Good heavens, a word pair that Oxford didn't "coin." A very rare admission for Waugaman.

Golding's "strange, quirky, colloquial vocabulary is one of the chief delights of his translation," writes Nims. "Sometimes, with Golding's weird and piquant vocabulary, we fell we are in Lewis Carroll country, where corsies whewl, where orpid buggs sty awkly in the queach, where froshes yesk, and flackering pookes ensue." None of these quaint words (and there are scores of them) ever became part of our common tongue. Golding's eccentricities are glorious, but they are nothing like Shakespeare, whose genius was to hit on words we didn't know we needed until he made them obvious.

Still less are they like Oxford. The earl's language is utterly colorless, his vocabulary limited, both in his poetry and prose. He writes of bare generic "birds" and "flowers."

What he shares with Golding is an Essex accent, without any of his uncle's vivid rustic wordhoard, all from the easternmost counties: uppen, quoath, sprink, queach, flacker, frosh, woodspeck. He and Golding both are notably clumsy poets. What's missing in the younger man is verve.

Now this (at a stretch) could be hendiadys (grimly greedy, grim because greedy). Or it could just be two adjectives, chosen for the alliteration, with "and" stuck in to keep the line iambic. Ovid has none: nat lupus inter oves (the wolf swan amid the sheep). Nim singles this out as an example of Golding's "gangling diffusion." Superfluous.

As noted, Golding often uses two or three adjectives where Ovid uses none. This hardly captures the concision and elegance of the original.

Golding's other translations are in prose. This one is poetry, which calls for heightened language: synonymia was then the height of eloquence. Furthermore, his verse is fourteeners, and those long lines take a lot of stuffing. In particular, "and" is very useful as an unstressed syllable in iambs.

Golding, writes John T. Nims, "has a special weakness for adjectives, the handiest means of stretching out a line metrically deficient. Ovid uses no adjectives when he has the wolf swimming among sheep in his great flood. Golding contributes three:

The grim and greedy Wolfe did swim among the siely sheepe.

Ovid first mentions Phaethon without an adjective; Golding contributes three overlapping ones: ‘a stalwart stripling strong and stout.’ Sometimes it seems that Golding—as Plato has Socrates say of a bad poet—seems to be trying to show in how many ways he can say the same thing, or how many synonyms he knows. Ovid: ‘pugnes’; Golding: ‘Strive, struggle, wrest, and writhe.’”

No: he used about that many word pairs. They are hendiadys only to the clueless Waugaman. So far, I've encountered two or three pairs that might be thought of as hendiadys.

So far, there have been two or three borderline examples.

No paradox at all. As Golding very well knew, John Calvin quoted this very work of Ovid's in his Institutes, his seminal work of Protestant systematic theology.

“There is an important intertextual relationship between Calvin and Ovid … that significantly aids our understanding of Golding’s decision to render Ovid into an English Protestant frame. … In the Institutes, Calvin employs two direct quotations from the Metamorphoses. In Book I, he takes a line from Book I of the Metamorphoses in order to discuss ‘God’s image and likeness in man’ … There is no condemnation of Ovid here, which makes for a striking contrast with Calvin’s comments on Lucretius … whom he describes as a ’filthy dog’. But maybe this is not too surprising. In Lucretius, there is a freedom from an idea of an essential self totally at odds with Calvin’s dogma. For Calvin, part of the appeal of Ovid is that many of the mythological figures of the Metamorphoses change their surface identity whilst remaining substantially unchanged. This approach to the inner self can be accommodated by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination which states that humankind is inherently sinful from the outset of the Fall; there is no escape from this notion of the self. By way of Metamorphoses I,84-6, Calvin explains the relationship between God and man.” (Liz Oakley Brown, “Translating the Subject: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in England, 1560-7” Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, 69-70).

“There is an important intertextual relationship between Calvin and Ovid ... that significantly aids our understanding of Golding’s decisiion to render Ovid into an English Protestant frame. ... In the Institutes, Calvin employs two direct quotations from the Metamorphoses. In Book I, he takes a line from Book I of the Metamorphoses in order to discuss ‘God’s image and likeness in man’ ... There is no condemnation of Ovid here, which makes for a striking contrast with Calvin’s comments on Lucretius ... whom he describes as a ’filthy dog’. But maybe this is not too surprising. In Lucretius, there is a freedom from an idea of an essential self totally at odds with Calvin’s dogma. For Calvin, part of the appeal of Ovid is that many of the mythological figures of the Metamorphoses change their surface identity whilst remaining substantially unchanged. This approach to the inner self can be accommodated by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination which states that humankind is inherently sinful from the outset of the Fall; there is no escape from this notion of the self. By way of Metamorphoses I,84-6, Calvin explains the relationship between God and man.” (Liz Oakley Brown, “Translating the Subject: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in England, 1560-7” Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, 69-70).

Commonplace. Le Morte Darthur (1485) has "forestes and woodes," as do Froissart (1523) and The dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght (1538). A book published in 1557 has "by wodes, forests by streyte passages, by hyls and dales." Golding needed that "and" for the sake of his iambics. Not hendiadys, and neither is the commonplace "hyls and dales."

Yet there is at least one in Metamorphoses—which Golding ignores in his translation.

Ovid writes protinus Andromedan et tanti praemia facti indotata rapit ("Forthwith he takes Andromeda, and the reward of so great a deed, without any dowry"). Andromedan et praemia is a hendiadys, meaning, “Andromeda as a prize.” Ovid divides that one idea into two: Andromeda and a prize.

Golding rejoins the two: "Forthwith he tooke Andromade the price for which he stroue / Endowed with hir fathers Realme." Curiously, he restores her dowry. The Latin clearly says indodata ("dowerless"), and indeed the whole point of the sentence is that Andromeda herself is his reward, that a dowry is superfluous.

Two of these doublets are exact translations from the Latin original. "Charmes & Witchcrafts" renders Ovid's cantusque artisque magorum; "Ayres and windes" is renders auraeque et venti, quite exactly: aura means "breeze, soft wind." Only "herbe & wéed" is not in the orginal, which has pollentibus ... herbis ("potent herbs"). Not hendiadys.

That "otiose" "doubling of adjectives” is what you incorrectly call "hendiadys," and praise as evidence of genius. You can't have it both ways.

