This is absolute nonsense.

It is the subject of Ms Price's book, Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography. The methods she uses to support this statement have been pounded to dust by critics (and some academics) and her conclusions have been completely ignored outside the small Oxfordian tent.

Tom Veal's dismantling of Price's earlier work is excellent. http://stromata.tripod.com/id115.htm

Another, less patient review by Professor Alan Nelson here. http://socrates.oxfraud.com/price.html

"received" scholarship.

This is an absurdly impudent slur on scholarship as a whole especially work not approved by Diana Price. She intends an association with "received wisdom", a phrase which is usually followed by some "blue sky" new thinking. She intends to enlighten the poor sufferers of hidebound conventionalism.

A favourite underhand trick of conspiracists everywhere.

Oxford has his numbers wrong. His claim that the pewterers are shipping 400, 500, 700 pound blocks of tin while claiming that they are 250 pound blocks would be fraud on the grand scale and result, if exposed, in heads on spikes. Given it was sold, exported and imported by weight, Oxford has noticed the existence of different sized ingots and jumped to a false conclusion.

The Worshipful Company of Pewterers is still proudly active. Careful what you say about them.

And using the verb "import" to mean "meaning" in a sentence about imports and exports is the work of a writer who doesn't think too hard about his finished product.

Tin was, indeed, big business. 16c England had little in the way of discovered natural resource. Some gold, some silver, iron ore here and there but it did have the largest known deposits of tin and lead. Whilst no one wore tin or lead jewellery, the metals were easy to work into pipes, coinage, drinking vessels and when alloyed with other metals, into tools and weapons. The problem with extraction was that it took manpower and the problem with exploitation of the results was that it took capital. Lots of.

Thanks to bailing Henry VII out in 1507, the tin business won the right to continue ruling itself with its own courts and Parliament, set up by a royal edict of Edward III. Its importance, however, required that it behave sensibly and play its allotted role in the modern state.

William Cecil, later Lord Burghley was a visionary. He and other far-sighted Elizabeth economists saw that owning the methods of manufacturing things that everyone needed was a better long term economic strategy than simply confiscating what everyone wanted most from their American colonies. Instant wealth was wonderful. Providing the wealthy with manufactured items on which to spend their gold was a more sustainable economic strategy.

Rather than hand out sinecures, he steered the rights to develop mineral extraction into the hands of entrepreneurs who could turn them into wealth with expertise, usually brought in from Germany or the Low Countries, or imaginative use of capital. These were Britain's first capitalists and like all pioneers, they failed and succeeded in equal measure.

Ms Cutting is almost correct at 4:51. The pre-emption on tin nearly ended up in the hands of a mining engineer who patented a water driven machine that manufactured nails. England's most famous engineer, Sir Bevis Bulmer, offered £10,000 for the pre-emption with the intention of investing a further £20000 in extracting and smelting technology. Instead, he was given an impost on coal and told to look for gold and silver in Scotland.

By the late 1580s, the pre-emption on tin was a complicated affair. It began as a cut off to prevent smelters forming a cartel and controlling the price paid to the miners by syndicated underbidding for the ore (as later featured in Poldark). Oxford failed to get it because he didn't understand it. The pre-emption was a reward for actual work, carried out by an actual overseeing body. He didn't understand the way natural resources used in the early manufacturing industry were strategic in their implications for the state. England had to manage on an economic model with no Spanish or American gold. The Spanish learnt the difference in 1588. English small bore, low recoil cannons, on wheeled gun-carriages with equatorial mounts were cast in "factories". They could be aimed and could fire as many times as they could be brought to bear. The galleon cannon, attached to the deck, was designed to fire once, just before the ship was boarded.

Burghley had been right. Making things the economy needed from mineral resources and modern extraction methods was a better economic strategy than making things that aristocrats liked to wear from precious metals stolen from abroad.

Oxford was not proposing to put anything IN, just take out £3,000 a year and put prices up to cover his reward. He was very clear that the only benefit in his scheme, was a benefit to him.

And THAT's why Burghley got rough with him. He didn't understand the math, didn't understand the business and had to have the facts explained to him in the simplest of terms. Raleigh had the pre-emption for a while, ships being important to Elizabeth, but the business required professionals at all levels and, geographically distant from London, it returned to managing itself under James.

At the end of the 16c Spain was bankrupt and about to return to the Dark Ages. England held on to the manufacturing and trading advantages Burghley helped create until the 20c.

Oxford had nothing to contribute

This is false. At any one time, it has been estimated, there are over 10,000 Shakespearean dissertations in preparation in the world's universities. None of their authors are troubled by what Alexander calls the authorship question. There isn't enough evidence for it to be taken seriously nor any alternative authorship claims, nor the claim that Shakespeare is a pseudonym.

The tight little group of mistaken contrarians is the coterie of Shakespeare deniers to which Alexander belongs.

Ultimately, Price makes a fair point. Although she has not tabulated all the spellings in all the texts.

Single spelling idiosyncrasies can't be taken as probative in age that cared little for spelling accuracy. But in context and as part of a package of contextual support, they are far from weightless.

Again, three pages of manuscript constitute riches. Price is simply confused about her 'samples'.

Other Oxfordians realise this and that this particular game is up. Rather than try to prove it is NOT Shakespeare's work, these Oxfordians try instead to prove that it IS somehow Oxford's.

It is very obviously not Oxford's handwriting. So the theory now is that Oxford dictated all his plays and that the Hand D additions are written by his amanuensis who writes in a hand that looks like Shakespeare's but isn't. If this seems mad at first (and it is) it is still more plausible than Price's argument that the signatures and the manuscript cannot be connected.

