“In 1599 .... [Bulmer] unsuccessfully tendered for the right of pre-emption of Cornish tin.” [ODNB]. According to A Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland, “In 1599 Bulmer tendered £10,000 a year for the right of pre-emption of the whole output of tin from Cornwall’s mines. ... Ultimately, such pre-emptive bids operated first by Bulmer and Sir Walter Raleigh ... were all thwarted in 1603 due to thorough-going opposition from two established tin dealers, who acted with the Levant Company and Michael Lok working from Venice to secure most of Cornwall’s tin output for export.” These merchants were way out of Oxford's league.

"Bring the truth to lyght" comes straight from the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter (1562, and much reprinted) used in church services, and often bound with the Geneva Bible. The quote was ubiquitous.

It's a commonplace. And it's a clause.

Two things to keep in mind about Gosson. One, he’d written stage-plays himself—he speaks of Catiline's Conspiracies as a "Pig of mine own Sowe”—and had recoiled in horror. Two, he loved trash-talking the gods. “Iuno crieth out in Seneca ... Let’s dwel in earth, for heauen is full of whores.” And “Apollo is a buggerer.”

Stephen Gosson makes no complaint of Athena in The School of Abuse (1579), saying only that Maximus Tyrius "attributeth the beginning of vertue to Minerva."

But this passage, from Playes confuted in fiue actions (1582), appears to be what Waugh has in mind:

“If their Gods be to be honoured, but theire Gods are by no meanes to be honoured, therefore theire playes are by no meanes to be receyued. [De spectaculis] Tertullian teacheth vs that euery part of the preparation of playes, was dedicated to some heathen god, or goddesse, as the house, stage, apparrell, to Venus; the musike, to Apollo; the penning, to Minerua, and the Muses; the pronuntiacion and acton to Mercurie: he calleth the Theater Sacrarium Veneris, Venus chappell, by resorting to which we worshippe her."

Waugh has carefully not quoted this relevant bit from Gosson: “Tertullian affirmeth yt Playes were consecrated vnto Bacchus."

Clearly Stubbs has plagiarized Gosson, almost word for word. And in turn, Gosson has warped the early Christian moralist Tertullian, who writes:

"At first the theatre was properly a temple of Venus. ... But Venus and Bacchus are close allies. These two evil spirits are in sworn confederacy with each other, as the patrons of drunkenness and lust. So the theatre of Venus is as well the house of Bacchus: for they properly gave the name of Liberalia also to other theatrical amusements—which besides being consecrated to Bacchus (as were the Dionysia of the Greeks), were instituted by him; and, without doubt, the performances of the theatre have the common patronage of these two deities. That immodesty of gesture and attire which so specially and peculiarly characterizes the stage are consecrated to them—the one deity wanton by her sex, the other by his drapery; while its services of voice, and song, and lute, and pipe, belong to Apollos, and Muses, and Minervas, and Mercuries."

Venus and Bacchus are blazingly the leads in this company; the rest of the pantheon is "also appearing." They're not even named as individual deities, but dismissively as types: "Apollines et Musas et Minervas et Mercurios." Tertullian is so hostile to the pagan gods that he lumps them together as "Apollos, and Muses, and Minervas, and Mercuries." And so forth, and so forth. They're certainly not assigned individual roles. He just treats them all as gangs of devils.

You will note that writing isn't mentioned. Hardly surprising, as Tertullian's real target is the Roman Games: the circus, the gladiatorial combats. What he loathes is spectacle.

So Gosson has to translate Tertullian's attack on an alien recreation into terms related to Elizabethan playhouses: not known for blood sacrifice or dazzling spectacle. Gosson has tried hard to rationalize that passage; he’s tried to attach an action to each god. But Minerva has no mythological connection to the theatre at all: her oversights are the strategy of war, wisdom, weaving. She's there in Tertullian simply as a abomination for Christians to shudder at. Gosson has to invent something for her to do, and “penning” is the closest he can come. (Of course, "penning" is what he himself did in his brief association with the theatre, so he may well have a particular aversion to it.) The Muses, of course, include Thalia and Melpomene (Comedy and Tragedy), so he clumps her with them. In short, when he tells us that "euery part of the preparation of playes, was dedicated to some ... god, or goddesse," he's confabulating. Making stuff up.