Golding's word pairs are doublets. They are not hendiadys.

Redundant. Not hendiadys. See thenext annotation for context.

Simple list of two things, taken from Ovid, though the Latin has "oaks." Ovid writes vivaque saxa sua convulsaque robora terra / et silvas moveo. The literal translation (Loeb) is "living rocks and oaks I root up from their own soil; I move the forests." Golding, more expansively, has: "And from the bowels of the Earth both stones and trées doe draw. / Whole woods and Forestes I remoue." There's lots of padding here, to fill out the fourteeners: "And from the bowels of" is filler; "doe draw" and "remove" are redundant. "Whole woods and forests" adds nothing to "woods." By silvas, Ovid means a collection of trees that can be rooted up by magic, not a tract of land reserved for hunting.

Oh yes: not hendiadys.

Common pair of opposites. Exact translation of Ovid's abigoque vocoque. Not hendiadys.

This is what excites Dr. Waugaman. Not linguistics, not literature, not history, but titles. For Oxfordians, what truly matters is not Shakespeare's writing, but his cultural capital, invested in bling. They fetishize the aristocracy.

Waugaman tries to prove that de Vere wrote Golding's translation by comparing Golding with Shakespeare. The only connection that he makes between de Vere and Golding is subjective: a critic's opinion that Golding's Ovid is "childish" and "naive." It's a con trick. He's selling Oxford by showing Golding.

You can't prove a=b by arguing that b=c. Yes, we all know Waugaman what believes about Shakespeare. But neither he nor all his cult has ever produced a shred of evidence to support their romantic fantasy.

If Waugaman actually wanted to support his hypothesis, he would need to look for hendiadys in de Vere's autograph letters and attested poetry. I can tell the good doctor right now that there's not much tin in that mine.

What Waugaman believes is a similarity is actually a fundamental difference between the uncle’s and nephew’s spelling.

Golding habitually indicates long vowels by double letters: wée, bée, shée; twoo, doo, intoo. Far more unusually, and only in verse, he will sometimes write aa for long a: naakt [=naked]; scaald [=scaled]; amaazd, faast [=faced]. Save for a handful of names (Dianaas, Philomelaas), chaast [=chaste], and oddly, maast [=mast], these spellings mostly form contrastive pairs. Golding will use naked when he needs a trochee, or naakt for a single ictus, with the double aa replacing a deleted silent e to preserve the long vowel. This quirk appears only in his Metamorphosis, and there, only in the introduction and books v through xv, as if he’d had the idea part way through his translation, after he’d published the Fyrst fower.

He could have found this mode of spelling in Thomas Phaer’s translation of The fyrst nyne books of the Eneidos of Virgil (1562), where amaasd and blaasd, vpfraamd and naamd appear. Phaer seems to have started a small fashion. Barnabe Googe has laamd in his Eglogs (1563); T.N., a student in Cambridge who translated Seneca’s Octavia (1566), has baarde and vouchsaaft; Twyne, who completed Phaer’s translation in 1573, adds a few like spellings of his own. Ten books of Homers Iliades (1581), translated from the French by Arthur Hall, has “daald dastards” (whatever that means) and raase. The anonymous translator of Seneca his tenne tragedies uses a score of such spellings: haades, aare, spaarde, baarde. And Richard Stanyhurst, lurking in the “shaads of night” in Thee first foure bookes of Virgil his Aeneis (1582), rounds things off by pinching Golding’s “snakes blacke scaald” for his own “black scaalde serpents.” For about twenty years, the long aa appeared to be a marker of poetic dialect in prestigious translations from the classics.

Does Oxford ever use aa? He does: but for a different set of words entirely. Whyte Haale [=Hall] is one such spelling; also, caale, Cornwaale, faale, smaale. (For Golding, the whole point of aa is to replace the silent e. Oxford, ever clumsy with language, uses both.) The outlier here is Waales (as in Prince of). Evidently, “Wales” and “walls” sound alike to him. “Sale,” in his orthography, is sall. The older man spells call, fall, small exactly like that, and "caul" is likewise call. Shakespeare puns on “all” (not “ale”) and cobber’s “awl.” He consistently has Wales and either Corn[e]wal[l]or Corn[e]wel[l]: clearly distinct. But for Oxford, “hall” and “hail,” “brawl” and “Braille” would be homonyms. 20 In his English Pronunciation, 1500-1700, E. J. Dobson, calls “the rhymes all : frail, small : fail ... a clear vulgarism” (111). He observes that Gil notes this use of long a for aw as an affectation of his Essex Mopseys; that in 1596, the Essex-born Edmund Coote, who taught schoolboys in Suffolk, describes it as “the barbarous speech of your country people.” Tsk.

Golding and de Vere actually use "aa" quite differently. Golding will use "naked" when he needs a trochee, or "naakt" for a single ictus, with the double "aa" replacing a deleted silent "e" to preserve the long vowel.

(De Vere's orthography completely muddles the distinction between long and short vowels, in both directions: "back," to him, is always "bake," and "sake" is spelled "sak." For that matter, the Queen herself spelling "waking," "wacking." This makes nonsense of all that Oxfordian pother about "Shaksper" and "Shakespeare": a distinction without a difference.)

De Vere uses "aa" for a different set of words entirely. Whyte Haale [=Hall] is one such spelling; also, caale, Cornwaale, faale, smaale. The outlier here is Waales (as in Prince of). Evidently, “Wales” and “walls” sounded alike to him. This is a marker of his Essex dialect, and was considered a "clear vulgarism" and "“the barbarous speech of your country people."

There is no trace of this Essexism anywhere in Shakespeare's work.

Earthquakes shake. It's in their job description.

Could be construed as hendiadys: "natural shape." Could also be read as two associated properties of things, as here in 1605: werewolves "to their own thinking haue both the shape and nature of wolues." Note that "both." Hendiadys makes one complex thing into two; "both" explicitly points out that two things are two, and makes them one: an anti-hendiadys. Doubtful. And in any case, dead commonplace.

One of each adjective, with the repeated "both" emphasizing their two-ness. Not hendiadys.

Could be read as "silent because void." Possible hendiadys.

I am surprised that Waugaman didn't try to call this title hendiadys. It's as good as any of his doublets—that is to say, not at all.

A sequence of verbs. Not remotely hendiadys.

