This isn't a matter of faith or bourgeois ideology and worship of genius. One might, e.g., have Shaw's opinion that Shakespeare was overrated. Though his elevatiopn to The bard of Avon whose works are too noble for anyone to read was a 19th century invention. Milton, a near contemporary and no mean judge himself, thought him great:
What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones To labor of an age in piled stones, Or that his hallowed relics should be hid Under a star-ypointing1 pyramid? Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a livelong monument. For, whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art, Thy easy numbers2 flow, and that each heart Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued3 book Those Delphic4 lines with deep impression took, Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving, Dost make us marble with too much conceiving, And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
This in 1630, 14 years after WS's death, and even early in WS's career, before he wrote the great plays, Francis Meres praised WS in the late 90s as the best English writer of both comedy and tragedy, calling him "sweet-tongued" and compared him to Ovid in wit.
Well, be that as it may. the issue here is evidence and historical method. The evidence is absolutely overwhelming that WS wrote the plays attributed to him, and Bacon or Marlowe or whoever did not. This sisn't a question of religious faith. It's not that you can choose who you like as the real WS because there is a shortage of evidence. There is a deluge of evidence and it all points the same way. If you reject WS's authorship of his plays, you have suspended historical judgment.
PS. with regard to John M's comments on Bacon and Coke:
1) Practicing lawyers do tend to be short on poetry. It's the job. Donne may have attended the Inns of Court (the common law law law schools of London) and was secretary or law clerk to Lord Keeper Thomas Egerton (whom John M rightlyt praises as a judge) for a while -- in fact had an affair with, and briefly and secretly married his daughter -- that didn't submit him to the grind of practice that strips the poetry out of lawyers. And it was only for a bit Bacon parcticed law all his adult life until convicted of corruption. Goethe studied a bit of law at Leipzig, as indeed Marx did in Berlin (the young Marx wrote very bad love poetry), but that doesn't make him a lawyer.
2) Coke was not a nice man, but he was pretty typical of the aspiring bourgeoise -- the incident with his armed "rescue" (or kidnapping of) his extranged (or was it ex-? wife's daughter who fled his plans for a career advancing marriage was not extraordinary in England of that day. Women were regarded as property, marriage a typical tool of parental advancement, legal pretexts available where one found them in a situation where a lot of law was very much up in the air, and violence not an untypical resort in dealing with others, high or low. I don't make excuses for these standards or Coke's behavior, but remark that he was not acting out of line, at least not much, by contemporary standards,w hich tells you a lot about Elizabethan England.
I am not sure that the accuracy of Coke as a reporter of law reflects on his greatness as a judge. No one disputes his greatness as a lawyer. He argued and won, e.g., one of great land law cases, establishing the Rule in Shelley's Case that generations of students have cursed in Property; i=the rule establish limits on what limits a testator may impose on a bequest. Nor was Cooknot the Queen's Attorney (Chief Prosecutor) for nothing. His prosecutions of Sir Walter Raleigh (a frame-up), the Gunpowder Plot conspirators (who tried to blow up the King and Parliament) and Essex and Southampton (who tried to overthrow Elizabeth) were brutal even by contemporary standards.
The Wikipedia lists some of his judicial accompliashments:
He interpreted Magna Carta to apply not only to the protection of nobles but to all subjects of the crown equally, which effectively established the law as a guarantor of rights among all subjects, even against Parliament and the King. He famously asserted: "Magna Charta is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign."
Among his most famous cases, Coke wrote Dr. Bonham's Case, which is seen by lawyers as the origin of judicial review of legislation. Coke's opinion in Calvin's Case established that subjects of Scotland born after King James VI became James I of England could hold land in England as well as in Scotland, because both Scots and Englishmen owed allegiance to the same king. This case would be important in supporting the idea that English colonists in North America would have the rights of Englishmen. He also wrote Semayne's Case, the origin of many of the rights to freedom from arbitrary searches; the Case of the Monopolies, important in anti-trust; Sutton's Hospital, a seminal case in corporations law; and William Aldred's Case, which may be the birth of environmental law.
The fact is, as a judge Bacon can't touch that and iI don't think Egerton can beat it.
A small personal footnote: as a law clerk faced with a
brief four times as long as permitted by the local rules -- 60+ pages!, I cited in a footnote one of Egerton's sanctions: he had the lawyer cut a hole in the offending papers, put them around his neck, and be led around the courts at Westminster. I noted that the Federal Rules does not contemplate this sanction, but that the court would be within its rights to strike the plaedings in question. (Which it did not do.)
Must go now.
--- jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net wrote:
> > > Whichever author you choose there is some
> aspect of faith to the
> > selection.
> > >
> > > John Thornton
> >
> > But why does the concept of sole authorship
> matter? It is an essentially
> > 19th century concept grown out of the bourgeois
> notion of property and it is
> > alien to the times when the said works were
> actually created. None of the
> > "great masters" was the sole authors of the works
> attributed to them - these
> > were the collective products of the workshops
> owned by these masters.
> >
> > This whole debate reminds me of the efforts of
> xtian and bourgeois moralists
> > to support their bullshit moral tales by "finding"
> embodiments of them the
> > nature. Likewise, the bourgeois ideology depends
> on the notion of
> > individual ownership and is trying to project that
> notion on everything it
> > manages to put its greedy paws, especially works
> of art.
> >
> > Wojtek
>
> Matter to whom?
> It doesn't matter to me.
> However some people are making money on and staking
> their reputation on their speculations. It matters
> to
> them since it is the source of their income stream.
> The connection to the bourgeoise ideology of
> individual
> ownership probably does not occur to the people who
> speculate on such things. That idea is just part of
> the
> ether of today.
> I am more curious as to how someone becomes
> convinced of one author over another. The comparison
> to
> religious faith is pretty much on the mark but I
> don't fully understand that either.
>
>
> John Thornton
>
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