In this tract, Gosson is explicitly replying to Thomas Lodge's A Defense of Poetry (1579). Lodge had just pwned him:

"But tell mee truth, Gosson, speakest thou as thou thinkest? what coulers findest thou in a Poete not to be admitted? are his speeches vnperfect? sauor they of inscience? I think, if thou hast any shame, thou canst not but like and approue them: are their gods displesant vnto thee? doth Saturne in his maiesty moue thee? doth Iuno with her riches displease thee? doth Minerua with her weapon discomfort thee? doth Apollo with his harping harme thee?—thou mayst say nothing les then harme thee, because they are not, and, I thinke so to, because thou knowest them not."

"Thou knowest them not." Why on earth would the allegedly well-educated Oxford take a name from an error propagated by a frothing fool?

In short, the only early modern writers who in any way attach Athena/Minerva to any aspect of the theatre are Stubbs slavishly copying Gosson misreading Tertullian who hated all the gods.

Let's add historical linguistics to the twenty-thousand subjects of which Mr. Waugh is ignorant. Like all his cult, he thinks that variations in orthography are hugely telling. He loves to jeer SHAKSPER SHAKSPER SHAKSPER like a schoolyard taunt. But how was “Shakespeare” actually pronounced?

What you probably think of as a "long a"—the diphthong eɪ—came much later in the development of English—after Dr. Johnson.

In early modern English, "beck" and "bake," "let" and "late," were pronounced with the same pure vowel, but a little drawn-out in "bake" and "late": literally a "long" vowel. Think of the same note, but as a crotchet and a dotted crotchet. If you know IPA, that's /bɛk/ and /bɛ:k/. To be precise, it’s an open-mid front unrounded vowel, like the first “e” in “every,” but drawn out a little: ehh. You can listen to an ɛ here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_front_unrounded_vowel

And the second syllable?

In Shakespeare's day, all of these words—bear, pear, swear, wear; shear, spear, fear, ear—could rhyme perfectly. He rhymes them himself:

But they do square, that all their Elues for feare Creepe into Acorne cups and hide them there.

I do wander euerie where, swifter then ye Moons sphere;

Night and silence: who is heere? Weedes of Athens he doth weare.

If the true concord of well tuned sounds, By vnions married do offend thine eare, They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds In singlenesse the parts that thou should'st beare:

Golden Quoifes, and Stomachers For my Lads, to giue their deers:

This is what the Cambridge History of the English Language calls a “conservative and prestigious” style of speech. Shakespeare did sometimes use an “innovative,” “modern,” or “advanced” style of London speech, in which “these” rhymes with “seas.” Some contemporary phoneticians thought it corrupt.

“Sheck” was rock solid, though.

So most likely Shakespeare’s name would have been pronounced /shɛ:kspɛ:r/ or (when said quickly) /shɛksper/. I imagine some thoroughly modern city types might have said /shɛ:kspi:r/, but Shakespeare’s roots were in provincial Warwickshire. And provincial accents are conservative: in Yorkshire, they’re still saying /bɛk/ and /mɛk/ and /tɛk/. Oxford’s accent, of course, would have been even more prestigious and conservative.

And since Waw is fond of sneering at spelling choices, I might add that Oxford’s are idiosyncratic, and that his peculiar habits—"wowld" for would, “lek” for like, “hightnes" for highness, “satisfise” for satisfy, “Oxenford” for Oxford—are nowhere in Shakespeare's works.

Dead wrong. The god you're looking for is Bacchus. In Histrio-mastix (1633), his rant against theatres, William Prynne deplores the "Devil-Idoll Bacchus ... to whom Playes, and Play-houses were consecrated at the first." He cites "Plutarch, who relates, that all Stage-players were consecrated unto Bacchus as well as these their Stage-playes."

If your Elizabethan earl were looking for a clever theatrical pseudonym, he should have called himself Bakehouse—often spelled (as it was pronounced) Bacchus. "Jack Bacchus" has a swagger to it.

Jonson, Heminges, Condell, Digges, Mabbe, Basse, whoever wrote the monument inscription, Meres, the Revels Office, Beaumont, Buc, Camden ...

Other than the First Folio, a number of quartos, part of the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, some odd scenes elsewhere, and the poetry?

No. We have evidence.

Codswallop. This was going to be the breakthough moment for your sect. They'd been recruiting for months. They packed the house and leafleted the seats with propaganda.

Sir Jonathan has answered this, but read her epitaph:

Witty above her sex, but that's not all,
Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse.

