Re: Breton, Cornish & French

Chess One wrote:
> "John Cartmell" <john@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> news:4f750ada8ejohn@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> In article <YNKdnT3BNrwXjiPanZ2dnUVZ_rmjnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
>>   Chess One <OneChess@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>> There is no evidence whatever that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
>>
>> In your terms: what would constitute 'evidence'. In common parlance
>> (and academic research) there is plenty of evidence - but you are
>> clearly more picky.
>
> Perhaps I should re-emphasise that I am not speculating on
> Shakespearean author****p - but on methodology - and somewhere at the
> head of these posts remarked that there is not /written/ evidence
> [which I dare call 'normative' for academic] in his own hand of that
> to inform us.

Where did this criterion suddenly pop up from? And why are you suddenly 
applying it to Shakespeare, rather than any of his contem****aries or 
predecessors? You know perfectly well that even if there were anything in 
his own hand that there are kooks who would flatly deny it. And we can be 
sure that even if there were agreement that Hand D of "The Boke of Sir 
Thomas More" were Shakespeare's that you would not accept it.

> Therefore the 'plentiful' evidence is not any form of primary
> material - and is indeed a somewhat mixed bag of second sourcing,
> suppositions [rightly to whatever degree].

You are defining "primary" somewhat arbitrarily - and disingenuously.

> So the 'how we know what we know' question is answered in the
> instance of Shakespeare by saying 'second sourcing of literary
> material from contem****aneous sources'. There are additional
> materials which contest the degree that Shakespeare wrote anything at
> all, or to what degree he did. It is not necessary to believe
> anything about this subject in order to note that varieties of
> opinion exist.

There certainly are not any "additional materials" of any sort - and these

"varieties of opinion" are beneath contempt.

> Since these messages include a Cornish newsgroup, it is pertinent to
> mention that Conrishman A. L. Rowse was [perhaps?] the principal
> Elizabethan scholar of the immediately preceding decade at Oxford,

Immediately preceding what?

> and author of some half dozen Shakespearean commentaries - and a frim
> 'Stratfordian'. Yet even Rowse speculated that for LLL, the principal
> hand in that was not Shakespeare but Bacon - since he saw in it
> something of a refutation of Euro Roscicrucianism; a certain
> sterility, which was somewhat relieved by the arrival of les femmes.

A.L. Rowse said a lot of very silly things - and he was a historian rather

than a literary scholar - but I find it hard to believe that he would say 
anything quite as silly as that - except, perhaps, as an academic joke, in

which case it wasn't written for the likes of you.

He would, however, have been able to spell "Rosicrucianism", and probably 
would have known that it never existed.

I suppose I shouldn't really be so harsh on you - it is one of the hazards

of being an autodidact that one is exposed to all sorts of abberrant 
thinking without necessary possessing the ability to discriminate.
-- 
John Briggs