If you feel you are losing your grip on reality, here is a link to an essay on the dictation idea, published in one of the now-defunct Oxfordian pseudo-academic journals.

https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/Oxfordian2003_Gidley_More.pdf

Excuse me, that is not the control sample. If you are testing the effect of a new chemical on crops, the control sample is a sample subject to identical environmental conditions, without the chemical added. The six signatures are authentic, witnessed 'exemplars' of Shakespeare's handwriting and palaeographic work (and forensic document examination) is frequently carried out with far fewer signatures. The "sample" in this case, is the anonymous manuscript which is being compared to the signatures. All four of the palaeographers above conclude that the Hand D handwriting is the same as that of the signatures.

And any amateur can see, from a survey of other period hands. that it is, at the very least, not incompatible.

A Gaugin painting, in a recent BBC documentary, was de-attributed on the strength of three letters in one signature, painted with a brush.

This argument is Wilberforcian anti-science. An attempt to hoodwink the unwary,

A good thing too.

His soi-disant discipline "bibliotics" has only one disciple.

This is a staggering inclusion. Professor Hugh Craig published 'Shakespeare, Computers and the Mystery of Authorship' in 2009, yet despite omitting this book from her bibliography and making no mention of it elsewhere, Price decontextualizes this passage and attempts to portray Craig as a sceptic about Hand D. Worse, she hints he is attempting to rebut her literary paper trail nonsense.

So let's be clear. His book links Hand D to the Shakespeare canon irrevocably. The chapter on Hand D in his seminal work on big data stylometry has this to say in conclusion about Hand D.

The identification of Hand-D with Shakespeare now seems one of the better established facts about his canon, and among the surest facts of his biography.

Ignoring contradictory scholarship in this blanket fashion is how The Flat Earth Society manages to recruit. The hint that Craig might be a sceptic, however, is 24 carat Oxfordian impudence.

Price is trying to put the authors on the defensive as if there were some valid contrary contention. There is not.

Price has her facts wrong, in any case. The handwriting case, made by Professor Maunde Thompson. was commissioned for the tricentenary and was published in 1916. Four whole years before anybody heard of the case for Oxford's authorship.

Pause for thought.

"was known as a secret writer"

except, of course, for when he did. Oxford's undisputed poetry was indeed published under his own name, as were other writings.

Here, the author, and doubters generally, are merely awarding themselves a licence to invent stuff. And this is still Point 1.

Price's bibliography is shameful, omitting every work which contradicts her ideas. Hugh Craig is a mathematician who has tested and validated a stylometric method which assesses Hand D as Shakeapeare's work in minute detail. Yet she includes only the work from which she has extracted a smidgeon of support, failing to mention the work by the same author which demolishes her case.

None of the serious work done by later palaeographers in the 20c makes it into her essay or bibliography yet every amateur crank who agrees with her not only makes the cut but is usually quoted at length.

Ask yourself why that may be. There's only one answer. Just as there's only one answer to the question "who wrote the Hand D additions?"

This can only be described as wilful misdirection or ignorance. Price's methods supply the clues as to which sin she has committed. There are three more palaeographic cases made by front rank scholars and a serious piece of big data stylometry, which places it close in style and date to the authorship of Othello.

This is Looking Glass World scholarship.

It reoccurs exactly where it might be expected to reoccur. In the instance of another character where "si" is intended to rhyme with "sigh". And for the same reason. It's a proper noun, the name of the tribune Scicinius in Coriolanus. A play in which the crowd scene echos that in the Hand D additions and some unaltered dialogue reappears. Both facts appear to have entirely escaped Price's notice.

Difficult for Price to read. The difficulty in legibility improves the discriminant value of the signatures (and makes it impossible to attribute the letterforms to a scribe). Look at the photographs of scribal work on this site.

Note also that when reproducing the signatures, Price offers, as do all Oxfordian analysts, terrible PMTs of an acid engraving made in the 1800s when high resolution photographs are easy to procure and copyright free. As if clarity would hurt their case. See the photo gallery at the head of this article.

Tannenbaum was a complete amateur who famously authenticated a forged Shakespeare signature. Nevertheless, he trumps all other palaeographers in Price's eyes because he says things that are helpful to her cause.

Some Oxfordians, like Nina Green in another of her 'Oxmyths' essays, also cleave for support to this charlatan who rejected Maunde Thompson's analysis and conclusions. Tannenbaum was a self-taught palaeographer, a psychiatrist by profession. Arthur Freeman & Janet Ing Freeman produced an authoritative work on forgery in the 19c¹, described his investigative monographs as 'fringe at best'. Amplifying, they point out that 'Tannenbaum’s eccentric palaeographical claims were not always sceptical, nor restricted to Collier: in 1927 he made the only extended modern attempt to rehabilitate Madden’s unlucky purchase of the ‘Shakespeare’ Montaigne, with its signature ridiculed by Collier himself, discredited by Maunde Thompson, and disowned by the British Museum. Tannenbaum found its genuineness ‘unquestionable." Robert Elrodt when writing in Shakespeare Survey², went further, quoting an Assistant Keeper of The British Museum, W H Kelliher, who said,"Tannenbaum’s arguments offer no serious challenge to Maunde Thompson".

This is simply incorrect. See the many disassemblies of Price's illogical categories and analysis.

A sample — https://stromata.tripod.com/id115.htm

Thompson is merely stating facts. Price is playing ducks and drakes with them.

https://stromata.tripod.com/id115.htm

Once ignored and largely unknown, Sir Thomas More now comes in an Arden edition and boasts many fine performances, a selection of which appear on YouTube. It is strongly relevant today with its focus on human rights, who has them, and the plight of religious exiles.

