Because it doesn't reveal anything about the works themselves &...
R.Сам 🦋🐏@Logo_Daedalus
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Jan 28, 2025
~2 min read
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Because it doesn't reveal anything about the works themselves & appears to be a hermeneutical dead end that explains almost nothing about the works adding infinite questions to be filled in with an absence of evidence. Elizabethan England isn't 20th Century America.
x.com/stanleyrogousk…
x.com/stanleyrogousk…
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How does that help us understand anything about the plays themselves? Now we just have to speculate that this hypothetical non-person "happened to be interested in XYZ"? "Just because"-- this is your idea of scholarship?
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You cannot write a Biography of Shakespeare without writing a biography of a fictitious person-- because Shakespeare is not a Pseudonym legally attributed to a fall-guy (one of a long series) for the purposes of avoiding libel suits from the aristocracy.
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He's not a real person-- there was a man named Shakspur who was hired by Edward De Vera for him to "own his name" for the stationer's register-- this was because if he had published under his own name, people would have sued *him* directly.
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Prior to Shakspur, Edward De Vere had been writing other several other allonyms with people who were in his employ. He had gotten into a lot of trouble under them & needed a new one with a more willing fall guy (his former one wanted out after a massive controversy).
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This is where the first mention of the name Shake-Speare is announced-- in the final publication of De Vere's last psuedonym-- in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit. Greene being a character he had to kill off because it had no "fall guy" no living person to claim it.
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The Literary Controversy Greene was involved in had the other side in the Marpleplate controversy was heavily suggesting that he was going to reveal that Edward De Vere was behind both Thomas Nashe & Robert Greene-- & so De Vere took up Shakspur, for legal purposes.
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Not only legal purposes, but he had another persona to fill out with his mature works-- with his juvenilia being tied to various other personas he had created. The Shake-Speare Work had a lot more effort put into it.
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The first "Shakespeare Biography" is Thomas Nashe's Play-- De Vere was aware that he was crafting this Shakspur character, a persona author, a foil for himself based upon Will Sommers, whom De Vere had known personally.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer%27…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer%27…
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In this sense "William Shake-Speare" is De Vere's Persona of the Elizabethan Court Jester. That was truly his role in a world-historical sense as Lord Great Chamberlain-- as in "the Lord Chamberlain's Men"