On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 08:56:35 -0700 joanna <123hop at comcast.net> writes:
>
>
> Mark Bennett wrote:
>
> >Well, there really isn't an abundance of scholarly work questioning
> >Shakespeare's authorship. Most of the "controversy" is the result
> the
> >speculations by amateurs and enthusiasts: some of it ingenious, to
> be
> >sure, but much of it crazed.
> >
> Here, here! The Bacon conjectures were particularly irksome since
> Bacon
> had not an ounce of insight or imagination and could as well have
> written King Lear as I could. But all the conjectures were odious,
> especially since most were based on the assumption that a man of
> humble
> origins could not have produced this great body of literature. The
> case
> to be proved is rather the opposite since the only genius aristocrat
> I
> can think of is Tolstoy and the seventeenth century was littered
> with
> great men of humble origins: Ben Johnson and John Donne to name just
> two.
Someone commented yesterday, that Mark Twain's espousal of the Baconian hypothesis seemed more than a little weird, since one would think that with even a little self-reflection Twain should have realized that it is possible for people of humble origins to achieve literary greatness.
>
> Joanna
>
>
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