Whole-corpora stylometry places the Hand D additions to Sir Thomas More in the centre of Shakespeare's envelope, not at the boundaries and watching any of the performances should leave no one in any doubt that we are watching Shakespeare, and Shakespeare on a good day.

In fact, it has become so popular it has acquired its own name, “The Stranger's Case”. Try this one, https://youtu.be/YaeDoTaYK5k

Now withdrawn. He is not the Faculty Expert on Shakespeare.

Coriolanus not only features a similar crowd scene but Shakespeare reuses a whole line from STM.

No. no, no, no, no.

A bit like the five negatives in Lear.

Never, never, never, never, never.

Another smoke screen. Shakespeare, and no other published person in his working lifetime, wrote "sci" when he wanted the syllable to rhyme with "sigh".

Whilst typographers may have corrected this in the run of normal dialogue, the spelling of a character's name is more likely to have been respected.

Price tries to draw attention away from this by pointing out variations of the spelling of "Justice Scilens" and by completely omitting a second, more consistent occurrence of the quirk in Coriolanus, where Shakespeare writes a character called "Scicinius".

There is one other instance of "scilens" getting into print in the 16c. Only one and it was before Shakespeare was born.

There are other idiosyncarasies. There are, in fact, a number of other spelling idiosyncracies. But "scilens" is a singularity in Shakespeare's lifetime and sticks out a mile (to use a scientific term of palaeographic reference).

"Bibliotics", Price fails to remind us, is Tannenbaum's soi-disant discipline, the one that isn't in the dictionary. A discipline with only one disciple.

When it comes to any modern list of auxiliary sciences, it isn't on it.

Nor Donne's. Nor Plath's. Nor Emily Dickinson's. Stieg Larsson never saw his fiction in print or got to spend a penny of the wealth it generated.

One of many problems that 'trouble' doubters, largely because they won't sit down and think about them for 10 seconds.

Hard to make any sense of this. Word pairs are not hendiadys and his explanation for the progression is highly improbable. His ideas on the frequency contribute nothing useful unless they are realted to average frequencies eleswhere.

Shakespeare "apparently" quotes "about half" of one of Golding's lines "almost" verbatim.

One of the great Oxfordian proofs. Apparently. Almost.

Extensively debunked here:

https://oxfraud.com/bible-home

A self-appointed job title for a self-created post.

"Are you siting comfortably? Then I'll begin

Once upon a time..."

There a no palaeographers in this category. The handwriting evidence is very strong but not conclusive by itself.

Almost all scholars who have expressed an opinion agree that the handwriting is very strong evidence and only a handful (we know of only two one of whom is the author of this article) are willing to object to it when taken in context with the other evidential support. Together the chain of evidence constitutes positive proof, easily sufficient for the demands of attribution.

Even the two principle objectors won't advance the claim of another candidate. There just isn't one.

The renewed interest we attribute to the passage's relevance to the current global immigrant crisis, not the authorship debate. Performances by actors as various as Sir Ian McKellen and Harriet Vane have featured on topical prime time news programmes such as the BBC's Newsnight,most of the broadsheet newspapers in the UK and in magazines in the US, France, Germany and other countries in which the crisis is neing keenly felt..

You too are fuilty of this.

No one disagrees with this.

Time for us to make a distinction. The difference between high and low levels of confidence in the palaeographic argument are meaningless is stylometry can conclusively attribute the additions to Shakespeare.

This is not true. If the hood ornament falls off an Alfa Romeo we can still claim, with a high degree of confidence, that we are not looking at a fire truck, even without finding it. Different strands of evidence can confirm a single conclusion.

The gigantic hole that no one can now fill, is who, if not Shakespeare IS responsible. Going back to our 1937 Type C Alfa Romeo, If we can eliminate the very few alternative possibilities, using whatever means, we are left with the only pre-war two seater capable of 120 miles an hour, with an alloy block and DellOrto carburettors.

Downloadable here.

https://oxfraud.com/HND-Pollard

1. we agree
2. the Conjuction Fallacy is everywhere visible in the arguments of doubters but it has not been a problem in Hand D scholarship
3. Nobody believes or claims that palaeography has proved anything beyond doubt.

AND by those who agree with his observations and conclusions.

The current director of British Museum and the current director of the British Library both fully authenticate Hand D as Shakespeare's.

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/wretched-strangers-shakespeares-plea-for-tolerance-towards-immigrants

Stylometry, especially big data stylometry which now attributes Hand D to Shakespeare's most productive period and places the vocabulary close to that of Othello has played a much larger role in revising academic views of Hand D than revision of the handwriting analysis.

Nothing depends on the handwriting analysis. If Hand D is canonical, it's connected to Shakespeare of Stratford by all the other evidence and no more need be said.

Our measurements (we have good internet data) indicate the opposite, There has been a major downturn in anti-Shakespearean activity in the last three years. Comments threads in Newsweek and The Guardian, which once attracted active discussion with 2000-5000 posts are a thing of the past and many regular posters have seemingly retired.

Too many promises not kept. Too many new paradigms have failed to arrive. Too many big fists which turned out yo be limp wrists.

Four paleographers have done exactly this. A more respctful start might have been in order..

Sadly the cannons of bibliographical troof shoot Price's argument to bits. The idiosyncratic spelling and vocabulary is not absolute proof by itself of Shakespeare's authorship but it is very strong evidence and taken in context, conclusive. See our own articles.

https://oxfraud.com/HND-handwriting

Nonsense.

