This whole blog seems to have become a big troll meant to piss me off. Not only do you hate the US Constitution (the point on which I used to agree to some extent but now vehemently disagree though some changes could be useful), but then you come out and support Putin. Then, to top it all off, you engage in the most refuted slander of all time and support Oxfordianism.
Only an idiot would let someone else take credit for those masterworks. And, indeed, we see Shakespeare doing things like pandering to Elizabeth's ancestors and excoriating the Yorkists and heaping lavish praise on the Lancastrians, avoiding the obvious and highly dramatic plot points in his Henry the Eighth (such as Henry's many marriages and executions) and adding fulsome praise of Elizabeth to the same, that would make no damn sense if he was a fall boy: Why have a fall boy if you aren't willing to risk a fall? Why not take the credit for your compliments to the queen? Shakespeare, despite his genius, is one of the biggest ass-kissers in all of history; you don't kiss ass with a pseudonym.
We see Shakespeare's development as a poet---and Oxford never even came close to him. Any verse in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, far and away his worst play and an early work, beats to living hell anything produced by Oxford. Or take Two Gentlemen of Verona, the other candidate for worst play and probably Shakespeare's very first, it too beats out Oxford's known production.
Not to mention, we know the men who were involved in printing the First Folio---and we have a rather detailed publishing history of some of the Quartos: Interesting how none of the diverse publishers of Shakespeare's work ever showed signs of suspecting Oxford. Certainly one of them might have tried to confuse the ownership issue when Shakespeare sought redress for an unauthorized publishing, as he did from Jaggard, by saying someone else was the author. But none did.
Furthermore, we have reason to suspect Shakespeare collaborated with a number of different authors: Titus Andronicus was a collaboration with Peale, and Edward III seems to have been a large collaboration of authors including Shakespeare. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, is a collaboration with Wilkins. Timon of Athens is obviously a collaboration with Middleton (if you desire a followup post on my blog making the case for these coauthorships, please say so in the comments). How could so many artists have collaborated with Oxford unknowingly? Or why would so many have held onto the secret?
As for Shakespeare's education being insufficient, we know what Shakespeare's sources were: Basically, Holinshed's chronicles, various popular works, and classics that any schoolboy studying Latin at the time would have had. What we don't see, at all, is the influence of Greek works---which makes sense as Shakespeare did not know Greek. I can, in fact, say that Oxford's work would have shown a much richer source material than what is known to have inspired Shakespeare.
Lastly, the fact that Oxford stopped writing must imply that I am secretly Kazio Ishiguro, because I produced a fair number of competent literary works when I was young and have done little with my life since, while he continued to publish and win Booker prizes. Seriously, man, an educated, rich guy stopped writing and didn't do any serious work so he must be the greatest literary genius of his time? That is your argument?
Indeed, the Oxfordian theory involves so many people keeping the secret that it begins to smack of Alex Jones. What am I saying, it is slander to accuse Alex of being an Oxfordian.
Seriously man, you want to debate this crap: Any time, any place. I eat Oxfordians for breakfast, son. Same way I eat Marxists, baby.
I hate to break it to you, but if you support the US Constitution, and therefore implicitly the American Revolution, you're not a reactionary. Maybe those actually are good things, but thinking such and being a reactionary are mutually exclusive. You should probably change the name of your publication if you want it to accurately reflect what your views seem to be. Words have meanings.
Oh no, I have never heard that one before. I guess I am going to kill myself now. You aren't the tenth person to have made that utterly false point to me.
Look up the definition of reactionary: a reactionary is a person who holds political views that favour a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which that person believes possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.
Pretty certain that if you want to roll back the popular election of senators and return to the pre-FDR Constitutional order that you are a reactionary since that constitutes a state that is prior to the status quo ante. Reactionaries can disagree about just HOW FAR BACK they want to go. I want to go back to the late Victorian ages, but with better technology.
You know Tolkien could call Curtis a filthy modernist because he wants to return to the Tudor period and not the time before the Norman conquest.
You clearly still think of politics in terms of Whig history "How far back do you want to go" which is if not antithetical to reactionary politics, it certainly is antithetical to Moldbugism. Furthermore, how exactly do you restore the late Victorian ages, just practically? That "better technology" changes things and you need to change in response if you want to control how that change goes. How do you restore the US Constitution? As you no doubt know, the Constitution is not followed even remotely by Washington. Returning to it would take absolute power, and if you have that, why would you spend it to try and reanimate what was done in 1787? Why not follow the spirit of 1787 and do the sort of thing the Framers did, but for modern times? What would Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, or George Washington do if they were here today?
The nature of Anglo-Saxon civilization, as exemplified by the Victorian expansion and the United States, is that of decentralized institutions, local assemblies, tea and cake. Anything outside of this framework is alien to our common-law based society. And so a Victorian reaction makes a lot of sense. It's a form of Anglo-Zionism.
You're a conservative, not a reactionary. You've just wound the clock back a little further than those who want back the '90s or the '50s. Well, land yourself a century in the past and you're still right on the same road to where we are now. Not to mention the foolishness of desiring a "retvrn" to any particular era. We can learn from the past, but we can't recreate it.
(Neo-)reaction means thinking outside the confines of Enlightenment (modern) thought, which the Victorians were certainly enveloped in themselves. Rightist critics seem to think "Moldbug wants to be a Tudor!" accurately represents his thought when no, this was just the first of the eras we can clearly examine outside of the Enlightenment. Obviously, the Enlightenment comes from Christianity, but Moldbug is mostly writing to progressives/libertarians who reject Christianity anyway but have a major blind spot.
But then you get conservatives coming around and pretending that UR is somehow inconsistent or proclaims some "good/evil" dividing line around the mid-1500s.
Precisely! I remember Chronicles Magazine running an edition devoted to the proposition that everything went wrong with the Renaissance...which it kind of did if you believe that medieval Catholicism formed the ideal end-point of civilisation. That sort of thinking goes a long way towards explaining why the palaeo-conservatives went nowhere. IMHO a rational reactionary absorbs/metabolises antiquity and modernity alike.
Nope, that is wrong. You are telling me the Victorian era lands us onto the same path of sexual wantonness and debauchery that we are on now---absurd. You could honestly use your "logic" to accuse anyone of not being a reactionary by saying "Go back 500 years and you are just on the same path we are on now." Your "logic" could be applied to any reactionary to argue he is not actually a reactionary.
If you are arguing that logic holds no matter how far you go back, then you are actually arguing that being a reactionary is impossible and that you and Moldbug are not reactionaries, which if you are not conservatives would make you radical, leftist reformers. This is the consequence of your own "logic."
You really should look at yourself, and your oxymoronic name, and ask whether or not you are, in fact, a leftist.
It's not an issue of "how far back you want to go," it's an issue of whether you universally condemn popular uprisings, especially popular uprisings that lead away from monarchy, on principle. Reaction isn't wanting to go back to some given date in history, in fact bog-standard conservatism wishes for that, albeit with relatively recent dates. Reaction is answering the question of if democratic revolution is ever legitimate with "no."
Reaction literally is wanting to go back to a given date in history. You are acting like liberals, letting Curtis redefine it the same way the homosexuals redefined gay. The word pre-existed him. You and he don't get to redefine it or coopt it.
Gay still means happy---not sodomy: Sodomy might make certain people gay, but that doesn't mean being gay requires sodomy. Reactionary still means someone who wishes to turn back the clock to an earlier political order, not anti-populist. Anti-populism is an aspect of Curtis Yarvin's reactionary stance---not a necessary component the same way sodomy is a component of homosexual gayness but not a component of mine; I perfer listening to classical music.
Why can't you guys get this through your heads: Curtis Yarvin is a reactionary. Being a reactionary does not mean being Curtis Yarvin. Socrates is mortal but not every mortal is Socrates.