The poem praises her fine intellect, which sprang from her father, and her spiritual wisdom, which sprang from God. Her earthly father is the epitome here of intelligence, as her heavenly father is of wisdom. By lauding his daughter, the verse praises William.

Camden's Britannia is about the past. He had no reason there to mention Shakespeare. However, he was well aware of the player-poet. As Clarenceux, he defended Shakespeare's grant of arms in 1602; in his Remaines (1605), he praises "William Shakespeare, & other most pregnant witts of these our times, whom succeeding ages may iustly admire."

In his disquisition on names in that book, he writes of "Some [named] from that which they commonly carried, as Palmer, that is, Pilgrime, for that they carried Palme when they returned from Hierusalem. Long-sword, Broad-speare, Fortescu, that is, Strong-shield, and in some such respect, Breake-speare, Shake-Speare, Shotbolt, Wagstaffe." To a scholar, these are not "obvious pseudonyms," but a common class in the taxonomy of surnames. Not a word about Athena, either: Camden was a classicist

At least one reader of Britannia did think "whoops who's missing." At some time after 1621, a Warwickshire clergyman named Richard Hunt annotated his copy. In the margin of the page where Camden says that Stratford owes its fame to John of Stratford and Hugh Clopton, Hunt added "et Gulielmo Shakespeare Roscio plane nostro"(and to William Shakespeare, truly [or indeed, or clearly] our Roscius). Stratford's great man of the theatre should not be overlooked.

My life through lingring long is lodgde, in lare of lothsome wayes,

My death delaide to keepe from life, the harme of haplesse dayes;

My sprites, my hart, my witte and force, in deepe distresse are dround,

The only losse of my good name, is of these greefes the ground. ...

Helpe gods, helpe saintes, helpe sprites and powers, that in the heaven doo dwell,

Helpe ye that are to waile aye woont, ye howling hounds of hell;

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;

Helpe eccho that in ayre dooth flee, shril voyces to resound,

To waile this losse of my good name, as of these greefes the ground.

FINIS. E. 0.

Have you read the Earl of Oxford?

We have plenty of his ink on paper—you should blush to acknowledge it. It does your fantasy of hidden genius no good at all. We have 77 letters and notes in his own hand, written over 40 years. That’s 45,000 words, a Hamlet and a half. They cannot be excused as juvenilia, as you do his poetry, or palmed off on a secretary. They display no remarkable intelligence—he might, on a good day, be described as brightish—and a deadly rhetorical ineptitude. He has no ear for language, no feeling for the shape of sentences, the sound of words. In all the plod and dribble of his writings, there is barely an insight: only grievances.

Lovely penmanship. Shame about the writing.

Here’s Oxenford, writing to Queen herself (he wants her to invest in tin on his behalf), in June 1599.

“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.”

Here’s Shakespeare, writing for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, between 1599 and 1602:

“I haue of late, but wherefore I knowe not, lost all my mirth, forgon all custome of exercises: and indeede it goes so heauily with my disposition, that this goodly frame the earth, seemes to mee a sterill promontorie, this most excellent Canopie the ayre, looke you, this braue orehanging firmament, this maiesticall roofe fretted with golden fire, why it appeareth nothing to me but a foule and pestilent congregation of vapoures. What peece of worke is a man, how noble in reason, how infinit in faculties, in forme and moouing, how expresse and admirable in action, how like an Angell in apprehension, how like a God: the beautie of the world; the paragon of Annimales; and yet to me, what is this Quintessence of dust: man delights not me, nor women neither, though by your smilling, you seeme to say so.”

Nonsense. Here are Welles and Peter O’Toole, recorded in October 1963, talking about Old Hamlet’s Ghost:

Welles (2:09): “Shakespeare played it, and that’s why he played it, because it’s the toughest part in the play. He must have been a great actor. ... It’s nonsense that he was a bit player. ... He played Iago, it’s almost certain.”

O’Toole: “The cast lists are there. He played all of Jonson’s leading parts.”

Welles: “You bet.”

O’Toole: “Face...”

Welles: “Leading player—and when he played the Ghost, it’s because the Ghost is the key to that play. I’ve often felt that the best actor in the company ought to play it, and the up-and-comer ought to be Hamlet.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smMa38CZCSU

"Ciphers to this great accompt..."

The boy Shakespeare had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to attend the King Edward VI Grammar School at Stratford. His plays and poetry evince a thorough grounding in rhetoric, if no abstruse learning.