If you want to see how analysis of Elizabethan spelling is done, check out our paper on Oxford's spellings.

https://oxfraud.com/HND-spellbound

It isn't. He may not have written "by me" but his signature is his own. The witnesses effectively swore an oath confirming this and the will passed through probate a matter of weeks later, without problem or question.

Again, check out the hi-resolution image in our gallery.

Every Oxfordian, when writing about Hand D, seeks out the worst possible reproductions of the signatures themselves and Price has certainly excelled herself with the execrable reproductions here. They then complain, as Price does, about how difficult they are to read.

Check out the much better reproductions in the gallery at the top of this page.

Utter rubbish.

Three solid palaeographic analyses have been done on Hand D since Maunde Thompson in 1923. R W Chambers in 1939, Giles Dawson in 1990 and Mac Jackson as a supplement to stylometry issues arising from Elliott & Valenza's stylometric work in the 1990s. All of this has been brought together, along with all the other evidence, here on Oxfraud.com but we don't rate a mention either.

http://oxfraud.com/HND-Hand-D-home

Mac Jackson and others say all you need for certainty is in R W Chambers 1939 article. And they're correct. Price knows this. We have pictures, quotes and links to all of it just a menu click away from this note. It is being deliberately concealed to keep her argument alive. In fact Price is here mendaciously denying its existence.

Even though this point is irrelevant, I wouldn't put a penny on the odds of this guess being correct. Yet Price is offering it as evidence.

Maybe not in 1989. Things are different now. Misdirection. In any case the palaeographic needs of attribution and the forensic requirement of proof beyond reasonable doubt are two very different requirements.

We just need to ask the question "Is this, when taken in context, enough to remove any doubt about its authorship?" The answer is yes.

No, there it isn't. Both Pollard and Maunde Thompson were active, at the request of scholars, for the tercentary celebrations and commissioned by Oxford University Press to look at Hand D. That was their agenda.

By Sir E. Maunde Thompson, G.C.B.

WHEN I contributed, in 1 9 1 6, to Shakespeare's England — the work compiled under the au- spices of the Oxford University Press in celebration of the Tercentenary of the death of Shakespeare — a chapter on the 'Handwriting of England ' at that period, I ventured to suggest that a close study of, and the resulting intimacy with, the English hand which Shakespeare wrote might be ap- plied with a fair prospect of success to the solution of some of the doubtful passages in his plays. In the subsequent study on Shakespeare's Handwritings in which I attempted to show that the handwriting of one of the Additions in the play of Sir Thomas More^ now the Harleian MS. 7368 in the British Museum, is the handwriting of Shakespeare himself, I sub- mitted an examination of the six surviving authentic signatures of the poet, and also of the handwriting of the Addition, in support of my contention. It has now been suggested that it would be of use to Shake- spearian scholars if I were to analyse and compare still more closely the individual letters of these writings and record the results of such further study, and at the same time notice how imperfect and hurried writing may have affected the normal shapes of the letters and have led to confusion and misinterpretation, and how the grouping and linking of certain letters may have been misunderstood or misapplied. I have accordingly here attempted to follow this suggestion in a way which may be practically useful, accompanying my remarks with drawings of the letters and combinations referred to.

Maunde Thompson concludes that the handwriting is Shakespeare's. Chambers and Dawson strengthen his case with their later analyses.

He places every occurrence of a letter form in the signatures, next to every occurrence of that letterform in Hand D in a series of diagrams that can be seen on this site. You will never see this work mentioned or reproduced in Oxfordian articles or websites. You will never see it referred to by Ms Price.

This is patently untrue. All analysts agree that the manuscript of Hand D is that of the author, not a copyist. The most elementary analysis confirms this as there are inline emendations and deletions which only an author could and would have made. As Ioppolo points out, any 'eyeskip' can be attributed to the author reusing or repositioning a fragment he was happy with.

Since we are dealing with a very, very good Bankside playwright, writing at the top of his form, the non-palaeographic arguments result in a very short list of potential authors.

Just one in fact.

Price has demonstrated either that she does not understand handwriting analysis or the scientific terminology she is abusing, or she is perverting the science to make her unsupported claims.

There is nothing wrong with the signatures as authenticated evidence.

There is nothing wrong with Hand D as a sample.

There is nothing wrong with the analysis of four palaeographers, all very much better qualified than any cited by Price. Anyone may have an opinion but serious analysis based on the originals, by trained palaeographers can be described as "expert opinion". Price studiously excludes every expert opinion and subsitutes amateurs, peppering them with small, out of context, extractions from better qualified people in an attempt to insinuate that they agree with her but have not contributed directly to the subject.

Reference to any serious scholarly work (apart from that in Pollard) on the subject is omitted completely.

More signatures and more handwriting might be nice but, with the additional context of stylometry and orthography there is no longer any reason to doubt that Hand D is in Shakespeare's handwriting.

Nor has Price created any such doubt.

It does not matter one iota what Price, or anyone else. thinks of their fluency.

What matters is whether they share distinguishing characteristics with Hand D, which they do.

Or whether they have distinguishing characteristics which would eliminate the Hand D author, which they very definitely do not.

Price has flogged her unscientific slurs on method and practice to death. Every claim she makes on the subject is inaccurate or downright untruthful.

We shall see who is deceiving themselves. as the article proceeds. Get you ad hominem insults in ahead of you "evidence" has become standard Oxfordian practice.