Associated terms: "Her colour dyde: her blood and hart did cleerly her forsake." Not hendiadys.

This is the third time Waugaman has quoted this line. Does he imagine it describes the adolescent Oxford? Golding would publish his Ovid in 1567; Oxford would kill an unarmed man.

Braden is writing of Golding's sense of the ridiculous; Lee, of Oxford's bad character: "a waywardness of temper which led him into every form of extravagance, and into violent quarrels with other members of his guardian’s household." The line that Waugaman quotes is just a few lines later: "His guardian Cecil found his perverse humour a source of grave embarassment." It is directly followed by an account of the manslaughter of Thomas Brincknell: no joke. And again, Lee speaks of Oxford's "violent and perverse temper." "Humour" here means "temperament": Oxford is by nature wayward, violent, perverse. What Lee calls his "perverse humour" would now be classed as a personality disorder, somewhere in Cluster B (Antisocial, Narcissistic). I leave it to Dr. Waugaman to diagnose.

What Sir Sidney Lee actually wrote was "his violent and perverse temper."

He ought therefore to recognize his own Family Romance: his fantasy that the Stratford player-poet is not his real Shakespeare, that his real Shakespeare wears a coronet. Tragicomically, this Freudian does not self-diagnose.

"And every straunge and monstruous thing ..." Both words here mean "weird." Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

Nope. Two pairs of synonyms.

Not hendiadys.

Fortunately, manuscripts in holograph survive for both nephew and uncle: Oxford’s letters and Golding’s prose translation of a Latin Aesop. Both are idiosyncratic spellers. They share a few habits in common, but each uses strikingly eccentric forms that the other does not. The orthography of Golding's Aesop matches that of his Ovid; Oxford's spelling in his letters does not.

What Golding and and Oxford do have in common in their writing is their Essex dialect, which is absolutely incompatible with Shakespeare's English.

Like his maternal uncle, the Essex-born Golding, Oxford usually spelled and rhymed as if long “i” and long “e” were the same interchangeable vowel. In London and court English, “like” was pronounced [ləɪk], with exactly the diphthong that Groucho Marx uses in “circus.” For Golding and his nephew, it was [li:k], exactly like “leek.” Oxford writes “misleke” for “mislike”; Golding writes “byleeke” for “belike.” The younger man rhymes “grief” [gri:f] and “strife” [stri:f]; the elder, “aliue” [ali:v] and “cleave” [cli:v], among many other such pairs.

In his Logonomia Anglica (1619), Alexander Gil describes that [i:]-for-[əɪ] substitution as a primary characteristic of East Anglian dialect. As late as the 1950s, rural folk in a small area round about Hedingham were still saying "meece" for "mice."

If Oxford were to write as “Shakespeare”—leaving aside all other temporal, spatial, intellectual, and social paradoxes—he would need to hold two incompatible systems of orthography in mind, two dissimilar accents, with their different assonances, rhymes, and quibbles. He would have to keep them utterly distinct: never let Shakespeare’s hand or mind appear in Oxford’s letters; nor let the Essex marshes seep into the plays or poetry. He would have to speak two languages.

And if the man could write like Shakespeare, why did he go on, for decade after decade, writing like Oxford?

Inked Out

I challenge you to find a new-invented word, an unhackneyed phrase in any of Oxford's own poetry or letters. Shakespeare was transcendent; Golding's love of language is infectious; Oxford simply had no feeling for words. They are three quite different people.

Oxfordians can never decide if their darling's genius was a deep State Secret or common knowledge, so they believe both at once.

A more elaborate fantasy, that is. If de Vere had been a precocious child, he must have suffered a devastating cranial injury before he came to write his own poetry and letters. His letters, written in his own hand over the course of a lifetime, and amounting in wordage to a Hamlet and a half, reveal a man of no remarkable intelligence, about on the level of a C+ student at an undistinguished university. At best, his prose is dull; at worst, incoherent drivel.

Invention. De Vere's surviving works consist of a dozen and a half Drab Age verses, and 77 letters and memoranda.

Golding here makes no distinction: "In woods and forrests is hir ioy, the sauage beasts to chase."

So which point do you want to make? That Golding's word pairs are unique, or that they're much-copied? And why do you assume that all these later instances must echo Golding? Woods and forests, for example, have been mentioned in the same breath since the 13th century, when the French word joined the Anglo-Saxon.

This makes no sense at all. Untold numbers of word pairs happen to be unique in EEBO (which includes only printed books from 1473 onward): this says nothing about the prominence of pseudo-hendiadys in Golding's Metamorphosis.

Synonyms (as used of land). Not hendiadys.

The words are synonyms, and have been paired since Middle English. For example, Caxton (1477) writes of "a sorowe moche aygre and sharp." Not hendiadys.

The association of brass with steel is utterly commonplace, as more than 500 proximity hits in EEBO attests. If Golding had associated those metals with nerves, you might have a case.

Two qualities of the soil: it's sticky and it's fertile. Not hendiadys.

"Fat" here means "Of mould, clay, etc.: ... having a ‘greasy’ feeling to the touch; sticky" (OED). Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

Commonplace. Not hendiadys.

As the 113 uses of “thick and foggy” in EEBO should convey, all this is dead common. Why any poet should find such dull and dreary stuff intriguing, only Waugaman knows.

Which is all that can be legitimately assigned to his authorship.

Paromoion!

Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

As noted, Golding earlier wrote of time before crops were cultivated: "The fertile earth as yet was frée, vntoucht of spade or plough," Now men began plough "the frée and fertile ground." You might construe this as "fertile because free," because it had never been cultivated. That's two.

Highly unlikely. The young earl had other passions. From 1563-1567, "Oxford spent £683–19–0, a sum greater than his entire cash inheritance of £666–13–4, on apparel, rapiers, and daggers. However much he gave to his studies, he was clearly giving more time, energy, and money to his accoutrements" (Nelson, 39)

The viscount would have scarcely known his father, save as a distant, rather splendid figure with a grandiose horde of retainers. The child was brought up by other people, in other households. His father's death meant access to his title and grandeur, with the glory of it all frustrated by his legal guardian.

Just how is it flawed? The grammar schools, with their relentless training in rhetoric, provided an ideal breeding-ground for early modern playwrights. And Shakespeare's immersion in the theatre world would have given him matchless hands-on experience . He knew what worked on these stages, for these actors. There's no way that Oxford could have learned this stuff, even if he'd wanted to.