Why don't you guys turn to using an actual dictionary instead of lecturing me? A few minutes with any decent dictionary could settle this dispute.
Who wrote Shakespeare's plays and the Oxford question are of course quite different. As noted above, Curtis's claim for Oxford makes no sense. Shakespeare used popular translations of classical sources. No classical scholar would do that, or at least not consistently.
I believe Ben Jonson knew Shakespeare and referred to him. Jonson thought quite highly of himself and of his art, as did Shakespeare, which is clear from his plays and his poetry. In his poetry he identifies his work as immortal, multiple times.
Calling Shakespeare both semi-literate and an actor makes no sense. As an actor he had to memorize difficult texts.
He was also director of the company. As director, he would have to know the entire play. If you think directing multiple Shakespeare plays is the work of a semi-literate person, perhaps you should reconsider your level of knowledge.
It's true that we don't know much about Shakespeare's life. We don't know much about any Elizabethan playwright's life, so that's not odd.
>Shakespeare used popular translations of classical sources. No classical scholar would do that, or at least not consistently.
The best-known “popular translation” of a classical work used by Shakespeare is probably Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is easy to explain from an Oxfordian perspective: Golding was de Vere’s maternal uncle, and they lived together in the household of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (Queen Elizabeth’s right-hand man and de Vere’s father-in-law). It’s only natural that de Vere would have been influenced by his uncle’s work. Indeed, given the timing of the translation’s publication and the close proximity of the two men, it’s not at all improbable that de Vere could have helped out with the translation.
To be literate means to know how to both read and write. An actor would only know how to read. Great evidence for knowing how to write would be letters. There is not a single letter in existence the proves Shakespeare could write. What about someone like Voltaire? Thousands of letters…
Shakespeare seems to have attended the Stratford grammar school, which had a pretty rigorous curriculum. Sister Miriam Joseph describes the curriculum in literature in her book on figures of speech in Shakespeare. If you really think that a boy learns to read Holinshed and difficult theatricals without learning to write, well, you may not know as much as you think.
Voltaire is about 200 years later. Ben Jonson was more famous and more admired than Shakespeare in their time, and there are only four letters of his extant.
There are many letters of de Vere. They don't reveal any particular command of language as far as I can see.
Marlowe: 'There are no manuscripts of Marlowe's plays, no letters written by him or to him, in fact no examples of his handwriting at all except a signature as witness to a will in Canterbury in 1585, when he was 21 years old, spelled "Christofer Marley." Not once during his lifetime was he ever referred to as a playwright or poet; surviving references spell his name every way from "Marly" to "Marlin," but almost never "Marlowe." The name "Christopher Marlowe," in any of its spellings, was never associated with any play or poem or literary work during the man's lifetime. There is no evidence to connect him with any acting company, or with the theater in any way.'
Shakespeare "seems" to have attended. There is no documented evidence he went there. Sure he could have.
Ben Johnson can be proven to know how to write, through letters and other primary sources and can be connected to his plays through direct evidence.
Things can be proven of Shakespeare through primary sources, but in regards to his academic and literary career it is left to speculation during his "lost years", such as his attending the Stratford grammar school or how he traveled.
How could he have done all his work without leaving a trace proving through evidence that he knew how to write?
The fact that this is left wide open to speculation leads to the legitimate academic question of his authorship.
It appears that you need a school attendance record for a ten-year-old in Elizabethan England. No one can supply that. But there's this: 'William's father John Shakespeare was a respectable citizen of Stratford. In 1557 he was elected Town Bailiff, which corresponds roughly to mayor. Shakespeare would have been three years old at the time. Children typically began their schooling at age four or five at a "petty school," where they learned to form their letters and to read English. After two years, they went on to grammar school. The local grammar school's charter specified that it was a "Liberam Scolam Grammaticalem," i.e., a free school where students paid no fees (Baldwin Vol. I p. 464). So while a poor family might need the child's labor or might not be able to afford school materials, children from middle-class families would attend school as a matter of course.'
Believe, if you wish, that the playwright's solidly middle class father had his son taught to read at an extremely high level, sufficient to cope with an entire play of great difficulty, but that the boy was not taught to write. If you will believe this, you will believe almost anything. I have no more to say here on this.
To say that because 16th century Shakespeare had background knowledge of ancient Roman history he must have been an aristocrat is like saying that because some writer today cribbed from Lord of The Rings they must have been a Tolkien-class medieval scholar
The Oxford argument has always struck me as incredibly classist
You must not read the blog very often; his support for Putin is pretty clear. Try re-reading "Gory for Ukraine." Enjoying Your Russian Civil War, for example, systematically ignores that we made security guarantees to Ukraine---precisely to end nuclear proliferation. Curtis Yarvin is too knowledgeable to be unaware of the Budapest Memorandum and so clearly did this in order to incorrectly sway people against adhering to our obligations. He did it because Putin is the example of the sort of monarch he wishes to see installed. Nuclear war must be avoided at all costs, so let's give up on the security guarantees we made to get people to give up their nuclear weapons.
It is utterly absurd to think a war of choice, where we are intentionally getting Ukraine to avoid attacking Russia proper, has any risk of spinning out of control into nuclear war. Putin, Biden, and everyone with half a brain knows there is no chance of that happening, or Putin would never have undertaken the war in the first place. And the idea that he would go nuclear over a little strip of territory Russia offered to give back to Germany in the early 90's, well, sorry but no one is going to die for Konigsberg. It ain't exactly Paris, dude.
You want a flashpoint for nuclear war, it is Taiwan. If he were serious about seeking to avoid it, he would be pushing for Taiwanese armament and the development of microchip manufacturing capabilities in the US. Putin, despite being a serious asshole, is not even willing to use nukes tactically---why would we fear a sudden escalation to strategic nukes. Again, Curtis knows that we would see Putin use tactical nukes before using strategic, giving us ample time to back down or reach a compromise, but intentionally refuses to name this fact. And he knows that even tactical nukes would destroy any hope of Ukrainian integration into a greater Russia. The chance of nukes being exchanged between the US and Russia is virtually zero.
If someone gets annoyed at a flat earther, would you say "you seem remarkably defensive, just saying." It isn't defensive; I am tired. Oxfordianism is to Shakespeare scholarship what flat earth is to geography. I am sure uninformed chicks at dinner parties are impressed by it, but it is tiresome and false.
"It isn't defensive; I am tired. Oxfordianism is to Shakespeare scholarship what flat earth is to geography."
If you say so. While aware of the subject I've never delved into it. I will say though, as a layman with a nose for bullshit narratives, the Stratford story---a man of humble origins who worked his way up and achieved his genius by collaborating with others---sounds _exactly_ like the sort of bullshit narrative one would expect to be propounded by English scholars in our democratic era. Doesn't make Oxfordianism true, of course.
As for Ukraine / the Budapest Memorandum... Yeah yeah, I'm sure the people working at State were thinking about a two-decade-old addendum to the NPT when they orchestrated the Maidan Revolution. Totally.
All Yarvin did was parrot the views of IR realists like John Mearsheimer, who've been trying to temper the mindless expansionism of the GAE for years now, unsuccessfully. If recognizing Russia as a sovereign nation with strategic interests = "supporting Putin," then I guess that makes everyone to the right of Vicky "Fuck the EU" Nuland a dictator-loving isolationist. So be it.
The Budapest Memorandum was non-binding and nobody involved could have possibly thought it meant that Ukraine would receive American support for any war forever, there's no such thing. Furthermore, they didn't really have a choice but to give them up, they didn't have the money to support them and it would involve even more difficulties to repurpose them for use against Russia. Also, you are aware he's an isolationist? Like not even going to fight for NATO, who we've made much stronger security guarantees to. No treaty is forever just like no regime is forever.