It became immediately apparent to Jonathan that the 'well-informed' audience was an audience of Oxfordians, with Oxfordian literature left on every seat.

And no wonder. Waugh's incoherent monologue is pounded to dust in a similar annotated article here.

This is a map of the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, a DEFRA designation which has manifold planning implications if you are inside it. The green area of the map is perfectly adequate as a modern definition of the Cotswolds. And it would have been larger in Shakespeare's day.

Oxfordian nit-picking over Shakespeare's use of Warwickshire words has consumed massive amount of their time. There's a recent essay by Ros Barber on the subject which, like Steinburg, does no more than try to find instances of individual words used outside the Cotswolds then follows up with discounting them from Warwickshire vernacular.

Finding the word "kecks" or the expression "sweating like a Flemish comedian" in Cornwall or on Tyneside does not obscure the scouse origins of either expression.

Steve's most adventurous claim for Oxford was to explain all of the work in relation to the Number 17. De Vere was the 17th Earl of Oxford and Steve wove one of the most complex arithromantic webs around counted syllables and the positions of individual words anyone has ever seen. Though he himself hasn't been seen since Nat Whilk pointed out that the Earl was more likely to have though himself the 16th Earl, or the 18th depending on which set of 13c errors he took into account. It wasn't until after Edward was dead that he was correctly numbered.

How are the mighty houses of cards fallen!

Still, nice to see that Steve wasn't too crushed by having his arithmetical fasntasy world dismantled.

http://oxfraud.com/100-Count

Oxford has completely misunderstood what is meant by "nourished". As has Cutting. When we talk, even today, of an industry supporting 20000 people, that does not mean that it employs 20000 people.

Better forget it. Although Cornwall was Crown protectorate, the tin industry had its own courts and its own Parliament, both established under Edward III, a fact well-known all over Europe.

The privileges of the stannaries of Cornwall were confirmed by Edward III on the creation of the Duchy of Cornwall in 1337. This confirmed that the tin miners were exempt from all civil jurisdiction other than that of the Stannary Courts, except in cases affecting land, life or limb. There was at this period no definition of the districts of each stannary.

I'm not quite sure where this comes from. Maybe becaue, like Oxford, Ms Cutting understands only the simplicty of slapping a tax on carts and ships.

The big money in tin was in turning it from ore into metal. This was a sophisticated business requiring lots of capital and lots of space and lots of energy. Generating the energy from wood, it became apparent to Burghley in the 1570s, would deforest the whole of England and so he suspended operations while coal resources were developed. The first environmentalist perhaps, but the practical considerations were his first priority.

The man with the non-existent discipline of bibliotics. Who cares what Tannenbaum says? There are much better qualified experts who will have no truck with Tannenbaum's amateur shenanigans.

Some Oxfordians, like Nina Green in another of her 'Oxmyths' essays, cleave for support to Samuel Tannenbaum who rejected Maunde Thompson's analysis and conclusions. Tannenbaum was a self-taught palaeographer, a psychiatrist by profession. Arthur Freeman & Janet Ing Freeman produced an authoritative work on forgery in the 19c¹, described his investigative monographs as 'fringe at best'. Amplifying, they point out that 'Tannenbaum’s eccentric palaeographical claims were not always sceptical, nor restricted to Collier: in 1927 he made the only extendeded modern attempt to rehabilitate Madden’s unlucky purchase of the ‘Shakespeare’ Montaigne, with its signature ridiculed by Collier himself, discredited by Maunde Thompson, and disowned by the British Museum. Tannenbaum found its genuineness ‘unquestionable." Robert Elrodt when writing in Shakespeare Survey², went further, quoting an Assistant Keeper of The British Museum, W H Kelliher, who said,"Tannenbaum’s arguments offer no serious challenge to Maunde Thompson".

Pollard was doing no such thing, though in a couple of references he describes the attribution's assured death knell for the SAQ as a serendipitous by product of the research.

Pollard's book can be read in its entirety in a digitised pdf here, in our filelist. http://oxfraud.com/HND-Pollard

The extent of Price's nonsense on the reasons for producing this study will become apparent from just the briefest of glances at The Preface.

Disingenuous. The Second Maiden's Tragedy is the only Jacobean Play which exists in manuscript.

The word "scilence" appears three times in this play which belonged to Will's King's Men company. While the attribution needs sorting, this is another potential link to Will. Another discovery of marker where one might be expected to appear.

Since it's a late Jacobean play, one candidate it cannot be associated with is Edward de Vere.

Although The Second Maiden’s Tragedy has been officially accredited to Thomas Middleton, there is evidence that William Shakespeare could have contributed to the play. When examining the manuscript, there are slips of paper that were added to the prompt book, which shows revisions or notes. These slips of paper have been examined and it is quite certain that Middleton did not write these revisions, as they do not resemble his handwriting. However, the notes resemble the handwriting assumed to be Shakespeare's. It is also possible that Shakespeare could have written these notes because at the time the play was to be produced, Shakespeare was still in the King’s Court, and could have been working on the play and had influence. Therefore, despite the certainty that Shakespeare is not responsible for the writing of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, it is quite possible that Shakespeare was involved in its production and revision. [Wikipedia]

We told you it was a smoke screen.

No such thing. No such acknowledgement. Pollard wanted to collect and provide the best scholarship on the Hand D addition. His work concluded that it was was canonical without starting off with that idea. He could not have cared less about Bacon's or Marlowe's claims. And had hardly had time to consider Oxford's

Price is not up to date with her reading. The latest stylometric work places Hand D close to the composition date of Othello. It's covered in the book by Hugh Craig, whose name she keeps dropping but whose contribution to the subject at hand she keeps ignoring.