It's quite likely that the Stratford boy did translate Ovid as an adolescent—Metamorphoses was a set text in the grammar schools. Boys in the fourth form onward were set daily passages of the poem to memorize, translate, then turn their English back into Latin. Ovid would have been a part of William Shakespeare's inner landscape from the age of eleven or twelve. Oxford? It is unlikely that he ever reached fourth-form Latin, on his scant two hours a day. He spent as much time on dancing and penmanship, the courtly arts in which he shone.

This is Waugaman's romantic fantasy, founded on nothing.

Romantic fantasy, unsupported by the evidence of Oxford's life and writings.

Merely a list of two body parts. Not hendiadys.

ἓν διὰ δυοῖν "one by means of two," "the figure of Twynnes." This isn't "triple hendiadys," but three synonyms.

Simple collocation. Not hendiadys.

Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

Near synonyms. Not hendiadys.

Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

And those who fetishize the aristocracy.

Padding in inevitable in fourteeners.

Waugaman still hasn't a clue what hendiadys is.

Oxford's count is zero.

A common collocation. Not hendiadys.

Synonyms. A common meaning of "suit" in the 16th century was "Kind, sort, class" (OED). Not hendiadys.

This is how de Vere wrote at 19:

"Althoth [=although] my hap hathe bin so hard that yt hathe visited me of lat [=late] wythe syknes yet thanks be to god throw [=through] the lokinge to which I haue had by yowr care had ouer me, I find my helthe restored and myself doble behowldinge vnto yow bothe for that and many good turnes whiche I haue receiued before of yowre part. For the which althothe I haue fownd yow to not account of late of me as in time tofore yet not wythstandinge that strangnes yow shall se at last in me that I will aknowlege [them] and not be vngratfull vnto yow for them and not to deserue so ill a thowght in yow that they were ill bestowed in me. But at this present desiringe yow yf I haue done any thinge amise that I haue merited yowre offence imput [=impute] [+it] to my yong yeares and lak of experience to know my friendes."

Does Waugaman imagine that the author of this chewed bootlace was capable of writing Golding's preface?

Waugaman never cites one single instance of hendiadys from de Vere's own writing. All of his alleged examples come from either Golding or Shakespeare, and nearly all of those he claims to discover in Golding are nothing of the kind. He presents no evidence that de Vere's literary career outlasted the 1570s.

"Form" here is used in its obsolete sense, "beauty, comeliness": a direct translation of the Latin forma, "beauty." So "forme and beautie" is yet another pair of synonyms. Golding uses this phrase twice to translate Ovid's forma.

In Book 2, he renders "forma mihi nocuit" ("my beaty hurt me") as "My forme and beautie did me hurt."

In Book 4, he translates "forma colorque" ("beauty and brightness") as "forme and beautie bright."

Golding uses that exact phrase in Book 2: "Nymph of Nonacris whose forme and beautie bright..." But Ovid never describes this Nonacrian nymph. The words are mere filler here.

Shakespeare invariably spelled that word, "Oxford."

Not hendiadys. Synonyms.

Not hendiadys. Synonyms.

A commonplace. The OED records this phrase from about 1225. Sometimes cited as a folk hendiadys, as if it meant "windy weather," but implies rain or snow. Borderline at best.

Two objects used to catch birds. Not hendiadys.

Golding did. There are exactly three "un-" words in Oxford's own poetry, all venerable: "uncomely," "unfayned," and "unknowne." There is not one new "un-" word in his letters from 1569 to 1604.

Waugaman fails to understand that a first appearance in EEBO only means a first appearance in print. The English language is much older than the press. "Hill and dale" is yet another commonplace, The OED records "ouer hillis and dalis" c1440.

That is, a pick and shovel. Bugger the "first of 43 instances" in EEBO. This collocation is as old as English. The OED cites just one (and not the earliest) appearance of "ge spadu ge mattuc" from c1000.

No. Golding's "hew" means "colour." Shakespeare's "hew" means "to chop, hack, gash." The words are unrelated.

A simple list: two attributes the earth had lacked. Not hendiadys.

"Coins"? The pairing "mist and clouds" is as old as the English language. Here's a 1425 usage: "Now gadirs mystes and cloudes in þe ayre."

Synomyms. Not hendiadys.

Note that Golding spells "mild" with an "ee": exactly the same vowel-sound as "meek." Like his nephew Oxford, he spelled as he must have spoken, with a distinctive Essex dialect. It's their native tongue, and absolutely alien to Shakespeare. That dialect alone disqualifies the Earl as author of the canon.

Waugaman has utterly failed to understand just what is particular about hendiadys. He's gotten as far as "word pair," so every time he sees word a and word b, up pops his eager little hand: "Hendiadys!"

It's a little more complex than that. Hendiadys, writes George Thaddeus Wright, "must be distinguished from the many commonplace expressions that have the grammatical form noun a and noun b, especially those of two types: first, ordinary collocations of related objects, groups, qualities, constituents, titles (wind and rain, women and children, pen and ink, flesh and blood, time and place); second, mere rewordings of the same idea without any significant increment, usually for an effect of expansion or elevation (lord and master, part and parcel, from ordinary speech; "help and vantage" ... "chance and hazard" ... "mute and dumb" [from Shakespeare])." ( (G. T. Wright, Hearing the Measures, 14).

Nearly all of Waugman's word pairs fall into these two classes. They "join together entities that are not only grammatically but conceptually assimilable ... concrete term with concrete term, abstract with abstract, things of one scale or category or context with comparable things." (Wrght 7).

True hendiadys is less straighforward. Wright explains the figure as a violation of our expectations: "The central word in hendiadys is usually and, a word we take as signaling a coordinate structure, a parallelism of thought and meaning.  ... The technique is a witty way of recognizing that a linguistic structure can be filled in with blanks of very different sorts" (6).

Waugaman's great heap of word pairs are exactly what and usually signals: simple lists and simple parallelisms, examples of that favorite Elizabethan figure *synonymia."

Examples from Golding's Metamorphosis:

Simple lists: meate and mancheate, heart and hand and all, snakes and todes, light nor heate, stones and trees, spade and mattocke, brasse and steele, sword and spear.