"I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my vnpolisht lines to your Lordship. ... Your Honors in all dutie, William Shakespeare."

They put up a scholar's monument to him, with an epitaph comparing their late husband and father to Virgil and Socrates. Whe Oxford's widow got around at last to a tomb, she wanted something "for vs ... fittinge our degree." The most important thing about the earl was his title.

John Brownswerd, of whom Dana F. Sutton writes:

"When the works of these regional poets are read together, a remarkable picture begins to emerge of the attainments of Humanistic learning and the rich and sophisticated culture of Elizabethan England in the provinces. In all three cases we see highly intelligent, cultured and creative men well content to live quiet lives in districts that could all too easily be written off as outlying backwaters. ... It strikes me that Brownswerd’s poetry is by no means irrelevant to the Shakespeare Controversy, to the extent (and it is probably a considerable one) that the fundamental assumption of those who would attribute Shakespeare’s works to Oxford, Bacon, or a Marlow who lived to exit Mary Bull’s Deptford tavern, is that a bumpkin from the benighted shires could not possibly have had the intellectual sophistication to have written them. Brownswerd (like Fitzgeoffrey, Stradling, and probably a number of other writers yet to be identified) goes to show the wrongness of this assumption of intellectual life in the provinces, which was in fact capable of attaining remarkable sophistication."

http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/brnswrd/intro.html

As long as it's a crowd of Oxfordians, you will.

This directly contradicts the written record, which states that Oxford was buried in the church at Hackney in 1604, where he was in 1613 when his countess asked to be buried beside him and a tomb (at long last) built "for vs ... fittinge our degree." There is no record of his interment at Westminster.

When do you imagine that his body was dug up, hauled across London, and snuck into the Abbey? By whom? Yet again you're inventing a group of conspirators, not one of which ever told his secret.

And if the evidence is not in writing, where is it? You hallucinated monkey faces on Shakespeare's monument in Stratford—what have you imagined this time? A golden finger, pointing? Angelic voices?

How was he banned? His dissertation, despite its great faults in logic and severe statistical problems, was passed, and he was granted his Ph.D. He has published. He has tenure, which many thousands of better-qualified scholars have struggled for in vain.

http://oxfraud.com/folger-bible-home

He did. Waugh confuses genius here with "stature," all bound up in his mind with rank and pomp and circumstance—as if a poet never made a naughty joke.

Macbeth is a response to the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605; The Tempest, to the wreck of the Sea Venture and the miraculous survival of all aboard her, as reported by Strachey in 1610; Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio were written in collaboration with John Fletcher, who first appears as a playwright in 1606. That last play appears to have been based on an episode in Don Quixote, which first appeared in English translation in 1612. Oxfordians have labored to explain away the evidence, in vain.

Why are you still here?

This is especially incoherent. What I think Waugh has invented here is a generational right to a certain spelling of a family surname: you don't get to be "Waugh" until your grandfather dies. As he imagines it, the great-grandfather would use "Woch," the grandfather, "Waugh," the father, "Wauch," and the son, "Waw"-- and when the "great grandfather died he moved up a line": so Alexander Waw would become Alexander Wauch, and Auberon Wauch become Auberon Waugh.

Sheer rubbish.

Ralegh is a bad example. His father died in February 1581, which matches none of Sir Walter's changes in orthography. "Down to 1583 his more usual signature had been the phonetic Rauley. But in 1578 he signed as Rawleyghe a deed which his father signed as Ralegh, and his brother Carew as Rawlygh. A letter of March 17, 1583, is the first he is known to have signed as Ralegh; and in the following April and May he reverted to the signature Rauley. From June 9, 1584, he used till his death no other signature than Ralegh."

"That man" is fictional, a character in Richard Brome's late Caroline play The Antipodes. Letoy keeps a company of players, and boasts:

These lads can act the emperors’ lives all over,

And Shakespeare’s chronicled histories, to boot.

And were that Caesar or that English earl

That loved a play and player so well now living,

I would not be outvied in my delights.

Letoy is saying that he ranks with the greatest of theatrical patrons. "That Caesar" is Nero; and "that English earl" would be Leicester, for whose company of players the Theatre was built in 1576.

Besides, Letoy goes on:

I write all my plays myself, and make no doubt

Some of the court will follow

Me in that, too.