Nor is she correct in her hopeful assumption that samples can be disqualified over time.

It would be front page news if there were large numbers of people willing to treat the "Authorship Question" seriously. But by 1923, there were so many runners and riders that the initial claims for Bacon had been diluted by the sheer quantity of candidates.

Inferring, as Price does, that the issue has been ignored, is illogical. There may be some, even now, who believe that another playwright may have been responsible but the vast majority of serious Shakespeare scholars have always believed that the additions are Shakespeare's, even if the hand is not.

None of this can be said to be either correct or relevant to the issue at hand. We do not need a probability of 100% and the sample size, when looking at three pages of manuscript, is more than adequate to match it to six authentic signatures.

There is not. See also R W Chambers, Giles Dawson and Mac Jackson, three other distinguished palaeographers who have written detailed essays on the subject (let's be kind) none of which Price appears to have read.

Again Price abuses science. Signatures are not normal handwriting. They are signatures. But because he has written his name, rather than made a mark, they reveal the same handwriting traits we see in Shakespeare's manuscript pages. There is no problem of sample size however hard Oxfordians try to manufacture one.

One of the ways to ease matters when debating difficult points is to reformulate your opponent's views to your liking to make them challengeable in your own terms. Known as a strawman argument, Alexander offers us a big one as studying English at university is nothing like his description here. He goes on to say he is not trying to demean Sir Jonathan but that is EXACTLY his intention with this comment. As we'll discover as he continues.

Yet all subsequent analysis has merely confirmed and strengthened the original conclusions.

Strange dreams Oxfordians have.

Because in no other instance is it a proper noun.

This begins a shameful attempt to disqualify Maunde Thompson (not "Thompson" it's a double-barrelled surname) by finding a job title he didn't give himself.

Forensic document examination is document examination done for forensic purposes. Maunde Thompson, therefore, was an FDE.

Every point is incorrect. Nor has Price, with her selective submissions, provided enough in the way of argument to support any of it.

Thank you. You can stop right there.

It's not Greg's concept. It's as old as Shakespeare scholarship itself.

Section 4 on Foul Papers is nothing more than a smoke screen. It adds nothing to Price's argument and removes nothing from the case for Shakespeare's authorship.

Yes it can. And yes it has.

Apart from the fact that it appears to be in Shakespeare's writing when subjected to close analysis.

Price cannot allow the argument to include context AND scientific analysis. Orthography, trademark stagecraft. trademark imagery and spelling all couple to the handwriting evidence like streamlined coaches to a Japanese Bullet train.

Someone else who hasn't read R W Chambers or seen the original signatures or manuscript. No reputable FDE would advance an opinion without first hand examination.

No it isn't. The authenticated signatures are the basis for comparison and provide enough evidence in the case of Hand D.

Three pages of manuscript is plenty. Price has her head on backwards throughout this "analysis".

All addressed in better analyses by Chambers, Dawson and Jackson. And others.

The signatures are not the control sample.

Tsk. Another reference to Craig intended to mislead.

Oh no it isn't!

Big data stylometry has reinforced the already concrete connections between Hand D and Shakespeare's work. There is simply no other author in whose hand it can be written. Not that there were many candidates in the first place,. It's not just Shakespeare, it's Shakespeare on a good day.

See other note. Price's paper trail could hardly be further from Craig's mind.

The British Library authentication of Hand D is unequivocal. The curators of the Hand D manuscript do not regard its attribution to Shakespeare as a 'theory". Nor does The Faculty. There are a few outliers (and Price will mention all of them) but this argument is dead as far as the vast majority of academics are concerned.

There's no doubt who wrote the Hand D Additions.

Mark Twain was doing no such thing as he had, by this point, been dead for 13 years and died without ever hearing of Oxford's pretensions.

He does not. This is a contortion. Professor Wells has no doubts about the identity of the author and acknowledges the many items of evidence that support his authorship both from his lifetime and subsequently. Price is using her trick of selectively excluding evidence that she does not like. Usually because it contradicts her.

How Oxfordians love to use word "forensic". Do they know what it means? We'll come back to this.

A hostage to fortune. An unhoisted petard.

They have indeed been challenged, though not by peers of the scholars who carried out the original analysis. And they have not been challenged successfully by anyone.

Annotations are for suggestions (and typos). They will not be shown in the published version. Or at least, that's the current intention.

In his debate with Sir Jonathan Bate, Alexander proudly boasted he was going to reveal to the world the new resting place of Shakespeare.

And here it is. Did the earth move for you?

I'm not entirely sure how much annotation this script needs. Not too many people seem to be all that willing to follow where Alexander's fantasy seems to be leading..

Edit. A month later. Sadly no one was really interested in taking up Waugh's ideas. Even die-hards on his own side have not only been strongly critical but have demolished Alexander's case in their own forums. Humiliation enough we think.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/oxfraud/permalink/835033516678155/