Simple synonyms: powre and sway, neat and trim, wyld and barbrous, shame and infamy, strives and strugles, fowle and filthye, meeke and meeld, quake and shake, black and swart, ghostes and soules, Charmes and Witchcraft, herbe and weed, Ayres and windes.

Simple antonyms: raise and lay, health and sicknesse, lyfe and death, needinesse and wealth, peace and warre, love and hate.

Commonly paired attributes: wyde and winding, harsh and hard.

Waugaman hunts for hendiadys like a child collecting treasures on a beach. The bucket that he empties before us is full of chunks of bottle glass, not emeralds.

And rightly so. This is vice of paromoion, of which Puttenham writes, "It is a figure much used by our common rimers, and doth well if it be not too much used, for then it falleth into the vice ... called Tautologia." Shakespeare found it hilarious.

Oxford is also guilty of cacosyntheton ("the bird not gets"; "Helpe ye that are to waile aye woont"), perissologia (wordiness), epenthesis ("oft" for "ought," and paragoge ("inought" for "enough").

Not hendiadys. Synonyms.

Not hendiadys. Synonyms.

Not hendiadys. Synonyms.

She's trying to look butch:

We'll have a swashing and a martial outside, As many other mannish cowards have That do outface it with their semblances.

It may be that Shakespeare, like Gabriel Harvey, meant to mock the foppish Oxford; but by 1599, that gibe was stale. The joke in the Parnassus plays is his attempt to foist his daughter on Southampton.

The attribution stands.

Sadly for Waugaman, this capstone work was written no earlier than 1610, six years after his darling's death.

The long "aa" first appeared in Thomas Phaer's translation of the Aeneid (1562) and was used for about twenty years in prestigious translations from the classics. Golding uses it only in books v through xv, as if he’d caught onto the idea part way through his translation.

What else would he dig with?

Golding.

In context, this is "sundry sorts of meate and mancheate." Yet another simple list.

No: it's two adjectives describing the banks of a stream.

His heart and hand both open and both free; For what he has he gives, what thinks he shows.

Another simple list. The hand here is what gives; the heart, what thinks.

La Pucelle has beaten the Dauphin is battle, and he is smitten: "My heart and hands thou hast at once subdued." Another list. The heart here is synecdoche for love; the hands, for martial strength.

This one isn't even a word pair. It's a threat: "My hate to Marcius: where I find him ... would I / Wash my fierce hand in's heart."

What? "Heart and hand" goes back to Old English. "With heart and hand" is a commonplace meaning "readily, willingly, wholeheartedly."

Yet again, a list.

Another list of two: venomous creatures.

No. Just two things that aren't there.

Not at all. It's a list.

Nope. Synonyms again.

Or rather, Golding did, and took to heart his lessons on abundance in writing.

Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

All pairs of antonyms. Not remotely hendiadys.

It gets even sillier: "My life, through ling’ring long, is lodg’d in lair of loathsome ways ..."

There is none. Everything about de Vere's life, intellect, and circumstances argues against this preposterous claim: his dates (he was forty before the plays began appearing, and dead before a third of them were written); his rank; his lack of schooling in grammar and rhetoric; his Essex dialect; his lack of connection with the theatrical world, and above all with the LCM/King's Men and Ben Jonson.

Wait, Waugaman's a psychiatrist? And he thinks that people are the same all the way through, like turnips? Golding wasn't all Superego—he evidently had an Id.

The mystery abides: how could someone allegedly fluent in Latin have such trouble parroting a few Latin phrases in his letters? The rational solution is that Oxford's formal publications were ghostwritten, along with those comic interludes for which he took credit. Almost certainly his secretaries Munday and Lyly would have done the lion’s share of composition, while he stood before them, the Lina Lamont of the Elizabethan court.

If the fifteen-year-old de Vere was capable of reading Virgil (and translating Ovid), why was the forty-year-old de Vere making childish mistakes in the simplest of Latin phrases?

Waugaman has not checked all variant spellings, or he would have noticed that "bore speare" appears in The dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght (1538) and its 1542 edition, as well in a translation of Horace and The second tome of the Palace of pleasure, both published in 1567.

Synomyms. Not hendiadys.

Two closely related weapons. Not hendiadys.

Golding is comparing time to waves:

But look / As euery waue dryues other foorth, and that that commes behynd / Bothe thrusteth and is thrust itself: Euen so the tymes by kynd / Doo fly and follow bothe at once, and euermore renew.

"Fly and follow bothe at once" is an explicit paradox, not one thing divided in two (hendiadys), but two things expressed as one.

Synomyms. Not hendiadys.

Synomyms. Not hendiadys.

Those doublets are catching!

Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

This is synonymia, "the foundation-stone of Erasmus' theory of eloquence and of sixteenth-century literary practice," what Peacham praises as "variation and change." In Golding's day, the Dead Parrot Sketch would have been admired for its lavishness. Nearly all of the figures that Waugaman calls hendiadys in this essay are actually synonymia simplex.

All of them true believers in the Oxfordian faith.

Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

A simple list: two commonly paired tools. Not hendiadys.

Synonyms. Not hendiadys.

Near synonyms. Not hendiadys.

A simple list: two metals. Not hendiadys.

A simple list: two of Atlas's attributes. Not hendiadys.

A simple list: two of Atlas's attributes. Not hendiadys.

Tautologia.

This is mere tautologia, "The repetition of the same idea in different words, but (often) in a way that is wearisome or unnecessary" (Silva Rhetorica

"More perplexitie" is a simple restatement of "greater care." Absolutely not hendiadys.

"Lump" and "clod" are synonyms. Not hendiadys.

Golding's Ovid.

Not hendiadys. Synonymia.

Not hendiadys. Synonymia.

The choice of image here is Ovid's. He writes that the ship "fluctibus ignotis insultavere," which Golding translates as "Did leape and daunce on vncouth waues." Lewis and Short define insulto as "to spring or leap at or upon a thing, to leap, bound, jump, spring." In Ovid, Phaethon "emicat," which Golding translates as "gan to leape and skip." The verb means "to spring out, spring forth, break forth, leap up." In each case, Golding uses that favorite of all Elizabethan figures, synonymia.