Anthony Parr, in his edition of The Antipodes, notes this as “A dig at the courtier-dramatists who produce plays which they ‘boast to have made ... when for ought you know they bought ‘em of Universitie Scholars’ (Epilogue to The Court Begger).”

Ghost-writing of this sort had long been common. Back in 1595, Francis Bacon wrote an interlude for Essex to present to the Queen. And earlier still, Oxford kept two playwrights, John Lyly and Anthony Munday, as servants. They would have worked on the comedies for which the Earl was applauded: either heavily rewriting what he gave them or (more likely) working from some airily sketched anecdote.

His face; their voices. The earl was the Lina Lamont of his age.

Really? In fact? You have evidence for this?

And if the retribution was so dire, why you imagine hundreds of allusions to a classified hidden poet, each with hundreds to thousands of readers, each of whom had friends, family, lovers, servants, and an all-too-human propensity to gossip? This is not how secrets are kept.

Shock at "Looney" has become a rising fury.

Bate pronounces "Looney" as the man himself did, as his family still does. You can hear the indrawn breaths of the audience.

Ariel: "One dowle that's in my plumbe." This word is particularly local. In Joseph Wright's great English Dialect Dictionary, it appears only in Warwickshire and bordering counties.

I think the word she's looking for is "folly." Or "delusion."

Why yes—he's a player. Deftly masking speaks of expertise. And he's masking "through/Stately troupes rich conceited": through a company of players.

If all you've got is a Debrett, everything looks like a nobleman to you. Those "purple roabes distaind" could be those of a prince of poets, or of a martyr, stained with blood. There have been good arguments made for Robert Southwell, executed in 1595, the year the poem was published: one "that should have been."

If Waugh would bother to read Edwards's Narcissus more carefully, he would observe that that the "masking" poet, Adon, is contrasted with another, purple-robed poet: "one ... That should have been of our rime / The only object and the star."

Edwards has been naming poets for their best-known works—as Spenser is Collyn, and Marlowe, Leander, so Shakespeare is Adon. He's described as a player, "deafly [deftly] masking thro, Stately troupes rich conceited."

Elite knowledge—all that stuff about aristocratic pastimes and concerns—was easy to come by. There were books. There was emulation, a desire to look cool in a class-ridden society.

There was nowhere a nobleman could go to look up "euery Leauen-weather toddes, euery tod yeeldes pound and odde shilling," even if he could imagine he wanted to. This sort of thing comes from immersion in a rural society.

Waugh's argument? Indeed it is.

Let's add historical linguistics to the twenty-thousand subjects of which Mr. Waugh is ignorant. Like all his cult, he thinks that variations in orthography are hugely telling. He loves to jeer SHAKSPER SHAKSPER SHAKSPER like a schoolyard taunt. But how was “Shakespeare” actually pronounced?

What you probably think of as a "long a"—the diphthong eɪ—came much later in the development of English—after Dr. Johnson.

In early modern English, "beck" and "bake," "let" and "late," were pronounced with the same pure vowel, but a little drawn-out in "bake" and "late": literally a "long" vowel. Think of the same note, but as a crotchet and a dotted crotchet. If you know IPA, that's /bɛk/ and /bɛ:k/. To be precise, it’s an open-mid front unrounded vowel, like the first “e” in “every,” but drawn out a little: ehh. You can listen to an ɛ here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_front_unrounded_vowel

And the second syllable?

In Shakespeare's day, all of these words—bear, pear, swear, wear; shear, spear, fear, ear—could rhyme perfectly. He rhymes them himself:

But they do square, that all their Elues for feare Creepe into Acorne cups and hide them there.

I do wander euerie where, swifter then ye Moons sphere;

Night and silence: who is heere? Weedes of Athens he doth weare.

If the true concord of well tuned sounds, By vnions married do offend thine eare, They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds In singlenesse the parts that thou should'st beare:

Golden Quoifes, and Stomachers For my Lads, to giue their deers:

This is what the Cambridge History of the English Language calls a “conservative and prestigious” style of speech. Shakespeare did sometimes use an “innovative,” “modern,” or “advanced” style of London speech, in which “these” rhymes with “seas.” Some contemporary phoneticians thought it corrupt.

“Sheck” was rock solid, though.