You're too knowledgeable to be unaware of China's No First Use pledge and small nuclear arsenal, and that it's the *only* one of the big three countries with these things, so, uh, why are you peddling Taiwan as the big flashpoint? You CIA, bro? /s
>we know the men who were involved in printing the First Folio
The obvious explanation is that they were in on the conspiracy. The dedicatees of the First Folio were brothers William Herbert, former fiancé of de Vere’s daughter Bridget, and Philip Herbert, husband of de Vere’s daughter Susan. A case for Sherlock Holmes this ain’t.
My favorite challenge for Stratfordian credulists actually has nothing to do with Shakespeare per se. It is the mystery of Mark Rylance—Oscar-winning actor and first artistic director of the restored Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London—being an anti-Stratfordian. Rylance’s position doesn’t prove that de Vere was Shakespeare, of course, but it does prove that it’s not unreasonable to doubt the current orthodoxy.
We have got to see if we can't get dumb people to think that Shakespeare's wife really wrote the plays. I bet you feminists would be all over that crap? Who is with me? We could have our own stupid ball and everything. It might even make better pick up conversation than the Oxfordian nonsense.
Shakespeare was most likely not a fall guy. Shakespeare has a documented history of being a businessman. However, there is no history that he knew how to write, such as a single letter he wrote. Edward or another writer could have gone to Shakespeare and made a deal so he would be the business front for these works.
This is the age of nom de plumes. There are many reasons he would do that. It was common for writers at the time to be arrested. It happened to Ben Johnson numerous times.
A nobleman being in commercial business was below them and uncouth. Perhaps Oxford protected Shakespeare while he was the business front.
You’re replying to this comment which was not a reply to you to say you’re going to leave it for others to respond while calling the theory cliché and absurd. Nothing more cliché on the internet than a low level comment like this that adds no substance or insight.
"We live in an oligarchy of prestigious institutions that is full of super-smart people." Dude, we have to disabuse you of elite-worship. Our oligarchy is full of imbecilic cliche-ridden screeching harpies and intellectually limited goblins capable of nothing but quoting Robin Diangelo. Yes, under Wilson and perhaps FDR we had real Brahmins, now we have vicious ghouls who all share one brain between them.
What does it say about the intellects of so-called conservatives, red-staters and right wing "dissidents" that they've been unable to dislodge this stinking behemoth, then? Okay, yes, they're horrible and degenerate-- why are YOU failing to beat them?
Politics is a measure of monkeys, not angels, as Curtis has written. We can surmise that progs are better at least than their professed rivals simply because they are on top. And that's what matters. You're angry at Curtis because he's scratching your veneer of importance; of the fake moral superiority, that never-arriving Providence of victory, that you sell yourself as a "rightist" to justify your submission.
As our ancient sages said: One fool may throw a stone that even a hundred wise men cannot retrieve. The progs are better at seizing power as a fungus is better than a rose in corroding a rotting carcass. Getting rid of fungus is not easy, but it's hardly a testament of the fungus's virtue.
Nah, getting nutrients from a corpse is a very narrow task, governing a country is a very wide task, failing at a similarly wide task of taking power disqualifies you from governing, sorry.
Yet your “elves” aren’t governing a country. Their forefathers during Wilsonian times did. Now they just engage in an orgy of repudiation towards their charge, defacing monuments, undoing the ties that bind the nation, and screeching the idiotic platitudes of race and gender. I fear you have sentiments for these creatures.
Yes, they ARE governing a country. Extremely poorly, but historically that’s no matter at all. You’ve subscribed to the conservative myth of illegitimate power. No civilization can be stateless, so someone is always doing the ruling. That person or class is legitimate because everyone else is by definition weaker (less worthy).
We live in the death-spiral of Western civilization, so all parties involved are reprehensible in most ways. That’s part of decline.
Progressives and conservatives are unable to strip away the caked-up rust of these dying myths because they subscribe to the old religion. The former are obvious utopians, but so are their right-wing counterparts.
Conservatives think that because their beliefs are “good” they are destined for victory over their enemies, and therefore the arc of history bends towards justice. Sound familiar? By placing themselves outside of history and assuming some kind of rules-based order in the world, they’re endlessly rehashing the old Christian myth of divine providence. And always losing.
Reactionaries realize that civilizations rise and fall (even Western civilization, yes) and that the false idols of man’s making —Humanity, the Nation, the Race, the Creed, the Party— CANNOT BE SAVED. But the individual, by learning from the past and engaging with the present, can live a worthy life in whatever circumstances he finds himself.
Legitimacy has nothing to do with it. My argument is that we are simply ruled by incompetent fools who lack both intellect and culture. Harpies screeching "Racism! Waaa!" Hence superlatives such as "super-smart elves" are in anything grotesque. In addition, I argue that any rural church-goer possesses a much more powerful system of transmission into the treasures of our civilization through music, hymns, and classical art.
Well they're not going to be "on top" for much longer. The only thing that made their project viable was not completely mismanaging the global economy. They've done just that. No one wants to work, police officers are quitting en-mass, people have lost all motivation for supporting a nation that actively promotes a "nation of renters". "Intellectuals" don't have power, they have the façade of power - and this fact upsets them a lot more than any "rightist" is upset by noting "the libs" control a lot of institutions. Institutions that are now considered as handing out false prestige. No one is "failing to beat them". What is there to beat? Things like "the great reset" are just rehashes of 1920s utopian literature (managers thinking they can manage anything into existence), annoying and patronizing, but not a threat. Immigration is sort of more serious, but people have their limits: and one group pretty much has a majority of the firearms and militia forming capability. Hell, "rightist" america has most of the resources the "intellectuals" need to do anything: energy (fracking/ pipelines), water (pipelines and reservoirs), food. They put up with the crap because they are just much nicer people, but their patience isn't infinite (much like Russias patience with Germany was not infinite). Oh and the intellectuals just told this group "you need to get by with a lot less stuff and money" .And there is no doubt, the most expensive thing in these "rightists" lives is maintaining the "intellectual" class, their stupid "intellectual" laws, and their stupid "intellectual" culture. And as the "rightists" were told...cuts have to be made.
They're not the smartest people in the world, but they are definitely above average, and sometimes way above average. If you doubt that, you probably don't spend much time around people on the left side of the bell curve.
I'm planted deep within the professional class and I wouldn't say that people are above average (not in consulting, law, marketing, etc.. Obviously in tech they are). These people are completely cultureless, steeped in idiotic BLM cliches, appreciative of Amy Schumer and Lady Gaga as "female role models," and haunt the hallways of corporate America as screeching phantoms with lists and project status reports. Any rural American that goes to church has a much stronger link to the treasures of Western civilization through music, classical art, prayer, and hymns.
That's a really smart article. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. I'm having difficulty envisioning the actually mechanics of the collapse. Will it cascade from something banal? Like when a confused Günter Schabowski said "As far as I know, it takes effect immediately, without delay", and then a few hours later the Berlin Wall was being dismantled with hand tools.
But then the East Germans had a better understanding of where they were than most of us do. We will see I suppose.
“Thomas Carlyle once said of the British Foreign Office that there was no remedy for it but to set a live coal under it.”
We call it the State Department in these here parts.
So it’s don’t save the Merlot drinkers today, back to regime change?
This inconstancy , and thy art no woman...
Well. Save the regime or change it.... with...who? What?
Ends, means, ways.
Ends must be adjusted to means.
Ways: This regime excels at poppy cropping to the very 4th grade classroom, coincidentally that’s when they start grooming rentboys. But it does work.
It works to make sure nothing exists to supplant it, although as Jan 6 and Uvalde teach us nothing exists to defend it, or anyone else either. So the means are castrated, now literally at age 7.
