Lying Liars and The Lies They Tell - Part I: In this series of posts, I am going to debunk the notion that the Hand D portion of Sir Thomas More (STMO) is the Jacobethan play fragment that is the closest to Shakespeares style which noted orthodox stylometrists Elliott & Valenza have ever tested....a claim made by some persons who (apparently) dont know how to read scientific papers on stylometry. Firstly, however, we need to briefly delve into some background on E&V and on their analysis of the play Sir Thomas More as a whole. In doing so, it may look to some as if I am perhaps somehow agreeing with the high-priest of the Lying Liars Cult....but fear not, he will be de-frocked in the 2nd Act. Here we go: E&V have developed or refined 48 separate tests for mathematically examining features of linguistic style of Jacobethan plays. When E&V examine an entire play as a whole, they have claimed 100% reliability in determining if it was written by Shakespeare or not written by him...and they have, over the years, tested and rejected just about every single play in the so-called Shakespeare Apocrypha as being written solely by Shakespeare. STMO as a whole play (including the Hand D fragment) fails E&Vs Shakespeare test by having 7 rejections/fails out of the 48 individual linguistic tests on their panel, while the threshold for Shakespeare vs. non-Shakespeare is only 2 or less rejections as a maximum. When one reads the fine print regarding the STMO rejection, however, one notices a QUITE interesting fact...one which no one has yet commented on in my knowledge: STMO as a whole play (all 19,509 words of it....not just the 832 words of Hand D as tested by E&V in their most recent paper) when compared to all the other Apocryphal plays rejected as being non-Shakespearean by E&V...is THE play which comes CLOSEST to matching Shakespeares signature linguistic style per E&Vs methods....both in the number of Discrete Rejections, and in what is known as their Discrete Composite Probability index. In other words, the play STMO as a WHOLE is the most Shakespeare-like of all the Apocrypha...and it actually scores as close or closer to Shakespeares putative core style than do such plays as: Titus Andronicus (7 rejections), 3 Henry VI (8 rejections), The supposed Shakespeare parts of Henry VIII (9 rejections) 1 Henry VI (11 rejections), Timon of Athens (13 rejections), Yet, Elliott & Valenza, and almost every other orthodox scholar, REJECT Sir Thomas More (as a whole play) as being written by Shakespeare. Orthodox scholars, instead, focus only on the Hand D portion of the play as being possibly physically written (and authored) by Shakespeare...probably because if they focused on the play as a whole, they would have to explain why all the other 18,000+ words were written down in DIFFERENT handwriting. As many of these words were written down by Anthony Munday, the man who once served as Edward de Veres Secretary, this is an area which NOT too many orthodox professors are eager to explore. For reference, here are the IDs of the persons which current orthodox consensus claims to have written down each of the different hands which appear in the manuscript of play Sir Thomas More: HAND S – Anthony Munday, the original manuscript; HAND A – Henry Chettle; HAND B – Thomas Heywood; HAND C – A professional scribe who copied out a large section of the play; HAND D – William Shakespeare; HAND E – Thomas Dekker. Question: How could this particular collection of people have written what turns out to be THE play, of all the non-Shakespeare plays that E&V ever tested (80+), which is closest in linguistic style to that of core Shakespeare. Please noodle on that as I prepare Part II of this essay.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 22:19:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015