So most likely Shakespeare’s name would have been pronounced /shɛ:kspɛ:r/ or (when said quickly) /shɛksper/. I imagine some thoroughly modern city types might have said /shɛ:kspi:r/, but Shakespeare’s roots were in provincial Warwickshire. And provincial accents are conservative: in Yorkshire, they’re still saying /bɛk/ and /mɛk/ and /tɛk/. Oxford’s accent, of course, would have been even more prestigious and conservative.

And since Waw is fond of sneering at spelling choices, I might add that Oxford’s are idiosyncratic, and that his peculiar habits—"wowld" for would, “lek” for like, “hightnes" for highness, “satisfise” for satisfy, “Oxenford” for Oxford—are nowhere in Shakespeare's works.

Four? More like forty.

“Lord Burleigh wrote Rawly. Robert Cecil wrote to him as Rawley, Raleigh, and Ralegh. A secretary of Cecil wrote Raweley and Rawlegh. King James, ... Raulie. ... The Privy Council wrote the name Raleghe, Rawleighe, and Rawleigh. George Villiers spelt it Raughleigh, and Cobham, Rawlye. ... In the wonderful mass of manuscripts at Lambeth ... , the name, beside forms already given, appears spelt as Ralighe, Raule, Rawlee, Rauley, Rawleye, Raulyghe, Rawlyghe, and Ralleigh. ... In Drummond’s Conversations with Ben Jonson he is Raughlie. ....”

https://mathewlyons.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/whats-in-a-name-walter-ralegh-vs-walter-raleigh/

What has Fulke Greville to do with anything? Yes, he wrote a few grim Senecan closet-dramas. Yes, his ancestral manor, Beauchamps Court, is on the Avon, But Davenant's elegy is for his father-figure, William Shakespeare, for whom the Avon wept itself dry.

You can argue anything you like in academia—but you must be able to support your argument with evidence. Cranks have nothing but assertion. If you belong to a creationist church, if you leaflet for the Flat Earth Society, that's your business. But if you argue from those beliefs in your dissertation, you will fail in your doctorate paleontology; you will fail your doctorate in astrophysics. If you insist that π=3.0, there goes your Ph.D. in maths. Universities have standards.

Or used to: the University of California, Irvine has just accepted a $200 million gift to build an "Integrative Health Institute": a school of quack medicine. Concordia and Brunel can do little harm, by comparison.

Sadly, neither was equipped to joke about his potent name.

Crazy to deny it. Sonnets 135 and 136 are meaningless unless the poet's name is Will.

His name was Kit.

Waugh completely misses all the wicked wittiness of Sonnets 135 and 136.

What Shakespeare says is:

In things of great receit with ease we prooue. Among a number one is reckon'd none. Then in the number let me passe vntold,

He's talking about sexual parts here: about his willie and the will that drives it; about his lover's commodious vault—her thing of great receit. He's asking her to let him in. So many many other men have entered there, that surely she can accept just one more? "Among a number one is reckon'd none." She'd hardly notice it.

"Untold" here means "uncounted." Far from denying his name, Will insists upon it: will is what you're after, and "my name is Will." None of this works if his name is Ned.

Utterly, abjectly clueless. Waugh has no idea what these sonnets mean. He's found the talismanic word "untold" and stripped it of its context.

No plays by Oxford have survived. Their "brilliance" is unfounded belief.

The actual Shakespeare collaborated with Marlowe on 1 Henry VI; with Kyd on Edward III; with Peele on Titus Andronicus. His company staged plays by Jonson, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, Heywood, and others. At least one of the King’s Men, their Fool Robert Armin, was also a playwright.

Balderdash. Will Shakespeare's name heads the list of the "principall Comoedians" who played in Jonson's Every Man In his Humor. It was "first Acted, in the yeere 1598, by the then L. Chamberlayne his servants ... with the allowance of the Master of Revells." His name is paired with Burbage's in the cast-list for Sejanus, "first acted, in the yeere 1603. By the Kings Maiesties Servants."

Jonson himself oversaw the publication of his Workes (1616).

http://shakespearedocumented.org/file/stc-14751-copy-2-page-72

http://shakespearedocumented.org/file/stc-14751-copy-2-page-438

This isn't debate—it's dog-whistling. Waugh knows that the his voting audience is packed with followers. He makes no effort to convince with evidence or logic, as the vote is assured. All he has to do is shake his pompoms at the crowd.

You produce no evidence for your belief.