Essentially impossible. If the boy were so accomplished a Latinist, what on earth could have happened to the man? The Latin in his letters would would disgrace a Stratford ten-year-old. It isn't even his own original Latin, just a few common phrases. All he had to do was parrot them. Yet summum totale is about on the level of “il tante des mon plume.” Fyre [= fieri ] facias is a malapropism worthy of Dogberry. But why should the earl have excelled at Latin? He spent as much lesson time on penmanship and dancing, and (as far as Burghley records) he dropped it altogether at thirteen. Any grammar-school boy of that age would have devoted at least four times as many hours to the study of Latin.

"Blokes oft [=ought] to be 250l a peace. But now they cast few vnder 400l a peace & most 5, 6, and 700l."

Once again, "oft to be."

Note "blokes." Why haven't Oxfordians, so Pharisaical about their silent "e"s, denounced his spelling? Throughout the letters, Oxford is perfectly indifferent to long or short. He writes "bloke" for "block," "cloke" for "clock," "moke" for "mock"; "bake" for "back, " "slake" for "slack," "latte" for late," "hape" for "hap," "shipe" for "ship."

Again: two people. With two distinctive, incompatible systems of orthography; two very dissimilar accents, with their clashing rhymes and puns; two vocabularies, two grammars, two rhetorics.

So what are these great words?

"Rare" in what sense? About 12,500 words appear just once in Shakespeare's canon. A great many of them are quite common words elsewhere.

What Cutting should be looking at now are function words: pronouns, articles, conjunctions, prepositions. Why? Because every writer uses those essential little words in a distinctive way: prefers “that” to “the” or “but” to “however.” These choices constitute a profile, a linguistic fingerprint that is independent of content.

In Shakespeare’s early plays, he nearly always uses the old-fashioned “hath” and “doth.” But his use of “has” and “does” rises through the 1590s; then after 1600, it jumps. By about 1610, in the late plays, he’s using the modern “has” roughly a third of the time, and “does” a little over half. Oxford never budges. His invariant "hath" and "doth" alone are enough to exclude him as Shakespeare.

Other function words also stand out. Oxford greatly prefers "sith" and "sithence" to "since," which he uses only eight times in the letters. Other way round with Shakespeare: he has "since" 460 times, and "sith" 22 times, and "sithence" only twice. Oxford is using the older forms 8:1. Shakespeare? 1:20.

Oxford adores "whereas," using it 45 times in the letters (and once in the poetry). The concordance shows Shakespeare using it seven times—but every one of those instances is in a doubtfully authentic text: those scenes of 1 and 2 Henry VI now attributed to other playwrights, The Passionate Pilgrim, the first two acts of Pericles, which belong to George Wilkins. Shakespeare never actually uses one of Oxford’s favorite words.

Oxford likes "earnestly": he uses it 30 times in the letters (44,000 words). It's rare in Shakespeare's canon (880,000 words) : he uses it only nine times in all. That makes them less likely to have been the same writer, not more, as in Cutting's cockeyed theory.

Dead common. EEBO returns a combined 1200 hits for "set a work" and "set awork," from the first printed Chaucer onward. That's not including variations like "set X a-work" or "setting a-work." It's just an idiom that neither Oxford nor Shakespeare had much cause to employ.

As Caroline Spurgeon observed, that sort of distaste has a way of getting into Shakespeare's figures of speech ("spanieled me at heels"). Oxford names the pewterers 31 times in these letters. If your theory were true, you'd expect a pewterer to figure in the plays as an emblem of deceit and double-dealing. Yet the only time Shakespeare uses the word—and it's in 2 Henry IV, written 1596-1599, at the very time of these angry letters—he speaks not of the trade but of the craft: ""a shall charge you, and discharge you with the motion of a pewterers hammer." Spoken like an artisan's son.

You were right about one thing: real scholarship is much much harder.

He does not use "a more richer," but simply "more richer." He does employ the indefinite article in other comparisons (“a more Fayrer sort”; “a more worthier way”; "a more safer voice”; “a more larger List of Scepters”), but not here.

Oxford has "more easier" and "more willinger."

And how is this wonderful? It's legal boilerplate. "To incur is "to become liable or subject to ... as, to incur debt, danger, displeasure/ penalty, responsibility, etc." In the litigious society that was Elizabethan England, "incur the danger" was a commonplace.

Well, yes. It belongs there. Portia is speaking in court, so she uses the appropriate jargon.

Just how much early modern English has Cutting encountered? OED: "All three alternatives easier, more easy, and more easier, were acceptable in this period. ... The double comparative was generally used for emphasis (and was praised by the dramatist Ben Jonson)."

What? Consulting EEBO, I find “incur the danger” (in all variant spellings) used 97 times in 81 books, up to 1600; 555 times in 448 books in all. The earlier hits (to 1600) include such obscure texts as the 1566 translation of Apuleius’s The Golden Asse, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Lyly’s Euphues, North’s Plutarch, Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, Hakluyt’s Travels, Holland’s Livy—many of these being Shakespeare’s sources—and of course Shakespeare’s The First Part of the Contention.

The exact words, “incurre the da(u)nger of the law(e),” appear in 34 books, including Apuleius (1566), North’s Plutarch (1579), and Shakespeare (1600). That’s 34 hits in 34 books: once each. In your conceit, that’s 34 parallelisms, all closer than Oxford’s. Are all these writers Shakespeare?

No, no, no, no.

If by “prior to this time frame,” you mean up to 1594, when Oxford began writing his tin-mining letters, EEBO lists 482 uses in 276 books. The word was in vogue. By the end of the 17th century, EEBO reports 11430 hits in 5245 records. Just between 1588-1594, it was used 125 times in 78 books: by Munday, Greene, Nash, Chapman, Drayton, in Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesie, and of course, in Lucrece and Titus Andronicus. Since Oxford uses “obscurite” in one of the Huntington letters (1596-1598), it’s likely he was just using a fashionable word. He most certainly did not originate it. Neither did Shakespeare.