Really people just want to survive gay Beria, there’s no fight in them.
So you see all that exists are atomized masses of people, nothing more is possible. As it happens I was in my humble way part of regime changes, you might call me “means.”
Like a breakfast taco, but more dangerous. Probably. But we did move, we did defend or offend, but we did move.
Moving for or against the regime is impossible now.
Its over now except for a paycheck. You’ll only have so many mutinous Border Patrol agents (disobeyed orders) to storm the gunman (their careers are toast).
There’s no organization to organize the means, the ways are well known , the ends delusional because the means do not exist.
The means are there, but the ways of the regime teach DO NOTHING or else.
So collect the last paychecks and wait for the lights to go out.
Our regime doesn’t change, it just will sit in the dark.
Frankly you should stock up on Merlot - and candles - and enjoy the decline.
I can’t imagine what Merlot goes with canned food or sawdust bread, but I am rather rustic I suppose. I do wonder if rat meat, or cat, dog, bugs is red wine or white?
"Our regime doesn’t change, it just will sit in the dark." Pure brilliance.
The Russians and Chinese will support the US in its decline for as long as it takes, like taxpayers financing indigenous people in a dysfunctional reservation. National greatness is pathway dependent and the US went off-road long ago.
"His signatures are those of a semi-literate man from the lower middle class, to which he belonged. (His daughter Judith signed her name with a mark.)"
That Shakespeare's/Shaksper's signature is "semi-literate" is disputable. The known examples are in what is called a "secretary" hand - the written equivalent of "Gothic" or blackletter type. Such handwriting was common in 16th century England. Ronald McKerrow writes in <i>An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students<i/> (Oxford, 1927: Clarendon Press) that:
"When we come to the sixteenth century, and especially to the later years of the century, we find a much larger number of literary documents which, not being the work of professional scribes, ae in cursive has of various degrees of informality and carelessness, and some of these are by no means easy to read. The only way in which the student can learn to make them out is by practice..." (p. 342)
McKerrow illustrates minuscules in Fig. 22, p. 343; and capitals in Fig. 23, p. 349. This writing looks very like the few known examples of Shakespeare's/Shaksper's signature.
In about the 1580s an Italian (Italic) handwriting began to be fashionable in England, and of this McKerrow writes:
"About the Italian hand there is no difficulty whatever, except such as may be due to the carelessness of the writer, for the formation of the letters is practically that of the 'copybook hand of to-day."
It will not do to dismiss Shakespeare's/Shaksper's handwriting as semi-literate because it reflects a now obsolete style that is difficult for modern readers, as compared to a later one that is easier for us to read. People tend to learn a style of handwriting earlier in life and to use it for the rest of their lives, regardless of changes in fashion. I have seen examples of very old-fashioned handwriting in use at a period when it was long outmoded; among them letters written late in life by an ancestress born in very early 19th-century Virginia, still using the long initial and medial ſ (s, like an f without the cross-stroke). It is reasonable to believe that in similar manner, Shakespeare/Shaksper learnt to use the secretary hand as a schoolboy, and persisted in so doing long after the italic hand became fashionable.
As for Judith Shakepeare/Shaksper signing documents with a mark, it was common for women of her time to know how to read but not how to write. A lady's education at the time revolved around religious devotion and the management of a household. The ability to read was necessary to both, while the ability to write write was essential to neither. Elizabeth I was famously literate in six languages, and she wrote in a fine italic hand - but hers was the education of a prince, whose concerns would transcend the merely domestic. Her example was far from usual.
The notion that middle class bourgeois in 16th century England like the Stratford Shakespeare couldn’t be literate or have educated background knowledge is I think very historically inaccurate. For what it’s worth Shakespeare has never read like an aristocrat to me, there’s no “de haut en bas” or affected quality to his writing at all
Maybe. But in 2019 my daughter took me to Stratford and we visited the Grammar School where Will allegedly went to school from age 8.
It was all verbal, with the elder kids teaching the younger kids, because you had to pay extra for pen and ink. Of course, the kids learned Latin. That was the whole point of a Grammar School. And the kids put on plays about classical subjects.
Oh. See, that has been the big sticking point for me. How would Shakespeare have known about the Julius Caesars and Anthonys and Cleopatras? Maybe it was the Latin classes. And the plays.
Also, Shakespeare's dad was a glovemaker. Sending him to the grammar school in an age when kids went to work at age 8 suggests that Shakespeare's father was a bit of a snob and was trying to push his kid upwards. as Mayor Vincy wa trying to do with Fred Vincy in "Middlemarch."
Still, I get your point. Shakespeare was not out of the top drawer, old chap. So how could he have written plays and poetry as though he was?
Shakespeare's classics education was not as good as Oxfords, but it was certainly better than anything we'd get today all the way up to undergrad as a minimum. Maybe even better than grad schools.
I see that your blog has become quite unpopular recently. But i think that is normal when you go mainstream. Suddenly a lot of people that never agreed with you are starting to read and guess what? They hate it. Big suprise! I for once continue to enjoy these posts, i just wish you had a bigger literary output and a faster pace of posting. We had like what? 6 posts in the last 3 months?
Hard disagree. Climbers are always the most vocal defenders of established order. There is no point in climbing if the status to which you aspire becomes meaningless before you reach it. It is not strange for someone to miss the irony of attempting to succeed through ability and defending the "natural order" of aristocracy.
On a second, minor note, I just don't buy the snobbishness that is supposed to make Shakespeare ludicrous. You know what's more ridiculous than some bumpkin being the champion of English lit? Some teenage bumpkin barging into a king's court, declaring that they'll lead his army to victory, getting to carry the banner of that army, then getting captured and dodging leading questions set up by established clergy meant to lead them to blaspheme. But no one doubts (I'm sure some doubt, there is always a fringe) the existence of Joan of Arc.
There is actually (at least one) whole field of study that collapsed overnight. Herb Terrace popped a big hole in the balloon of animal sign language experiments, the teaching of gorillas/chimps to talk to humans. There's a fascinating video on it if you have 50 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7wFotDKEF4
Not sure if that disproves Yarvin's point about "you can't reform (from within) your way out of an existing scholarly consensus" or if it's the exception that proves the rule. But at least this one exception exists.
Here is a good Shakespearean play: Curtis’s dream comes true. The Gray Prince emerges and he is a direct descendant of the Earl of Oxford. The true and only king as has been proved by the bloodline creating works that shadow over us like Mufasa looking over the pride land from the heavens. Growing up the Prince has read all of Curtis’s work and is schooled by him and other great elites receiving the greatest modern education anyone has received. Eventually he is proclaimed King and cleans up Washcorp. However, Curtis’s son does not like the new government and starts writing against the new king and the nobles and is eventually murdered by the new regime. Curtis dramatically stabs the Gray Prince in retribution.
This whole blog seems to have become a big troll meant to piss me off. Not only do you hate the US Constitution (the point on which I used to agree to some extent but now vehemently disagree though some changes could be useful), but then you come out and support Putin. Then, to top it all off, you engage in the most refuted slander of all time and support Oxfordianism.
Only an idiot would let someone else take credit for those masterworks. And, indeed, we see Shakespeare doing things like pandering to Elizabeth's ancestors and excoriating the Yorkists and heaping lavish praise on the Lancastrians, avoiding the obvious and highly dramatic plot points in his Henry the Eighth (such as Henry's many marriages and executions) and adding fulsome praise of Elizabeth to the same, that would make no damn sense if he was a fall boy: Why have a fall boy if you aren't willing to risk a fall? Why not take the credit for your compliments to the queen? Shakespeare, despite his genius, is one of the biggest ass-kissers in all of history; you don't kiss ass with a pseudonym.