Not quite. In his 1583 rant, The Anatomie of Abuses, Philip Stubbs spreads the blame across the pantheon,"false Idols, gods and goddesses," assigning "the House, Stage, and Apparell to Venus: the Musicke to Appollo: the penning to Minerua & the Muses: the action and pronunciation, to Mercurie."

Indeed, the "we" of the prologue (Fletcher and Shakespeare) are talking about Chaucer:

We pray our play may be so, for I am sure

It has a noble breeder and a pure,

A learnèd, and a poet never went

More famous yet ’twixt Po and silver Trent.

Chaucer, of all admired, the story gives;

The word you want is "knowledgeable."

You haven't read Two Noble Kinsmen, have you? It's not only a patchwork of scenes by two distinct hands, it's an inconsistent patchwork, as if each collaborator didn't quite know what the other was doing or had done. If Fletcher had rewritten or completed an old play of Shakespeare's, he would at least have known the plot.

Percival Golding was Oxford's half-cousin once removed (his mother's half brother's son). He did later write that the Oxford "lieth buried at Westminster." That's not his only error. He also claims that de Vere was "of the Privy Council to the Kings Majesty that now is" and that "he was a man in mind and body absolutely accomplished with honourable endowments." A mere puff piece. The records state otherwise.

Waugh's "Ben Jonson" is merely Waugh's sock puppet, a mouthpiece for his own shabby beliefs. The historical Jonson was speaking of the Stratford player-poet, whose company (including Shakespeare) produced and acted in his plays. There's no evidence whatever that Ben Jonson knew the Earl of Oxford; nor would he have wanted his acquaintance. Waugh, I fear, he might have beaten for this insult.

Denialists love to see Jonson as one of themselves: a glib liar. Not so. He could excoriate where he detested, but he valued both his friendships and his honour as a poet. Will's work astonished and exasperated Jonson: his praise is Horatian in its balance of austerity and warmth.

Denialists—including Waugh—are sadly wanting in this skill. Waugh cannot read well enough to comprehend the texts he's manipulating, even on the most basic grammatical and lexical levels. He cannot construe them. As for practical criticism, he's incapable of hearing that his "Shakespeare" is profoundly rhetorically incompetent. Oxford wields language as a sow a shovel.

Terminal pareidolia. Next they'll be seeing monkey faces everywhere.

If there are all these hundred of nudge-wink allusions to a secret author, where's the secret? Did no one expect the Spanish Inquisition—sorry, the Star Chamber—to interrogate these naughty people?

Not at all. He's responding to William Basse's elegy "On Mr Wm. Shakespeare he dyed in Aprill 1616," widely circulated in manuscript. Basse wants those poets buried in the Abbey to budge up for the Stratford man:

Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumond lie A little nearer Spenser, to make room For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold Tomb.

Jonson finds that unnecessary:

I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye A little further, to make thee a roome

Waugh's false "Shakespeare," Edward de Vere, was buried on 6 July 1604 in St John-at-Hackney. Two surviving church registers record his interment. No monument was raised to him. As she wished, his countess was buried on 3 January 1613 "in the Church of Hackney ... as neare vnto the bodie of my said late deare and noble lorde and husband as maye bee."

Neither Waugh's false Shakespeare nor Jonson's true one appears in the burial records of the Abbey.

Bald assertion.

Typography was the printer's concern, not Jonson's.

You might start here:

http://shakespearedocumented.org/

Nonsense. "Masques and Stage-playes," says Prynne, are the "sacrifices of Bacchus." Can you cite me one text in which playwrights are said to be invoking Pallas?

Davenant's ode "In remembrance of Master William Shakespeare" was published in his Madagascar (1638), but he said that he wrote it as a boy of twelve, circa 1618. The conceit of the poem is that the Avon itself mourned Shakespeare, and had wept itself dry:

The piteous River wept it selfe away

Long since (Alas!) to such a swift decay;

That reach the Map; and looke

If you a River there can spie;

And for a River your mock'd Eie,

Will finde a shallow Brooke.

Waugh's habit is to pluck single words out of context, and spin fantasias on them. Here, he sees only "mock'd."

I assume that this abject nonsense is going straight back into Waugh's new allusion book? Oh dear oh dear. This will be mortifying.

Davenant (1606-1668), who worshiped Shakespeare, was happy to be "thought his Son." Whether in the flesh or spirit is ambiguous—but he was said to be the poet's actual godson. William's name and birthdate exclude Oxford.