Patrick Ketman had this ti say about Waugh's geometry

After watching Waugh's lecture, I tried checking some of the geometry from which his chi-rho symbol is derived. Using nothing more than a set square, I found his right-angled triangles were not quite right-angled, and I decided to go to the source, Alan Green's video, to see if I could resolve the discrepancies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTlXOqriwwc The image below is a screenshot from Green's video at the point where he'd finally drawn the centre of the circle. Now, those two horizontal lines in the middle of the original title-page are of equal lengths. If the right-hand ends are to be on the circumference of the circle, they must be in the same vertical line, one directly below the other. But using a set square, you can see that they aren't—quite. It's just one of many not-quites in this diagram, each of them small enough by itself to avoid catching the eye or tripping any mental alarms, but unfortunately for Green they accumulate in such a way that even the naked eye can see that the centre of the circle isn't where it should be. Fiddling the edges of his diagram is the only way he could get all six points touching the circumference of his circle, but the price he pays is having the radial centre pushed further and further out of position. It should be equidistant between the upper and lower of those two horizontal lines. In fact, the distances, upper and lower are in the ratio of about 5:3. You might think these approximations don't matter, but Green goes on to calculate ratios from them (relating them to the pyramids, natch) resulting in such constants as e, e-1, pi, not to mention the magic 51 50/51 that the Egyptians knew all about. From his inaccuracies he has calculated exactitudes so fine that he feels compelled to give it special mention: "All these points have to be exactly where they are on the circumference in order to arrive at this number. One slightly off and the angles all change..." Breathtaking. Waugh has been sold a pup, but what does it matter? He is the inventor of "timed locks" in Italian canals where changing water levels are called "tides". The way he trims language is hardly different from the way Green trims geometry.

Nothing easy peasy here. Sleight of hand. Alexander needs a 9 to make his next trick work. Everything that follows is from the same box of tricks.

Baconians covered most of the ground Alexander is standing on trying to prove connections to the pyramids. Of all things.

Cryptology is the study of cryptography. Alexander will continue to confuse the two and abuse the word "encrypt" throughout the talk.

This is a frequent and mistaken mathematical construct used by conspiracy theorists everywhere. When you multiply probabilities together, the odds get longer, not shorter.

The trick is a simple one and relies on the human brain's instinct to take shortcuts to solutions based on inadequate but suggestively arranged data.

Known as The Conjunction Fallacy. [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Conjunction_fallacy]

A statement of fact. There aren't many in what follows.

Again, the question arises, is this really what Alexander means? Or does he mean that the odds of his argument having any statistical validity run into the zillions?

Is it? Many a scheme has fallen to bits because those claiming to have cracked the encryption have not first understood what is meant by the term. Here's Wikipedia.

In an encryption scheme, the intended information or message, referred to as plaintext, is encrypted using an encryption algorithm – a cipher – generating ciphertext that can only be read if decrypted.

So is that what Alexander means??

Technology is baffling stuff.

Technology does seem to baffle the average Oxfordian.

Ironically, Jonson has anticipated the kind of attacking mistreatment that Alexander is dishing out.

12:00 an echo is actually a direct sound

What Alexander hears is merely a false echo of Jonson's meaning. An echo intended to suit his malformed claims.

This transcript is derived from the automatically generated closed captions on the video. The original file contains many errors. We did some initial editing but now can no longer eliminate these without risk to the annotations, sadly.

Waugh corrected this statement more than once. He was there, he said, to prove that Shakespeare was a pseudonym. Something he didn't manage because he seemed to forget himself what he was supposed to be proving.

Sadly Alexander has fallen at the first hurdle. Since he admits WS was a real person—since therefore, it is an allonym—it cannot be a pseudonym.

Case closed without more ado. Much ado about nothing, one might say.

Diana Price specialises in warping evidence. Using her technique, she could probably prove there are no pictures in The National Gallery. She would find a way of ruling out pictures that were hanging vertically, pictures in frames and pictures in which graphic materials had been used.

Her analysis of Hand D works this way. By deliberately confusing what is meant by 'control sample', she attempts to dismiss handwriting analysis on the grounds that the sample is too small. The sample is actually the three pages of foolscap. More than enough to match the six witnessed signatures with high levels of certainty.

The evidence for canonical attribution is gathered here. Taken all together, the orthographic, paleographic, handwriting and stylistic case is water tight. http://oxfraud.com/HND-Hand-D-home

Alexander spins a series of tall tales around John Weever, all of which are dealt with in this article.

http://oxfraud.com/100-weever

Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh (born 1963) is an English businessman, writer, critic, journalist, composer, cartoonist, record producer and television presenter. He is best known for his biography of the Wittgenstein family (The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War) published in 2009.

He is a founding director and Chairman of Xebras Management Ltd, the digital media company. He has also served on the boards of Concert Agency, Manygate Management Ltd, and of the award winning Travelman Publishing Ltd. He is currently an independent Non-Executive Director of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels plc and Chairman of the Remuneration Committee.

Anyone who simply re-reads the transcript or re-runs the video will see that Alexander hasn't addressed the issue of who wrote Shakespeare, let alone proved anything.

Idiosyncratic interpretation of the writings of unconnected authors (Diana Price would rule all your evidence out) can hardly be called probative and in most cases, it's easy to demonstrate they they are not even supportive of your case.

Oxfordians are constantly trying to demonstrate that there is elite knowledge in the plays to which Shakespeare had no access.

Sheep shearing and leatherwork constitute a kind of elite knowledge that the aristocracy were unlikely to encounter.

In other words the battle for the hearts and minds of all but the Oxfordian faithful was won by Sir Jonathan.

It's not even a moderately long essay. Alexander has a short attention span. You can't prove that "kex" is not Liverpudlian slang by finding an instance of its use in Scotland or Melbourne. Yet this is her only method.

Caroline Spurgeon wrote a very long book and Shakespeare's imagery and language. That is a better place to look.

We'll be waiting

No you don't Alexander. Everyone in the audience knows what you're about.

Alexander is quite alone in this rather wild conjecture.

That's 20c legal practice. There is nothing suspect about Shakespeare's will as evidenced from the fact that it passed probate just three months after Shakespeare's death.

Oxfordians are keen to build smokescreen around the will as it links Shakespeare to his fellow actors and the overseers of the First Folio and the signatures link to the Hand D additions to Sir Thomas More.

http://oxfraud.com/HND-handwriting

Shakespeare wrote more than 154 sonnets. Henry V ends with one and there are five in Love's Labours Lost. Shakespeare was a master of the form. He wasn't the first to use the structure that now bears his name. Not the first but the best.

So anyone "afraid" of them has no place in literary debate. Certainly no Stratfordian is afraid of them. Oxfordians like Alexander should be afraid of them as their group offers some of the worst readings to be found anywhere.

Very kind of Alexanerd to entertain us with his thoughts on Alf Tennyson. But.

Shakespeare's great contemporary, John Donne, was also rather fond of a pun on his name. Like many poets who did have the opportunity to pun on their name, (and whom Alexander clearly has not read). Donne does this several times, nowhere with more magisterial weight than in one of his last, A Hymn to God the Father, where he builds a cadenza of name puns to a devastating conclusion.

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,<br> Which was my sin, though it were done before?<br> Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,<br> And do run still, though still I do deplore?<br> When thou hast done, thou hast not done,<br> For I have more.<br>

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44115/a-hymn-to-god-the-father

You are correct. It is finished. You lost.

This concluding note dates from the response to Prices's book 'Shakespeare: An Unorthodox Biography'. It's written by an exasperated Professor Alan H Nelson, who is the Earl of Oxford's only peer-reviewed biographer.

While Price will not let you believe that William Shakespeare's close acquaintance with Thomas Russell may naturally have led to an acquaintance - even a distant acquaintance - with Russell's stepson, she will let you believe that Leonard Digges could harbor an admiration for a poet-playwright whom he named as "Will" Shakespeare for more than a decade (from 1613 to 1623) without ever twigging to the fact that his step-father had a very good friend with the very same, highly unusual name.

For note: if Digges ever had even the slightest inkling of the acquaintance between Russell and Shakespeare, then Price could not deny the fact of an acquaintance between Digges and Shakespeare. Further debate would be not about the fact of an acquaintance, but about its extent. Thus Price's argument is predicated on the assumption that Leonard Digges was necessarily ignorant of the identity and name of one of his step-father's closest friends.

In conclusion, Price will not let you believe the reasonable or the probable; but she will let you believe the preposterous.

You don't need a roomful of paeleologists. One will do these days.

Alexander doesn't understand what a control sample is. Neither does Diana Price or Ros Barber. The sample we have is three pages of foolscap and it's more than enough. A recently disputed Gauguin was de-attributed on the strength of three letters painted with a brush.

Hand D has always been a problem for denialists like Alexander because it closes the loop between the Canon and the Stratford man.If Shakespeare's handwriting is on a three page manuscript and also appears six times in signatures on witnessed documents, there is no room for argument.

Recently The British Library, custodians of the manuscript, reviewed all the evidence and bade farewell to cautious ambivalence. The Hand D additions to Sir Thomas More, to the chagrin of doubters everywhere, are now attributed, categorically, to William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon.

A Freudian slip. Alexander is referring to Jonson's Preface to the First Folio but even were he serious, it wouldn't be much less probable than many of his other claims.

Another fantasy web built from nothing. This one, thanks to the title of the article on Oxfraud which dismantles the claims, has become known as The Giraffe Gaffe.

http://oxfraud.com/100-giraffe

Nonsense. Everyone who worked at The Globe knew Shakespeare. He was a joint stock partner in the business. And this was the most successful theatre company in London. Leonard Digges, in his introduction to the Second Folio, describes the competition between Jonson and Shakespeare's work. He knew both of them. Jonson and Shakespeare were neighbours in Blackfriars and Shakespeare appears on the cast list of seven plays in Jonson's collected works, published in 1616 under the direct supervision of the playwright himself.

You are all very welcome.

And don't miss our Facebook Group.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/oxfraud

There are almost no instances of Oxfordians changing their minds.

This is outright nonsense. It takes a developed scholar's ear to differentiate between poets using stylistic analysis. Without detailed literary analysis of Shakespearean texts, the question of whether the Sir Thomas More additions were canonical may never have been raised. It makes little difference to historians or lawyers.

What Waugh is seeking to do here is promote the views of amateurs above the level of experts. Also known as moving the goalposts.

Alexander is being disingenuous. He knows that Jonson wrote tenderly of Shakespeare in his Timber Memoir. He's discounting it as evidence without acknowledging it or giving a reason.

" I REMEMBER the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. “Sufflaminandus erat,” 2 as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said in the person of Cæsar, one speaking to him: “Cæsar, thou dost me wrong.” He replied: “Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause; 3 and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned."

Simon Michael Schama, CBE, FRSL (born 13 February 1945), is an English historian specialising in art history, Dutch history, and French history. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University, New York.

Good enough as a historian? Schama states that the authorship question demonstrates a catastrophic failure of the imagination on the subject of imagination. Most historians, if not all these days, would agree. There is a prima facie case for Shakespeare, recognised by historians and lawyers alike, which is easily strong enough to disarm dispute.

He did no such thing. This occasioned a reply on Sir Jonathan's Blog.

https://jonathanbate.com/2017/09/22/ted-hughes-marlowe-shakespeare/

Almost everything Alexander has asserted so far is either wrong or misleading.

Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL (born 26 June 1958), is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar. He specialises in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of Creativity at Warwick Business School.[1]

Specimen annotation. Is "cost" the right word here. These are definable complications but not, per se, "costs".