We see Shakespeare's development as a poet---and Oxford never even came close to him. Any verse in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, far and away his worst play and an early work, beats to living hell anything produced by Oxford. Or take Two Gentlemen of Verona, the other candidate for worst play and probably Shakespeare's very first, it too beats out Oxford's known production.
Not to mention, we know the men who were involved in printing the First Folio---and we have a rather detailed publishing history of some of the Quartos: Interesting how none of the diverse publishers of Shakespeare's work ever showed signs of suspecting Oxford. Certainly one of them might have tried to confuse the ownership issue when Shakespeare sought redress for an unauthorized publishing, as he did from Jaggard, by saying someone else was the author. But none did.
Furthermore, we have reason to suspect Shakespeare collaborated with a number of different authors: Titus Andronicus was a collaboration with Peale, and Edward III seems to have been a large collaboration of authors including Shakespeare. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, is a collaboration with Wilkins. Timon of Athens is obviously a collaboration with Middleton (if you desire a followup post on my blog making the case for these coauthorships, please say so in the comments). How could so many artists have collaborated with Oxford unknowingly? Or why would so many have held onto the secret?
As for Shakespeare's education being insufficient, we know what Shakespeare's sources were: Basically, Holinshed's chronicles, various popular works, and classics that any schoolboy studying Latin at the time would have had. What we don't see, at all, is the influence of Greek works---which makes sense as Shakespeare did not know Greek. I can, in fact, say that Oxford's work would have shown a much richer source material than what is known to have inspired Shakespeare.
Lastly, the fact that Oxford stopped writing must imply that I am secretly Kazio Ishiguro, because I produced a fair number of competent literary works when I was young and have done little with my life since, while he continued to publish and win Booker prizes. Seriously, man, an educated, rich guy stopped writing and didn't do any serious work so he must be the greatest literary genius of his time? That is your argument?
Indeed, the Oxfordian theory involves so many people keeping the secret that it begins to smack of Alex Jones. What am I saying, it is slander to accuse Alex of being an Oxfordian.
Seriously man, you want to debate this crap: Any time, any place. I eat Oxfordians for breakfast, son. Same way I eat Marxists, baby.
I hate to break it to you, but if you support the US Constitution, and therefore implicitly the American Revolution, you're not a reactionary. Maybe those actually are good things, but thinking such and being a reactionary are mutually exclusive. You should probably change the name of your publication if you want it to accurately reflect what your views seem to be. Words have meanings.
Oh no, I have never heard that one before. I guess I am going to kill myself now. You aren't the tenth person to have made that utterly false point to me.
Look up the definition of reactionary: a reactionary is a person who holds political views that favour a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which that person believes possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society.
Pretty certain that if you want to roll back the popular election of senators and return to the pre-FDR Constitutional order that you are a reactionary since that constitutes a state that is prior to the status quo ante. Reactionaries can disagree about just HOW FAR BACK they want to go. I want to go back to the late Victorian ages, but with better technology.
You know Tolkien could call Curtis a filthy modernist because he wants to return to the Tudor period and not the time before the Norman conquest.
You clearly still think of politics in terms of Whig history "How far back do you want to go" which is if not antithetical to reactionary politics, it certainly is antithetical to Moldbugism. Furthermore, how exactly do you restore the late Victorian ages, just practically? That "better technology" changes things and you need to change in response if you want to control how that change goes. How do you restore the US Constitution? As you no doubt know, the Constitution is not followed even remotely by Washington. Returning to it would take absolute power, and if you have that, why would you spend it to try and reanimate what was done in 1787? Why not follow the spirit of 1787 and do the sort of thing the Framers did, but for modern times? What would Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, or George Washington do if they were here today?
The nature of Anglo-Saxon civilization, as exemplified by the Victorian expansion and the United States, is that of decentralized institutions, local assemblies, tea and cake. Anything outside of this framework is alien to our common-law based society. And so a Victorian reaction makes a lot of sense. It's a form of Anglo-Zionism.
You're a conservative, not a reactionary. You've just wound the clock back a little further than those who want back the '90s or the '50s. Well, land yourself a century in the past and you're still right on the same road to where we are now. Not to mention the foolishness of desiring a "retvrn" to any particular era. We can learn from the past, but we can't recreate it.
(Neo-)reaction means thinking outside the confines of Enlightenment (modern) thought, which the Victorians were certainly enveloped in themselves. Rightist critics seem to think "Moldbug wants to be a Tudor!" accurately represents his thought when no, this was just the first of the eras we can clearly examine outside of the Enlightenment. Obviously, the Enlightenment comes from Christianity, but Moldbug is mostly writing to progressives/libertarians who reject Christianity anyway but have a major blind spot.
But then you get conservatives coming around and pretending that UR is somehow inconsistent or proclaims some "good/evil" dividing line around the mid-1500s.
Precisely! I remember Chronicles Magazine running an edition devoted to the proposition that everything went wrong with the Renaissance...which it kind of did if you believe that medieval Catholicism formed the ideal end-point of civilisation. That sort of thinking goes a long way towards explaining why the palaeo-conservatives went nowhere. IMHO a rational reactionary absorbs/metabolises antiquity and modernity alike.
I just want to wind the clock back 132 years---give me a break. You are just picking fights for no reason, dude.
I never said I was a neo-reactionary---I am a paleo-reactionary.
See the second part of my first paragraph.
Nope, that is wrong. You are telling me the Victorian era lands us onto the same path of sexual wantonness and debauchery that we are on now---absurd. You could honestly use your "logic" to accuse anyone of not being a reactionary by saying "Go back 500 years and you are just on the same path we are on now." Your "logic" could be applied to any reactionary to argue he is not actually a reactionary.
If you are arguing that logic holds no matter how far you go back, then you are actually arguing that being a reactionary is impossible and that you and Moldbug are not reactionaries, which if you are not conservatives would make you radical, leftist reformers. This is the consequence of your own "logic."
You really should look at yourself, and your oxymoronic name, and ask whether or not you are, in fact, a leftist.
It's not an issue of "how far back you want to go," it's an issue of whether you universally condemn popular uprisings, especially popular uprisings that lead away from monarchy, on principle. Reaction isn't wanting to go back to some given date in history, in fact bog-standard conservatism wishes for that, albeit with relatively recent dates. Reaction is answering the question of if democratic revolution is ever legitimate with "no."
Reaction literally is wanting to go back to a given date in history. You are acting like liberals, letting Curtis redefine it the same way the homosexuals redefined gay. The word pre-existed him. You and he don't get to redefine it or coopt it.
Gay still means happy---not sodomy: Sodomy might make certain people gay, but that doesn't mean being gay requires sodomy. Reactionary still means someone who wishes to turn back the clock to an earlier political order, not anti-populist. Anti-populism is an aspect of Curtis Yarvin's reactionary stance---not a necessary component the same way sodomy is a component of homosexual gayness but not a component of mine; I perfer listening to classical music.
Why can't you guys get this through your heads: Curtis Yarvin is a reactionary. Being a reactionary does not mean being Curtis Yarvin. Socrates is mortal but not every mortal is Socrates.
Why don't you guys turn to using an actual dictionary instead of lecturing me? A few minutes with any decent dictionary could settle this dispute.
"This whole blog seems to have become a big troll meant to piss me off."
Yes
Thank you Curtis for making good use of my money *tips fedora*
Who wrote Shakespeare's plays and the Oxford question are of course quite different. As noted above, Curtis's claim for Oxford makes no sense. Shakespeare used popular translations of classical sources. No classical scholar would do that, or at least not consistently.
I believe Ben Jonson knew Shakespeare and referred to him. Jonson thought quite highly of himself and of his art, as did Shakespeare, which is clear from his plays and his poetry. In his poetry he identifies his work as immortal, multiple times.
Calling Shakespeare both semi-literate and an actor makes no sense. As an actor he had to memorize difficult texts.