His parents kept a wine tavern in Oxford where Shakespeare was said to have stayed on his journeys to and from Stratford as an "exceedingly respected" guest. "Inns offered beds to the travelling public, wine taverns did not, so Shakespeare was staying as a friend." (ODNB). John Davenant, as Antony Wood recalled was "an admirer and lover of plays and playmakers, especially Shakespeare."

It's the one Waugh's heard of.

In reality, Elizabeth saw more theatrical performances at Whitehall than at all the rest of her palaces—Hampton Court, Greenwich, Whitehall, Windsor—put together; James saw plays and masques at Whitehall, all but exclusively. Between Shrovetide 1578 and her death, Elizabeth took refuge at Hampton Court only in the plague years 1592-1594: two Christmases. There she heard three plays by Strange's Men and two by Pembroke's, which may have included 3 Henry VI, 1 Henry VI, and just possibly Richard III. Every other play of Shakespeare's that she ever heard, every performance for her by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, was at Whitehall, Greenwich, or Richmond.

By ill fortune, James's first Christmas season in command of the King's Men, 1603-4, was another plague year, so again the court retired to Hampton Court. After that, he heard his plays at Whitehall. Between 1603 and 1614, James saw 156 performances by the King’s Men alone. Of these, 146 were at Whitehall. Just eight were at Hampton Court.

So, the link between Shakespeare and Hampton Court is all but nil in Elizabeth's time, and adventitious in James's.

Remember that Ben Jonson wrote this elegy. What court performances would he have seen? Those at Whitehall, overwhelmingly: his own plays and masques, as well as Shakespeare's. At Christmas 1592, he was just twenty, and would not emerge as a player and patcher with the Admiral's Men until 1597. As for Christmas 1603 at Whitehall—he was there and was chucked out for heckling Samuel Daniel's masque. No reverence there for Hampton Court.

Finally, there's no recorded link between Oxford and Hampton Court either. His company of boys performed only four times at court, all within a single year, 1584. At Whitehall on New Year's Day and at Shrovetide, they did two plays by Lyly; at Greenwich at Christmastide, another play and "Duyers feates of Actyuytie" (tumbling). Oxford's sole known performance at court was at Whitehall, at Shrovetide 1579, when he danced in that trainwreck of a shipwreck device.

He was writing them for indoor theatres: for Blackfriars and the court.

The first known performance was at Gray's Inn Hall on 28 December 1594, and would have been candlelit: hence, there needed to be act divisions.

No act divisions in the Quarto (1600).

No act divisions in the Quarto (1597).

There are no act or scene divisions in the Quartos (1597 and 1599).

Court performances were typically lit by 141 one-pound candles. See R. B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567-1642 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).

He did:

https://jonathanbate.com/2017/09/22/references-for-mr-waugh/

Truest thing he's said.

No comment.

"Avondunum" was a Latin toponym invented by John Leland (1503-1552), and used indifferently for all the Hamptons: North-, South-, and Court. A very few scholars have cited it as Leland's opinion, but it has never otherwise been used, in Latin or in English, in history or literature or law. It's a nonce-word.

You'll find it in Camden's Britannia because he disagrees with it, explicitly. In his own Latin writing, he uses "Hamptona." Camden taught Ben Jonson Latin. How likely is it that the protegé would use Leland’s “Avondunum,” or any form of it, when his master pointedly did not?

If Oxford had in fact assumed the name William Shakespeare, that would have been an allonym, not a pseudonym, as WS was a real person.

Free as air.

Oxford is a minor figure in theatrical history. His boys appeared only three times at court: at Whitehall on 1 January and 3 March 1584, performing John Lyly's Campaspe and Sappho and Phao; and at Greenwich on 27 December of that year, with the anonymous History of Agamemnon & Vlisses. On New Year's Day 1585, John Symons and his fellows, "Seruantes" to Oxford, performed "Duyers feates of Actyuytie" (tumbling and juggling). Oxford's Men toured the provinces for many years, but made few appearances in London.

For comparison, Leicester's company appeared before the Queen at court a score of times between 1571 and 1583; they played in his great entertainments for her at Kenilworth in 1566, 1572, and 1575. When Burbage built The Theatre in 1576, it was Leceister's company it housed: the first artists in residence on the first purpose-built common stage,

Of course, the greatest patrons were the Queen herself, and then the King; and the Lords Chamberlain, Henry Carey and his son George. Oxford was pretty small beer.