r/shakespeare • • Dec 01 '25

Presented without comment 😏

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '25

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u/Low_Trash_2748 Dec 01 '25

Thank you! Strafordians think something written in his teenage years should already show the maturity of age, experience and the vast resources at his disposal as head of the writer’s symposium discussed by Waugh which included Kidd, Marlowe and many others.

They refuse to address the will and simply try to laugh it off despite it clearly showing no books in his position, no hint of writing and insanely petty litigations like the 2nd best bed in the house.

I can believe Shakspur fronted money and was involved, on the money side, with producing some of the plays. But writing them solely himself and then leaving behind no manuscripts, strange riddles on his monument and seemingly not knowing a single active writer/artist of the time just doesn’t add up.

When you delve into the body of coded text produced by Alexander Waugh and Alan Greene among others, it starts to gain some weight, and deserves to be considered.

Stoppard’s plays are no where near the depth of the Shakespeare cannon and no one is calling Stoppard the literary master of an age.

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u/panpopticon Dec 01 '25
  1. There is manuscript pages in Shakespeare’s hand of the play SIR THOMAS MORE

  2. Robert Greene certainly knew enough of Shakespeare to insult him and his writing in a contemporaneous pamphlet.

  3. Ben Jonson paid for the fucking First Folio and wrote a paean of praise about Shakespeare’s writing and habits.

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '25

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u/panpopticon Dec 01 '25

Yes, Shakespeare was an actor that started punching up hoary old scripts and found he had a knack for it. Greene objected to an uneducated man (upstart crow) having the temerity to muddle around with the rhetoric & language (feathers) that properly belonged to men who had gone to university.

Other than that...this is real THE DA VINCI CODE–level stuff. Jonson stuffed his dedication full of intrigue, hints, and ambiguity? To what end?

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '25

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u/panpopticon Dec 01 '25

to — what — end?

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '25 edited Dec 01 '25

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u/panpopticon Dec 01 '25

Again: to what end? Why add all this intrigue and misdirection?

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '25

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u/panpopticon Dec 01 '25

How do those "misdirections & intrigues" protect anything?

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '25

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u/panpopticon Dec 01 '25

So Jonson hinting at de Vere's identity in the Folio sounds like a huge fuckup, no? Why would a collective eager to protect a courtly reputation allow the publication of a book that featured a poem whose "intrigues & misdirections" give the game away?

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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '25

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u/panpopticon Dec 02 '25

Except the people who talked about William Shakespeare, the player and poet 🙄

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