He was also director of the company. As director, he would have to know the entire play. If you think directing multiple Shakespeare plays is the work of a semi-literate person, perhaps you should reconsider your level of knowledge.
It's true that we don't know much about Shakespeare's life. We don't know much about any Elizabethan playwright's life, so that's not odd.
Shakes
>Shakespeare used popular translations of classical sources. No classical scholar would do that, or at least not consistently.
The best-known “popular translation” of a classical work used by Shakespeare is probably Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is easy to explain from an Oxfordian perspective: Golding was de Vere’s maternal uncle, and they lived together in the household of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (Queen Elizabeth’s right-hand man and de Vere’s father-in-law). It’s only natural that de Vere would have been influenced by his uncle’s work. Indeed, given the timing of the translation’s publication and the close proximity of the two men, it’s not at all improbable that de Vere could have helped out with the translation.
But is there any evidence from the plays that their author did his own translations from Latin or Greek? I think not. It all runs the other way.
To be literate means to know how to both read and write. An actor would only know how to read. Great evidence for knowing how to write would be letters. There is not a single letter in existence the proves Shakespeare could write. What about someone like Voltaire? Thousands of letters…
Shakespeare seems to have attended the Stratford grammar school, which had a pretty rigorous curriculum. Sister Miriam Joseph describes the curriculum in literature in her book on figures of speech in Shakespeare. If you really think that a boy learns to read Holinshed and difficult theatricals without learning to write, well, you may not know as much as you think.
Voltaire is about 200 years later. Ben Jonson was more famous and more admired than Shakespeare in their time, and there are only four letters of his extant.
There are many letters of de Vere. They don't reveal any particular command of language as far as I can see.
Marlowe: 'There are no manuscripts of Marlowe's plays, no letters written by him or to him, in fact no examples of his handwriting at all except a signature as witness to a will in Canterbury in 1585, when he was 21 years old, spelled "Christofer Marley." Not once during his lifetime was he ever referred to as a playwright or poet; surviving references spell his name every way from "Marly" to "Marlin," but almost never "Marlowe." The name "Christopher Marlowe," in any of its spellings, was never associated with any play or poem or literary work during the man's lifetime. There is no evidence to connect him with any acting company, or with the theater in any way.'
This post of Yarvin's has little merit.
Shakespeare "seems" to have attended. There is no documented evidence he went there. Sure he could have.
Ben Johnson can be proven to know how to write, through letters and other primary sources and can be connected to his plays through direct evidence.
Things can be proven of Shakespeare through primary sources, but in regards to his academic and literary career it is left to speculation during his "lost years", such as his attending the Stratford grammar school or how he traveled.
How could he have done all his work without leaving a trace proving through evidence that he knew how to write?
The fact that this is left wide open to speculation leads to the legitimate academic question of his authorship.
The same way Marlowe and other playwrights did?
It appears that you need a school attendance record for a ten-year-old in Elizabethan England. No one can supply that. But there's this: 'William's father John Shakespeare was a respectable citizen of Stratford. In 1557 he was elected Town Bailiff, which corresponds roughly to mayor. Shakespeare would have been three years old at the time. Children typically began their schooling at age four or five at a "petty school," where they learned to form their letters and to read English. After two years, they went on to grammar school. The local grammar school's charter specified that it was a "Liberam Scolam Grammaticalem," i.e., a free school where students paid no fees (Baldwin Vol. I p. 464). So while a poor family might need the child's labor or might not be able to afford school materials, children from middle-class families would attend school as a matter of course.'
Believe, if you wish, that the playwright's solidly middle class father had his son taught to read at an extremely high level, sufficient to cope with an entire play of great difficulty, but that the boy was not taught to write. If you will believe this, you will believe almost anything. I have no more to say here on this.
The point is that it cannot be proven without speculation that he knew how to write, let alone write the plays.
THANK YOU
To say that because 16th century Shakespeare had background knowledge of ancient Roman history he must have been an aristocrat is like saying that because some writer today cribbed from Lord of The Rings they must have been a Tolkien-class medieval scholar
The Oxford argument has always struck me as incredibly classist
Lol, this is not to understand what Shakespeare had that the grain merchant didn't.
You sound remarkably defensive. Just sayin'.
And where did Yarvin "support Putin"?
You must not read the blog very often; his support for Putin is pretty clear. Try re-reading "Gory for Ukraine." Enjoying Your Russian Civil War, for example, systematically ignores that we made security guarantees to Ukraine---precisely to end nuclear proliferation. Curtis Yarvin is too knowledgeable to be unaware of the Budapest Memorandum and so clearly did this in order to incorrectly sway people against adhering to our obligations. He did it because Putin is the example of the sort of monarch he wishes to see installed. Nuclear war must be avoided at all costs, so let's give up on the security guarantees we made to get people to give up their nuclear weapons.
It is utterly absurd to think a war of choice, where we are intentionally getting Ukraine to avoid attacking Russia proper, has any risk of spinning out of control into nuclear war. Putin, Biden, and everyone with half a brain knows there is no chance of that happening, or Putin would never have undertaken the war in the first place. And the idea that he would go nuclear over a little strip of territory Russia offered to give back to Germany in the early 90's, well, sorry but no one is going to die for Konigsberg. It ain't exactly Paris, dude.
You want a flashpoint for nuclear war, it is Taiwan. If he were serious about seeking to avoid it, he would be pushing for Taiwanese armament and the development of microchip manufacturing capabilities in the US. Putin, despite being a serious asshole, is not even willing to use nukes tactically---why would we fear a sudden escalation to strategic nukes. Again, Curtis knows that we would see Putin use tactical nukes before using strategic, giving us ample time to back down or reach a compromise, but intentionally refuses to name this fact. And he knows that even tactical nukes would destroy any hope of Ukrainian integration into a greater Russia. The chance of nukes being exchanged between the US and Russia is virtually zero.
If someone gets annoyed at a flat earther, would you say "you seem remarkably defensive, just saying." It isn't defensive; I am tired. Oxfordianism is to Shakespeare scholarship what flat earth is to geography. I am sure uninformed chicks at dinner parties are impressed by it, but it is tiresome and false.
"It isn't defensive; I am tired. Oxfordianism is to Shakespeare scholarship what flat earth is to geography."
If you say so. While aware of the subject I've never delved into it. I will say though, as a layman with a nose for bullshit narratives, the Stratford story---a man of humble origins who worked his way up and achieved his genius by collaborating with others---sounds _exactly_ like the sort of bullshit narrative one would expect to be propounded by English scholars in our democratic era. Doesn't make Oxfordianism true, of course.
As for Ukraine / the Budapest Memorandum... Yeah yeah, I'm sure the people working at State were thinking about a two-decade-old addendum to the NPT when they orchestrated the Maidan Revolution. Totally.
All Yarvin did was parrot the views of IR realists like John Mearsheimer, who've been trying to temper the mindless expansionism of the GAE for years now, unsuccessfully. If recognizing Russia as a sovereign nation with strategic interests = "supporting Putin," then I guess that makes everyone to the right of Vicky "Fuck the EU" Nuland a dictator-loving isolationist. So be it.
EDIT: Initially wrote "Noland."
The Budapest Memorandum was non-binding and nobody involved could have possibly thought it meant that Ukraine would receive American support for any war forever, there's no such thing. Furthermore, they didn't really have a choice but to give them up, they didn't have the money to support them and it would involve even more difficulties to repurpose them for use against Russia. Also, you are aware he's an isolationist? Like not even going to fight for NATO, who we've made much stronger security guarantees to. No treaty is forever just like no regime is forever.
You're too knowledgeable to be unaware of China's No First Use pledge and small nuclear arsenal, and that it's the *only* one of the big three countries with these things, so, uh, why are you peddling Taiwan as the big flashpoint? You CIA, bro? /s
Of course he sounds defensive. He has a very defensible position.
I, on the other hand, do not have such a position, merely a link to some fiction in a different literary journal: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/shakespeare-finds-out-about-the-shakespeare-authorship-question-from-walter-mondale
“He has a very defensible position.”
Yarvin not so much.
That whole “give Putin a free hand in Europe” essay of his isn’t looking great right now.
>we know the men who were involved in printing the First Folio
The obvious explanation is that they were in on the conspiracy. The dedicatees of the First Folio were brothers William Herbert, former fiancé of de Vere’s daughter Bridget, and Philip Herbert, husband of de Vere’s daughter Susan. A case for Sherlock Holmes this ain’t.
My favorite challenge for Stratfordian credulists actually has nothing to do with Shakespeare per se. It is the mystery of Mark Rylance—Oscar-winning actor and first artistic director of the restored Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London—being an anti-Stratfordian. Rylance’s position doesn’t prove that de Vere was Shakespeare, of course, but it does prove that it’s not unreasonable to doubt the current orthodoxy.
We have got to see if we can't get dumb people to think that Shakespeare's wife really wrote the plays. I bet you feminists would be all over that crap? Who is with me? We could have our own stupid ball and everything. It might even make better pick up conversation than the Oxfordian nonsense.
Shakespeare was most likely not a fall guy. Shakespeare has a documented history of being a businessman. However, there is no history that he knew how to write, such as a single letter he wrote. Edward or another writer could have gone to Shakespeare and made a deal so he would be the business front for these works.
This is the age of nom de plumes. There are many reasons he would do that. It was common for writers at the time to be arrested. It happened to Ben Johnson numerous times.
A nobleman being in commercial business was below them and uncouth. Perhaps Oxford protected Shakespeare while he was the business front.
This has reached the point of cliché + absurdity, which I think others are better able to pursue, so I will leave it to them.
You’re replying to this comment which was not a reply to you to say you’re going to leave it for others to respond while calling the theory cliché and absurd. Nothing more cliché on the internet than a low level comment like this that adds no substance or insight.
"We live in an oligarchy of prestigious institutions that is full of super-smart people." Dude, we have to disabuse you of elite-worship. Our oligarchy is full of imbecilic cliche-ridden screeching harpies and intellectually limited goblins capable of nothing but quoting Robin Diangelo. Yes, under Wilson and perhaps FDR we had real Brahmins, now we have vicious ghouls who all share one brain between them.
https://www.thehebrewconservative.com/2021/08/18/there-aint-no-cure-for-stupid-on-the-american-oligarchy/
What does it say about the intellects of so-called conservatives, red-staters and right wing "dissidents" that they've been unable to dislodge this stinking behemoth, then? Okay, yes, they're horrible and degenerate-- why are YOU failing to beat them?
Politics is a measure of monkeys, not angels, as Curtis has written. We can surmise that progs are better at least than their professed rivals simply because they are on top. And that's what matters. You're angry at Curtis because he's scratching your veneer of importance; of the fake moral superiority, that never-arriving Providence of victory, that you sell yourself as a "rightist" to justify your submission.
As our ancient sages said: One fool may throw a stone that even a hundred wise men cannot retrieve. The progs are better at seizing power as a fungus is better than a rose in corroding a rotting carcass. Getting rid of fungus is not easy, but it's hardly a testament of the fungus's virtue.
Nah, getting nutrients from a corpse is a very narrow task, governing a country is a very wide task, failing at a similarly wide task of taking power disqualifies you from governing, sorry.
Yet your “elves” aren’t governing a country. Their forefathers during Wilsonian times did. Now they just engage in an orgy of repudiation towards their charge, defacing monuments, undoing the ties that bind the nation, and screeching the idiotic platitudes of race and gender. I fear you have sentiments for these creatures.
Yes, they ARE governing a country. Extremely poorly, but historically that’s no matter at all. You’ve subscribed to the conservative myth of illegitimate power. No civilization can be stateless, so someone is always doing the ruling. That person or class is legitimate because everyone else is by definition weaker (less worthy).
We live in the death-spiral of Western civilization, so all parties involved are reprehensible in most ways. That’s part of decline.
Progressives and conservatives are unable to strip away the caked-up rust of these dying myths because they subscribe to the old religion. The former are obvious utopians, but so are their right-wing counterparts.
Conservatives think that because their beliefs are “good” they are destined for victory over their enemies, and therefore the arc of history bends towards justice. Sound familiar? By placing themselves outside of history and assuming some kind of rules-based order in the world, they’re endlessly rehashing the old Christian myth of divine providence. And always losing.
Reactionaries realize that civilizations rise and fall (even Western civilization, yes) and that the false idols of man’s making —Humanity, the Nation, the Race, the Creed, the Party— CANNOT BE SAVED. But the individual, by learning from the past and engaging with the present, can live a worthy life in whatever circumstances he finds himself.
Legitimacy has nothing to do with it. My argument is that we are simply ruled by incompetent fools who lack both intellect and culture. Harpies screeching "Racism! Waaa!" Hence superlatives such as "super-smart elves" are in anything grotesque. In addition, I argue that any rural church-goer possesses a much more powerful system of transmission into the treasures of our civilization through music, hymns, and classical art.
Well they're not going to be "on top" for much longer. The only thing that made their project viable was not completely mismanaging the global economy. They've done just that. No one wants to work, police officers are quitting en-mass, people have lost all motivation for supporting a nation that actively promotes a "nation of renters". "Intellectuals" don't have power, they have the façade of power - and this fact upsets them a lot more than any "rightist" is upset by noting "the libs" control a lot of institutions. Institutions that are now considered as handing out false prestige. No one is "failing to beat them". What is there to beat? Things like "the great reset" are just rehashes of 1920s utopian literature (managers thinking they can manage anything into existence), annoying and patronizing, but not a threat. Immigration is sort of more serious, but people have their limits: and one group pretty much has a majority of the firearms and militia forming capability. Hell, "rightist" america has most of the resources the "intellectuals" need to do anything: energy (fracking/ pipelines), water (pipelines and reservoirs), food. They put up with the crap because they are just much nicer people, but their patience isn't infinite (much like Russias patience with Germany was not infinite). Oh and the intellectuals just told this group "you need to get by with a lot less stuff and money" .And there is no doubt, the most expensive thing in these "rightists" lives is maintaining the "intellectual" class, their stupid "intellectual" laws, and their stupid "intellectual" culture. And as the "rightists" were told...cuts have to be made.
They're not the smartest people in the world, but they are definitely above average, and sometimes way above average. If you doubt that, you probably don't spend much time around people on the left side of the bell curve.
I'm planted deep within the professional class and I wouldn't say that people are above average (not in consulting, law, marketing, etc.. Obviously in tech they are). These people are completely cultureless, steeped in idiotic BLM cliches, appreciative of Amy Schumer and Lady Gaga as "female role models," and haunt the hallways of corporate America as screeching phantoms with lists and project status reports. Any rural American that goes to church has a much stronger link to the treasures of Western civilization through music, classical art, prayer, and hymns.
That's a really smart article. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. I'm having difficulty envisioning the actually mechanics of the collapse. Will it cascade from something banal? Like when a confused Günter Schabowski said "As far as I know, it takes effect immediately, without delay", and then a few hours later the Berlin Wall was being dismantled with hand tools.
But then the East Germans had a better understanding of where they were than most of us do. We will see I suppose.
“Thomas Carlyle once said of the British Foreign Office that there was no remedy for it but to set a live coal under it.”
We call it the State Department in these here parts.
So it’s don’t save the Merlot drinkers today, back to regime change?
This inconstancy , and thy art no woman...