"Commodity" is almost one of Shakespeare's "rare words," under Cutting's "working definition." It appears just fourteen times, in a virtuoso range of senses. The merchant of Venice, Antonio, comes closest to its neutral meaning: "Neither have I money nor commodity / To raise a present sum." But aside for him (and one other), the word belongs to Shakespeare's knaves, dissemblers, villains, pimps. For Philip the Bastard in King John, who rails on it, it is "this Commodity, / This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word." Falstaff uses it three times, calling his wretched soldiers "a commodity of warm slaves." Tranio and Feste, both tricksters, use it: "Now Jove, in his next commodity of hair, send thee a beard!" For the Pandar in Pericles, "the commodity" is what he trades in. Of virginity, Parolles says, "'Tis a commodity will lose the gloss with lying; the longer kept, the less worth: off with 't while 'tis vendible." Pompey, Borachio, Conrade all employ the word. And just when you think it's the language of vice, Hermione redeems it:

To me can life be no commodity: The crown and comfort of my life, your favour, I do give lost; for I do feel it gone, But know not how it went.

Remember: 80% of Shakespeare's words are "rare." That's over 25,000 of them. You'd have a hard time not finding a match.

So Cutting's methodology—as far as I can gather from this wifty explanation—is: pick a word or a collocation from one of Oxford's letters; look it up in the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare; if it appears less than ten times in the canon, it's a parallelism! This makes no sense at all.

"Over eighty percent of Shakespeare's words are rare, in the sense that he used them fewer than ten times each," writes Alexander Harcourt (in a book on human diversity). That's 25,000 words. Over forty percent are unique in his work. By Cutting's criteria, he could be triumphantly matched with almost any writer in the Early Modern corpus, or indeed, in modern English.

Rare words that appear only in the Shakespeare canon, or only in the canon and a few other texts, are another matter. They at least could form the basis of an argument. But Cutting has not consistently looked up her parallels in EEBO; and when she has, her figures are startlingly wrong.

Sadly, her attempt to match Oxford's vocabulary with Shakespeare's is fundamentally invalid.

"Now I thowght my good lord the case standinge thus, that there was nothinge so fytt to be done, as to aquaynt yowre Lordship with the whoole cause, That yow beinge fully posessed therwythe, by the knowlege of her Magestyes ryght in lave [=law], the examminatione of whatt number of Tyne ys transported, may easly and perfetly discerne, what the weyght or lyghtnes of the matter importes."

And here's a crucial orthographic eccentricity of Oxford's: "u/v" for "w" and "w" for "u/v." I doubt that he learned at Gray's Inn to spell "law" with half a double u as "lave" (34 times in the letters), along with "lavers" for "lawyers," "vnlaufull," "brotherinlave," "owtlavrie." He writes "draves" for "draws," "dravne" for "drawn," "feve" for "few," "vove," for "vow," "hawe" for "have." This is not within the common range of Elizabethan spelling . It would have caused endless problems for compositors, and led to some terrible textual corruptions. There's no trace of it in Shakespeare.

Yes. To be precise, Oxford uses "yowr(e)" and "yowres" 580 times, and "youre" just once. "Yow(e)" is not almost invariable, but absolutely: 310 times. And Shakespeare? "You" and "yours," without exception.

You are correct on that one point: there is no "i." Perhaps you could check his letter of 17 June 1595 for another instance of this spelling, "the trwithe of myne actions."

The presence or absence of the "i" is a minor issue. What matters here is "trwthe." That is a very rare, very antiquated spelling of the word. Had you checked in EEBO, you would have found only two writers who habitually favored that spelling. George Joye used it in print 95 times in 12 books between 1531 and 1546; Thomas Cartwright, 57 times in 2 books, 1575-1577. Those are by far the latest appearances of "trwth(e)." Save for Joye and Cartwright, that spelling is limited to 14 uses in 9 books between 1517-1551: all but one written before Oxford was born.

Yet "w" for "u" after a consonant is one of Oxford's signature spellings: "trwe" (17 times); "swt(e)" and "swter" (27); variations on "bwy," "bwyer," "bwyinge," even "bwylt" [=built] and "bwyrd" [=bird].

There's no trace of this in Shakespeare.

Utterly. To which I might add, "slovenly" and "turgid." They are not even in Shakespeare's language, Oxford's spellings (and in his poetry, his rhymes) reveal that he spoke with an Essex accent: he would have said "leekwheeze" and "Wheat Hail" and "teen meaning in Cornwhale." There is absolutely no trace of his pronunciations in the canon. An Essex Shakespeare would have rhymed different words, made different puns; his accent would have pervaded the plays, which are (above all) meant to be spoken. . Oxford's letters, in themselves, constitute strong proof that he wasn't Shakespeare.

Remember: 80% of Shakespeare's words are rare (by your definition). It would be much harder not to find hits.

It has long been observed that Shakespeare capitalizes random words beginning in "c," most likely for reasons of clarity: the minuscule "c" in secretary hand can be confused with several other letters. Oxford, writing in italic, has no need to do this, and does not.

Is Cutting really this transcendently naive about the apparatus of scholarship? She describes a full diplomatic transcription as if it were some whimsical party-game of Nelson's. He does this this, of course, so that serious scholars may read Oxford's letters as he wrote them, with his own original orthography, his emendations and corrections. Next, she'll be complaining about footnotes: all those little numbers floating up in the air are distracting.

I can guess why you find this "beautiful": it's simple, and stands out as a relief.

Cutting's attempted ShakesVere mash-up only serves to show the poverty and pomposity of Oxford's language and the vivid brilliance of Shakespeare's.

And you think that's a good thing? Trump at 3 am on Twitter? Surely when he's making an economic proposal of such gravity, he should give it some thought.

I can just see him not thinking.

By the fourth page, he's barely making sense at all: "thus in hast [=haste] I crave yowre Magestyes pardone, for I thowght yt better for me to make a fault in my writinge, then yat yowre Magestye showld suffer any losse by so great abus [=abuse] | and to informe yowre Magestye how necescassarye [=necessary] yt yt ys yf yowr plesure be not to lease [=lose] a commodite, made ^\so// redie to yowre handes, to countermade [=countermand] thys last order, and to giue commandment that the order of yowre premptione be nott altred, least the Marchantes havinge prepared this monye and beinge provyded to furnishe yowre seruice, disposinge yt otherwise and vpon sum other imploymentes, the leke [=like] facilite and oportunite to effect yt be never hadd agayne."

What is your evidence for this?

So they're not the same person. Glad we've settled that.

Nice. You should submit this to the OED. It's rather an awkward invention, and it never caught on. EEBO finds only three English uses in the 17th century. In French, of course, "obscurément" is an adverb, meaning "darkly" not "darkness," and so Burghley uses it in 1594. Still, such as is it, it's Oxford's.

