write his own poetry and plays: REALLY? <\/blockquote> ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3575"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5132,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3575\/revisions\/5132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}