Well. Save the regime or change it.... with...who? What?
Ends, means, ways.
Ends must be adjusted to means.
Ways: This regime excels at poppy cropping to the very 4th grade classroom, coincidentally that’s when they start grooming rentboys. But it does work.
It works to make sure nothing exists to supplant it, although as Jan 6 and Uvalde teach us nothing exists to defend it, or anyone else either. So the means are castrated, now literally at age 7.
Really people just want to survive gay Beria, there’s no fight in them.
So you see all that exists are atomized masses of people, nothing more is possible. As it happens I was in my humble way part of regime changes, you might call me “means.”
Like a breakfast taco, but more dangerous. Probably. But we did move, we did defend or offend, but we did move.
Moving for or against the regime is impossible now.
Its over now except for a paycheck. You’ll only have so many mutinous Border Patrol agents (disobeyed orders) to storm the gunman (their careers are toast).
There’s no organization to organize the means, the ways are well known , the ends delusional because the means do not exist.
The means are there, but the ways of the regime teach DO NOTHING or else.
So collect the last paychecks and wait for the lights to go out.
Our regime doesn’t change, it just will sit in the dark.
Frankly you should stock up on Merlot - and candles - and enjoy the decline.
I can’t imagine what Merlot goes with canned food or sawdust bread, but I am rather rustic I suppose. I do wonder if rat meat, or cat, dog, bugs is red wine or white?
"Our regime doesn’t change, it just will sit in the dark." Pure brilliance.
The Russians and Chinese will support the US in its decline for as long as it takes, like taxpayers financing indigenous people in a dysfunctional reservation. National greatness is pathway dependent and the US went off-road long ago.
"His signatures are those of a semi-literate man from the lower middle class, to which he belonged. (His daughter Judith signed her name with a mark.)"
That Shakespeare's/Shaksper's signature is "semi-literate" is disputable. The known examples are in what is called a "secretary" hand - the written equivalent of "Gothic" or blackletter type. Such handwriting was common in 16th century England. Ronald McKerrow writes in <i>An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students<i/> (Oxford, 1927: Clarendon Press) that:
"When we come to the sixteenth century, and especially to the later years of the century, we find a much larger number of literary documents which, not being the work of professional scribes, ae in cursive has of various degrees of informality and carelessness, and some of these are by no means easy to read. The only way in which the student can learn to make them out is by practice..." (p. 342)
McKerrow illustrates minuscules in Fig. 22, p. 343; and capitals in Fig. 23, p. 349. This writing looks very like the few known examples of Shakespeare's/Shaksper's signature.
In about the 1580s an Italian (Italic) handwriting began to be fashionable in England, and of this McKerrow writes:
"About the Italian hand there is no difficulty whatever, except such as may be due to the carelessness of the writer, for the formation of the letters is practically that of the 'copybook hand of to-day."
It will not do to dismiss Shakespeare's/Shaksper's handwriting as semi-literate because it reflects a now obsolete style that is difficult for modern readers, as compared to a later one that is easier for us to read. People tend to learn a style of handwriting earlier in life and to use it for the rest of their lives, regardless of changes in fashion. I have seen examples of very old-fashioned handwriting in use at a period when it was long outmoded; among them letters written late in life by an ancestress born in very early 19th-century Virginia, still using the long initial and medial ſ (s, like an f without the cross-stroke). It is reasonable to believe that in similar manner, Shakespeare/Shaksper learnt to use the secretary hand as a schoolboy, and persisted in so doing long after the italic hand became fashionable.
As for Judith Shakepeare/Shaksper signing documents with a mark, it was common for women of her time to know how to read but not how to write. A lady's education at the time revolved around religious devotion and the management of a household. The ability to read was necessary to both, while the ability to write write was essential to neither. Elizabeth I was famously literate in six languages, and she wrote in a fine italic hand - but hers was the education of a prince, whose concerns would transcend the merely domestic. Her example was far from usual.
those verses don't seem like they are in the style of Shakespeare but more in the style of the time, which to us reads as "Shakespearean" generally
I see no onions
I see no belts
The notion that middle class bourgeois in 16th century England like the Stratford Shakespeare couldn’t be literate or have educated background knowledge is I think very historically inaccurate. For what it’s worth Shakespeare has never read like an aristocrat to me, there’s no “de haut en bas” or affected quality to his writing at all
Maybe. But in 2019 my daughter took me to Stratford and we visited the Grammar School where Will allegedly went to school from age 8.
It was all verbal, with the elder kids teaching the younger kids, because you had to pay extra for pen and ink. Of course, the kids learned Latin. That was the whole point of a Grammar School. And the kids put on plays about classical subjects.
Oh. See, that has been the big sticking point for me. How would Shakespeare have known about the Julius Caesars and Anthonys and Cleopatras? Maybe it was the Latin classes. And the plays.
Also, Shakespeare's dad was a glovemaker. Sending him to the grammar school in an age when kids went to work at age 8 suggests that Shakespeare's father was a bit of a snob and was trying to push his kid upwards. as Mayor Vincy wa trying to do with Fred Vincy in "Middlemarch."
Still, I get your point. Shakespeare was not out of the top drawer, old chap. So how could he have written plays and poetry as though he was?
Shakespeare's classics education was not as good as Oxfords, but it was certainly better than anything we'd get today all the way up to undergrad as a minimum. Maybe even better than grad schools.
I see that your blog has become quite unpopular recently. But i think that is normal when you go mainstream. Suddenly a lot of people that never agreed with you are starting to read and guess what? They hate it. Big suprise! I for once continue to enjoy these posts, i just wish you had a bigger literary output and a faster pace of posting. We had like what? 6 posts in the last 3 months?
"It seems unlikely that a climber would write"
Hard disagree. Climbers are always the most vocal defenders of established order. There is no point in climbing if the status to which you aspire becomes meaningless before you reach it. It is not strange for someone to miss the irony of attempting to succeed through ability and defending the "natural order" of aristocracy.
On a second, minor note, I just don't buy the snobbishness that is supposed to make Shakespeare ludicrous. You know what's more ridiculous than some bumpkin being the champion of English lit? Some teenage bumpkin barging into a king's court, declaring that they'll lead his army to victory, getting to carry the banner of that army, then getting captured and dodging leading questions set up by established clergy meant to lead them to blaspheme. But no one doubts (I'm sure some doubt, there is always a fringe) the existence of Joan of Arc.
There is actually (at least one) whole field of study that collapsed overnight. Herb Terrace popped a big hole in the balloon of animal sign language experiments, the teaching of gorillas/chimps to talk to humans. There's a fascinating video on it if you have 50 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7wFotDKEF4
Not sure if that disproves Yarvin's point about "you can't reform (from within) your way out of an existing scholarly consensus" or if it's the exception that proves the rule. But at least this one exception exists.
Literary Piltdown cracked me up.
Time travel typo: 1876 for 1576
A great reading for those who subscribe to the theory that Edward De Vere wrote the plays: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015010324559&view=1up&seq=22
>The market for ideas is what machine-learning nerds
Did anybody try running AI on the writings of various suspects to compare how close they are to Shakespeare's work? Like they did to McCartney/Lennon - https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/xcq8a1v1/release/7 ?
Here is a good Shakespearean play: Curtis’s dream comes true. The Gray Prince emerges and he is a direct descendant of the Earl of Oxford. The true and only king as has been proved by the bloodline creating works that shadow over us like Mufasa looking over the pride land from the heavens. Growing up the Prince has read all of Curtis’s work and is schooled by him and other great elites receiving the greatest modern education anyone has received. Eventually he is proclaimed King and cleans up Washcorp. However, Curtis’s son does not like the new government and starts writing against the new king and the nobles and is eventually murdered by the new regime. Curtis dramatically stabs the Gray Prince in retribution.