"the sudden cannot giue me oportunite to gather vp so many remembrances, as ys necessarie to vnfould a matter so full of obiections, deceytes, and fals apparences."

"The deceyt lyees where the Tyne is transported, and when the Stokes be vnderrated, as where 4 Blokes showld be a thowsand, yt ys commonly sene that thre Blokes attayne to that quantetye."

Oxfordisms: "Tyne." "Blokes" and "stokes" for "blocks" and "stocks." "Showld."

And this is where EEBO comes in. The standard for stylometric comparisons for playwright with playwright is LION, but of course, Oxford's letters aren't in it.

It is, indeed, absolute fantasy.

The only one who matters here is Shakespeare. His idiosyncratic spellings are nothing like Oxford's.

Smith was an a scholar of languages and an orthoepist, one who sought the reformation of the English language: proper speech spelled rationally. Yet de Vere emerged from that household with an unreformed Essex accent, clear in his orthography and rhymes.

It depends. Some of his "w" for "u" spellings, like "yow," are merely uncommon. Others, like "wowld" and "bwylt," are vanishingly rare.

Possibly because "too" and "to" can be confused, but "trw(i)the" can only be "truth" in this context.

No. "All these things" reveal the truth: they show how Oxford wrote. The prettified transcription that Cutting wants slaps makeup on his writing, paints over its flaws and wrinkles an inch thick. "I'm ready for my closeup now, Mr. Fowler."

Why is it misleading?

No, that's a commonplace.

Shakespeare uses "importeth" only twice, but he has "imports" ten times: four times in Hamlet (three in the First Folio, once in Q2), twice each in Measure for Measure and Othello, once each in the King Lear Quarto and Two Noble Kinsman (I.i, which is his). He uses the modern form of the third person singular, present tense. After 1600, "hath" and "doth" were increasingly replaced by "has" and "does." Shakespeare was rather old-fashioned, compared with upcoming Jacobean playwrights: in his last single-authored plays (The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest), there are forty instances of "doth," and forty-seven of "does." And Oxford? He's a generation behind. In the letters, he invariably uses "hathe" and "do(o)the." Never "has" and "does." That's visible-from-space stylometry.

To be precise, as "a more richer." He writes: "Of the commodites which goethe owt, there ys not a more rycher then thys of Tyne.”

Oxford makes a grammatical error in "commodites ... goethe," He does sometimes trip up on the concord of numbers, even in English:

"Helpe man, helpe beastes, helpe birds and wormes, that on the earth doth toile, / Helpe fishe, helpe foule, that flockes and feedes upon the salte sea soyle."

"They semed to answer that sure I mistoke yt in wrightinge, and for hast [=haste] hadd mist the number of my syphers for I hadd wrytten yt 3000, and they thowghte I ment but 300. Whervpon her Magesty caused the Lord Thresorer to send vnto me, and wryght whyther [=whether, i.e., which] I ment. I affirmed the 3000."

"Thresorer" is another habitual (41 times) Oxfordism unknown in Shakespeare.

Read the passage. Oxford hasn't done his homework, and is blowing smoke. "I take yt" means he's heard someone say this, he thinks, and is assuming it's true. One of his secretary's jobs was to swot things up for him, and write him précis. If he was remembering reading (or half-reading) a text, it was far likelier to be notes recently prepared for him than the statute itself. "So long agoo" would be at most within the last year or two, or however long he'd been obsessed with tin. As a restless and ungovernable adolescent, he would hardly have read deeply into the statutes governing the trade in tin, in case he'd be interested thirty years later.

Oxford's ignorance of legal Latin—he couldn't write "fieri facias" properly, when he had incurred the danger of that statute—is strong reason to conclude that he had not attended Gray's Inn, or if he had, had learned nothing.

"“They can carye yt so cunninglye, that they will iuggel yt so cleane, owt of her Magestyes fingers, as she shall never have any sence or felinge therof.”

"secondly ther ys a statute I take yt in Edward the iijd tyme, that for suche a quantite of Tyne transported the Marchante oft [=ought] to bringe in suche an other quantite. or proportione of gould Bullione [int] and deliuer yt into the Towre, yt ys so long agoo yat I dyd pervse [=peruse] yat statute thinkinge this Matter had bene no more to be revyved, that tyll I loke yt over agayne, I cannot certeynly sett yt downe."

Note Oxford's invariant spelling of "ought" as "oft." This was (and is) a vulgar pronunciation of the word.

OED: "A means of evasion, or of extricating oneself from an awkward or difficult situation; a loophole.Very frequent in the 16th and 17th centuries."

Shakespeare uses it to cap a list of synonyms: "What trick? What device? What starting-hole?" This rhetorical figure, copia, was one of the first learned in grammar schools. Very neatly done: one, two, three syllables; French, French, Anglo-Saxon.

"As for the caveat in the end I will say lyttell, but by yt, a startinge hoole ys left for a good excuse [when] yf ever herafter the obsurdite [=absurdity] in yeldinge to so great a guyle showld come in quesitone."

Like nearly every sentence Oxford wrote, this provides orthographic oddities habitual with him, and just not found in Shakespeare. Oxford's quirk of tacking final "e" onto words like "startinge," "yeldinge," and "quesitone" is so conspicuous that a practiced eye can pick it up on first reading. Nearly a third (32%) of his words end in "e"; less than a fifth (19%) of Shakespeare'as do, in either the "Good" Quartos or Hand D. For Oxford, words like "question" end in "ione" 80% of the time. Not in Shakespeare.

"Cowld,"wowld," and "showld" are all but diagnostic of the Earl.

"To the benifite of 500 pore people which shalbe therby sett aworke."

It’s certainly rare in Shakespeare’s vocabulary—as in, nonexistent. In the five years (1594-1598) that dear Oxford was obsessing over tin, Shakespeare wrote ten or so plays, co-founded a great company of players, and was about to build a playhouse.

Oxford’s usual spelling, by the way, was “tyne.” With his Essex accent, he would talked (incessantly) about “teen meaning.”

Cutting's method here is impressionistic, merely what MacDonald Jackson has called the “uncontrolled accumulation of parallels between a disputed work and an authorial candidate whom the scholar favours." She finds what she’s looking for: