"A Woman's 'Yes'"

A woman's yes is Life
A woman's yes is Love
A woman's yes
Is Life and Love
    And what we're dreaming of.

January 29, 2012

"When I Came Upon the Gypsy"

When I came upon the gypsy
She was munching on a newt
She said she likes them screechy
(And I gulped.)
January 29, 2012

Set

1. "How's the World Treating You"
2. "You'll Never Walk Alone"
3. "Try Me Again"
4. "It Doesn't Matter Anymore"
5. "How Do You Speak to an Angel"
6. "Funny How Time Slips Away"
7. "Almost Persuaded"
8. "My Way"
9. "Dark End of the Street"
10. "Hallelujah"
11. "Makes No Sense" Terri Allard
12. "Crying"
13. "I Let My Mind Wander"
14. "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love With You)"
15. "Four Strong Winds"
16. "Faithless Love"
17. "Your Song"
18. "Wild Horses"
19. "Change of Heart"
20. "Me and Paul"

"Like Some Sewer Rat"

Climb out of your vat of beer
Emerge like some sewer rat
It's facts and feelings you fear
But life really ain't like that.
January 25, 2012

"Life Came to Me"

Life came to me
. From across the room
. . She saw that I was dying.

She asked me out
. She bared her breast
. . She told me I was lying.
January 22, 2012

Demolishes Oxford

One True Bard?

Shakespeare Lost and Found: Evidence for William Stanley, Sixth Earl of Derby, as the Man Behind the Mask by John M. Rollett

Wherefrom Comes 'Shake-Speare'?

'thy countenance shakes spears'*

Gabriel Harvey in G. Harveil gratulationum Valdensium libri quatuourr (1578)--dedicated to the 17th Earl of Oxford (Edward de Vere)--in which Harvey tells him to throw away his feeble pen and prepare to defend his country.

*Translated as 'your glance shoots arrows' by Alan Nelson.

"Except, Of Course"

All of my friends are drug addicts
Drunken bums and crazies
Not a one of them normal
Except, of course
For me.
January 12, 2012

Letter to Peter Dickson: January 10, 2012

Dear Peter Dickson,

Consider the possibility, if you will, that the arrests* were not relevant to the production of the First Folio, although the Spanish Marriage debacle may have been. Consider the events in Germany which saw the newly crowned King and Queen of Bohemia (Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick of Heidelberg) fleeing in disarray from Prague after the disastrous Battle of the White Mountain on 8th November 1620. Her father, James I refused all aid, despite the wishes of parliament, but Horace Vere, mounted an expeditionary force which proved ineffective in the event. I have read a letter from Horace Vere in the B.L. recounting the events.

History records that Frederick King of Bohemia escaped in disguise through enemy lines (and left his Garter insignia behind). According to the historian, C. V. Wedgwod, they left in such haste that the youngest prince was all but forgotten and 'the Queen's frivolous books were left flying about in her rooms to scandalize the piety of the conquerors' (126). I know that Elizabeth took some books with her to The Haag because I have seen on display in the University of Heidelberg the Manessi Codex which was known to have been in the castle library in 1613 and which turned up in Paris years later (it is possible that, desperate for money, Elizabeth sold the codex to her sister in law Henrietta).

Now consider the possibility of Elizabeth's going to live in Heidelberg in 1613 in a castle which housed one of Europe's great libraries and with a 500 seat theatre newly built by her young husband in one of the castle's towers; consider the possibility that she left England with no playscripts or books in English. Commonsense tells me that she would have taken English books and playscripts with her,such as the half dozen by Shake-speare performed in the months before her wedding, as well as others. Where are they now?

After the defeat in Bohemia, King James tried to negotiate a settlement whereby Frederick and Elizabeth could return to Heidelberg under Spanish protection, but not surprisingly they refused. In April 1622 Frederick left the Haag and joined General Mansfield on the Rhine but they were no match for the Imperial general Tilley.

When Tilley ransacked the castle, in September 1622, he sent the famous library to the Vatican. However when the collection was returned to the University of Heidelberg for the great retrospective exhibition in the 1980s celebrating the university's 600th anniversary, there were no English language books listed. I have seen the catalogue.

What happened to the English language books? Destroyed? Hidden in the Vatican? Hidden in Prague Castle? Sent back to England badly damaged? Your theory does not explain why much of the Folio was set from such obviously damaged material . . parts of several plays seem to have been reconstructed from memory. And most important of all: why was it necessary to print the collected plays? What is in them that had to be kept for posterity? Have we missed something in them? Did you know that there were ten English companies playing in Germany by 1620? What happened to their playbooks? A list of some of their plays turned up in  Dresden in the mid-19th century and includes several by Shake-speare and a few by Marlowe too.

The Spanish Marriage affair was not all that concerned the English in the early 1620s.

You should consider the possibility that the dreadful events of the Thirty Years War, sparked by the affairs in Bohemia, which led to apparently indiscriminate slaughter and burning of towns and books may have been the catalyst for the decision to collect and preserve the plays of William Shake-speare in print . .

Sincerely,
Jane Nelson, University of Adelaide S.A.

*in June 1621 involving Henry de Vere, son of Edward de Vere, and Henry Wriothesley.

(posted here by permission of author)

"His Beauty Shown"

God put us here
Reason unknown
A face makes clear
His beauty shown.
January 7, 2012

Popular Narrative Poems: December 2011

Narrative poems receiving the most traffic last December were . .

1. 'The Man Who Wrote Shakespeare'
2. 'Confession'
3. 'Dionysus'
4. 'The Man Who Brought Royalty to America'
5. 'The Man Who Saved History'
6. 'An Idiot Chase'
7. 'I Asked the Angels'
8. 'An End to War'
9. 'The Day God Invented Bluegrass'
10. 'When Love Met Hate on the Causeway'

Partly due to the popularity of the narrative poems, but mostly so I won't be editing different versions, I've created just one page for 'An End to War' and 'The Tycoon Who Craved Macaroon' in the narrative section. I pulled versions under the other genres they fit: beat and word, respectively.

Ironically, 'War' was my first major beat poem, and still could be considered the grandmother of all of them. And 'Tycoon' is certainly the king of my word poems.  I've left links from the other categories, together with the titles on the index pages, so visitors will know these poems share a genre.

'Spanish Marriage Crisis'

"The two British historians most suspect in this regard are S. J. Houston and Roger Lockyer, who made major contributions in rediscovering the vendetta between the Oxford-Southampton-led Patriot coalition against the proposed Spanish marriage policy (i.e. a marriage between England's Prince Charles and a sister of the Spanish King) and the policy' s chief promoters: King James, his homosexual lover (Buckingham) and the notorious Spanish Ambassador Count Gondomar."

FROM:  http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-123453619/british-scholars-erasing-two.html
SEE ALSO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Match

Shakespeare Plays Set in Italy

1. All's Well that Ends Well
2. Antony and Cleopatra
3. Coriolanus
4. Cymbeline
5. Julius Caesar
6. The Merchant of Venice
7. Much Ado About Nothing
8. Othello
9. Romeo and Juliet
10. The Taming of the Shrew
11. Titus Andronicus
12. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
13. The Winter's Tale

For What Service?

"Tobie Matthew was knighted at Royston, not long since, but for what service, God knows."

'The indefatigable correspondent, Chamberlain, wrote on October 25th, 1623, to Carleton'
FROM: Sir Tobie Matthew: Bacon's Alter Ego by his kinsman Arnold Harris Matthew (De jure Earl Of Landaff, Of Thomastown, County Tipperary) and Annette Calthrop (1907)

Decision Analysis Applied to Shakespeare Authorship

A decision-support technique known as the analytic hierarchy process, for which various software packages exist, might help people decide on a candidate--or group of candidates--to support as author(s) of the works now attributed to Shakespeare.  Especially as no definitive documentation can be shown to establish who actually wrote what.

The goal would be determine the 'best' candidate, the criteria could be determined by group or individual (Looney's might be a good idea-starter), the candidate list would also be determined.

The actual decision analysis might be done in a room or remotely--for a group--or individually.  It might be done at a conference, for example, then the results could be posted online, together with the apparatus so users might alter and adapt as they see fit.

'No one single manuscript has ever been found to identify Shakespeare as the author of these productions'

'prior to the year 1611, a number of plays, tragedies, comedies, and histories, of various degrees of merit, were produced, of which William Shakespeare was reported to be the author, and which undoubtedly were, in some way, the property of the company of actors of which he was an active member. No one single manuscript has ever been found to identify Shakespeare as the author of these productions; nor is there, among all the records and traditions handed down to us, any statement that he was ever seen writing or producing a manuscript; nor that he ever claimed as his own any of the excellent, or repudiated (as unworthy of him) any of the worthless, productions presented to the public in his name.

He seems, at no time, to have had any personal or peculiar interest in them; both during and after his life, they appear to have been the property of the stage, and “published by the players, doubtless according to their notions of acceptability with the visitants of the theatre.”'

William Henry Smith, Esquire
Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry Touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-Writers in the Days of Elizabeth
(John Russell Smith, London; 1857)

SHAKSPER: A miracle of intuitive force?

"Conceding that Shaksper was a miracle of intuitive force, such a gift would not have conferred knowledge or science, the inevitable result of studies and opportunities, which latter did not then exist. It almost seems ridiculous to talk about the writings of any man, when not a line of his has come down to us, and not a word, except his own signature. Is it a matter of possibility or probability that if Shaksper wrote so well in every sense of the word and such a vast amount, that no manuscript of his, good, bad or indifferent, has been preserved, when the writings of so many men of far lesser note, conceding any greatness to Shaksper, should not only exist but abound?"

General J. Watts de Peyster

---

SOURCE: An impartial study of the Shakspeare title: with facsimiles by John Hawley Stotsenburg (John P. Morton & Company; 1904), who pulls from Joseph C. Hart's--'the first public disputer and denier of the Shaksper title'--book The Romance of Yachting (Harper and Brothers; 1848) who transcribes from a pamphlet by General J. Watts de Peyster: 'Was the Shakespeare after all a Myth?' (1888).